How do we establish a Workers' State here in the US?

[Jacob Cliff]

I've seen somewhere that it usually only takes an active 3% of the population to overthrow a government – for us, that 3% is over 9 and-a-half million; by far dwarfing all communist movements.
The left here seems to be stagnant, and there certainly seems to be a surge in ultra right-wing politics and "traditionalism" – in combination with generations of McCarthyism and propaganda AND the strength of the US military, drones, air strikes, surveillance, etc., how in the world to we expect to do away with the current government? A revolution of any time, I'm afraid, would get crushed – this isn't 1917 where we can storm a few government buildings or wage land-war against the enemy; this is 2015, and the enemy has drones, wiretapping, surveillance cameras galore, mass communication, weapons of mass destruction, etc.
I'm not abandoning revolutionary socialism, but my god, I don't see how it would succeed here. Does anyone have any ideas? I know it's impossible to predict how we'd wage a revolution in a time where it's not even on the table as a possibility, but what are some of your ideas? I don't want to slip into some neo-Kautskyian parliamentary socialism, but I'm starting to lose confidence in the potential for actual revolution.

[The Feral Underclass]

I think it's important to recognise that revolutions are not some thing that you wage. It is something that emerges out of the cycles of struggle against the contradictions of present society. You cannot decide to have a revolution and then have one, as if you were organising an event.

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

I think it's pretty bad if self-identified communists can't dare to envision what the transformation of society at the hands of the exploited and oppressed might look like.

You evoke a real tendency of communists to disregard the possibility of revolution and only focus on the immediate critique of what's going on now, saying something like "revolution is so far off we don't need to think about the specifics yet." This lack of engagement with imaginative thinking and creative behavior represents blunted affect, maybe induced by the shame or embarrassment associated with having "strange" ideas which were supposedly discredited by failed Marxist projects of the 20th century or despair in being marginalized for those ideas. We should envision many futures, some of them less impossible than others. But we especially need the impossible ones, because communist revolution is considered impossible. Prediction of impossibility itself is always possible and we need radical counter-futures now more than ever. The bourgeoisie, who in finance lingo have even created a market on which to trade futures, are not hesitant (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/steel-market-forecast-2015-2025--future-opportunities-for-leading-companies-300108061.html) to (http://www.cftc.gov/opa/speeches/opadial-75.htm) make (http://www.futuristspeaker.com/extended-bio/future-of-business-futurist-thomas-frey/) predictions (http://www.gartner.com/search/site/premiumresearch/simple?tabChg=true&keywords=prediction).

The military does not hesitate to forecast in terms of decades (http://csat.au.af.mil/2025/volume3/vol3ch15.pdf) either.

But the impossibility percept is also compounded by the entertainment industrial complex. When was the last time a big budget movie came out depicting a communist revolution?

Some food for thought (w/my emphasis): (http://weblog.liberatormagazine.com/2007/12/kodwo-eshun-and-afro-futurism.html)



Market Dystopia
If global scenarios are descriptions that are primarily concerned with making futures safe for the market, then Afrofuturism's first priority is to recognize that Africa increasingly exists as the object of futurist projection. African social reality is overdetermined by intimidating global scenarios, doomsday economic projections, weather predictions, medical reports on [End Page 291] AIDS, and life-expectancy forecasts, all of which predict decades of immiserization.

These powerful descriptions of the future demoralize us; they command us to bury our heads in our hands, to groan with sadness. Commissioned by multinationals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), these developmental futurisms function as the other side of the corporate utopias that make the future safe for industry. Here, we are seduced not by smiling faces staring brightly into a screen; rather, we are menaced by predatory futures that insist the next 50 years will be hostile.

Control through Prediction
It is clear that power now operates predictively as much as retrospectively. Capital continues to function through the dissimulation of the imperial archive, as it has done throughout the last century. Today, however, power also functions through the envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable futures.

SF Capital
Science fiction might better be understood, in Samuel R. Delany's statement, as offering "a significant distortion of the present" (Last Angel of History 1995). To be more precise, science fiction is neither forward-looking nor utopian. Rather, in William Gibson's phrase, science fiction is a means through which to preprogram the present. Looking back at the genre, it becomes apparent that science fiction was never concerned with the future, but rather with engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present.

Hollywood's 1990s love for sci-tech fictions, from The Truman Show to The Matrix, from Men in Black to Minority Report, can therefore be seen as product-placed visions of the reality-producing power of computer networks, which in turn contribute to an explosion in the technologies they hymn. As New Economy ideas take hold, virtual futures generate capital. A subtle oscillation between prediction and control is being engineered in which successful or powerful descriptions of the future have an increasing ability to draw us towards them, to command us to make them flesh.

[John Nada]

IMO the objective conditions have long existed for a revolution, but there's extremely poor subjective conditions in the US. Meaning capitalism long past it due date(we're getting closer to capitalism extinguishing all life on earth, either from a nuclear war or environmental destruction), but there's neither the will nor capacity to attempt to replace ATM.

Resistance to capitalism pops up all the time spontaneously. Workers get pissed at stuff, and resist anywhere from bitterly complaining about how everything is bullshit, to strikes and riots a step short of an insurgency. Fellow workers(I assume most here are not bourgeois, statistically speaking:lol: ) may not articulate it as capitalism is the problem, but IME many do sense something is not right. There would be contradictions between the proletariat and bourgeoisie even if all socialist theorists were never born and no revolutionary theories ever developed.

However, left to its own devise, that gut feeling of fighting capitalism gets channeled within avenues acceptable to the ruling class and state's dominate ideology. They may self-destruct inwards with drugs and alcohol, turn to crime, find a scapegoat, adopt reactionary populism or seek refuge in religion. Perhaps just walk the line and be a good worker, maybe one day win the lotto and live the "American Dream"(TM), fuck your fellow workers. Maybe there will be a near nihilistic riot to lash out that burns out quickly, or even have a strike highjacked by the labor bureaucracy to stick only to a few short-term workplace-related grievances. Or if they go further in their discontent, it gets channeled into the Democratic Party every 4 years.

