WeeklyWorker

01.08.2024
Belgium’s general strike: Eugène Laermans ‘Un soir de grève’ (1893)

In search of a synthesis

General strikes can be a tactic. But do they amount to a strategy? Steve Bloom calls for a positive resolution of the differences he has with Mike Macnair’s Revolutionary strategy

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

The words above, spoken by Brutus in Shakespeare’s play, hold a deep significance for those who want to think systematically about revolutionary strategy. It is a significance we will discuss shortly, but first a few introductory remarks.

This is not the article I started out to write after reading Mike Macnair’s book titled Revolutionary strategy. Indeed, I not only started writing a different article: I actually completed it and submitted it for publication to the Weekly Worker. My submission prompted a personal exchange with Mike, in which he convinced me that I was misunderstanding a fundamental aspect of his book by identifying an electoral road to the dictatorship of the proletariat as its underlying premise. I had come to the conclusion that this was the book’s premise primarily because of one ambiguous sentence. Mike clarified the intended syntax, which completely changed its meaning.

I had also come to my conclusion about the underlying premise of the book because it does not include a clear explanation of how Mike conceives the historical moment of transition from a bourgeois state to a workers’ state. I therefore filled in the blank - in a way that was consistent with my incorrect interpretation of Mike’s syntax. In our correspondence, however, Mike filled in the blank for me in a different way.

The result is the present article, with the same basic thrust, but, I am confident, based on a better appreciation of what Mike is calling for in terms of a strategy for transforming society.

Mike and I will offer you dramatically different assessments regarding a series of important events in revolutionary history - and he talks a lot about revolutionary history in his book. I will be submitting a follow-up article in which I plan to take a look at some of these differences, because (a) they are of interest, and (b) it will help us to explore important points of methodological divergence. But on the big question of revolutionary strategy itself, which is the most important question, I do not perceive an unbridgeable divide. That was my conclusion, even when I thought Mike was conceiving an electoral road to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

With my revised appreciation of his outlook I now see even less of a gap between us. Indeed, I see essentially a convergence on overall strategy, with a need to further clarify the one aspect which is missing in Mike’s book: how do we conceive the actual process of transition - the insurrectionary moment, in which a bourgeois state can be overturned and replaced with the dictatorship of the proletariat/workers’ state?

I therefore start the present comment as I did my original: by holding out my hand to Mike in hopes that he will join me in the search for a synthesis that can combine the many deep insights he contributes in Revolutionary strategy with something he firmly (but mistakenly in my view) rejects in the same pages: the importance of the mass-strike or ‘dual-power’ approach to revolutionary change.

Misunderstanding

First, however, let us take a closer look at the primary source of my original error, since doing so will help us in developing our proposal for a synthesis. Mike makes it clear that he uses the words, “extreme democracy”, as a description of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here is an example from the text:

This understanding enables us to formulate a core political minimum platform for the participation of communists in a government. The key is to replace the illusory idea of ‘All power to the soviets’ and the empty one of ‘All power to the Communist Party’ with the original Marxist idea of the undiluted democratic republic, or ‘extreme democracy’, as the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (p119, emphasis added).

I will defer a discussion about whether the slogan, ‘All power to the soviets’, is “illusory” until my promised excursion into some of the more interesting differences I have with Mike on historical and theoretical matters. For now let us simply note that if “extreme democracy” is a description of the proletarian dictatorship, then another passage, two pages later, originally made no sense to me: “The Kautskyans were right on a fundamental point. Communists can only take power when we have won majority support for working class rule through extreme democracy” (p121, emphasis added).

This seemed completely contradictory. “Extreme democracy,” I thought to myself, cannot be both a synonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the method by which we win a majority for working class rule before taking power. If “extreme democracy” means the dictatorship of the proletariat, then it is clearly unavailable to us as a structure through which we can win a majority before the working class takes power - because it does not yet exist.

As noted, this takes the syntax of the sentence in question to read: ‘Communists can only take power when we have won majority support ... through extreme democracy’. Mike wrote back that, no, what he was trying to say is: ‘Communists can only take power when we have won majority support for working class rule.’ ‘Extreme democracy’ in this sentence is a description of the method by which the working class will rule, not the means by which we will convince a majority.

In our correspondence Mike also provided an explanation of his conception of the transition, and of the non-electoral process of winning a majority that leads up to the transition - something that might have helped me to interpret the sentence in question correctly, had it been in the book. I quote extensively, with Mike’s permission, from an email he sent to me on July 22 (all emphasis in the original):

What is the means by which we get to workers’ power? The answer is to build up the organisations of the working class as a large minority ‘state within a state’ like the parties of the Second International ...

