BY
The revolutionary socialist
vision is a vital one. Today’s rising socialist movement shouldn’t discard it.
Many years after having
vanished, socialism is back in
the US political arena. This is because of the election of Donald Trump as
president in 2016 as well as Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic Party
nomination. Even the more forbidden term “revolution” has made a comeback
recently, with Sanders’s call for a political revolution to implement a
progressive agenda of job creation, wage increases, protection of the
environment, and universal
health care.
The popularization of
socialism and Sanders’s call for a political revolution has raised the question
of how to respond for the Marxist left. To do so, it would be useful to outline
the fundamental characteristics of the Marxist revolutionary tradition, a
tradition that helps provide some guidelines to an appropriate response to the
new political situation in the US.
For Marxists, Sanders’s
progressive agenda is worth fighting for, in as much as it represents a stand
against the neoliberal social
agenda implemented by Democrats and Republicans alike since the 1970s. Their
participation, however, is informed by the distinctive view that, in order to
win those struggles, it is necessary to go far beyond the ballot box and take
them into the workplaces and neighborhoods of America, to “socialize” those
struggles and turn them into a movement from below, independent of the two
parties. Marxist socialism seeks to articulate these and other progressive
struggles — against racism and imperialism and for immigrants and refugees —
into a long-term view of systemic change: a social revolution that brings down
the economic and political system founded on the profit motive, capitalism, and
replaces it with a politically and economically democratic one.
Marxist Views of Revolution
For many people, the term
“social revolution” conjures the image of a sudden explosion of armed
insurrection. An analog of this view exists within the revolutionary tradition,
best exemplified by Che
Guevara, for whom revolution only meant insurrection. So it did for the
whole revolutionary Cuban leadership in the 1960s, which insisted that “the
duty of the revolutionary was to make the revolution.” Che Guevara took this
notion to its extreme by rooting revolution on sheer voluntarism, the sheer
will for armed insurrection and relegating the objective circumstances, the
concrete situation on the ground, to a marginal role.
But revolution involves much
more than armed insurrection. It involves fighting political battles for
reforms to advance the interests of working people, mobilizing and organizing
them to open up revolutionary possibilities. In further contrast to Guevara
(and other voluntarists like Mao Zedong), the objective situation plays a
central role in the process leading to insurrection.
This view is best articulated by
V.I. Lenin:
To the Marxist it is
indisputable that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation;
furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution.
What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We
shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major
symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their
rule without any major change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another,
among the “upper classes,” a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading
to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed
classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient
for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way, it is also
necessary that “the upper classes should be unable,” to live in the old way;
(2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute
than usual’ (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is
considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow
themselves to be robbed in “peace time,” but in turbulent times, are drawn both
by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes” themselves
into independent historical action.
In contrast to the Guevara-Mao
view of revolution at the voluntaristic end of the Marxist spectrum stands the
determinist view of Karl
Kautsky, who in his The Road to Power (1909) wrote:
“The Socialist party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making
party. We know that our goal can be attained only through a revolution. We also
know that it is just a little in our power to create this revolution as it is
in the power of our opponents to prevent it. It is no part of our work to
instigate a revolution or prepare the way for it.”
For Kautsky, a prominent
theoretician of the German Social
Democratic Party, revolution was the automatic result of objective
conditions that inevitably led to it (although in other occasions he wrote
about it with a different tone). History, however, has contradicted Kautsky’s
passive evolutionary view. Although revolutions have been preceded by deep
social and political crisis, it was not inevitable or predetermined which side
would end up winning; their outcome depended not only on the depth of the
crisis and the social support for each of the clashing sides, but also on how
effectively the contending forces were led, organized, and conducted
themselves. Contrary to Kautsky’s unilinear evolutionism, social, economic, and
political conditions may make revolutions more likely, but they do not
guarantee their victory over historical reaction.
Applied to the present
conditions, Kautsky’s passive perspective, which in the classic German case
placed an exaggerated emphasis on the growing parliamentary representation of
the SPD, would downplay the response of the ruling classes to the movement,
ranging from lies and propaganda against it in order to weaken it by sowing
division and confusion, to government surveillance, provocation, and repression
— such as the Palmer Raids which deported large number of radicals in the US
after World War I, or McCarthyism after World War II — which might force the
movement into a clandestine existence with far more limiting conditions for
political life.
