A Modest Proposal for Socialist Revolution

By Chris Wright

At this point in history, two things are clear. First, Marx was right that capitalism is torn by too
many “contradictions” to be sustainable indefinitely as a global economic system. In its terminal
period, which we’re entering now (and which we can predict will last generations, because a global
economic order doesn’t vanish in a decade or two), it will be afflicted by so many popular
uprisings—on the left and the right—so many economic, political, and ecological crises causing
so much turmoil and dislocation, that only a permanent and worldwide fascism would be able to
save it. But fascism, by its murderous and ultra-nationalistic nature, can be neither permanent nor
continuously enforced worldwide. Even just in the United States, the governmental structure is too
vast and federated, there are too many thousands of relatively independent political jurisdictions,
for a truly fascist regime to be consolidated nationwide, in every nook and cranny of the country.
Fascism, or neo-fascism, is only a temporary and partial solution for the ruling class.

Second, the original Marxist predictions of how a transition to a new society would play out are
wrong and outdated. Some Marxists still continue to think in terms of the old formulations, but
they’re a hundred years behind the times. It is no longer helpful (it never was, really) to proclaim
that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” will “smash the state” and reconstruct society through
initiatives that magically transform an authoritarian, bureaucratic, exploitative economy into an
emancipatory, democratic one of dispersed power. The conceptual and empirical problems with
this orthodox view are overwhelming, as I’ve explained in this book (chapters 4 and 6). As if the
leaders of a popular movement that, miraculously, managed to overcome the monopoly over
military force of a ruling class in an advanced capitalist country and took over the government
(whether electorally or through an insurrection) would, by means of conscious aforethought, be
able to transcend the “dialectical contradictions” and massive complexity of society to
straightforwardly rebuild the economy from the ground up, all while successfully fending off the
attacks and sabotage of the capitalist class! The story is so idealistic it’s incredible any Marxists
can believe it (or some variant of it).

Some leftist writers have argued, rightly, against an insurrectionary approach to revolution in a
core capitalist nation, using the words of Kautsky and other old Marxists to make their point. But
it isn’t necessary to follow this general practice of endlessly poring over the works of Kautsky,
Bernstein, Luxemburg, Lenin, and others who wrote in a dramatically different political economy
than the present. It can be useful to familiarize oneself with hundred-year-old debates, but
ultimately the real desideratum is just some critical common sense. We don’t need pretentious
academic exercises that conclude in some such statement of truisms as the following (from an
article by Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian):

What is certain is that waging a struggle within and against the state demands that
we build new forms of democratic participation and working class organization
with the goal of breaking definitively with capitalist production relations and forms
of political authority. This process will occur in fits and starts… Navigating
between a reflexive anti-statism and the fallacy of attempting to “occupy” state
institutions without transforming them is undoubtedly challenging. But only in this
 way can we advance beyond the past shortcomings of both dual power and social
democratic approaches to the capitalist state.

Pure truism, which it wasn’t necessary to write a long essay to support. So let’s shun elitist jargon
and academic insularity, instead using the democratic capacity of reason that’s available to
everyone.

The social democratic (or “democratic socialist”) approach to revolution is favored by the Jacobin
school of thought: elect socialists to office and build a social democratic state such as envisioned
by Bernie Sanders—but don’t rest content with such a state. Keep agitating for more radical
reforms—don’t let the capitalist class erode popular gains, but instead keep building on them—
until at last genuine socialism is realized.

I’ve criticized the Jacobin vision elsewhere. It’s a lovely dream, but it’s over-optimistic. The social
democratic stage of history, premised on industrial unionism and limited capital mobility, is over.
It’s a key lesson of Marxism itself that we can’t return to the past, to conditions that no longer
exist; we can’t resurrect previous social formations after they have succumbed to the ruthless,
globalizing, atomizing logic of capital.

Suppose Bernie Sanders is elected this year (which itself would be remarkable, given the hostility
of the entire ruling class). Will he be able to enact Medicare for All, free higher education, a Green
New Deal, safe and secure housing for all, “workplace democracy,” or any other of his most
ambitious goals? It’s highly unlikely. He’ll have to deal with a Congress full of Republicans and
conservative Democrats, a conservative judiciary, a passionately obstructionist capitalist class,
hostile state governments, a white supremacist electoral insurgency, etc. Only after purging
Congress of the large majority of its centrists and conservatives would Sanders’ social democratic
dreams be achievable—and such a purge is well-nigh unimaginable in the next ten or twenty years.
Conservatives’ long march to their current ascendancy took fifty years, and they had enormous
resources and existed in a sympathetic political economy. It’s hard to imagine that socialists will
have much better luck.

