Rev Left Radio - Regeneration: Goodbye Revolution?

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

In this article in Regeneration magazine, the official outlet for the Marxist Center, Tim Horras analyzes and critiques, in a comradely and principled fashion, the reformism and some core premises of the Democratic Socialists of America. He argues for left wing gun clubs to be organized under the direction of civilian leadership in a revolutionary party structure. And he makes it very clear just what the overthrow of capitalism, and the implementation of socialism, will require, and what obstacles we will have to overcome in order to do it. You can find and support Regeneration Magazine here: https://regenerationmag.org You can follow Regeneration Magazine on twitter @RegenerationMag ---- Outro Music: "And Then You Die" by Adia Victoria. Support her amazing music here: http://adiavictoria.com ---- Support Rev Left Radio via monthly subscription (and get access to bonus content) at Patreon here: Or make a one time donation to the Rev Left team here: paypal.me/revleft

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and Comrade, Brett O'Shea. And today we're doing something a little different. This is going to be another layer of content that we're adding to our lineup here at RevLeft. We've already released the first episode of our sub-series called Red Hot Takes. We're working on a new sub-series called Marxism 101, where I help explain basic concepts in Marxism. We're going to continue to do our full-length interviews, as we always have.

And then this new thing, which is reading articles from Regeneration Magazine. As some of you may know, Rev. Left Radio is officially affiliated with the Marxist Center, and Regeneration Magazine is the Marxist Center's magazine, their main media outlet. And so I thought it'd be really cool if one way we can help the growth of the Marxist Center and Regeneration is for me to do sort of like an audiobook for the articles that come out of Regeneration, right? So this is going to be the first attempt with that. We'd love to hear people's feedback. Again, this is not going to take the place of any other of our content.

The normal interviews and all the rest of that stuff are going to be just as frequent and just as regular as they always have been. This is just something else we're adding on top of it. It's a quick and easy way to support an organization and a magazine that we're affiliated with and that I support. These articles are really high quality and give people a lot to think about. And they talk about very important issues for contemporary organizing, tactical ideas. tactical ideas, clear-up, misunderstandings, etc.

So without further ado, I'm going to read Goodbye Revolution by Tim Horace from Regeneration magazine. In the wake of the disastrous 2008 financial crisis, class consciousness has taken hold of elements of the working class in the United States. This has led to the re-emergency. emergence of explicitly socialist politics among a small but influential strata of young people. A majority of the socialist movement follows the lead of a revitalized 21st century social democratic reformism. This broad current, as expressed ideologically by the journal Jacobin and

organizationally by the Democratic Socialist of America, hold several political coordinates in common. They include the centrality of participation in elections, the efficacy of running candidates under the ballot line of the Democratic Party and the supposedly revolutionary character of reforms. The persuasive power of Jacobin and dominant political position of the DSA within the U.S. left has been accompanied by a rapid collapse and shake-up of what remains of the revolutionary left in this country. In desperation, even veteran socialist in the Trump era have become ideologically disoriented and susceptible to the temptations of political opportunism. Most serious among the errors of the socialist movement has been the subtle degradation of the prospects of revolution

in North America. The widespread promotion of this argument has resulted in the dominance of a strategic perspective urging us to, as Vivek Chibber states, quote, downplay the centrality of a revolutionary rupture and navigate a more gradualist approach, end quote. Chiber argues that, presently, the left cannot reasonably expect the emergence of a revolutionary conditions where state breakdown is really in the cards. In other words, the left needs to be a reason. In other words, the left needs to pivot to reality and accept the pragmatism of reformism. It is true that today there are no obvious models for revolution in advanced capitalist regimes, but does it also follow, as our democratic socialist comrades would have it, that a, quote, ruptural break with capitalism is off

the agenda? It certainly seems that way right now, but history delights in playing practical jokes, and revolution has surprised the naysayers more than a few times. The question of revolution is a practical question. Revolutionaries are often condemned for dealing in abstractions, but proponents of reformism are generally no less abstract when they argue that, quote, the democratic state commands tremendous legitimacy, end quote. There are a number of assumptions baked into statements such as this.