Political conditions in
democratic capitalism are certainly more favorable for political organization,
but they cannot be taken for granted, and their prospects might well decline,
as is now happening in this era of right-wing governments such as those
existing in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and in the Western capitalist democracies,
including the US.
In contrast to Guevara and
Kautsky’s thought, revolutionary socialist politics requires strategic and
tactical thinking and action long before a revolutionary situation arises, in
order to strengthen the working class and the socialist movement to respond
appropriately to the revolutionary situations that otherwise could be resolved
in favor of the forces of reaction.
A tragic example of the lack
of preparation to respond to such critical situations was General Augusto
Pinochet’s coup
in Santiago, Chile,
on September 11, 1973, when President Salvador Allende’s unconditional
commitment to parliamentarism led to the crushing of democracy and the Chilean
left. As Kautsky recognized in his writings but never integrated into his
perspective, the ruling classes will do everything and anything to prevent the
success of a revolution, even after they have been initially defeated.
Revolutionary Socialism in a
Nonrevolutionary Situation
The United States is very far
from being in a revolutionary situation of any kind. However, there are serious
problems affecting vast sectors of the population. In contrast with the “thirty
glorious years” that followed the end of WWII, the majority of the US
population has been experiencing a progressive deterioration in their living
circumstances. As author Ben Fountain put
it recently, Americans are working harder than ever for a steadily shrinking
share of the rewards as shown by the data on wages, income inequality,
household wealth, and class mobility, a reality that is also confirmed by the
metrics of life
expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, and in deaths from “the diseases
of despair” like opioids and suicide. Add to this other sources of oppression
like police brutality and massive incarceration, among other forms of racial
discrimination. These changes open the road for substantial radicalization on
the Left even if these do not result in a revolutionary situation.
In response, popular movements
have been taking shape like the Black Lives Matter movement. The #MeToo
movement has brought to the surface the long-standing
problem of gender inequality and oppression. The numerous and
inspiring teachers’
strikes, especially in the most politically conservative states in the
union, constitute another promising response that points to the possible
rebirth of a labor movement that never recovered from the employer and
government offensive since the late 1970s. (One front where, unfortunately,
there has been no popular engagement since the massive protests against the
mounting efforts of the Bush government to invade Iraq on February 2003, is the
foreign front, desperately needed particularly at a time when the Trump
administration is beating the drums for war with Iran.)
For revolutionary socialists,
it is crucial to actively participate in those and other progressive movements,
even if limited to the terms of what those movements seek to achieve. And to do
so by highlighting the connections of one social grievance to other social
grievances and to the social system — capitalism — as a whole, underlining the
systemic nature of the different kinds of oppression against which each of
those movements are fighting.
Along the lines of Marx and
Engels 170 years ago, the socialist movement must “fight for the attainment of
the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the
working class, but in the movement of the present they also represent and take
care of the future of that movement.”
In that process, along with
other socialists, socialist revolutionaries oppose as divisive and distracting
any attempt to blame other workers, at home and abroad, or poor people like
welfare recipients who are victims of capitalism, pointing instead to the
profit system as the fundamental source of their problems. And they insist on
measures to remedy present and past racial discrimination, including
reparations. The same political spirit and logic applies to gender and other
forms of discrimination.
But what distinguishes the politics
of revolutionary socialism in terms of their participation in today’s struggles
is its refusal to compromise the organizational and political independence not
only of working-class organizations, but more generally of the social movements
of the oppressed, a method and approach that is applicable to a wide variety of
political situations ranging from the workers struggle with employers to
electoral politics. This is paramount to preserve those organizations and
movements as independent agents and to prevent them from being co-opted and
diverted into supporting the politics and priorities of their opponents.
What follows are examples of
how this method applies in the arenas of 1) the labor movement, specifically
regarding labor-cooperation schemes, and 2) political activity, specifically
regarding elections and participation in Democratic Party politics.
Independence of the Labor
Movement
The starting assumption of an
approach putting the independence of the working class at the center is that
unions cannot concern themselves, and much less attempt to guarantee, the
profitability of the enterprises for which their members work. That includes
participating in co-management schemes with employers, which, in practice,
involves accepting responsibility without getting any real power in
decision-making, and compromising in the process the union’s organizational
independence.