Meanwhile, civilization will be succumbing to the catastrophic effects of climate change and
ecological destruction. It is unlikely that an expansive social democracy on an international scale
will be forthcoming in these conditions.

So, if both insurrection and social democracy are apparently hopeless, what is left? Realistically,
only the path I lay out in my above-linked book.1 Marx was right that a new society can be erected
only on the basis of new production relations. Democratic, cooperative, egalitarian relations of
production cannot be implanted by fiat from the commanding heights of national governments.
They have to emerge over time, over decades and generations, as the old society declines and
collapses. The analogy with the transition from feudalism to capitalism is far from perfect (not
least given the incredible length of time that earlier transition took), but it’s at least more suggestive
than metaphorical, utopian slogans about “smashing the state” are. Through democratic initiative,
allied with gradual changes in state policy as leftists are elected to office and the state is threatened

1
Being an outgrowth of my Master’s thesis, the book over-emphasizes worker cooperatives. It does,
however, answer the usual Marxist objections to cooperatives as a component of social revolution.
by social disruption, new modes of production and distribution will emerge locally, interstitially,
and eventually in the mainstream.

The historical logic of this long process, including why the state and ruling class will be forced to
tolerate and aid the gradual growth of a “solidarity economy” (as a necessary concession to the
masses), is discussed in the book. The left will grow in strength as repeated economic crises thin
the ranks of the hyper-elite and destroy large amounts of wealth; the emerging “cooperative” and
socialized institutions of economic and social life will, as they spread, contribute further to the
resources and the victories of popular movements. Incrementally, as society is consumed by
ecological crisis and neo-fascism proves unable to suppress social movements everywhere in the
world, one can expect that the left will take over national states and remake social relations in
alliance with these democratic movements.

Such predictions assume, of course, that civilization will not utterly collapse and descend into a
post-apocalyptic nightmare. This is a possibility. But the only realistic alternative is the one I’m
sketching.

Ironically, this “gradualist” model of revolution (which, incidentally, has little in common with
Eduard Bernstein’s gradualism) is more consistent with the premises of historical materialism than
are idealistic notions of socialists sweepingly taking over the state whether through elections or
armed uprisings. At the end of the long process of transformation, socialists will indeed have taken
complete control of national governments; and from this perch they’ll be able to carry the social
revolution to its fruition, finalizing and politically consolidating all the changes that have taken
place. But this end-goal is probably a hundred or more years in the future, because worldwide
transitions between modes of production don’t happen quickly.

Again, one might recall the European transition from feudalism to capitalism: in country after
country, the bourgeoisie couldn’t assume full control of the state until the liberal capitalist
economy had already made significant inroads against feudalism and absolutism. Something
similar will surely apply to a transition out of capitalism. It is a very Marxist point (however rarely
it’s been made) to argue that the final conquest of political power must be grounded in the prior
semi-conquest of economic power. You need colossal material resources to overthrow, even if
“gradually,” an old ruling class.

What are the implications for activism of these ideas? In brief, activists must take the long view
and not be cast into despair by, for instance, the inevitable failures of a potential Sanders
presidency. There’s a role for every variety of activism, from electoral to union-building; and we
shouldn’t have disdain for the activism that seeks to construct new institutions like public banks,
municipal enterprises, cooperatives (worker, consumer, housing, financial, etc.), and other non-
capitalist institutions we can hardly foresee at the moment. It’s all part of creating a “counter-
hegemony” to erode the legitimacy of capitalism, present viable alternatives to it, and hasten its
demise.

Meanwhile, the activism that seeks whatever limited “social democratic” gains are possible will
remain essential, to improve the lives of people in the present. While full-fledged social democracy
in a capitalist context is no longer in the cards, legislation to protect and expand limited social
rights is.

Anyway, in the twenty-first century, it’s time Marxists stopped living in the shadow of the Russian
Revolution. Let’s think creatively and without illusions about how to build post-capitalist
institutions, never forgetting that the ultimate goal, as ever, is to take over the state.