Cosmonaut Magazine Article: Artisanal Politics, Bolshevism, and the Path to a Marxist Proto-Party

In the US, the existing state is a clear obstacle to what the Left wants to achieve. There is a long history of the military being used to break strikes, and governors deployed National Guard troops against the BLM protests in 2015 and 2020. If socialists gained a majority in Congress and held the Presidency, the political role of the military would become an even more pressing issue, because the people who run the military are firmly integrated with the ruling class and have a strong interest in maintaining the status quo.[3] The existing state, particularly including the military, has long imposed a check on what mass movements can achieve in the US. Any president trying to implement socialism in the US today would have to contend with the possibility of a Pinochet-style coup.

But mass movements in the US have not only come into confrontation with the power of the state; they have also found ways to successfully fight back. In the 1930s, workers were able to build a powerful industrial labor movement because they combated strikebreaking by National Guard troops, including by persuading the troops to stand down. As Art Pries wrote in his history of the CIO:

But strikers and their thousands of supporters did more than shame the young National Guardsmen. They educated them and tried to win them over. Speakers stood on boxes in front of the troops and explained what the strike was about and the role the troops were playing as strikebreakers. World War I veterans put on their medals and spoke to the boys in uniform like “Dutch uncles.” The women explained what the strike meant to their families. The press reported that some of the guardsmen just quit and went home.[4]

Similarly, in 1970, when Nixon deployed National Guard troops in an attempt to break a wildcat strike of postal workers, many soldiers expressed support for the strike, and some even helped to prevent the resumption of mail service by deliberately missorting items; if the National Guard troops had been more loyal to the state authority, Nixon may have been able to crush the strike, but instead the strike continued and became one of the biggest victories for public sector workers in US history.[5] There were also glimmers of this during the George Floyd uprising five years ago, when protesters persuaded members of the National Guard to lay down their shields and take a knee in solidarity with the movement.[6]

This raises the question: how could these efforts ultimately be systematized, scaled up, and escalated by a mass revolutionary movement? That will only be possible if a substantial layer of the public is willing to support attacks on the existing order, but here I think there is actually some room for optimism. In the early 1960s, for example, nearly 80% of Americans said they trusted the government to do the right thing at least most of the time, but during the decades since then, the percentage has dropped substantially, and for the past ten years it has fluctuated around 20%.[7] Another recent poll found that 58% of Americans believe the US political system needs major changes but are not confident that it can be reformed.[8] These general anti-establishment sentiments are frequently intertwined with a variety of ideas, including conservative ones. But there is evidently a deep dissatisfaction with the existing system, and an openness to other possibilities. All this underscores the need for a socialist party that can patiently argue for a clear, concise program which directly challenges the legitimacy of the system as a whole, lays out a path for replacing it with a socialist one, and begins working right now to organize the already existing public hostility toward the state.

It is easy to imagine the sorts of events—like overreach by the Trump administration, new climate-induced disasters, or deep cuts in public services when the dollar finally loses its international reserve currency status—that could spark massive new social crises in the coming years and decades. When these things happen, it is likely that new mass movements will emerge, and soldiers will again be called upon to restore order. To navigate those situations and be more than just spectators, Marxists will need to already have a sizable organization with some clarity about what to do. How do we get from here to there?

This is exactly the type of question I think the history of Bolshevism can shed light on. A good starting place is the Bolshevik Party program, since the program specified the key positions a person had to accept to be a member and thus created a basis for shared clarity about the aims of the party.[9] As part of this, it is useful to understand the development and origins of the Bolshevik program in the early Russian Social Democratic movement, because this history shows how Marxists laid the basis for the October Revolution through their work over a three-decade period, beginning at a time when they were a small force in society. To demonstrate these ideas, in the next section I am going to emphasize the way Russian Social Democrats navigated issues related to the military; I do this because I think it provides a useful example, and because I think these issues have an underappreciated relevance for Marxists today, but similar points could also be made about various other demands and tactics that the Social Democrats raised.

