Article series: "The strategy of attrition"

Here's part one. I found it very informative, though have some issues with some representations and analyses. In essence, I think it summarizes many of the basic ideas of the Centre before the outbreak of the First World War, but in a deformed way.

Just as with a strategy of insurrection [anarchism and bolshevik-leninism], there are political implications to attempting to conquer political power and subordinate the state to the process of socialisation. We can summarise those implications thus:

1. Subordination requires support both active and passive support within the apparatus [bureaucracy].
2. Democratic legitimacy is essential to securing that support.
3. Democratic legitimacy means winning power democratically and putting that legitimacy to the test repeatedly.
4. Winning elections requires a mass party.

So arising from the our position on the state, a quite different conception of political strategy follows. On the one hand, insurrection with a revolutionary vanguard party and mass assemblies, on the other, mass socialist parties winning power via the existing democratic system. Or, to put the argument another way, if we don’t need an insurrection and if we don’t need an entirely new system of workers councils, we don’t require parties whose fundamental task is to promote that strategy. Because we are making socialism and not insurrection the central strategic goal, we have no need to maintain an organisationally distinct revolutionary party.
Quite the opposite. We want to merge the socialists into mass organisations so that ideologically socialist parties exist on a truly large basis over a prolonged period of time, for decades at least, for centuries if necessary.

Here's part two.

Although increased instability is likely, especially as the gross inequality of the current system leads to fragmentation within the elite itself, this does not in itself make socialism a likely outcome. This transformation to socialism can only come from the working class having a pre-existing organisational capacity to take advantage of these developments, especially in the most advanced countries, of which the United States is currently the most important. That capacity takes decades to build up and it’s not a process that can be rushed or circumvented by some clever shortcuts and nor should it be.


It is always tempting to think that we are special, that ours is a special nation or a special generation, one that could accomplish gigantic feats. But sober analysis tells us that we are more likely to be an ordinary generation located in a dynamic but ultimately fairly ordinary time.


That isn’t the end of the story however. Even if a successful insurrection is not on the horizon, it doesn’t mean that we have no role to play. Our short-term tasks do not involve overthrowing capitalism — a mode of production cannot even be overthrown — but to construct the organisations that someday will outcompete it, organisations which can survive even if the upheavals do not come soon, even if no opportunities for transition appear for years. Should we survive even that bleak a scenario with an eco-system of institutions intact, the next generation of socialists can start from a much more advanced point.


There is much in this world that is outside our influence, at least at this juncture, but institution-building is not. But it won’t be enough to try and persuade workers that a revolution or even socialism will solve their problems; rather we need to convince them that they have to do great things for the socialist organisation, that the future itself depends on us all playing our role in that great collective project, outside of which there is no salvation.

Who's the comrade who has or had that signature on Kautsky, revolutionary social democracy, and parliamentarism? I need that ASAP for a full-fledged article countering this crap. My scattered posts on majority political support, cheap electoralism, rule-of-law constitutionalism, are no longer enough!

Workers control over production?

"Social Democracy harbors no illusions that it can directly achieve its goal through elections, through the parliamentary road. . . The first step of the coming revolution...[would be to]...demolish the bourgeois state" Kautsky (1881)

^Beat you to it