This ‘state within a state’ is also prefigurative to the extent that democratic centralism operates, meaning the norms of the pre-1914 SPD and related organisations, and as opposed to the theft of the name in 1919 for the militarised party; so there is self-government for the branches, fractions, associated societies, and so on; with the result that, when the existing state falls into crisis, there is a large minority already existing which can think of socialist collective action as an alternative way of making decisions, and hence possibly running society, and this large minority can be converted into a majority.

It is perfectly possible that the form of the crisis will start with a left victory in a general election, or with a military mutiny, or with OTT repression in response to minor terrorist activity triggering a radical loss of legitimacy and collapse of the state, as in Ireland in 1918 and Cuba in 1958-59; or whatever. (It can also start with military defeat in a war, which is the essence of Russia 1917 and Germany and Austria 1918-19 underneath the superficial appearances.) It does not have to take the form of the mass strike.

How do we judge whether we have a majority? We need to have a party large enough and rooted enough to make such judgments (the Trotskyists routinely radically underestimate the actual size and weight of the RSDLP (Bolsheviks) in 1912-14 and even in February 1917, in the hope that their own grouplets could ‘leap’ into leadership under crisis conditions). Even so Lenin’s famous judgments about the time being right were based as much on local government (Zemstvo) elections in July-September 1917 as on soviet elections. And, as Trotsky pointed out in 1923 and 1931, the soviets of 1905 were created by the Mensheviks (in imitation of British trades councils) and in most of Russia those of 1917 by the Mensheviks and Right SRs, in the belief that they would support the war effort (justified until the failure of the June 1917 offensive).

As a general sketch of revolutionary tasks in the period leading up to an insurrectionary moment, and even of the revolutionary moment itself, this is all more than reasonable. I have disagreements with details and specific formulations, but they are not fundamental. So we will set them aside at least for now.

The primary difficulty which remains is that Mike, in his book, mistakenly rejects the “general strike” or “dual power” model, rather than integrating it as one possible form (and a likely one based on historical experience) that might trigger the moment “when the existing state falls into crisis”. More importantly, even if it is not the trigger, the mass strike is still a powerful political tool the working class can turn to in its attempt to resolve such a crisis by taking power. I agree with the passage above, where Mike writes: “It is perfectly possible that the form of the crisis will start with a left victory in a general election, or with a military mutiny, or with OTT repression in response to minor terrorist activity triggering a radical loss of legitimacy and collapse of the state”, etc. But, when he then concludes: “It does not have to take the form of the mass strike”, he makes a counterposition that is conceptually confusing - in essence comparing apples and oranges.

No, it does not have to start with the mass strike. But the most important question is not the way in which the crisis starts, but the way in which it ends. No matter how the crisis originates - and it might originate with a general strike - such a strike is surely an available political tool by which the masses can resolve the crisis, helping to create the social conditions which will allow a genuine working class government to take power.

If Mike wants to argue that the mass strike/dual power concept was overtheorised by the Trotskyist movement historically, as the one and only ‘true’ revolutionary model, then I will acknowledge that this is correct. Our overtheorisation made it extremely difficult for us to figure out what was happening, when confronted with the Chinese and Cuban revolutions in particular. These events were hard to fit into our theory without twisting our analyses into pretzel-like shapes. So let us agree that we should not overtheorise the mass strike. But let us also not discard it as a valid element in our strategic thinking about the insurrectionary moment (that moment when “a large minority ... can be converted into a majority” and actively engage in the project of taking power). This is, in short, the synthesis that I am asking Mike to consider and join me in adopting.

At least in part our problem may flow from the use of the same word (‘strategy’) in two different senses, suggesting that two elements should be compared/contrasted to each other, when in fact this is not the case. I would say that ‘tactics’ and ‘strategy’ are fluid concepts. What is a strategy in relation to something smaller than itself can be a tactic in relation to something bigger than itself. Mike is using ‘strategy’ in his book to discuss a years-long process of constructing a mass working class opposition force that can become strong enough to take power, when there is a crisis of bourgeois rule. In relation to this project, the mass strike can only be properly thought of as a tactic, something that comes into play at a particular moment - and a relatively fleeting moment at that (though also a decisive one). On the other hand, if we are considering just that moment of social crisis, it is perfectly reasonable to talk about the mass strike as the keystone in an insurrectionary ‘strategy’, with a whole host of smaller tactical questions arising in that context: Who will call the strike? When? What will its demands be? etc.