The paradigmatic case of
labor-management cooperation is the United Auto Workers (UAW) collective
bargaining agreement with Chrysler in October 1979. This new contract included
a supposed concession by Chrysler Corporation accepting the appointment of UAW
president Doug Fraser as member of the company’s board of directors. As
described by Labor Notes at the time, the international union, along
with Lee Iacocca, the head of Chrysler, issued a joint statement to the press
warning that the company would go bankrupt and that the workers would lose
their jobs if they did not partake in the pain and contributed with their own
share of sacrifice.
Besides new contract language
making it easier for the company to discipline workers with poor attendance
records or for “abusing” sick leave, this sacrifice amounted to a $203 million
donation (or $2,000 per worker) by Chrysler employees. This was a small amount
compared to what Chrysler was going to receive from government-backed loans,
sale of preferred stock, state and local tax relief, and joint ventures. But
neither Democratic president Jimmy Carter nor the Democratic-controlled two
houses of Congress would agree to a bailout without the workers accepting
significant sacrifices. Sixty nine percent of the workers accepted the
concessionary agreement based on the notion that “half a loaf was better than
none,” although in the end that meant that they ended up paying to avoid a
capitalist bankruptcy for which they were not responsible.
Meanwhile, by joining the
board of directors, the union leadership ended up accepting political
responsibility for that denouement. In the decades to come, that 1979 concessionary
agreement would come to look relatively mild as the union continued to accept
ever worsening agreements with features such as two-tier wages for new hires.
And it initiated a concessionary wave that spread throughout the whole economy,
in many cases involving corporations that did not have a credible claim of
economic hardship but that used that false claim to extract concessions from
their employees.
One could say that the 1979
UAW agreement that co-opted the union into its board as the policeman of its
own members in the name of cooperation was the result of the defensive position
in which the union was put by the likely bankruptcy of the enterprise and the
loss of thousands of jobs of its members. (Although the union, could have, for
example, attempted to organize a national campaign for a political solution
forcing the government to intervene to protect the contractual rights of the
workers — which it did not do.)
But there are labor-capital
cooperation proposals in contexts more favorable to labor that are coming from
the Left itself. This is the case for example, with the British Labour Party’s
Jeremy Corbyn, whose government program, if he were elected to office — an
undoubtedly big victory for the Left and the working class — would ask
every company with 250 or more employees to create
an “inclusive ownership fund” (IOF) involving shares for the workers
in each firm into which the company would transfer at least 1 percent of their
ownership each year, up to a maximum of 10 percent. As a result, almost 11
million workers would end up receiving up to 500 pounds in dividends every
year. The Labour Party estimates that 10.7 million people — or 40 percent of
the private sector labor force — would initially be covered by the plan with
workers’ fund representatives having voting rights in their company’s
decision-making processes similar to that of other shareholders.
Yet far from representing a 10
percent advance on the road to socialism, this legislation would do the
opposite. It would further incorporate the working class into capitalism, since
the unions, in exchange for a rather small income increment for its members,
would end up assuming corporate responsibilities as members of the boards of
directors, of which they would in any case constitute a small minority. In
political and social-psychological terms, this proposal would also
significantly increase the workers’ identification with “their” company in
exchange for minimal influence, at best, in corporate decision-making.
Instead of investing major
political capital in this legislation, the new Labour leadership, if
victorious, could use its newfound clout to increase independent working-class
power by beginning to reverse the drubbing that unions took under the Thatcher
and Blair governments by restoring at least some of their lost institutional
power, without compromising, as Corbyn’s proposal does, the political and
organizational independence of the working class.
The Issue of Compromise
The negative consequences of
Corbyn’s plan would have been the same even if it had proposed, as a
compromise, a 40 percent instead of the 10 percent increase in their company’s
shares (Elizabeth Warren has proposed a similar plan, which will be emulated by
Bernie Sanders’s coming proposals.) But this does not mean that Marxist
socialism is in principle opposed to compromise.
Revolutionaries do not reject
compromise as such, but instead focus on what the specific compromise entails,
in this case as it regards union independence. In a collective-bargaining
situation or in a strike, a union might be forced to agree to accept less than
it originally demanded for its members, given that the balance of power at that
point in time has tilted in favor of the boss. That is one kind of compromise.