Which state are we speaking about in particular? Is the capitalist regime actually democratic in any meaningful sense? Does the capitalist state command legitimacy among the working masses? If so, is this legitimacy, a permanent feature of working-class consciousness, or is it rather provisional and enforced with periodic bloodshed? It is inadvisable to attempt to deduce strategy from first principles. Instead, strategy must be rooted in what Lenin referred to as, quote, a concrete analysis of a concrete situation. That is to say, we have no other alternative than to study each society in its

particularities and ask ourselves the question, can this society follow a parliamentary road to socialism, or is revolution the only mechanism from which socialism can result in this time and place? Is revolution even possible in these societies? Why or why not? Just because a reformist strategy may have success in one place doesn't mean it will everywhere, and vice versa. However, reformists would have us believe the parliamentary road to socialism is equally applicable in every advanced capitalist economy with seemingly no regard to the dearth of democratic levers in one state as compared to another. If anything, an impartial assessment of the settler colonial regime in the United States

indicates that the prospects for reformism here may be perhaps even more limited than the social democratic welfare states of popular imagination. Eugene Perrier has provided a brief but relatively comprehensive historical sketch of the establishment of the capitalist regime with the focus on the origins of the United States as a society constructed upon the bodies of the indigenous people, slaves, and women. per year rightfully skewers the supposedly uniquely quote self-reforming character of our government even a cursory overview confirms that our supposedly representative democracy is neither representative nor a democracy we live under the rule of a regime which lacks any sort of direct oversight over its judicial branch a skews proportional representation in favor of a system originally designed to preserve the power of rural slave owners sets up a representative system in which the number of constituents per elected official is completely out of proportion to the actual population in order to further empower a declining white petty bourgeoisie, allows politicians to gerrymandered districts to their

liking, and entrusts an arcane entity known as the Electoral College to choose its chief executive, when indeed the latter is not chosen directly by the Supreme Court. That is when the entire edifice does not, for long periods of time, shut down entirely. Worse, the mechanisms for changing our Constitution throw up nearly insurmountable hurdles to making any alterations to the rules of the game. Democratic socialists are, of course, aware of these flaws, but nevertheless prefer to follow a strategy which confines itself to the narrow framework of bourgeois legality and constitutionality. Chris Massano writes in the call that, quote, many but not all democratic demands could be one within the current constitutional framework, and if implemented, would mitigate a number of its

most anti-democratic aspects, end quote. Yet, Masano is forced to acknowledge that far-reaching structural changes would be nearly impossible, thanks to the effective minority veto, by which, as arch-conservative Antonin Scalia pointed out, less than 2% of the population can block any proposed amendments. Indeed, Masano goes on to state that, quote, given the egregiously high barriers to calling a constitutional convention or amending the current constitution, a demand for a wholly new constitution would be utopian, end quote. Thus, the reformist turned back before even reaching the limited horizon of bourgeois legality. Instead, these comrades urged socialists to tinker around the edges

while maintaining loyalty to the regime, even when the means of radical change are permissible under the current system. This is likely because Maisano and others recognize that any new constitutional convention, if it weren't dominated by reactionary's intent on tearing away the few hard-won rights we've managed to secure, would most likely result in a full-blown civil war. To avoid or delay this possibility, Democratic socialists posit a quote-unquote preference for peace. This is endorsed either on its supposed feasibility or based on the argument that the working class would never be willing to resort to force of arms in order to defend its rights and livelihood. But as Marxists and students of history, we recognize, quote, the chronic lag of ideas and

relations behind new objective conditions right up to the moment when the latter crash over people in the form of a catastrophe." Simply because the working class would prefer to make changes peacefully and through pre-approved channels does not mean that the ruling class will grant concessions, much less a transfer of power. Indeed, certain changes may not even be structurally possible given existing state forms. Nor does this quote-unquote preference for peace guarantee that the working class will simply sit still during a time of continuously declining standards of living or political unrest. After nearly 150 years of muddling along,

following the reproachment between the federal government and the remnants of the southern aristocracy following the termination of reconstruction and the end of the Great Sioux War, the constitutional mechanisms of the United States are understood, even by many far outside of the socialist movement, to be breaking down under the pressure of the continuing profitability crisis in the advanced capitalist economies. If we extrapolate current economic and political trends into the future, it is fair to ask,

is it at all certain that the capitalist regime of the United States, States will maintain its tenuous hold on legitimacy with the population indefinitely? And if the aspirations of the masses cannot be met through recourse to a democratic, peaceful path, what then? Our evaluation of the balance of forces and particularities of the American state leads many of us to conclude that rather than undertaking a strategy of reclaiming the state, to achieve socialism in North America, it will be necessary to smash the old regime and implement a vigorous program of decolonization in order to establish. some form of cooperative commonwealth.