If we remain cognisant of the fact that, when the word ‘strategy’ is used by proponents of the mass strike, they are not using it in the same way that Mike is in the title of his book, it should help us to avoid counterposing two ‘strategies’ that actually need to be combined, as we think about the nuts and bolts of a revolutionary process.

Marxist concept

Mike’s polemic against the mass strike in Revolutionary strategy responds to a version that presents such a strike as a self-contained formula for revolution. Let me offer another fairly long quotation which will illustrate his approach and thus give us the background we need for a proper discussion:

Let us imagine for a moment a general strike which is both truly general (everyone who works for a wage withdraws their labour) and indefinite, to continue until certain demands are met, happening in a fully capitalist country like Britain. Power supplies are cut off, and with them water supplies and the telephone system. No trains or buses run, and … petrol … soon runs out. The supermarkets are closed, and no deliveries are made to those small owner-run shops that remain open. The hospitals and doctors’ surgeries are closed. It should at once be apparent that this cannot continue for more than a few days. If the result is not to be general catastrophe, the workers need not simply to withdraw their labour, but to organise positively to take over the capitalists’ facilities and run them in the interests of the working class. A truly all-out indefinite general strike, therefore, immediately demands the effective de facto expropriation of the capitalists. As a result, it at once poses the question: will the state protect the capitalists’ property rights? In other words, it poses the question of political power.

Now, of course, what the advocates of the mass strike strategy were calling for was not such a truly all-out, indefinite general strike, called by the political party. The reality of mass strike movements is something a great deal more messy, of the sort described, for Russia, in Luxemburg’s The mass strike, but seen since then in many different countries at different times. The political regime falls into crisis. Some spark sets off the mass movement. Rather than a single, planned, truly all-out, indefinite general strike, there is a wave of mass strikes - some protest actions for political demands; some partial struggles for economic demands. They begin to overlap and are accompanied by political radicalisation.

But a movement of this sort still poses the question of political power, and for exactly the same reasons. A mass strike wave disrupts normal supply chains. This can be true even of a strike in a single industry, like the miners’ strikes in Britain in 1972 and 1974. Equally, however, the capitalists’ property rights are, from their point of view, not merely rights to things, but rights to the streams of income (ie, of social surplus product) which can be made to flow from the social relations which ownership of these things represents. The strike is therefore in itself an interference with their property, and a mass strike wave threatens the security of their property. They begin to disinvest, and to press the state for stronger action against strikers. The economy begins to come unravelled. The loss of the normal (capitalist) mechanisms of authority (decision-making) impacts on the broad masses in the form of dislocation and shortages of goods. A strike wave or revolutionary crisis can last longer than a truly all-out, indefinite general strike, but it cannot last longer than a period of months - at most a couple of years. In this situation, if the workers’ movement does not offer an alternative form of authority … the existing social structures of authority are necessarily reaffirmed. Either the military moves in (Spain in 1873-74 and 1936, etc) or the reformists, put in power, re-establish capitalist order (Ebert-Scheidemann in 1918; everywhere in Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War II; in a much weaker sense, the 1974-79 Wilson-Callaghan government in Britain).

The ‘mass strike strategy’ thus precisely fails to resolve the strategic problem of authority which the negative aspect of the left’s approach - the critique of the struggle for reforms - posed (pp41-42).

What is most interesting to me is that Mike’s understanding of the limits of a mass strike - in particular his observation that such an event actively poses, but cannot on its own resolve, the question of power - is part of the ABCs I learned as a new member of the Young Socialist Alliance (youth group of the US Socialist Workers Party), while the May-June 1968 strike wave was unfolding in France. The ideology of the SWP was firmly rooted in the mass-strike/dual power concept. It was also rooted in the understanding that Mike offers us above. The solution to the limitations of the mass strike developed by the SWP’s theory was the construction of a political party that is capable of taking power, precisely at that moment when the mass strike poses this as a social necessity. Unlike in the version of the mass strike strategy that Mike polemicises against, therefore, the SWP did not envision the strike, by itself, as the sum total of what is needed - something that would, on its own, answer the fundamental political question that such an event puts on the agenda. The role of the strike is merely to pose the question of power in an immediate sense, thus enabling the political forces of revolution to offer a solution that has, suddenly, transformed itself from a mere propaganda slogan into a realistic call to action.

General strike

And thus we come back to the theoretical synthesis I propose now to Mike. Rather than seeing the mass strike as counterposed to the kind of party-building (majority-building) effort he quite correctly puts at the centre of his strategic orientation, let us simply agree that we need to appreciate the ways in which both elements have essential roles to play. The general strike - or some other variety of mass response to a social crisis - is unable to resolve the question of power that it poses without the pre-existence of a revolutionary party. At the same time a revolutionary party is unable to achieve its goal of establishing the proletarian dictatorship without a mass strike, or similar development, which actively poses the question of power as an immediate social issue, visible to tens and even hundreds of millions.

