Problems of Socialist Strategy
By Brian O’Cathail
Article originally published in Issue 8 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
The socialist movement is at a strategic impasse, argues Brian O’Cathail
The already unfolding climate disaster means that humanity is facing into the abyss. Rising militarism and ‘great power’ conflict in the wake of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine raise the very real prospect of nuclear annihilation. Economic crisis follows economic crisis; working class living standards are falling, the super-rich continue to grow wealthier, while much of the intermediate strata face ruin. The phrase “socialism or barbarism” may well be a terrible cliche, but it is used so often for very good reason. Yet the path to a socialist future is not clear, and none of our maps appear to be reliable.
For most of the revolutionary left, questions of strategy tend to resolve themselves into questions of party building. What exactly the “revolutionary party” will do once constructed is less than clear, beyond a mostly quite vague commitment to a 1917-style revolution as filtered through the experience of 1968.
For others on the left, questions of strategy tend to merely become questions of electoral tactics. The question of how a transition to socialism would come about after an improved electoral performance or even after the election of a left-wing government simply doesn’t arise: ambitions have retreated to the administration of capitalism in some improved, less brutal, form. Unfortunately for reformists, many of the barriers to revolutionary change I discuss here are problems equally for those committed only to these supremely modest ambitions.
For some years, particularly around the height of the anti-globalisation movement, anarchist ideas (or more often anarchist-inspired ideas) enjoyed a certain popularity. That phenomenon, amongst other things, represented a belief that questions of transformational strategy could be evaded. Currently, there’s a certain small-scale revival of Stalinism or at least of Stalinist aesthetics on the internet. While it’s tempting to focus on the edgelord aspect of that phenomenon, for our purposes its most relevant aspect is that it represents a claim that questions of strategy have somehow already been resolved elsewhere; in the fiction of “Marxism-Leninism” and the history of dead movements now worn as a costume.
A rare conversation about strategy
In 2006, writers associated with one of the more sophisticated revolutionary currents, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionaire (LCR) opened up the kind of discussion of basic questions of socialist strategy that is all too rare amongst socialists. This discussion included contributions from, amongst others Antoin Artoud and Cedric Durand and, most notably an essay by Daniel Bensaid entitled “The Return of Strategy”.[1] In that essay, Bensaid reflected on the history of socialist strategy in the second half of the twentieth century.
Using the concept of a “strategic hypothesis”, he compared the main approaches adopted by revolutionaries, concentrating particularly on the one which the LCR had itself mostly, but not unwaveringly, adopted: the insurrectionary general strike. (This could be crudely simplified as 1968 but this time we will be organised and ready). His purpose was to remind the socialist movement of the need for strategic thinking.
Thirteen years later, in an essay also calling for new attention to strategic thinking, “The Strategic Question Revisited: Ten Theses”, Panagiotis Sotiris lamented that Bensaid’s plea had not been heard.[2] That while the crisis of 2008 had brought questions of “power and hegemony” back to the fore, the left’s answers were still impoverished.
I recommend reading those two essays. The purpose of this article isn’t to attempt to make as substantial or meaningful a contribution, it’s more to draw attention once more to the need for strategic thinking. It is a plea for socialists to stop acting as if questions have been answered that very obviously have not.
““It is a plea for socialists to stop acting as if questions have been answered that very obviously have not.””
Orphaned by time
If we take a dispassionate look at the recent fortunes of the main strategies employed by socialists over the last century, it is hard to find much reason to trust in any of them.
In the early and middle parts of the last century, the spontaneous creation of workers’ councils was common enough to be almost an expected feature of any major social crisis. This is no longer the case and has not been for many years. The last large-scale outbreak of workers’ councils in a developed parliamentary democracy was in France in 1968, a time now further removed from us than it was from October 1917. If it made sense for the generation of 68ers to hope that it was a harbinger of things to come, a kind of dress rehearsal, even their own 1905, it makes rather less sense to assume the same now.
But if the assumptions based on 1968 underlying the “insurrectionary general strike” hypothesis now look more shaky, the main rival hypotheses are in no better a state.
Guerrilla struggle was once the revolutionary strategy of a range of radicals in the third world, Guevarists, Maoists, some left nationalists and even briefly some Trotskyists. That period essentially came to an end three decades ago. Most of the political trends focused on guerillaism have disappeared or become something else. They have been undermined by the same geopolitical trends and socio-economic processes as other radical movements, but also by rapid urbanisation and an increasingly dismal military situation when faced with an even slightly competent state equipped with a reasonably modern military.