All of the above are perfectly within the confines of capitalism, even the shit that's illegal or frowned upon.
I've seen somewhere that it usually only takes an active 3% of the population to overthrow a government – for us, that 3% is over 9 and-a-half million; by far dwarfing all communist movements.I've read that too. That would be the subjective factor lacking at this moment. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that there is more than 3% who do not want to live in the old ways and would be down for some straight up revolutionary action. One in thirty-three people around you thinking the same is not unrealistic. However it's sporadic, isolated(everyone seems to complain there's nothing going on where they live, but all over the country) and parochial.
The left here seems to be stagnant, and there certainly seems to be a surge in ultra right-wing politics and "traditionalism" – in combination with generations of McCarthyism and propaganda AND the strength of the US military, drones, air strikes, surveillance, etc., how in the world to we expect to do away with the current government? A revolution of any time, I'm afraid, would get crushed – this isn't 1917 where we can storm a few government buildings or wage land-war against the enemy; this is 2015, and the enemy has drones, wiretapping, surveillance cameras galore, mass communication, weapons of mass destruction, etc.Everyone across the political spectrum complains about the same thing. Democrats complain that there's all Republicans, and Republicans complain it's all Democrats. Fuck, on the far-right they moan about this. That fucking fascist turd Dylan Roof whined there wasn't any racist fascists in motherfucking South Carolina, birthplace of the Confederacy and generally written off as reactionary as fuck! Fucking Islamists complain there's no "real Muslims" in Iraq and Afghanistan!

An absolutist repressive state apparatus, powerful military, police state with a generally reactionary culture among the people poses a problem. However, that hasn't necessarily shown to be decisive. Russia and China would've appeared objectively among the worse places to have revolutions at first glance. There was few legal rights, a very repressive reactionary state and a quasi-fascist opposition. Workers were a small minority, industrial workers even more so.

Germany and the US had, if not a proletarian majority, a proletarian plurality. There was far more legal bourgeois-democratic rights, populous was superficially more progressive and even had mass legal organizations. Hell reading literature from revolutionaries in Russia and China, they seemed to have wondered why the workers in the west, being a majority with bourgeois-democratic rights, don't just vote the bourgeois out, then launch an insurrection when the bourgeois dictatorship refuses to yield to the proletariat.:confused: Harder than it looks, I know.

Yet it was the former two that had revolutions, the latter either witnessed the complete liquidations of the left in the case of the US, or it imploding on itself in Germany. True, Russia and China were in dire crises that greatly weakened their bourgeoisie. But Germany too had crises, and the second one from the Great Depression only saw the rise of the far-right and the physical annihilation of the left, among many others. US has had crises, from the Great Depression, to Vietnam's War of Liberation, to the Great Recession.

The US doesn't have the subjective conditions to liberation themselves yet. I think it's entirely possible that with different circumstances, the US could've had a revolution long ago. Who know, maybe twenty years from now things will be drastically different. Seems like a long time, but in the grand scheme of things not that long. And in past revolutions, they didn't know if it'd suceed or even happen. Reading some of the bolsheviks before the October Revolution. They were not even sure if the Tsar will ever be replaced with a bourgeois-democratic republic, let alone a dictatorship of the proletariat. In China, they almost got annihilated, and many were also not sure if they'd survive. Neither of them knew if they'd succeed. They easily could've ended up like the Indonesian or the Paris Communards.

Yet at the same time, if the people don't want to be stay in the old ways and the bourgeoisie can't rule as they want in the old ways, there's unlikely to be the same dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. In Vietnam, the US dropped more bombs than all of WWII. They were tracking down tens of thousands of suspected Communists and assassinating them. But the people didn't want to be a US neo-colony and resisted. Inspite of the overwhelming technological advantage of the US and its puppet allies, the US lost, and it potentially could've provoked revolution in the US too if there was stronger revolutionary forces.
I'm not abandoning revolutionary socialism, but my god, I don't see how it would succeed here. Does anyone have any ideas? I know it's impossible to predict how we'd wage a revolution in a time where it's not even on the table as a possibility, but what are some of your ideas? I don't want to slip into some neo-Kautskyian parliamentary socialism, but I'm starting to lose confidence in the potential for actual revolution.There needs to be a situation of dual power. Crises will happen, people will spontaneously get pissed once in awhile. But there must be revolutionary forces to channel that away from what's acceptable to the bourgeoisie and towards changing things and constructing a proletarian counter-hegemony that will one day become the dictatorship of the proletariat. If there's proletarian power side by side with the bourgeois state, it's an unstable situation. It's likely the state will fall.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

"There needs to be a situation of dual power."

This is a very very vague statement. Who is going to disagree with the fact that workers need to pose a separate 'power'? But what this kind of language usually is connected to is Soviets and hair brained schemes of 'spontaneous' revolutions. We should not try to recreate revolutionary conditions that existed in feudal Russia.

As the OP claims, "...Kautskyanism" can not be equated with revolution. I disagree. Why? There was nothing generally wrong with Karl Kautsky's vision, and if you read his book The Road to Power (https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/) Lenin called him the "Pope of Marxism" and spent most of his life as a pupil of Kautsky's, trying to studiously recreate under much more dire/revolutionary conditions an organization based on the principles set out and experiences won by the Marxist SPD.
Yes, the SPD sold out, and Kautsky proved himself a man lacking in the necessary ruthless, Lenin-esque revolutionary moral character. As DNZ has pointed out, and I agree with, a new party-movement should adopt more strict rules than the SPD, such as only workers being let into the party; and I would add to that regulating administrators more in order to weed out the individuals lacking in the necessary moral character to take on leading roles etc. But party-movement organization has proven to be and is the most likely-to-be-effective method of marxist political organization.