The precursor to the original Bolshevik program was the Social-Democratic Emancipation of Labor Group’s program from 1884, which had a standard minimum/maximum structure.[10] The maximum section spoke to the socialist transformation of society that would become possible once the working class won state power. The minimum section, or “minimum program”, described the things to be fought for before the working class rose to power, and included political demands that laid out what it would mean to replace the tsarist autocracy with a democratic republic. The logic of this program reflected the understanding that working-class political rule could only be exercised through a democratic system. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto: “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”[11]

As part of the call for a democratic republic, the minimum program included an important point related to the military: it demanded “the replacement of the standing army by general arming of the people.”[12] Demands like this were important because they clarified what it would mean to overthrow the existing autocracy and what the autocracy would be replaced with. Since the existing military was a cornerstone of the autocracy’s power, building a democratic republic would have to mean replacing the existing military with something else, and to the extent that they were serious, Russian Social Democrats needed to have some idea of what that “something else” would be.

At its party congress in 1903, the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) adopted a program that was largely inspired by the Emancipation of Labor group’s ideas. The RSDLP program’s minimum section called for a democratic republic and the “replacement of the standing army by universal arming of the people.” Although the program did not provide details about this—for example, it did not explain if or how the armed population would be organized into a militia—it did bring clarity to a fundamental issue: the new state power was supposed to be rooted in the armed masses, rather than the existing bureaucratic-military machine.

The 1903 congress also passed a “Resolution on Demonstrations” that gives a sense of how the party intended to deal with the military in its day-to-day work:

In view of the fact that regular troops are increasingly being used against the people in demonstrations, steps should be taken to acquaint the soldiers with the character and purpose of the demonstrations, and they should be invited to fraternize with the people; the demonstrators should not be allowed to antagonize them unduly.[13]

When a revolutionary situation developed in Russia during 1905, the Russian Social Democrats gave agitational speeches to win the military rank and file over to their side; this was powerfully portrayed in the movie Battleship Potemkin. When the Potemkin sailors took over their ship and put it under the control of an elected committee, they demonstrated what it would mean to dismantle the existing military and transfer that power to the working class through the “arming of the people.”

In 1912, when the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP formed what we now know as the “Bolshevik Party,” the RSDLP program became the Bolshevik Party program. The political demands in the minimum program continued to be central to the party’s agitational work.[14] When World War I began, the main party newspaper published a statement by the Bolshevik Central Committee which called for a revolutionary struggle against the war, and held up the Paris Commune—in which the communards built a workers’ state by suppressing the standing army and arming the people—as the example to follow.[15]

Similarly, rank-and-file party members agitated for a revolutionary struggle against the war and for a democratic republic—although many apparently ignored some of the Bolshevik Central Committee’s more radical directives regarding “revolutionary defeatism.”[16] This is because, as I will discuss in more detail below, the Bolshevik Party was held together by a shared commitment to an overarching political project, not by top-down micromanagement of members or monolithic agreement about secondary issues.

In 1917, Lenin (and some other leading Bolsheviks) became convinced that the conditions had arrived for an international socialist revolution.[17] He argued for a revised and more radical minimum program, which described the conditions under which a revolutionary socialist government of workers and peasants could take power:

The party fights for a more democratic workers’ and peasants’ republic, in which the police and the standing army will be abolished and replaced by the universally armed people, by a people’s militia; all officials will be not only elective, but also subject to recall at any time upon the demand of a majority of the electors; all officials, without exception, will be paid at a rate not exceeding the average wage of a competent worker; parliamentary representative institutions will be gradually replaced by Soviets of people’s representatives (from various classes and professions, or from various localities), functioning as both legislative and executive bodies.[18]

Despite important changes, there was a certain continuity with the old minimum program, in the sense that it described the new political system to be created through a revolution, and clarified what it would actually mean to break the power of the existing regime.[19] In essence, Lenin’s draft program kept the old RSDLP demand regarding the military, but situated it within a more radical vision of mass participatory democracy. Delegates representing the party’s hundred thousand members met to discuss these issues at the Bolsheviks’ April 1917 Conference, where the core positions in Lenin’s revised minimum program were adopted.[20]

The subsequent events of 1917 showed what it would mean to implement this minimum program in the real world. Over the course of the year, Bolshevik agitators played a key role in winning over the military rank and file to the revolution.[21] The major turning point came in August, when soldiers and sailors helped to defeat Kornilov’s coup attempt by arresting their commanding officers and setting up committees to democratically run their units themselves.[22] Once the military and the factories were under the control of the working class, it became relatively straightforward to assume state power with a brief insurrection. Although the revolution itself was clearly the product of larger historical forces, it was possible in part because Russian Marxists were finally able to persuade the public, after three decades of trying, that the standing army should be replaced by the arming of the people; only then was it possible to build the system of radical socialist democracy that the Bolsheviks advocated.