Roadblocks and detours on the parliamentary road. For our more naive comrades, the U.S. government works much as it's presented in high school civics class. Individual citizens vote for candidates in a free and fair political environment, which results in the advancement of candidates whose views represent the will of the electorate, on average, and who then enter into positions in government and dutifully represent the will of the people. The more sophisticated democratic socialist will grant that capitalist class power deforms the functions of government, but argue that the existing constitutional order is indestructible and or a neutral objective tool, which can be made use of

by any class. Thus, the existing state apparatus could be either used on behalf of the working class and the oppressed or peacefully transformed from an apparatus of capitalist rule into an instrument of the working class sovereignty. In other words, the idea is that if the left wins enough elections to possess a majority in Congress, the capitalist state, with its courts, police, prisons, and military, can then implement, quote-unquote, full-throated democratic socialism with the consent of the voters. Thus, reformists generally posit a scenario whereby the capitalist class in their military and career civil service cede power in a relatively peaceful process to the working-class majority. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that such a

peaceful transition is possible in some circumstances, even marks and angles allowed for possibility. If Marx writes, in the United States, the working class were to gain a majority in parliament or Congress, they could, in a legal way, get rid of the laws and institutions blocking their development, though they could only do so insofar as society had reached a sufficiently mature development, end quote. But do we really think that the most powerful and ruthless ruling class in human history will quietly acquiesce as they find their ill-gotten wealth expropriated? This seems unlikely. To wit, in the very next paragraph, Marx continues, quote, However, the quote-unquote peaceful development could quickly change into a violent one through a rebellion by those with a stake in the old order.

If they, as in the American Civil War and French Revolution, were crushed by force, then it would be as rebels against the legal power, end quote. A more compelling perspective is perhaps offered by the centrist wing of the DSA, whose politics are frequently articulated in Jacobin, as well as in the factional journal DeKal. following in the footsteps of British academic Ralph Miliband, this current attempts to walk the knife edge between reform and revolution, postulating a so-called, quote-unquote, revolutionary reformism. What exactly does this mean? Consider the following scenario. A large and growing socialist movement is able to elect a majority to parliamentary bodies, let's say for the sake of argument, socialists are elected to both houses of Congress and the presidency.

Immediately upon winning the election, capitalist resistance to the democratic mandate of the masses begins. This could take the effect of judicial interference, capital strikes, and violent fascist provocation. However, there are even deeper issues. If the socialist were allowed to take up elected positions and representative bodies of the capitalist state, reformist strategies must reckon with resistance on the part of the, quote, apolitical civil service, an enormous and strategically positioned body consisting of, quote, around 9.1 million employees, about 22.4% of which are full-time feds and the rest coming from contractors, end quote. Ralph Miliband reminds us that, quote, by far the larger part of the state personnel at higher

levels and at least a very large number in the lower ones as well, are much more likely to be ideologically, politically, and emotionally on the side of the conservative forces than of the government. In many cases, they will be firmly opposed to programs and policies which they believe to be utterly detrimental to the national interest, end quote. perhaps more ominously, reformist strategy must provide a mechanism for disarming or otherwise rendering inert, the power, organization, capacity for organized violence, and sheer size of the national security state. In addition to the 1.3 million active duty military, there are over 800,000 National Guard and Reserve Forces, in addition to at least another 700,000 civilians

working under the aegis of the Department of Defense. At least another 700,000 work for state security agencies such as the FBI, CIA, NSA, Border Patrol, DEA, ATF, ICE, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons. These numbers do not include local and state-level police forces. As Kim Moody notes in On New Terrain, quote, the concept of the state as a coercive apparatus in defense of capitalism as a system at home and abroad is alive and well, end quote. To their credit, left reformists do not try to minimize these problems. problems. However, given that their sole recourse to counter-revolution is mass mobilization and vague appeals to the ability of movements to stymie the bloody tide of reaction, this is wishful

thinking. Mass mobilizations, broad popular support, and the weapon of the general strike certainly ought to be tactics in the arsenal of any socialist movement. But in the face of the ruling class's trump card, a full-blown military coup, it is likely even these powerful forces will prove insufficient without an armed and organized resistance. And since these very same democratic socialist reject out of hand the possibility of insurrection and presumably also dispense with the need to make preparations today for the eventuality of armed struggle, we are faced with the ironic prospect that democratic socialist will not be prepared to defend their own reforms. If civil war is likely to be an inevitable component of the transition to socialism, our movement must make

every preparation necessary, psychologically and in practice, to ensure that the forces of the working class and oppressed come out on top in such a contest. Trotsky made the same point nearly a hundred years ago when he said, quote, one cannot lull the masses day in and day out with claptrap about a peaceful, painless transition to socialism, and then at the first solid punch on the nose, summon the masses to an armed response. This is the surest way of assisting reaction in the root of the proletariat. To prove equal, to a revolutionary repulse, the masses must be ideologically, organizationally, and materially prepared for it.