Another, qualitatively
different, compromise involves the union’s agreement to the employer’s proposal
to establish labor-management productivity committees, reduce the union’s
ability to communicate with its members inside the plant, or to participate in
advertising campaigns against the firm’s competitors. The first compromise
would not jeopardize the union’s organizational independence and preserve its
ability to continue fighting for a better contract in the next round (or for
fighting to enforce the new contract in the best interests of its members). The
second type of compromise would jeopardize the independence of the union and
its class alignment.
Independent Political
Activity, Elections, and the Democratic Party
For some 150 years, the Left
has been divided with respect to elections in liberal capitalist democracies.
At one end, anarchists and
various kinds of leftists have refused to participate in elections for fear of
legitimating and furthering illusions on the willingness of the capitalist
state to allow fundamental structural reforms, and on a parliamentary road to
socialism. At the other end is the far more influential tendency on the Left to
consider the parliamentary system all powerful and parliamentary politics as
the main if not only form of political struggle.
Since the late nineteenth
century, German Social Democracy has classically embodied this attitude, which
in conjunction with the extreme adventurism and sectarianism of the Stalinized
German Communist Party opened the road for Hitler’s rise to power. Karl Marx
captured the essence of this political phenomenon in The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte under the term “parliamentary cretinism” that
he coined to describe “that peculiar malady which since 1848 has raged all over
the Continent … which holds those infected in it in an imaginary world and robs
them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external world.”
Although revolutionary
socialists have no illusions about the parliamentary road to socialism, it is
important for them to participate in elections supporting independent and
socialist candidates because during the electoral period, people are more
likely to pay attention to political issues and even participate in political
organizations, thereby compensating for the political apathy and atomization
typical of capitalist democracies in economically developed countries. Access
to the mass media during electoral campaigns adds the further advantage of allowing
left-wing candidates to argue for their policy proposals to far wider
audiences.
We are now witnessing the
growth of progressive and left movements that have led to the election of their
representatives to those offices. The opportunities for those elected officials
to use their positions as public platforms to propose and mobilize for
left-wing legislation are obvious, as we’ve seen with the impact of
Congresswoman Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortezon the media and public opinion with her proposals like
the Green New Deal.
But the electoral history of
the Left is fraught with examples of elected officials being unable to resist
the blandishments and wheeling and dealing of “normal” politics and to remain
faithful to the politics with which they ran for office. As Seth Ackerman put
it in an interview with Jacobin: “any politicians that we managed
to elect are going to find themselves under a lot of pressure to find
alternative sources of support and therefore to pursue alternative policies to
the ones that we want them to pursue.” This is the sort of situation that
compelled the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to
criticize Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s endorsement of neoliberal Andrew Cuomo for
governor of New York in the 2018 elections.
The newly elected socialist
politicians will also be subject to other, subtler, pressures: used to the very
austere, if not disheveled, world of the left movements, or even to the mostly
clean, efficient, but not necessarily luxurious world of independent nonprofit
organizations and NGOs, they begin to operate in a world of power over
assistants, office staff, budgets, and office paraphernalia often located in
impressive, even august, government buildings. In the normal course of
legislative and government work, they begin to meet important people, who in
turn are the source of invitations to high-level social functions and parties,
opening the door to an often-glamorous social milieu previously barely
discernible if not entirely unimaginable.
The newly minted socialist
officeholder will find common ground with decent legislators and government
functionaries who, like themselves, are displeased by the corruption ongoing in
the legislative and executive bodies but who don’t have a single radical political
bone in their bodies. And they will also come to realize that many liberal and
even conservative legislators they meet are not so personally repelling as they
had imagined.
In the end, all of this may
well end up co-opting the socialist officeholders. The possibility of that
happening is magnified when the elected socialist representatives are not
directly responsible to the people who elected them and to the socialist
organizations that selected or supported them as candidates. That is why revolutionary
socialism insists on the importance of remaining alert to the political
behavior of their elected officials by the mobilized base of those who voted
for them, and to the need for some sort of democratic discipline that holds the
elected candidate responsible to the organizations’ political guidelines.