Anyway, as OP pointed out, how could a proletarian seizure of state power in the US ever be successful, with the massive expansive power of the current state? It's worthless to even give it a slimmer of thought at the current time, unless and until some extraordinary social or political upheaval were to occur. We have to be that extraordinary event. To organize as revolutionary socialists on a political level and gain national recognition as a power and doggedly demand a significant reduction of the outreach and strength of the US State.

[Црвена]

Great responses so far. I just want to point out one thing: the conditions in contemporary America are not the same as those in 20th century Russia, and we certainly shouldn't try to recreate them (what is this, LARP?). But there is one thing that the workers of America in 2015 have in common with the workers in Russia in 1917: they are all workers. The survival of capitalism still depends on our labour, our consumption, our consent. If we refuse to put up with the system, the entire thing will collapse. Simple as that.

There are also ways for dissident groups to use technology to their advantage and to attract disaffected people. Look at what IS did: they constructed a brand which appeals to people through skilful use of social media and technology, and this brand drew thousands of people with ostensibly comfortable lives in Western democracies away to risk their lives. Now obviously I'm not saying that we should start filming executions or declare a caliphate or anything or that IS is anything other than reactionary filth, but this group's, ahem, achievements have proven that it is still possible to gather huge amounts of support for an organisation opposed (at least on the surface) by Western governments. The age of technology has brought new challenges for the workers' movement, but it is also something that could be a great asset to us if we know how to make use of it.

[Jacob Cliff]

So do you think that the organization of the proletariat into a small, tightly-knit vanguard party (to evade the increasing surveillance, espionage, etc.) is necessary here, or do you think that building a mass-party akin to the earlier days of the SPD would be necessary? Because of course, we shouldn't mimic Russia -- we simply don't have the same conditions, nor the same requirements. But at the same time, I don't understand how a mass party could be built and maintain an undiluted communist program, and also maintain the high degree of militancy necessary to smash the bourgeois state.

[Црвена]

So do you think that the organization of the proletariat into a small, tightly-knit vanguard party (to evade the increasing surveillance, espionage, etc.) is necessary here, or do you think that building a mass-party akin to the earlier days of the SPD would be necessary? Because of course, we shouldn't mimic Russia -- we simply don't have the same conditions, nor the same requirements. But at the same time, I don't understand how a mass party could be built and maintain an undiluted communist program, and also maintain the high degree of militancy necessary to smash the bourgeois state.

How does a mass party make the program more likely to be diluted?

[The Feral Underclass]

The establishment of "workers' power" through the establishment of a "workers' state" is simply the other side of the power of capitalism. These conceptions do not challenge the fundamental aspects of the relations of production and simply reproduces the worker as a worker. In this respect any "transitional period" should be understood for what it is: counter-revolution.

[Црвена]

The establishment of "workers' power" through the establishment of a "workers' state" is simply the other side of the power of capitalism. These conceptions do not challenge the fundamental aspects of the relations of production and simply reproduces the worker as a worker. In this respect any "transitional period" should be understood for what it is: counter-revolution.

Except that capital accumulation and the law of value are abolished, and thus we do away with the exploitation of labour. That's pretty fundamental.

There is also the obvious point that this transitional period, provided the revolution is not isolated, will become communism as the workers' state is rendered unnecessary by the spread of the revolution, further development of productive forces and the fact that private property now no longer exists. A period which lays the foundations for communism cannot be called "counter-revolutionary."

[The Feral Underclass]

Except that capital accumulation and the law of value are abolished, and thus we do away with the exploitation of labour. That's pretty fundamental.

A transitional phase is not an abolition of the law of value, or indeed of accumulation, these things are simply managed differently. In terms of the immediate transitions from capitalism, your "mass party" and "workers' movement" is not bringing into question capital as a means of production, you are bringing into question the fact it is managed by the bourgeoisie.

"Since the development of the capitalist relation — that is to say of the struggle of its classes — did not immediately bring the abolition but the generalisation of wage-labour, the proletariat abstracted the final goal from the movement and made the revolution — its seizure of power — depend on the maturation of conditions both objective (the development of the productive forces) and subjective (its will and its class consciousness). It thus posed communism as a programme and its full achievement as the ultimate term of an impossible transition: the proletarian repossession and mastery of the movement of value, wage-labour supposedly “withering away” from the moment that one replaced money with the labour note. […] What the workers’ movement thus called into question was not capital as mode of production, but only the management of production by the bourgeoisie. It was either a question of workers seizing the productive apparatus from this parasitic class and of destroying its State in order to rebuild another, led by the party as the bearer of consciousness, or else of undermining the power of the bourgeois State by organising production themselves from the bottom up, through the organ of the trade unions or councils. But there was never a question or an attempt of abolishing the law of value — the compulsion towards accumulation and thus towards the reproduction of exploitation which materialises itself at the same time in machinery, in fixed capital as capital in itself, and in the necessary existence, facing the working class, of an exploiting class, bourgeois or bureaucratic, as the collective agent of that reproduction."

François Danel, Introduction to Rupture dans la théorie de la revolution: Textes 1965-1975


There is also the obvious point that this transitional period, provided the revolution is not isolated, will become communism as the workers' state is rendered unnecessary by the spread of the revolution, further development of productive forces and the fact that private property now no longer exists. A period which lays the foundations for communism cannot be called "counter-revolutionary."

Yes, the transitional period consists of the re-organisation of capitalist production and the defeat of the bourgeoisie so that international communism can somehow wither into existence. But if every part of the world is going through the same process of simply changing the management of capitalist production, the law of value continues to prevail, capital social relations continue to exist, albeit managed by "revolutionaries" and the role of the worker continues to be reproduced. Without immediate communising measures -- understanding that revolution is communisation -- it doesn't matter whether the so-called revolution is international or national. This is indeed counter-revolution.