After the October Revolution in Russia, the expected international revolutions failed to materialize. In early 1918 the Soviet government was forced to sign a peace treaty with Germany under highly punitive terms, with calamitous effects for Russia’s economy, which was already devastated by years of war.[23] Ultimately, much of the country’s industrial capacity was destroyed, a significant percentage of workers had to become peasants, and millions faced starvation; the combined effect of these things was to eliminate any material basis in Russia for the creation of a stable proletarian democracy.[24]

But none of this should obscure the radically democratic vision upon which the Bolshevik revolution was based. And it is even more important to keep in mind that, because of the enormous degree of economic and technological development that has taken place over the past 108 years, there is a much stronger material foundation on which to build a system of radical socialist democracy today.[25] We need a program that clearly articulates what it would mean to create this system, drawing on the positive and negative lessons from the October Revolution, as well as the experiences of other parties across the world.[26]

What would this program actually look like? As a starting place, I recommend reading the fourth section of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGP) program, which describes the system of working-class political rule the party seeks to create: a state in which supreme power is held by a single popular assembly of elected delegates, who are recallable at any time and paid a workers’ wage; replacement of the standing army and police by a people’s militia; unrestricted freedom of speech; openness (transparency) in all state affairs; the radical democratization of various aspects of the economy.[27] A program for the US would need to include these sorts of points. In putting forward a vision for a democratic workers’ state, a US program would have to grapple with the specificities of racial oppression in this country and the need to complete the unfinished work of post-Civil War Reconstruction, as the Marxist Unity Group argues.[28] More generally, a Marxist program has to explain the need to fight for the international unity of working and oppressed people, and the need to fight against the ruling class, including by fighting for various immediate demands. Finally, a Marxist program should discuss the gradual transition to stateless communism that will become possible once the working class wins power (as in the fifth section of the CPGB program). These are the sorts of fundamental ideas I believe should be in a Marxist program today.

At the same time, a party program should not take a position on everything, because the program specifies the political positions that new recruits have to accept before joining, and the party will condemn itself to irrelevance if it defines its political identity too narrowly. Again, the history of Bolshevism is instructive here. At various points between 1903 and 1912, it was necessary for the Bolsheviks to form a unified party with the Mensheviks, because many workers—even the “advanced” workers the Bolsheviks wanted to recruit—needed a chance to “test” certain ideas before they could see whether those ideas were correct.[29] Lenin made similar points in 1919, when he opposed a decision by the German Communist Party to expel ultra-leftists from its ranks; although he was adamantly opposed to the “semi-syndicalist” tactics that the ultra-leftists advocated, he argued that unity in a single party was “both possible and necessary” as long as there was “agreement on the basic issue (for Soviet rule, against bourgeois parliamentarism).”[30]

All of this boils down to a simple idea: if people have the same fundamental aims, then an effort should be made to find agreement on a way to achieve those aims; if at all possible, tactical disagreements should be resolved through persuasion and debate, rather than by splitting into distinct organizations. Although we need a program that takes a clear position on fundamental issues, the program should not try to settle every tactical question at the outset.[31]

These things also need to be considered in relation to the consciousness in society as a whole. For example, in 1912, when the Bolsheviks believed that their positions were sufficiently understood by the wider working class in Russia, they became willing to build a party based on a higher level of internal agreement.[32] By the same token, because the working class in the US knows relatively little about the issues that divide the socialist Left today, Marxists should work to build a party around a relatively small number of fundamental programmatic commitments, which I discussed above, but can be summarized as follows: proletarian internationalism, socialist revolution, and the establishment of a democratic socialist state rooted in the armed working class. Relative to these fundamental aims, virtually all tactical questions—for example, questions about the usefulness of mutual aid, or the degree to which Marxists should work within the structures of existing unions—should be considered secondary.