There remain two notable Maoist “protracted people’s wars”, one in the Philippines and the other in India. Despite the fantasies of tiny but noisy internet fan clubs, neither has any prospect of actually winning. They can maintain a few thousand fighters in the remotest areas for years or decades on end, but they can’t progress beyond that. Only in the most undeveloped countries, with very weak states with little social base, and appropriate terrain is this kind of strategy now even slightly credible. Neither India nor the Philippines are those kind of countries; they haven’t been in a long time and won’t be again short of something like civilisational collapse caused by climate change.[3]
Revolutionary syndicalism, including anarcho-syndicalism, is another strategy left orphaned by time. The question of whether a revolutionary trade union could be a vehicle for socialist transformation doesn’t appear to even arise in a context where nobody has been able to build a functioning revolutionary union of more than a few thousand in the first place.
““Revolutionary syndicalism, including anarcho-syndicalism, is another strategy left orphaned by time.””
An electoral alternative?
Meanwhile, across the West at least (and while the situation is more mixed in the underdeveloped world it is not generally much better), the traditional electoral parties of the left have moved drastically to the right, withered, or both. The old social democratic parties first abandoned the idea of moving beyond capitalism and then, in almost all cases, abandoned even the goal of reforming it significantly. The once large Communist Parties have themselves adopted various forms of social democratic politics and have declined in most cases faster than their old rivals.
The experience of what were known as the “new left parties”, coming into being from the mid 1990s, has been valuable in many ways, not least in keeping a socialist or at least “left” presence in mainstream politics in a number of countries. But whatever we think of their programmes, these have almost universally been niche parties, rarely threatening to attain governmental power and without any plan to supersede capitalism if they do. There have also been a series of electoral “moments” centred around particular leaders, usually figures left over from the struggles of previous generations, suddenly thrust to the fore, Sanders, Corbyn, Mélenchon. This is an interesting phenomenon but thus far one that is indicative of political volatility rather than showing a reliable way forward.
On the very rare occasions where forces to the left of what remains of European social democracy have attained governmental office, the experience has ranged from disastrous surrender (SYRIZA) to reasonably successful reformist capitalist governance (Bolivia).
What has changed?
Both the revolutionary socialist movement and the mass reformist socialist parties based themselves on a working class culture and a sense of working class solidarity that was intimately linked to the living and working conditions of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Deindustrialisation, or shifts in industry to new locations, along with post-Fordist work patterns, have undermined those particular social networks and communities, both in workplaces and in the streets and suburbs which were linked to them.[4]
This is not to suggest that only industrial workers or workers in large factories are real workers. Nor is it to suggest that new working class solidarities cannot or will not be created in new more splintered conditions. And the industrialisation of large segments of the global south is enormously significant without being a replay of earlier processes in the developed world. But in the West, the forms of consciousness that were given political expression by the mass social democratic and communist parties of the past grew out of specific conditions which largely do not exist in the same way now. But much contemporary reformism and crucially also revolutionary socialism now involves a sense of nostalgia for something which is not in fact returning and needs to be replaced by something as yet uncreated. The Spirit of 1945 is just the Labourist version of this nostalgia, we could equally talk of a Spirit of 1968 or 1936.
““Contemporary reformism and crucially also revolutionary socialism now involves a sense of nostalgia for something which is not in fact returning.””
It is useful to conceptualise these changes in terms of a throwing back of consciousness, linked to the defeats of the union movement in the Western world. But we can’t treat this as something like a loss of confidence, something that can be fixed with some victories and heightened morale. There are material underpinnings to these retreats.
Trade unionism, for example, hasn’t been in more or less continuous decline for perhaps forty years just because bureaucratic leaders won’t fight, or because class confidence is low, but also because fighting and organising on the terrain of financialised, globalised capitalism has become substantially trickier. A revitalised labour movement will have to be one that finds ways of fighting internationally and locally at the same time. Something that’s much easier to declare a need for than to accomplish.
Problems we never solved in the first place
It’s important to note that new problems aren’t the only ones we face. The socialist movement was not, in fact, on the verge of leading a transformation of society before they came into existence. There were many problems that we’d never really come to terms with in the first place, and most of them remain problems.