What we are talking about is a revolutionary Marxist concept of the mass strike and its role in the process of creating conditions that can lead to working class power. Mike most often makes reference to the Bakuninist and anarchist conceptions of a mass strike in his book and I make no assertions about the validity of his polemic in relation to these theories. His argument falls short, however, if we are considering a different understanding of the mass strike concept: one that attempts to integrate this phenomenon into a more rounded revolutionary strategy that includes a longer-term party-building perspective.

Note also that in the discussion above I leave open the question of what kind of party we need in order to fill the vacuum of power at the moment when this vacuum is created by a mass strike or similar social crisis. The vision of that party held by the US SWP in the 1960s was quite different from the one Mike presents. At this stage of my life, and at this stage of the class struggle in the USA and on a global scale, I am far more partial to Mike’s general conception. That is why I call for a synthesis, rather than simply defending the old theory that I learned in the 1960s.1 We have to combine Mike’s general appreciation of what kind of party we need with the revolutionary Marxist conception of the role that can be played by a mass strike as part of a generalised social crisis leading to the potential for revolution.

Winning a majority

Mike repeatedly portrays the mass strike strategy as an effort by a minority party to trick the masses into taking power, something we would resort to only if we are attempting to avoid the hard work of winning a majority. Again a couple of quotations:

In the first example Mike even offers us the words, “conning the working class into taking power”, in quotes, as if this is a stated approach by those who believe the mass strike to be an important element in our strategic thinking. But this is a complete misunderstanding/misrepresentation of what the mass strike strategy is, at least in the version that I and other revolutionary Marxists advocate. The mass strike is, in reality, simply a different yardstick by which we can measure whether there is a majority in favour of socialist revolution.

In the French May-June 1968 referred to above there were simultaneous demonstrations across the nation, in which 10 million human beings marched in the streets waving red flags - in a country with a total population of 40 million. I think it is fair to say that, if 25% of the population is actually out in the streets participating in a demonstration, this is proof of majority support for the demands of that demonstration (in this case the demand for socialist revolution).

Thus the Marxist advocates of a mass strike strategy do not reject the idea that we must win a majority in order to make the socialist revolution. We simply assert that the breadth of the mass strike itself can be a legitimate means by which we measure whether we have succeeded in achieving that majority.

This brings us to the quote from Shakespeare with which I began. The socialist revolution can only be made when it represents a majority. But in the world we inhabit majorities and minorities on such big questions as this (and even on smaller questions, of course) are never static. They are in a constant state of flux. As Mike correctly notes, a general strike is not a permanent state of mobilisation. It is, by its very nature, fleeting. And yet it is at this fleeting moment of general strike when the majority sentiment that can produce revolutionary change is at its height, and when the active mobilisation of that majority sentiment, which is essential for smashing the old state (more on this in a moment), is also at its height. This is “the tide in the affairs of men” that we must take at the flood “or lose our ventures”.

Taken at the flood, the mass sentiment for social change reflected in the general strike can succeed in smashing the old state, establishing extreme democracy and achieving all the rest. Allowed to ebb - because the potential of the mass strike movement was not taken at the flood - and the inevitable result is demoralisation (or at least demobilisation) that begins to set in, as the old order re-establishes itself to fill the vacuum of power. The majority sentiment demonstrated by the strike begins to be transformed into its opposite. Such a process of transformation can be completed in a relatively brief time.

This was the danger Lenin noted in 1917, when he objected to Trotsky’s plan to wait until the Congress of Soviets to give the Bolsheviks a clear democratic mandate for the insurrection. Lenin feared that even a delay of weeks might result in an ebb in the mass sentiment for revolution, making insurrection more difficult or even impossible. Lenin’s fears turned out to be unfounded. But they were based in a proper understanding of how revolutionary situations unfold - in particular how they come upon us and then disappear in a matter of weeks or months, if we fail to take advantage, in a timely way, of the majority sentiment in favour of revolution that has developed, while some tangible form of mass mobilisation is ascendant. Our strategy must understand that the height of this ascendancy, the height of the mass mobilisation, is the prime moment for taking a genuinely revolutionary initiative, because it is also the moment when our majority is at its peak.