[Spectre of Spartacism]

TFU, the idea that the collectivized property under the control of a workers' state is capitalism presupposes definitions of capitalism and value that are, at best, highly questionable. Capitalism requires value, and value requires autonomy in a "market" among competing property owners. If you don't have those, you don't have capitalism, even if what you have isn't ideal and isn't communist.

[Rudolf]

TFU, the idea that the collectivized property under the control of a workers' state is capitalism presupposes definitions of capitalism and value that are, at best, highly questionable. Capitalism requires value, and value requires autonomy in a "market" among competing property owners. If you don't have those, you don't have capitalism, even if what you have isn't ideal and isn't communist.


So what you're saying is if the state owned all the MoP and was the sole owner of capital then you wouldn't have capitalism...

Why even bother with the descriptor "workers" then if you think the state being the national capitalist renders capitalism non-existent? Or is it that the state becomes the workers' state the moment it becomes the national capitalist? Eitherway, it leads to the same faulty plan: run for government and nationalise industry. Or maybe the revolutionary version of the faulty plan: overthrow the government then nationalise industry.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

A transitional phase is not an abolition of the law of value, or indeed of accumulation, these things are simply managed differently. In terms of the immediate transitions from capitalism, your "mass party" and "workers' movement" is not bringing into question capital as a means of production, you are bringing into question the fact it is managed by the bourgeoisie.

"Since the development of the capitalist relation — that is to say of the struggle of its classes — did not immediately bring the abolition but the generalisation of wage-labour, the proletariat abstracted the final goal from the movement and made the revolution — its seizure of power — depend on the maturation of conditions both objective (the development of the productive forces) and subjective (its will and its class consciousness). It thus posed communism as a programme and its full achievement as the ultimate term of an impossible transition: the proletarian repossession and mastery of the movement of value, wage-labour supposedly “withering away” from the moment that one replaced money with the labour note. […] What the workers’ movement thus called into question was not capital as mode of production, but only the management of production by the bourgeoisie. It was either a question of workers seizing the productive apparatus from this parasitic class and of destroying its State in order to rebuild another, led by the party as the bearer of consciousness, or else of undermining the power of the bourgeois State by organising production themselves from the bottom up, through the organ of the trade unions or councils. But there was never a question or an attempt of abolishing the law of value — the compulsion towards accumulation and thus towards the reproduction of exploitation which materialises itself at the same time in machinery, in fixed capital as capital in itself, and in the necessary existence, facing the working class, of an exploiting class, bourgeois or bureaucratic, as the collective agent of that reproduction."

François Danel, Introduction to Rupture dans la théorie de la revolution: Textes 1965-1975



Yes, the transitional period consists of the re-organisation of capitalist production and the defeat of the bourgeoisie so that international communism can somehow wither into existence. But if every part of the world is going through the same process of simply changing the management of capitalist production, the law of value continues to prevail, capital social relations continue to exist, albeit managed by "revolutionaries" and the role of the worker continues to be reproduced. Without immediate communising measures -- understanding that revolution is communisation -- it doesn't matter whether the so-called revolution is international or national. This is indeed counter-revolution.

That is a silly ad hominen against genuine social revolutionaries who simply see value in a different organizing principle than yourself. Capital is the enemy of communism, everyone who has some exposure to Marxism understands that, no need to be haughty comrade.

First of all, economics today is highly complex and mostly run by computers. The richest Bourgeois today make very few decisions about their employees' surplus but hire armies of tech nerds, researchers and managers to extract surplus, to plan and manage production for them.

In Germany however, all Corporations that have over 1,000 employees must have half their boardroom elected by those workers. Now, are you saying Germany is 50% on its way to Communism? That's silly. Communism is the highest phase of societal wide development. As such, there will be certain concessions that need to be made by individual work places in regards to the demands of society progressing as a whole. Socialism, as the transitional phase to full communism (no more money, no more states etc.), will always incorporate higher degrees of authoritarianism the weaker the international revolution and the more the state that protects it is threatened.

Under Socialism, computers will most likely take an even larger role in planning whole economies than currently. These plans will be decided upon 1) firstly the immediate demands of the state that protects the revolution against death, and 2) the material demands of the working people, to survive and be somewhat comfortable 3) and last of all, once these basic requirements have been satisfied, the higher communist ideals of an international growth of an egalitarian culture, reduction of work hours towards the free expression and growth of all individuals, will be considered. You cannot anymore practically advocate the old dystopian anarcho-capitalist dream where workers of each individual plant have full autonomy over their individual surplus. I think no genuine socialist would disagree with you however if the debate were about whether we want to see all workers rise up to become lively intellectual workers, not alienated but having an authoritative say over their work.

[The Feral Underclass]

That is a silly ad hominen against genuine social revolutionaries who simply see value in a different organizing principle than yourself.

I have no idea why you consider what I said an ad hominem.


First of all, economics today is highly complex and mostly run by computers. The richest Bourgeois today make very few decisions about their employees' surplus but hire armies of tech nerds, researchers and managers to extract surplus, to plan and manage production for them.

In Germany however, all Corporations that have over 1,000 employees must have half their boardroom elected by those workers. Now, are you saying Germany is 50% on its way to Communism? That's silly. Communism is the highest phase of societal wide development. As such, there will be certain concessions that need to be made by individual work places in regards to the demands of society progressing as a whole. Socialism, as the transitional phase to full communism (no more money, no more states etc.), will always incorporate higher degrees of authoritarianism the weaker the international revolution and the more the state that protects it is threatened.