The most obvious of these are sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism. These things are not reducible to tools of the capitalist class, dividing the workers. But they do in fact, as well as having other aspects, divide the working class in ways which pose deep strategic challenges. This is one set of problems that have been the subject of a great deal of thought and theorisation, particularly by Marxist Feminists and Black Marxists, that can’t be dealt with here. But it is important to note in any list of strategic problems for socialists that the necessity of finding ways to overcome divisions caused by racism or sexism, the necessity of forging a unity based on opposition to all forms of oppression, is another thing that is easier to declare than it is to accomplish.
A problem that much of the revolutionary left prefers not to think about too much has been the unexpected resilience of working class belief in bourgeois democracy. This was something that had already begun to be seen as a problem in western Europe in the early period of the Communist International. A century later, most people are still voting and still think of politics in terms of parliaments or presidents and elections. In recent decades we have seen revolutionary crises in a number of autocracies and oligarchic democracies but, instead of throwing up workers’ councils, the forms of the movements have been popular rather than class-defined and the demands of the movements have never moved past calls for the introduction of parliamentary democracy or its better functioning.
““It’s important to note that new problems aren’t the only ones we face.””
There are, of course, approaches to this problem drawn from socialist history. The recent attempts to resurrect the thinking of Kautsky, most obviously, appear likely to follow the original in miniature in devolving into standard parliamentary reformism and in any case provide little in the way of distinct answers to most of the more difficult questions raised here. There are also those who refer back to the early Comintern’s concept of a Workers’ Government. But while an interesting and in my view probably more productive starting point it is just that and very far from providing fully formed answers for our time and place.
So what then?
To this point, we’ve concerned ourselves only with problems that precede the taking of power (or even just the taking of office). But it’s not at all clear what comes next. I’m not referring here to the traditional reluctance of socialists to sketch out in detail the contours of a socialist society, although I do think that this can serve as an excuse for not thinking through some important questions. I’m talking about more immediate issues of the survival of any form of working-class power, or even of a genuinely radically reformist government.
When the Bolsheviks led the Russian Revolution, they were aware that its success depended on the revolution spreading. Isolation, political and economic, led to ever-increasing bureaucracy which eventually strangled the revolution and left in its place a mockery of socialism. Russia may have been the first domino to fall, but all early twentieth century Marxists knew that a revolution must spread or die. The Bolsheviks took their gamble and lost. But they took their gamble at a time when Western Europe contained a vigorous and powerful labour movement, and a substantial part of the working class had socialist views. That is, they had quite sane reasons to believe that the cavalry was likely to come.
It takes no great insight to realise that no such cavalry yet exists today, given the state of the labour movement and the decline of socialist consciousness. This is not just a problem for the hypothetical worker’s state or federation of anarchist councils, but even for radical reformism. When SYRIZA abjectly surrendered to the EU and bondholders, many left-wing commentators wrote penetrating and correct criticisms of their failures. Most of them however, were much less convincing in their alternatives, with vague suggestions that a defiant Greek government should have appealed to the workers of Europe over the heads of their governments. Well yes, they should have, but is anybody really convinced that it would have worked?
The weakened state of international solidarity within the West has its mirror in a long standing lack of solidarity between the developed and underdeveloped worlds. Yet, the ability to truly internationalise struggle against capital, will require just such solidarity. As will any ability to decarbonise, which doesn’t simply assume the perpetual immiseration of much of the global South.
The problem here is not just the problem of solidarity but the direct material impacts of globalisation and financialisation. The relatively footloose nature of modern capital and the internationally integrated nature of production make it all too easy to play workers in one location off against those in another. Or simply to abandon workers in one locale entirely.
Autarky?
Which brings me to one of the biggest problems. The idea of socialism in one country was always a mirage. The best that could be built in such circumstances was an outpost of working-class power. An island in a sea of capitalism, subject to all kinds of bureaucratic pressures. But the problems of maintaining such an outpost are in many ways even greater than they were a century ago. For that matter, there was a much greater opportunity to pursue radically reformist social democracy in one country too. Any socialist experiment will not only have to spread, but it will have to spread rapidly.
If you are reading this on a smartphone, components may have been made in over 40 countries.[5] Raw materials for the components came from even more. That’s a particularly extreme example, but the same thing holds to a substantial degree for any complex manufactured good. There is very little that is produced here in Ireland, for instance, that doesn’t depend on complex global supply chains. About the only thing produced from scratch on a significant scale is cattle, and even that depends on imported fertilisers. The same is broadly true of most other countries, even much larger ones with more indigenous industries.