As long as we have a shared understanding of our fundamental aims, Marxists should be able to debate secondary questions in a unified (proto-)party, and carry out whatever the majority position ends up being, while still retaining the right to argue for a different position. This can be contrasted with artisanal politics, in which Marxist organizations define their identities by taking hardened positions on secondary issues, and draw rigid organizational boundaries between themselves on that basis, rather than working toward principled unity on fundamental issues.[33]

In summary, Bolshevism was based on a program which clearly laid out what it would mean for ordinary people to collectively run society. This was a radically democratic vision, in which the basis of state power was the armed working class, rather than a bureaucratic-military machine. Bolshevism remains a crucial reference point for thinking about how to develop a program for a socialist party today.

In addition to having the right program, socialists need to have enough social weight to actually carry their program out. A useful analogy can be made here with a union organizing drive. It is impossible to organize a union simply by giving speeches and writing articles; there must also be organizers who can have one-on-one conversations with workers and build the union on the shop floor. That’s why, in successful union drives, there is generally at least one dedicated organizer for every hundred workers.[34] Similarly, to organize a mass political strike or an insurrection, a socialist party must have a sufficiently large base of members in relation to the broader public, so that these members can conduct the type of “patient, systematic, and persistent explanation” famously described by Lenin in the April Theses. Even in Russia, where the working class was relatively small, the Bolshevik Party had around a quarter million members by July 1917.[35] In short, a revolutionary socialist party must ultimately also be a mass workers’ party.

Although Russian Social-Democratic organizations first developed in the 1880s, there was nothing in Russia that could truly be called a workers’ party prior to 1903. In fact, before 1905, because of the political repression that existed in Russia and the absence of a legal, institutionalized labor movement, it was difficult to even hold meetings with more than a few people at once.[36] Thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian Marxists occupied themselves with organizing Social-Democratic “circles” or “groups,” which focused on intensive study of Marxist ideas with small numbers of workers (i.e., propaganda), although they also did things like distributing leaflets at strikes and demonstrations.[37]

During that time, Social-Democratic groups in Russia tended to last a matter of months before being destroyed by police arrests, so issues related to secrecy and security had an overwhelming importance.[38] The situation we face today is obviously somewhat different, and this serves as a reminder to not overgeneralize from the things that Marxists did in a specific historical context. Still, there is a useful analogy to be made between the small Marxist organizations that exist now and the Social-Democratic circles in pre-revolutionary Russia. The Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA) allude to this in their manifesto, when they discuss the current state of the Left and mention the “myriad of sectarian groupings” involved in “small-circle politics.”[39] Based on this, RCA seems to have drawn the conclusion that they can simply dismiss the rest of the Marxist left and declare themselves “the party.” I draw a very different conclusion, but I do believe the era of “small-circle politics” in Russia involved problems relevant to Marxists today.

In fact, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia’s Social-Democratic groups faced problems that I suspect some readers will find eerily familiar. For example, various groups tried to produce their own newspapers, but it was a huge challenge for any of them to find the resources to do this in a sustainable way.[40] They lacked the economies of scale that could exist in a unified movement, which meant that, as Lenin argued, the Russian Social-Democrats were organizing their work in an inefficient and “artisanal” way, roughly resembling the system of individualized craft production that was predominant when capitalism was in its infancy.[41] At the same time, because they were too marginal to have a significant impact on the world around them, some groups instead tended to tail existing consciousness, jumping from one idea to another depending on whatever was happening in the rest of society.[42]

Thus there was a need to replace these disparate groups with a party unified around a clear Marxist program. One conceivable way forward might have been for a single group to simply declare itself “the party” and dismiss the others for their “small-circle politics.” But this is not how the RSDLP was built, and, as Mike MacNair has persuasively argued, the declare-yourself-the-party strategy is unlikely to ever succeed because it does not address the underlying reasons why socialist movements tend to be weak and divided in the first place.[43]