Under Socialism, computers will most likely take an even larger role in planning whole economies than currently. These plans will be decided upon 1) firstly the immediate demands of the state that protects the revolution against death, and 2) the material demands of the working people, to survive and be somewhat comfortable 3) and last of all, once these basic requirements have been satisfied, the higher communist ideals of an international growth of an egalitarian culture, reduction of work hours towards the free expression and growth of all individuals, will be considered. You cannot anymore practically advocate the old dystopian anarcho-capitalist dream where workers of each individual plant have full autonomy over their individual surplus. I think no genuine socialist would disagree with you however if the debate were about whether we want to see all workers rise up to become lively intellectual workers, not alienated but having an authoritative say over their work.

I'm not sure how what you're saying is related to what I said. Are you talking about the specific way socialised production is managed? If you are it doesn't really matter how you organise the management of it, the fact is that you are not challenging these relationships or overcoming capital as a mode of production, you are just altering the way this mode of production and these relationships are managed. The law of value still remains, accumulation still remains, money still remains, surplus value still remains (recuperated by the state). The worker is still reproduced as a worker.

For communism to succeed measures that abolish these relations have to be taken immediately. Indeed, they have to form the entire content of the revolution -- it is the revolution.

[Art Vandelay]

As the OP claims, "...Kautskyanism" can not be equated with revolution. I disagree. Why? There was nothing generally wrong with Karl Kautsky's vision, and if you read his book The Road to Power (https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/) Lenin called him the "Pope of Marxism" and spent most of his life as a pupil of Kautsky's, trying to studiously recreate under much more dire/revolutionary conditions an organization based on the principles set out and experiences won by the Marxist SPD.

The 'orthodox Marxist' narrative on this matter simply fails to address the historical record. This fiction that gets regurgitated ad nauseum, that the Bolsheviks were organized on the basis of the SPD party model, is all fine and well until one actually begins to seriously engage with the theoretical contributions wrought out by Lenin following the SPD's historic betrayal. It decontextualizes and fetishizes the earlier approaches to party building pursued by the RSDLP, while remaining incapable or unwilling to seriously reflect on the analysis developed by Lenin in seminal texts like The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.

The primary conclusion that Lenin drew from the degeneration of the second international was that there was a material basis for opportunism in the workers movement. It was precisely this analysis and Lenin's resulting line, which saved the workers movement in Russia from ending up like the reformist political swamp that Kautsky played a chief role in creating in Germany. As Lenin correctly pointed it, the final historical record on Kautsky and his ilk was that they were "contemptible sycophants in the service of the bourgeoisie."

With the polemical sharpness of a surgeons scalpel, Lenin rightly takes Kautsky to task for turning Marx into a common liberal, his continued appraisal of the Mensheviks as socialists, for divorcing the concept of democracy from the question of class, and for confusing the form of government with the form of state. He characterizes his 'Marxism' as intellectually dishonest and far exceeding Berstein in his breaking with Marx & Engels. The list goes on and on, but perhaps it would be best to leave it off with a quote (and if you substitute Kautsky for the self appointed 'orthodox Marxists' of today, it still rings as true):

"It is impossible to enumerate all Kautsky’s various absurdities, since every phrase he utters is a bottomless pit of apostasy."


Anyway, as OP pointed out, how could a proletarian seizure of state power in the US ever be successful, with the massive expansive power of the current state? It's worthless to even give it a slimmer of thought at the current time, unless and until some extraordinary social or political upheaval were to occur. We have to be that extraordinary event. To organize as revolutionary socialists on a political level and gain national recognition as a power and doggedly demand a significant reduction of the outreach and strength of the US State.And here you betray the reformist nature of the Kautskyian line quite clearly. It's worthless to give even a slimmer of thought at the current time to the proletarian seizure of state power, you say? Good riddance to you then. You'd do the old 'Pope of Marxism' proud. After all, when working with the old minimum-maximum program of social democracy, I suppose it makes sense. Socialism is simply window dressing for the blatant reformism of the Kautskyists; it can always be put off on the back burner for another day. This approach to party building is nothing other than an attempt at recreating an organization which marched millions of workers to their slaughter under the banner of their fatherlands, and Rosa Luxembourg was right to call it a stinking corpse.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

I have no idea why you consider what I said an ad hominem.



I'm not sure how what you're saying is related to what I said. Are you talking about the specific way socialised production is managed? If you are it doesn't really matter how you organise the management of it, the fact is that you are not challenging these relationships or overcoming capital as a mode of production, you are just altering the way this mode of production and these relationships are managed. The law of value still remains, accumulation still remains, money still remains, surplus value still remains (recuperated by the state). The worker is still reproduced as a worker.

For communism to succeed measures that abolish these relations have to be taken immediately. Indeed, they have to form the entire content of the revolution -- it is the revolution.

I disagree that that is the revolution. A revolution is passion, vision, a deathly fight to free humanity from the narrow confines of class society! much more than a mere workplace change.

However, I agree that changing the relations of production is the final goal of the revolution, but that is dwarfed by totality of what a revolution is in my opinion. If you agree that revolutions are a violent seizure of state power by the organized working class, then you must be able to comprehend that it is not a matter of minutes that these new communistic relations of productions could be enforced, most likely not days, weeks or months either - Why? Because a complete and immediate overthrow of managerial operations implies that workers will spend X amount of time less slaving away at their worksite, i.e. less production which equates to economic ruin. Naturally, those institutions of workers control absolutely must be set up in the socially/economically advanced countries. But it takes time and training of workers to collectively run an enterprise.