Ideally, the candidate must be
nothing more and nothing less than an expression of the politics of the
organization that democratically selected her to run for office. It is in that
vein that parties in the socialist tradition have taken organizational measures
such as insisting that the elected officeholders turn over their government
salaries to the party’s coffers, and to compensate them with a salary
comparable with that of a skilled worker, an efficient way to reduce the social
distance between the representatives and their electors.
The Democratic Party
The Democratic Party has long
been called the “graveyard” of progressive and radical movements in the labor,
civil rights, and peace arenas. The classic example is what happened to the
militant and radical Congress
of Industrial Organizations (CIO) of the 1930s, which was gradually
domesticated by its wholesale entry into Democratic Party politics. The
Democratic Party’s deadening impact is primarily due to the fact that it is a
party that fundamentally reflects the interests of capital.
As Lance Selfa shows in his
book The
Democrats: A Critical History, important sectors of capital contributed
similar, if not higher, sums to the Democratic than to the Republican Party in
the 2008 elections. Contributions to the Democratic Party included 45 percent
of all the funds contributed to the election by agribusiness, 68 percent of all
the election contributions from the communications and electronics sectors, 52
percent from defense, 55 percent from finance, insurance, and real estate, 54
percent from health, 74 percent from lawyers and lobbyists, and 55 percent from
miscellaneous businesses.
In the 2016 presidential
election, while total spending on behalf of Trump’s election from all sources
totaled a little more than $861 million, Hillary Clinton’s campaign raised $1.4
billion. With the possible exception of 1964, the Clinton campaign surpassed
any other campaign since the New Deal and obtained financial support from
sectors and firms that have rarely supported any Democrat. Undoubtedly, Hillary
Clinton, not Trump, was the presidential candidate supported by the majority of
the capitalist class.
Moreover, it cannot be claimed
that the Democratic Party chiefly represents the liberal wing of the capitalist
class. Only a wing of the Democratic Party’s elected representatives can be
called liberal; a few conservatives and a very large number of neoliberals
account for an ample majority of its officeholders, although the liberal wing —
with the addition of a number of socialists — has grown substantially as a result
of the 2008 recession, Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and the Trump presidency.
Insofar as its internal
organization is concerned, the Democratic Party is led by the Democratic
National Committee, which as Selfa explained, is “composed of hundreds of elected
politicians, union leaders, lobbyists, and campaign donors, [which] exists
mainly to raise money for Democratic candidates. Its role in policy making or
determining the direction of the party is fairly minimal. In essence, the
Democratic Party is a loose federation of candidate-based local and state
electoral machines.”
Thus, in reality, the
Democratic Party is not a party in the usual sense of the term involving a
membership that decides the party’s policy through internal deliberations and
decision-making. The only thing resembling a Democratic Party program is the
platform it adopts before every presidential election. Even then, Democratic
candidates at the federal, state, or local level are free to ignore, and for
the most part do ignore, their party’s platform when they are running for
office.
Another important
characteristic is that those who register as Democrats at election time do not
elect their own party leaders. That is why, in spite of having won twenty-three
state primaries in the period leading to the 2016 elections, Bernie Sanders did
not end up representing and leading the Democratic Party in any of those
states.
These characteristics of the
Democratic Party make it totally impervious to any attempt by many American
leftist leaders in the past to “take it over.” Unlike the British Labour Party
where its members directly elect their leaders, as they recently elected
left-wing Jeremy Corbyn, it is impossible to do so in the Democratic Party,
which is not a membership-based party.
Despite agreeing with the
previous arguments, many would still argue that Democrats should be supported
because they represent a lesser evil. But this argument, brandished for quite a
few decades, presents several problems. Historically, the supposedly “lesser
evil” has sometimes turned out to be the larger one, as was the case of the
1964 election in which Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic Party “lesser evil”
winner over really evil Barry Goldwater, significantly escalated the war
in Vietnam with the number of US troops surpassing half a million. It
is unlikely that Barry Goldwater could have outdone Johnson’s massive
deployment of US troops, use of Agent Orange and strategic hamlets, by unleashing
massive nuclear warfare in Vietnam, if for no other reason that such an act
might have very likely provoked a war with the USSR and/or China.