To transcend the artisanal phase of the Russian Social-Democratic movement, it was necessary to persuade the members of the existing groups to collectively adopt a compelling Marxist program, which only became possible after a years-long period of fierce debate. It was also noteworthy that these debates happened out in the open, in the form of public polemics; as Lenin would later argue, this type of transparency is important because it creates an incentive for leaders to behave responsibly and focus attention on issues that actually matter.[44]

The early debates in the Russian Social-Democratic movement did not involve very many people—in all the years leading up to the RSDLP’s 1903 Congress, the total number who joined Russian Social-Democratic groups was only around 3,500.[45] Lenin himself appears to have devoted significant time and energy to polemics against Rabocheye Dyelo, a Social-Democratic group that published twelve issues of a newspaper from 1899 to 1902 and then faded from history.[46] Despite the relative obscurity of this group, if one searches Marxists.org for writings by Lenin that mention Rabocheye Dyelo, over a hundred hits will appear. Although the Russian Social-Democratic movement was small, Marxists had no choice but to engage with the movement that actually existed.

Russian Social Democrats finally adopted a shared program and created the infrastructure for a genuine party at the 1903 Congress of the RSDLP. Fittingly, at the congress itself, there was so much debate that delegates had to continue meeting for almost a month.[47] But Marxists were willing to accept these seemingly interminable discussions because they understood the need to develop shared political clarity. Lenin summarized the significance of all this in the following way:

For the first time, a secret revolutionary party succeeded in emerging from the darkness of underground life into broad daylight, showing everyone the whole course and outcome of our internal Party struggle, the whole character of our Party and of each of its more or less noticeable components in matters of programme, tactics, and organisation. For the first time, we succeeded in throwing off the traditions of circle looseness and revolutionary philistinism, in bringing together dozens of very different groups, many of which had been fiercely warring among themselves and had been linked solely by the force of an idea, and which were now prepared (in principle, that is) to sacrifice all their group aloofness and group independence for the sake of the great whole which we were for the first time actually creating—the Party. But in politics, sacrifices are not obtained gratis, they have to be won in battle. The battle over the slaughter of organisations necessarily proved terribly fierce.[48]

Thus to build a genuine workers’ party, it was necessary to “slaughter” the existing groups and unite their members in a single organization with a shared program. And this required a battle, particularly because for some leaders, maintaining control over a small group was more appealing than submitting to the discipline of a unified party.

These issues became central to the differences between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the party, as the Menshevik leaders proved unwilling to carry out the decisions of the party congress.[49] By 1912, after multiple temporary reunifications, it became clear that the majority of the Mensheviks were unwilling to carry out the party’s program, and instead wanted to “liquidate” the RSDLP into a broad-based reformist organization.[50] At the same time, it appeared that the vast majority of militant, class-conscious workers had been won over to the side of the Bolsheviks—in fact, at that point, the Bolsheviks even dominated the leadership of the major unions.[51] For these reasons, there was a clear political rationale for a final split, and the organization we now know as the “Bolshevik Party” was formed at the Prague Conference in 1912.[52]

But the diversity of opinion in the party, and the culture of public debate that went along with that, continued, and remained an essential element of the party’s political identity.[53] For example, the positions in Lenin’s April Theses were initially opposed by the majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee, but they were still published in the party newspaper, and the next day a response from Kamenev was published, entitled “Our Disagreements.”[54] The key thing to understand is not simply that there was significant space to fight for minority ideas; the more important point is that this process was actually central to the production of majority opinion in the party: many of Lenin’s key theoretical contributions in 1916–17 drew on previous work by Bukharin that Lenin had initially dismissed as ultraleft.[55] Thus, there is a sense in which “Leninism” only exists as we know it today because there was so much room in the Bolshevik Party for members to argue against the views that Lenin actually held during much of his life.