They must understand the inevitability of a sharpening of the class struggle and of its turning at a certain stage into a civil war, end quote. Writing on the tragedy of the Finnish Revolution, in which a democratically elected socialist government was overwhelmed by counter-revolutionary violence, Eric Blanc, a leading DSA theorist and frequent contributor to Jacobin and The Call, concludes that it is, quote, a mistake to throw out the strategic lessons learned from a successful workers' revolution on the grounds of its later military defeat, end quote.

But given that nearly every democratic socialist government has been overthrown by force in those cases it hasn't immediately sold out, a cursory glance at this balance sheet should at the very least give us pause. Without a viable military strategy, even the most duly elected socialist government is likely to go down in bloody defeat. The mentality of the revolutionary is not to expect, history to follow prescribed paths, but to leap into political openings when they present themselves. As such, we do not reject a tactical engagement with elections, nor do we dismiss out of hand

the prospect of a parliamentary road to power. However, for a variety of reasons, we believe the likelihood of such a turn of events is exaggerated by reformists. But as the economic and political contradictions sharpen over the coming years, our movement must begin planning for any number of unexpected occurrences. Lennon writes, quote, Marxism does not reject any form of struggle, end quote. Given the manifold stumbling blocks on the parliamentary road to socialism, it is clear that the question of armed struggle must not be an afterthought. We must begin readying ourselves now, not in the individualist fashion of the modern-day prepper,

but by building up and creating institutions of community's self-defense. Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson usefully sums up the role of self-defense under present conditions. Quote, in our present era, romantic and often hypermasculine notions of self-defense centered on militaristic images, practices, and traditions can be very problematic. They can sometimes be a deterrent or a turnoff to large sectors of our people seeking to avoid unwarranted confrontations with the state. They invite an influx of agent provocateurs into our organizations and communities and give the state an easy target and excuse for intensified repression before we have built the movement we need to defend ourselves.

Their often undemocratic practices have historically fostered hierarchy, patriarchy, and heterosexism. Rather, we must have a broad and dynamic understanding of self-defense that addresses the material and social needs of our people first and foremost and intentionally incorporates the positive and negative lessons of our historical legacy of struggle against white supremacy and genocide. Today, the foundations of our self-defense organizing must first and foremost be about building community by intentionally and systematically struggling to forge, quote, common unity amongst our people on questions relating to our survival and overall well-being, end quote. Akuno correctly emphasizes the need for a host of mutual aid initiatives, including but not

limited to, legal defense formations, emergency response corps, child care cooperatives, food pantries, etc. But paramilitary organization necessarily must play a critical role as well. As Donald Parkinson notes, based upon historical precedent, quote, defensive and paramilitary organizations must be successfully organized before the appearance of revolutionary situations, at which point a mass party becomes a major social influence and thus subject to police and fascist violence, end quote. Organizations of self-defense not only have long-term strategic importance, but can immediately protect our oppressed and working class communities who are becoming more frequent

targets of right-wing violence. Nothing says that Democratic Socialists needn't take seriously the danger of fascist violence, especially because the latter has already struck out at our movement from Charlottesville to Louisville and beyond. The rise of left-wing militias in the manner of Redneck Revolt, John Brown Gun Club, and the Socialist Rifle Association are welcomed developments in this direction. However, the link between the socialist political forces and the militia movement today is weak, with the latter element functioning in a completely autonomous manner. Despite the best of intentions, a lack of political leadership over the militia movement by socialist political formations has led these formations to be rocked by repeated crises of accountability.