Look, if there is a revolution, the country will be broken. Many millions of working people will be broken; drug addiction, prostitution, the depressed, mental problems etc., and people will become more and more ugly and mean the worse capitalism gets. You cannot honestly demand all enterprises to immediately be run by individuals who have to first put their life together once given the hope and security of a revolution. And this will take time for many workers to become leaders, those that are motivated enough by a victorious revolution that is. Hence, the development towards successful workers control will take time. As it is intrinsically tied to the physical, mental health, vitality and growth of the people. Besides that, it's my personal conviction that real communism (and the relations of production of it) will never be achieved, and why it hasn't been achieved altough TheFeralUnderclass was not the first to think of it, until the reality and even prospect of raising and disciplining young men (and women) to die in battle is abolished.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

And here you betray the reformist nature of the Kautskyian line quite clearly. It's worthless to give even a slimmer of thought at the current time to the proletarian seizure of state power, you say? Good riddance to you then. You'd do the old 'Pope of Marxism' proud. After all, when working with the old minimum-maximum program of social democracy, I suppose it makes sense. Socialism is simply window dressing for your blatant reformism; it can always be put off on the back burner for another day. This approach to party building is nothing other than an attempt at recreating an organization which marched millions of workers to their slaughter under the banner of their fatherlands, and Rosa Luxembourg was right to call it a stinking corpse.

Absolutely. Do you disagree or something? Are you suicidal? Do you know what kind of resources the Police forces, FBI, CIA, and US Military have at their disposal if their major bases were not accounted for and outgunned during an insurrection? Ha! Ridiculous. Let me know of a single unified working class organization that has a militant membership near state bases and in all the major cities of the United States and I will join. NONE. Revolutionary insurrection is not a practical reality right now because we have no mass movement. Find me one. Is it Trotskyist sect 1001 or 1002? I'll join and start talking about the practical realities of seizure of state power, which, however, will still be a political struggle to demilitarize police, smash the treacherous CIA, NSA institutions as a whole and weaken the tyrannical overmight of government currently.

[Spectre of Spartacism]

Absolutely. Do you disagree or something? Are you suicidal? Do you know what kind of resources the Police forces, FBI, CIA, and US Military have at their disposal if their major bases were not accounted for and outgunned during an insurrection? Ha! Ridiculous. Let me know of a single unified working class organization that has a militant membership near state bases and in all the major cities of the United States and I will join. NONE. Revolutionary insurrection is not a practical reality right now because we have no mass movement. Find me one. Is it Trotskyist sect 1001 or 1002? I'll join and start talking about the practical realities of seizure of state power, which, however, will still be a political struggle to demilitarize police, smash the treacherous CIA, NSA institutions as a whole and weaken the tyrannical overmight of government currently.


I think a more important question is whether you would ever envision a time when what you point out about the current balance of forces is not a justification for reformism.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

I think a more important question is whether you would ever envision a time when what you point out about the current balance of forces is not a justification for reformism.

Could I envision a time where revolution were called for... haha what a joke. The necessity for revolution is everywhere where people are hungry, neglected, oppressed. I grew up in the stressful conditions of poverty. You wouldn't accuse me of petty-bourgeois socialism if you knew me fucker. That frustrating mixture of despair and drive found in working people kills them eventually if they don't go insane under those conditions which are not compatible with everyone. This understanding is what drives me to read and debate, and obviously i'd much rather advocate a more spontaneous approach to revolution as i did when i was younger. My logical mind however tells me that spirit leads to defeat under somewhat stable conditions. Who down here doesn't want revolution? Smashing the bourgeois state has nothing to do with class collaboration but sets the ground for a revolution to succeed once there is another crisis. It's a matter of strategy and thinking intellegently

[Spectre of Spartacism]

Could I envision a time where revolution were called for... haha what a joke. The necessity for revolution is everywhere where people are hungry, neglected, oppressed. I grew up in the stressful conditions of poverty. You wouldn't accuse me of petty-bourgeois socialism if you knew me fucker. That frustrating mixture of despair and drive found in working people kills them eventually if they don't go insane under those conditions which are not compatible with everyone. This understanding is what drives me to read and debate, and obviously i'd much rather advocate a more spontaneous approach to revolution as i did when i was younger. My logical mind however tells me that spirit leads to defeat under somewhat stable conditions. Who down here doesn't want revolution? Smashing the bourgeois state has nothing to do with class collaboration but sets the ground for a revolution to succeed once there is another crisis. It's a matter of strategy and thinking intellegently


Woah there. I haven't accused you of petite anything. I just asked, if you think keeping revolution at the centerpiece of your political and agitational strategy means neglecting the balance of armed forces within the state, whether and when your position will ever shift to placing primary importance on revolution instead of reform. Your background, while admirable, doesn't answer this question. The reality is that socialist revolution will not emerge from the armed forces or the police. It will emerge from the working class.

[The Feral Underclass]

I disagree that that is the revolution. A revolution is passion, vision, a deathly fight to free humanity from the narrow confines of class society! much more than a mere workplace change.



I'm not talking about a mere change in workplace; I'm talking about abolishing the relationships of capital. If you conceive of revolution in this spiritual way you have described then it is doomed to failure. What of passion and vision, if the relationships of capital endure? You can be as passionate and as visionary as you like, but if you do not abolish the law of value and so on, then your passion and vision are meaningless.




However, I agree that changing the relations of production is the final goal of the revolution, but that is dwarfed by totality of what a revolution is in my opinion. If you agree that revolutions are a violent seizure of state power by the organized working class, then you must be able to comprehend that it is not a matter of minutes that these new communistic relations of productions could be enforced, most likely not days, weeks or months either - Why? Because a complete and immediate overthrow of managerial operations implies that workers will spend X amount of time less slaving away at their worksite, i.e. less production which equates to economic ruin. Naturally, those institutions of workers control absolutely must be set up in the socially/economically advanced countries. But it takes time and training of workers to collectively run an enterprise.



But you talk of work sites and enterprises as if you were budding capitalist. The flux and trauma of abolishing capitalist production is real, but if you take a substitutionist and programmatic view towards class struggle -- like you are describing -- rather than seeing the emergence of communist measures as class struggle, then you can only narrowly conceive revolution in political terms. This means the seizure of state power is a logical step within your conception. Of course, however, the state and its new monopoly over production is no better for the revolution than the preservation of the bourgeoisie.