Along with this diversity of opinion, the party also had to live with a diversity of political action, as when leaders of the Bolshevik Military Organization helped to instigate the premature “July Days” uprising in 1917 but faced little or no discipline afterward.[56] Even Lenin, who certainly did not shy away from advocating expulsion in other situations, argued against discipline for the Bolshevik Military Organization after the July Days fiasco: "It is necessary to help them, but there should be no pressure and no reprimands. To the contrary, they should be supported: those who don’t take risks never win; without defeats there are no victories."[57]

In summary, the party that led the October Revolution was in many ways a rowdy, wild, messy organization, in which a variety of political currents existed. But the party was able to maintain a certain degree of cohesion because members had a shared commitment to a set of fundamental aims.

In a sense, the Marxist Left in the US today is the opposite of the Bolshevik Party: rather than united around a program that takes clear and compelling positions on fundamental issues, Marxists in the US are organized into an alphabet soup of tiny groups which distinguish themselves with hardened positions on secondary issues. At the same time, in many cases, the leaders of these organizations do not appear to have any idea what it would mean for the working class to win state power, or any idea of what it would look like to get from here to there.

I will now illustrate these problems by looking at Socialist Alternative (SA), an organization that I have been a member of for the past three years. I should clarify that, in the past, I have certainly made mistakes like the ones I describe below, and so my aim here is not to pontificate. Instead, my intention is to draw attention to some political problems in the Marxist Left that need to be addressed at a collective level. In this section, I am going to focus on some interrelated issues of program and organization.

At SA’s national convention last year, one of the decisions was to hold discussions throughout the organization as part of a process to eventually draft and vote on a program. In addition to this proposal, the convention also adopted a “building document,” which recognized the need for “refounding” our international organization, the International Socialist Alternative, “on a clear programmatic basis.” Thus there seemed to be widespread agreement that Socialist Alternative’s lack of a program was a problem we would need to rectify through collective discussion at all levels. The convention also elected SA’s main national leadership body, the National Committee (NC), which I became a member of, and which is supposed to be accountable to the convention’s decisions.

Unfortunately, although the convention identified the need for SA’s members to collectively discuss programmatic questions, so far the NC has declined to include space for these discussions in the priorities they set for the organization. Instead, at a meeting in February, the majority of the NC chose to adopt an updated “What We Stand For” document.[58] Despite the fact that the vast majority of members were not given a chance to weigh in on (or even see) this document before it was adopted, the document is now being treated as a program for the whole organization; the Executive Committee (EC), which is elected by the NC to oversee the day-to-day work of the organization, refers to the document as a “distilled version” of SA’s “program.” In effect, SA’s national leadership has claimed for itself the right to settle key programmatic questions on its own.

This is a recipe for building a weak organization. One reason is that, if a socialist organization is not firmly rooted in a set of shared principles established through democratic discussion and debate, there is a danger that leadership, without a firm political anchor, will erratically change positions in response to the prevailing winds in the rest of society. To see that this is more than just a hypothetical concern, consider SA’s constantly shifting position on the Democratic Party. In Spring 2022, around the time I joined the organization, the national leadership created a petition with a “never voting for a Democrat again” pledge to be used at Socialist Alternative tables, and also published an article on this theme.[59] Then, a few months later, they chose to endorse two Democrats for the Seattle City Council.[60] More recently, the NC voted to adopt the above-mentioned EC “program,” which takes an unequivocal stand against “votes or donations to any Democrats or Republicans.” But then, just five months later, the EC decided that Socialist Alternative would call upon New Yorkers to vote for Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party’s candidate for mayor.[61]

These zigzags are a violation of the SA constitution, specifically the part that states “all major policy and organizational decisions of the organization will be taken after full discussion at every level of the organization.” The above examples also illustrate the tendency for lower bodies in SA to cavalierly disregard decisions by the higher bodies that elected them (as when the Executive Committee disregards a decision by the National Committee). At the same time, the national leadership has shown a willingness to engage in bureaucratic practices, like responding to legitimate criticism with threats of disciplinary action, and using a kangaroo court to remove a political opponent from an elected body. I could easily give more examples to illustrate this, but the basic point is that, although members’ activities are often micromanaged by the national leadership, the leaders themselves are not meaningfully accountable to anyone. Thus, although SA describes itself as a “democratic centralist” organization, it is actually the opposite.