In terms of domestic policy,
it was the explosive black protests in the streets of America, and not Johnson’s
politics, that brought about big gains, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In the midst of the incendiary situation prevailing in the country in 1964,
Senate Republican minority leader Everett Dirksen and his caucus felt obliged
to respond to black demands by joining Johnson in preventing the white racist
Southern Democrats from filibustering the Civil Rights Act.
“Lesser evil” political
accounting has always limited itself to a very short-run perspective — and has
ended up contributing to the very conditions leading to the success of a “worse
evil.” Hillary Clinton represented the “lesser evil” alternative to “evil evil”
Trump, but it was Clinton’s own neoliberal economic policies that played a
definitive role in engendering the white popular support for Trump. Supporting
the “lesser evil” Democrats on the basis of short run considerations — winning
the election — ignores the evil that they create in the medium and long run, as
in the case of Clintonian neoliberalism.
The “Dirty Break”
Several Jacobin and
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) writers such as Seth Ackerman have
proposed that socialists consider the use of the Democratic Party ballot line,
not necessarily as matter of political commitment to the party but as a way to
use their ballot status to reach out to vast sections of the population to
which it would otherwise have no access, particularly when it may be difficult
to run as independents. Advocates of this view justify this “dirty
break” strategy by arguing that the chances for creating a third party that
reflects their left politics are minimal given the legal obstacles for the
creation of such parties in the US.
The main problem with this
tactic is that it might end up unintentionally misleading voters who might feel
manipulated unless they are explicitly informed that the “dirty break”
candidates do not support, and in fact oppose, the Democratic Party as
presently constituted. And the candidates pledge, in advance, that if elected
they will not join the Democratic caucus and instead create a separate caucus.
And that if they lose, they will not support a mainstream Democratic Party
winner (a big problem with Bernie Sanders’s strategy of supporting mainstream
Democrats who win the presidential and other primaries.) This approach would
also have the virtue of preventing the cementing of illusions about the
Democratic Party.
The issue is, however, that
the national success of such a transparent dirty break presumes the very same
conditions — namely the massive radicalization of the voting population — that
would also lead to the formation and success of a third party, rendering the
dirty break tactic irrelevant.
Conclusion
The above discussion assumes
that neither the US nor other economically developed capitalist democracies are
likely to confront revolutionary situations either in the short or even medium
term. Yet, these democracies have been undergoing a series of crises — whether economic,
the last one being the 2008 recession that that devastated working class and
especially minority living standards; and the ongoing ecological degradation —
that have created openings for the development of social protest movements. So
does the alarming growth of open racism and Islamophobia, and the
anti-immigrant campaigns by governments in power.
Liberal capitalist democracy
is under attack in countries like Turkey, Poland, and Hungary, and in the
United States itself, with its successful efforts to gerrymander electoral
districts, and to reduce voting
rights, particularly among blacks and Latinos.
While it is true, as some have
argued, that the means of state surveillance and consequently, of state
control, have increased in the last one hundred years, this has not translated
into the unchallenged legitimacy of the state. In fact, state legitimacy has
been subject to serious attacks, especially from the Right: just witness the
attacks by the current President of the United States and his immediate
entourage against the “deep state” in general, and against the heretofore
“sacred” institution of the FBI in particular. Similar developments are taking
place in Europe with the right-wing calling into question, for its own reasons,
the legitimacy of long-respected state institutions such as the independent
judiciary.
The notion, often implicit in
the defense of reformism, that the existing liberal capitalist democracies will
preserve their present character forever, is ahistorical, ignoring the crises
affecting them today, which are likely to deepen further down the road. Given
these crises, it is important to keep in mind that the capitalist ruling
classes have historically jettisoned democracy when their fundamental interests
have been threatened.
Historian Eric
Hobsbawm described the “short” twentieth century (1914–1991) as the
“age of extremes” that ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in Eastern
Europe. His account refutes the optimistic, unilinear views of history
expounded by Karl Kautsky and others. In this context, Rosa
Luxemburg’s historical projection is far more relevant when she
pointed to the stark option of “socialism or barbarism,” an option
that speaks far more to what is happening in today’s world. It poses the
possibility that revolution may occur not as the crowning advance of the forces
of progress, as welcome as these might have been, but rather as a defensive
last gasp and decisive fight against brutal regression.