Look, if there is a revolution, the country will be broken. Many millions of working people will be broken; drug addiction, prostitution, the depressed, mental problems etc., and people will become more and more ugly and mean the worse capitalism gets. You cannot honestly demand all enterprises to immediately be run by individuals who have to first put their life together once given the hope and security of a revolution. And this will take time for many workers to become leaders, those that are motivated enough by a victorious revolution that is. Hence, the development towards successful workers control will take time. As it is intrinsically tied to the physical, mental health, vitality and growth of the people.



Even if we accepted this macabre view of revolution, it does not deal with the very real material concerns of the perpetuation of capitalist production and its effects on the production of communism. In any case, I reject entirely this 'new age' conception of revolution as some kind of spiritual nurturing. If class struggle and subsequently revolution are what they should be: measures for communism, then all the practical requirements for the proletariat to produce this new epoch and abolish itself will be realised. All this talk of enterprises is irrelevant -- why would we want workers to manage enterprises? We want to produce communism, which is, above everything, the abolition of classes!




Besides that, it's my personal conviction that real communism (and the relations of production of it) will never be achieved, and why it hasn't been achieved altough TheFeralUnderclass was not the first to think of it, until the reality and even prospect of raising and disciplining young men (and women) to die in battle is abolished.



So we get to the crux of the issue: You don't actually see the abolition of classes as a genuine objective. Instead you are content with seeing the worker as a worker, enslaved to state capitalist power that is reproduced in the name of exploitation.

[VivalaCuarta]

Revolution in the U.S. is part of the world revolution. The U.S. imperialists are weakening, fracturing and demoralized. The workers in the U.S. are beginning to get the idea that if they struggle, the bosses can be beaten. What's missing is a revolutionary workers party. The percentages the OP cites are pseudoscientific, and even if they had any bearing on politics, they are temporary surface phenomena. Way more than three percent of the U.S. population, and the world dominated by the U.S. imperialists, would love to get that hateful boot off their neck. Three percent? Blacks in America are about 12 percent of the population and America treats dogs and horses better than black people. They just need the leadership, organization and class power of the advanced workers.

[Spectre of Spartacism]

So what you're saying is if the state owned all the MoP and was the sole owner of capital then you wouldn't have capitalism...

Why even bother with the descriptor "workers" then if you think the state being the national capitalist renders capitalism non-existent? Or is it that the state becomes the workers' state the moment it becomes the national capitalist? Eitherway, it leads to the same faulty plan: run for government and nationalise industry. Or maybe the revolutionary version of the faulty plan: overthrow the government then nationalise industry.

Sorry I didn't catch this until now. I am not equating state ownership with the absence of capitalism. I am not even equating the core of the economy being nationalized with the absence of a bourgeois state, a sloppy formulation that some of my comrades use from time to time. Equating nationalization with the overthrow of capitalism is more in line with the CWI/IMT tradition of Ted Grant, who pioneered a theory he called "proletarian bonapartism" in which states from Burma to Egypt to Syria were said to have undergone a proletarian revolution just because of the sweeping nationalizations.

Not even the Soviets went that far, instead characterizing these global south countries as "national democracies" pursuing a "non-capitalist path of development" under a "revolutionary democratic" regime of "progressive" petty bourgeois bureaucrats aligned to some extend to the "world socialist system."

The purpose of saying these theories were wrong is not to make declarations about how good or bad those societies or governments were. The purpose of these delineations is to function as scientific terms intended to reveal a programmatic course for revolutionaries to take. We uphold the USSR from the years 1917 to 1991 as a workers' state of some variety because capitalism, to the extent that it existed e.g. during the NEP, did not serve as the class foundation of the state apparatus. To the extent that political repression and bureaucracy existed, this was not the result of the nationalized property that was being centrally planned by bureaucrats within the same government (and to the exclusion of the working class). It was just the other way around: the political repression of the working class, their exclusion from power, ate away at the attempts at planning, eventually leading to the disintegration of that economic system. If it were capitalist, you would not expect the political expropriation of workers to have a corrosive economic effect. Capitalism thrives on oppression of workers, which is why forced labor has made a resurgence in the industrializing capitalism of the global south today. Because they weren't capitalist, the program of toppling the bureaucracies of the Stalinized workers' states included accounting for the way in which the bureaucracy, not being a ruling class, would split as it did most visibly during the August coup or as it did in Romania, with workers militarily and only militarily blocking with Stalinist officials when those officials had turn their guns turned toward the privatizers. In no way was political support ever countenanced, or their oppression of workers embraced.

In the case of Burma, Egypt under Nasser, most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, etc., nationalization took place on the basis of the law of value rather than its negation. What do I mean when I say this? It means that businesses were nationalized in order to reduce international competition and develop capitalism in "hothouse" conditions. Nationalization was undertaken specifically for the purpose of accumulating private property in the hands of a developing bourgeoisie. Good relations with the imperialist nations were generally preserved, almost always with reparations being paid to whatever imperialist firms lost property during the nationalizations. When industry had developed to a competitive level, the private booty stolen by these thugs was (being capital) parlayed directly into taking ownership of different sectors of the economy. Note the seamless and gradual transitioning to private ownership in these countries. After decades of parading around the bogus theory of proletarian bonapartism, even the CWI leadership have conceded how wrong theory was. Small service to the workers of the world, though, since this recognition comes only after decades of touting these kleptocracies as in any way related to socialism.