Agreement

Below I will make reference to strategic elements, and there are many, on which I find myself in agreement with Mike Macnair. Before we leave our conversation about the mass strike, however, one of these needs to be highlighted in particular. Mike and I agree that “the existing capitalist ... state has to be ‘smashed up’” (p70). This is an essential programmatic point, without which agreement on other matters of revolutionary strategy would be meaningless in my judgment.

Yet, if we are going to ‘smash up’ the existing state, we need a mechanism to do so. That mechanism can only be a mobilised mass movement, armed for self-defence against the existing military and police forces (and any new armed force created by the counterrevolution) - a mass movement that is also capable of making deep inroads into the consciousness of these existing repressive forces and thus neutralising them, to the greatest possible degree, as a tool to be used against the revolution. As noted above, this mobilised mass movement is also at its height during the days or weeks that a mass strike is taking place.

This, too, points to the “tide in the affairs of men” and the need to take that tide “at the flood”. It is a key strategic aspect of our understanding of the mass strike as part of a revolutionary perspective (note: not the sum total of a revolutionary strategy, but one key element within it).

At the end of his book Mike offers us a list of 14 summary points. One of these, point 7, seems like a useful clarifications to me, but not really a point of strategy in itself. So I will address the other 13. I wrote either “excellent,” “very good,” or “good” in the margins of eight, so there is no need to discuss them further at the moment. Points 4, 5 and 6 reflect the problem with Mike’s misunderstanding/rejection of the mass strike and can, therefore, be fairly easily adjusted if we are able to accept the synthesis proposal I make above.

Thus we have strong potential agreement on a whole series of issues related to party building as part of an effort to win a majority; the need for democracy in the party, in the mass movement, and in society as a whole, extending all the way to “extreme democracy” as the expected form of the proletarian dictatorship; a rejection of bureaucratic centralism; revolutionary patience (at least in non-revolutionary times); and a number of other questions.

This leaves two formulations I consider problematic:

Mike’s point 1 addresses the relationship between the explicitly working class struggle and other forms of resistance against oppression. His take on this reflects an ongoing discussion, in which I have a somewhat different viewpoint. I believe that Mike and I (and by implication any revolutionary current that is guided by the other 11 points on which we are potentially united) can agree to disagree on this for now, allowing a continued interaction with actual struggles against oppression to help us resolve our disagreement through an ongoing conversation.

Point 12 is also problematic in my view. It tries to answer a question I promise to consider at greater length in my next article: How does the dialectic of a socialist revolution that must be international in its scope unfold in a world that is divided into nation-states, with the class struggle (and therefore revolutionary potentials) reflecting such a substantial unevenness between nations? The solution Mike suggests - attempting to generate a simultaneity on at least a continental scale - does not seem like a practical orientation to me. And yet here, too, there is no urgency for us to agree on a solution. The problem is off in the future at the present moment. We can continue to discuss, while at the same time understanding that the actual dynamics of future events, as they unfold, will most likely offer some clues that can help us to resolve this problem one way or another on the theoretical level. This is similar to the manner in which the debate between Lenin and Trotsky about the class nature of the coming Russian revolution (a conversation that took place between 1905 and the outbreak of the revolution itself) was resolved by the lived experience of 1917.

With such an extensive level of agreement it is, I believe, reasonable to hope that a common approach to revolutionary strategy can emerge from a conversation between Mike and me (and, of course, other readers of/contributors to the Weekly Worker), leading potentially to the development of a stronger organisational presence for revolutionary forces in the USA - where I have been engaged in a parallel exchange with members of the Marxist Unity Group through their publication, Cosmonaut - perhaps in Britain too. And if we want to include another ‘perhaps’, it might even suggest a way in the longer term to develop a meaningful rebirth of a revolutionary international movement worthy of the name.

Reaching such a synthesis would be a demonstration, even if only a small one, that it is possible for revolutionaries to seek unity based on an honest exchange of views despite substantive disagreements on questions of history and theory, and therefore without recourse to either diplomatic formulas that paper over differences or pretending that such differences have no meaningful consequences. I agree with everything Mike Macnair says in his book about “unity” that is achieved in one of these two ways.

  1. I am inclined to think that, as we consider this in more detail, it will become clear that on the party-building question we also need a synthesis, since elements of what traditionalists might tell us about the need for a ‘vanguard party’ continue to be correct, even if their overall approach demonstrably leads to the creation of sects rather than revolutionary parties. Our synthesis must combine the essential elements of their analysis with the kind of structural and conceptual approach that Mike proposes in order to avoid the previous trend toward bureaucratic leaderships, unnecessary and debilitating splits, and an effort to promote monolithism within most self-proclaimed ‘vanguard’ organisations.↩︎