To understand what is at stake here, it is useful to pause for a moment and think about some of the reasons why Marxists go through the trouble to build a party in the first place, rather than working within, say, the Democratic Party. One reason is that the Democratic Party is run in an undemocratic way: the organization’s administrative staff might consult with various “stakeholders,” or even allow people to participate in the party’s nominally democratic internal processes, but at the end of the day it is the party functionaries who have their hands on the levers of power. This is why, when DSA members in Nevada were formally elected to lead their local Democratic Party, the party’s staff were able to quickly sabotage them, paving the way for the old guard to return to power shortly afterward. If our aim is to adopt a Marxist program and collectively carry it out, then we need to build a very different type of organization, which is under the collective control of its members. Unfortunately, most of Socialist Alternative’s national leadership appears committed to an undemocratic approach in which they settle the key political questions on their own, switch positions whenever it feels convenient, and expect the rest of the members to simply parrot whatever ideas are handed down to them.

Since SA’s national leadership is unable or unwilling to build a socialist organization under the control of its members, it should come as no surprise that they are unable to articulate a clear vision for a political system under the control of the working class. Just consider the EC’s “program” that I mentioned earlier. As I discussed in Section 3, during the decades before the October Revolution, Russian Marxists understood that the military was a cornerstone of the existing regime’s power, and an obstacle to the establishment of working-class political rule; this was why it was necessary to develop a program that clearly dealt with these issues, and argue for that program in society. In contrast, the EC’s program talks about the need to “drastically cut the bloated U.S. military budget” and redirect that money to other uses. In effect, rather than describing what it would look like for society to be run by the working class, the EC’s program merely raises a standard progressive demand for redistributing resources within the existing capitalist state. This is in keeping with a political vision for Socialist Alternative in which, although classical Marxist texts are sometimes discussed internally, the outward-facing work of the organization is largely confined to campaigning for progressive-left ideas while trying to build public support for socialism in the abstract.

This is a problem because a socialist society will not emerge spontaneously from workers’ fights for progressive-left demands. Instead, millions of people will have to consciously work to overthrow the existing system, and they will have to construct a new system by doing specific things. And someone, somewhere, will have to convince these people to do these things. This means that Marxists have to do more than just build movements, or try to build support for “socialism” or “revolution” as concepts. They will have to explain what socialist revolution actually means, and provide some reasonable ideas for how to get from here to there. The EC’s “program” does not do anything like this.

Even if our revolution is still a long way off, this should not stop us from thinking about how to connect a Marxist program to things happening around us today. Here it is useful to again think about the George Floyd uprising in 2020, when millions of demonstrators took to the streets and state governors called out National Guard troops to quash the protests. There were several reports of soldiers objecting to the role that they were being ordered to play.[62] Moreover, this took place in a context of more general discontent among National Guard troops, which ultimately led them to organize unions in Texas and Connecticut.[63] So, it is unsurprising that, in some cases, as I discussed in Section 2, BLM activists were able to persuade members of the National Guard to openly support the protests. What might a Marxist party have been able to accomplish in that atmosphere if it had made a concerted effort to organize and scale up these efforts on a nationwide basis? Such a party might have connected this work with a programmatic demand for replacing the existing military with a militia controlled by the working class, as part of a longer-term effort to build majority support for socialist revolution. Instead, during the George Floyd uprising, Socialist Alternative’s main focus was on fighting for more progressive tax policies.

It is also worth noting that these issues are not unique to one organization. Consider the program of the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA).[64] Although it includes more exclamation points, their program is similar in substance to the EC’s “distilled” program. In particular, the RCA program states that a workers’ government would “slash the military budget and invest in social needs,” but completely evades the question of whether the existing military should be left in place at all.[65] In other words, the RCA program, like the EC’s program, does not provide any coherent vision for what it would actually mean for the working class to win state power.

The leaders of SA and RCA like to use the word “revolution,” but when they use that word, what are they actually talking about? Without a minimum program that describes the conditions under which it would be possible for the working class to assume power, and without a plan to make those conditions a reality, the concept of “revolution” becomes a meaningless abstraction. This underscores the need for more discussion among Marxists to establish a shared understanding of our fundamental aims.