When the Soviets wrote on the supposed "non-capitalist way" they actually recognized this reality, calling the officials with billion-dollar offshore accounts, biding their time until the national firms could compete with others in the rest of the world, a "bureaucratic bourgeoisie." The "planning" that took place in this economy was always geared primarily toward enhancing private property and the accumulation thereof in competitive conditions. Think Charles Taylor's billions in Swiss bank accounts, or the leader of Belarus, who along with his gangster cronies is currently parlaying that countries extensive nationalizations into similar hidden wealth (as wikileaks revealed). The law of value remained the basis of these economies. The planned economy in the Soviet Union and deformed workers' states had a qualitatively different character, even conceding that there was corruption and skimming.

I hope this clarifies my position.

[John Nada]

This is a very very vague statement. Who is going to disagree with the fact that workers need to pose a separate 'power'? But what this kind of language usually is connected to is Soviets and hair brained schemes of 'spontaneous' revolutions. We should not try to recreate revolutionary conditions that existed in feudal Russia.I don't buy the spontaneous theory.The spontaneous tends towards trade-unionism alone, and we don't even have that in the US. There's spontaneous and there's "spontaneous" with quotation marks;). Like a million armed workers "spontaneously" assembling at 9:45AM, chanting "All power to the Soviets!" and "Down with US imperialism!" as an orchestra "spontaneously" assembles and plays The Internationale.

Russia was militarist-feudal imperialist, whereas the US is an imperialist-capitalist superpower. Having vanquished the last vestiges of feudalism long ago, there won't be a "democratic-dictatorship" as an immediate demand.
As the OP claims, "...Kautskyanism" can not be equated with revolution. I disagree. Why? There was nothing generally wrong with Karl Kautsky's vision, and if you read his book The Road to Power Lenin called him the "Pope of Marxism" and spent most of his life as a pupil of Kautsky's, trying to studiously recreate under much more dire/revolutionary conditions an organization based on the principles set out and experiences won by the Marxist SPD."Such wrote Kautsky, when he was a Marxists". That and Socialism and Colonial Policy was probably his last good works. WTF happened to him? Went from a leading Marxist theorists who could've been the third "head" between Engels and Lenin, to an archetypical revisionist whose very name is a synonym for bastard spending the end of his life writing anti-communist rags that seem to have shaped the mainstream anti-Soviet, anti-communist narrative. But I digress.

Going by Kautsky's list of the objective conditions in most nations at the time, modern US should be primed for revolution. Yet it's got even less union activity, let alone a Socialist movement.:confused:

We've got one advantage over the workers in the Road to Power days. In that Kautsky said the proletariat only had to go by the Paris Commune as past experience, the only defeat yet not yet victories. Now we got a few victories and tons of defeats to learn from.:lol:
Anyway, as OP pointed out, how could a proletarian seizure of state power in the US ever be successful, with the massive expansive power of the current state? It's worthless to even give it a slimmer of thought at the current time, unless and until some extraordinary social or political upheaval were to occur. We have to be that extraordinary event. To organize as revolutionary socialists on a political level and gain national recognition as a power and doggedly demand a significant reduction of the outreach and strength of the US State. http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/PW38.html#s6 Probably one of the most brilliant application of dialectical materialism. Just substitute "large but weak country" and "small but powerful country" with classes instead of countries.
Great responses so far. I just want to point out one thing: the conditions in contemporary America are not the same as those in 20th century Russia, and we certainly shouldn't try to recreate them (what is this, LARP?). But there is one thing that the workers of America in 2015 have in common with the workers in Russia in 1917: they are all workers. The survival of capitalism still depends on our labour, our consumption, our consent. If we refuse to put up with the system, the entire thing will collapse. Simple as that.And if the workers launched an insurrection or people's war, that would tank the stock market and strike a deathblow to imperialism, even if it failed in said imperialist nation. Many more workers in the subjugated nations of the world would still have the doors opened for successful revolutions.
There are also ways for dissident groups to use technology to their advantage and to attract disaffected people. Look at what IS did: they constructed a brand which appeals to people through skilful use of social media and technology, and this brand drew thousands of people with ostensibly comfortable lives in Western democracies away to risk their lives. Now obviously I'm not saying that we should start filming executions or declare a caliphate or anything or that IS is anything other than reactionary filth, but this group's, ahem, achievements have proven that it is still possible to gather huge amounts of support for an organisation opposed (at least on the surface) by Western governments. The age of technology has brought new challenges for the workers' movement, but it is also something that could be a great asset to us if we know how to make use of it.Damn, if only we had a group of committed cadre who skillfully used media to rally the masses, even inspire first-worlders to abandon all possessions for the cause, and set up a state as a base. Oh wait:ohmy: ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Civil_War :unsure: Though at least I don't think they used decapitation, stoning and crucifixion for executions or filmed it for the internet.:lol:

I strongly suspect that they're trying to mimic a protracted people's war. Much of which isn't direct war. That media shit is part of the psychological warfare. Only in form but not content, because it can only truly be pulled off by fighting a just revolutionary war that's progressive in character. Something Daesh cannot, representing the feudalistic classes like the clergy, landlords and military officers.
Absolutely. Do you disagree or something? Are you suicidal? Do you know what kind of resources the Police forces, FBI, CIA, and US Military have at their disposal if their major bases were not accounted for and outgunned during an insurrection? Ha! Ridiculous. Let me know of a single unified working class organization that has a militant membership near state bases and in all the major cities of the United States and I will join. NONE. Revolutionary insurrection is not a practical reality right now because we have no mass movement. Find me one. Is it Trotskyist sect 1001 or 1002? I'll join and start talking about the practical realities of seizure of state power, which, however, will still be a political struggle to demilitarize police, smash the treacherous CIA, NSA institutions as a whole and weaken the tyrannical overmight of government currently.Yet none of that stopped many third-world guerrilla forces, both progressive and reactionary. It would be the strategic defensive phase. The accumulation of forces and the beginning of the construct of dual power as revolutionary bases. If it failed, like I typed earlier the havoc would still free up workers in other nations oppressed by imperialism.