If a reasonably developed country has isolation from the world capitalist market forced upon it, great parts of its economy will be on the edge of collapse in short order. It is very difficult to imagine an attempt at a socialist transformation of society maintaining much popular support in Spain or Argentina, or Denmark for very long if the attempt means being forced into an attempt to rebuild very quickly on a semi-autarchic basis.
Even without a real rupture from capitalism, a sufficiently radical social democratic reformism faces problems almost as extreme. Preventing capital flight requires measures that will also cut the country off from capital in-flows. Neither the bond markets nor the rest of the capitalist world will respond generously. Just ask Yanis Varoufakis. The long trend towards neoliberalism has not just been a matter of elite interests or intellectual fashion, although it has been both of those things. It is near-universal because it is enforced.
The prospect of immediate isolation for any socialist project looms even larger after the collapse of the Stalinist bloc. Usually, the strategic consequences of that collapse are seen primarily through the lens of its effect in setting back socialist consciousness and in diminishing the degree to which the capitalist classes of the West felt threatened enough to make concessions to social democracy at home. These are both very important to understanding today’s world. But you don’t have to have any illusions about the nature of Stalinism to understand that the absence of a large genuinely different economic bloc also reduces the ability of any socialist experiment to manoeuvre.
Withering away?
Finally, there are lessons from the Russian experience which have not been taken entirely on board. We are no closer to a clear understanding of how exactly to progress from an initial experiment in working class power towards the withering away of the state, the abolition of money, and of coercion in general. This may be one of those issues that it is more reasonable not to have much vision of in advance, but more damningly, there seems to be very little discussion of what should be done in the short term after a rupture with capitalism.
The early Bolshevik years are usually seen as heroic on the revolutionary left. It’s less often appreciated how chaotic they were, how filled with wild swings in response to new and unexpected crises. They had no idea how to govern, quite unjustified optimism about how easy things would be to work out once the workers were in charge, and a distinct tendency to argue as if each new desperate turn was obviously the only correct and principled approach all along. A socialist movement with real ambition needs to learn from that - not just some anecdotes about inspirational leaders or the thought of Lenin, Trotsky or Bukharin but that it needs to have some coherent plans in advance.
No despair
This article has outlined a great number of barriers to a socialist transformation of society. In a movement more prone to upbeat exhortations, this may be received as a counsel of despair. It is not intended as such.
My point is not that any of these issues are impossible to overcome. It’s that they must be overcome. And that means, amongst other things, that they have to be thought about and addressed. The socialist movement needs to think about strategy more and not just tactics for building a bigger, more influential, cadre group or for getting more votes at the next election, or for winning some immediate struggle on a particular issue, valuable though any of those things may be.
The socialist movement needs a viable “strategic hypothesis”, something it is hard to argue that we currently have. Beyond that, we need to develop a habit of thinking in the long term and thinking our aims through, integrating that with our active participation in movements and struggles.
There are many dogmatists on the socialist left. It's an unfortunately widespread practice on the socialist left for small groups to present themselves as if they are already in possession of all of the answers, a complete and finished programme. If such a group tries to recruit you, you should ask them some hard questions about strategy and subject their answers to a certain sceptical scrutiny.
There are also many groups and individuals concentrating entirely on the current campaign, the current elections, the current struggle. That doesn’t mean that they are “spontaneists” in theory for the most part, it just means that issues of socialist transformation seem distant. Much of this activism is useful and important. But it isn’t going to be enough without a wider vision. The capitalist system, if it isn’t replaced, is going to destroy any liveable future for the bulk of humanity. That’s not rhetoric. That is what is happening on an ecological level. This article is a plea for socialists to take that seriously and once again think strategically.
Notes
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bensaid/2006/08/polstrat.htm
https://socialistproject.ca/2019/05/the-strategic-question-revisited-ten-theses/
There was a third remaining “protracted people’s war” up until quite recently, in Nepal, one of the dwindling number of countries with a suitably extreme lack of development, a weak state with a narrow social base, and appropriate terrain. The insurgency even attained a favourable military position before its leading party suddenly abandoned that strategy in its entirety, took an electoral turn and entered a coalition. To the aforementioned fan clubs, this was due to them suddenly coming down with a terrible dose of “Revisionism”, a meaningless phrase with no explanatory power. The rest of us might instead think about how an attempt by a victorious guerilla army to impose Maoist “New Democracy” in a desperately poor country, landlocked and entirely surrounded by the hostile behemoths of China and India would have actually gone.
This is more complex in Ireland, which at least in the South was lacking mill towns and large factories to begin with. The North fits the general picture more closely.
https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/iphone-supply-chain/