Ultimately, in order for such bodies to function as effective nuclei for the defense of the revolution rather than mere recreational clubs for hobbyists, stronger relationships must be developed in which the militias directly subordinate themselves to civilian leadership of the movement in accordance with the principle that, quote, the party commands the gun and the gun must never be allowed to command the party end quote in the context of a revolutionary situation defensive measures will need to quickly pivot toward an all or nothing struggle for power or else face utter annihilation halfway measures and equivocation will lead us straight to the graveyard this is why the core constituencies of the revolutionary movement the base must have no illusions about the likelihood of a peaceful transition and must prepare to extirpate the old regime root and branch conclusion base building for what to sum up in order to posit a plausible democratic reed parliamentary strategy to achieve socialism reformist must answer several objections reflecting contradictions which cast doubt on the viability of their central thesis parliamentary rotors must establish how class independence which will be necessary to pursue revolutionary transformation of society is achieved while operating for any length of time in a capitalist or cross-class electoral bloc. The perspective of left reformists tends to downplay the pressures of systemic co-option on socialist leaders, especially those occupying posts in government, and fails to offer a compelling countermeasure to hold elected officials accountable. For instance, democratic centralism, a mechanism initially intended as a check on the independent power

of wayward elected officials. Further, they must explain how the masses and their leaders will be prepared to overthrow the government, a prerequisite for implementing socialism, without a clear orientation on the need to prepare such action in advance and without prior arming and training of the working class. And finally, reformist must posit a compelling theory of defense against the counter-revolution, a particularly thorny point when many advocates of the parliamentary road seemingly disavow the willingness to make use of revolutionary violence. While we can never know with scientific certainty when or if revolution will come, it is this very uncertainty which compels us to retain at least some forces within the socialist movement to act as a contingency plan in this eventuality, so that we're not caught completely flat-footed if revolution does break out.

Far from being an abstract or irrelevant concern, we can begin preparing for revolution today. The past 200 years of working class history provides ample evidence that the path to socialism is anything. but linear. The parliamentary road and the peaceful transition to socialism may be one possible future, but it is not the only one, and it may not even be the most likely. Comrades in DSA display welcome humility when they write that they, quote, do not pretend to know exactly how a transition from capitalism to socialism will ultimately play out, end quote. Open-mindedness and a willingness to amend a mistaken points of view in light of new evidence are surely qualities lacking in our movement today, especially within what passes for the revolutionary left.

Ironically, it is the left reformist strategy which posits a universal and relatively straightforward path to power, when the history of class struggle itself proceeds and zigs and zags. While revolutionaries don't make revolution, i.e. revolutions are not consciously plotted and diagrammed by revolutionaries, it is nonetheless also true that human beings are the raw material out of which revolutions are constructed. One of our primary tasks in constructing this oppositional current to the status quo is the creation of stewards of the class, or experienced, competent, and politically astute working class fighters. Quote, the institutions we help build won't substitute for working class upsurges, and they won't create new objective realities, but they will develop stewards of the class who can help lead, not moderate, those inevitable surges, and they will create frameworks that serve as vessels for those surges.

end quote. Revolutionaries then, even when operating in a non-revolutionary situation, still have an important mission, to prepare ourselves in our class for the emergence of a revolutionary crisis. Today this entails formulating a political program to exit the crisis, fashioning powerful mass organizations which the working class can mobilize and deploy in such a crisis to direct the movement away from state sanctioned channels, organizing community self-defense, and preparing a layer of working class leaders who are ideologically committed to overthrowing the state and can impart to the working class that its interests lay in running society itself. Whatever future scenario comes to pass, base building remains the defining responsibility

of the socialist left today. But a socialist base must be self-consciously piloting toward a revolutionary rupture with the capitalist regime, or reintegration with capitalism, is a sure bet. This is ultimately the worst disservice the reformist due to our movement. By foreclosing the possibility of revolution, they fail to psychologically and practically prepare the tens of thousands of socialists who are coming up in our movement for the eventuality of a ruptural break, denigrate fidelity to revolutionary change, and underestimate the sacrifices which would be necessary to see through this break to its final conclusion. That was Goodbye Revolution, an article by Tim Horace in the Marxist Center magazine Regeneration.

Good night. And then the day came, all we were talking about was her dying. All we were talking about was her dying. And if we had the right to ask her to keep trying, live. Look up. Keep your eyes on the prize, girl. Don't be surprised when your road goes still.

days you go dancing with your demons screaming they seem just like your friends these are things i wish my mother would have told me all i ever really wanted was her story You die, you die, you die, you die, you die. You're not the only one feeling hurt taste. I have been run out of skin. But little girl, you've got to dream beyond the blood house. I hear I'm hutting you. I'm hunting you down

Don't get them to win These are things I wish I wish my mother would have told me All I ever really Was a warning You live a better And then you die You die, you die, you die, you die

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You're trying to finder. It's hard to find or it's like there was no one there you turned upon her it's like there was no one there you turned upon me it's like I was never there I was a blackbird

a black dude a black blackboard over there blackboard over there blackboard over there Oh, ah, oh, ah, oh, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, oh.