An interesting, deep look and criticism of the Marxist Unity Group's (DSA caucus) proposal of what communist strategy should be.
Kolya Ludwig takes issue with the strategy of the Marxist Unity Group, arguing that a successful Marxist strategy must identify an intermediate political goal and a specific political enemy.
An interesting conversation has recently developed that speaks to some of the key theoretical and practical questions involved in revolutionary activity in the United States and elsewhere. It began with Steve Bloom’s critique of Donald Parkinson’s argument for the minimum-maximum program,[1] continued through Bloom’s elaborated critique of the Marxist Unity Group’s (MUG) thesis of a ‘Constitutional revolution,’[2] and resulted in a sequence of responses featured on Cosmonaut and in the Weekly Worker.[3] Tracing the debate thus far has led me to offer some reflections about its broader implications for socialist strategy.
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The Marxist Unity Group, a caucus within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has accomplished the rare feat of taking theoretical discourse seriously within an organization that more and more appears to be surviving off of pure, spontaneous inertia. To their credit, MUG has spared us the disappointing (pseudo-)secrecy of some in the Marxist left by publicizing their perspective regarding the path to socialism and thus opening themselves to scrutiny. The current debate would be unthinkable otherwise.
As to the specific content of their theoretical positions, though, it strikes me that MUG has cornered itself into a contradictory political program: one that anticipates the ‘democratic republic’ as the desired form of workers’ state but fails to account for the ways that the masses themselves are already fighting for democracy. This contradiction arises, I believe, from MUG’s commitment to a neo-Kautskyan ‘strategy of patience’; a theory that forecloses serious consideration of cross-class alliances, and that has precluded a more productive relationship to the conjuncture and effective leadership within DSA. While its critiques of other Marxist conceptions of hegemony are well-taken, MUG still proceeds from a logic which does not break thoroughly enough from the fundamental mode of thought that predominates in contemporary US Marxism—that which broadly conceives of hegemony as a future prospect rather than an immediate question.
What makes the present perspective on hegemony distinct from other Marxist strategic formulations, including that of MUG, is (1) its assertion that proletarian class-consciousness is only developed by navigating the complexities of the struggle for hegemony over other classes, (2) its commitment to an intermediate revolutionary rupture that is already conceivable to the masses, and (3) a willingness to make politically agile calculations based on conjunctural assessments that do not adhere to prescriptive programs. Furthermore, I argue that this is not a novel strategic formulation, but the one Lenin actually practiced for most of his life, which Alan Shandro convincingly demonstrates in his book Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony.[4] Shandro’s scholarship, which I foreground in this article (while of course adding my own insights and emphases),[5] presents problems for neo-Kautskyan perspectives that require serious theoretical engagement—the lack of which, to date, suggests how disturbing Shandro’s thesis is for the dominant conceptions of hegemony on the Marxist left.[6]
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There is much to appreciate about MUG’s Constitutional revolution thesis. For one, their preoccupation with the country’s founding document disturbs the sedimentation of “state loyalism” within DSA, a tendency whose defects are visible for all serious revolutionaries to see.[18] Secondly, and most importantly, MUG’s identification of an intermediate target on the road to workers’ power shows a willingness to take the necessary risk inherent in being a Communist: namely, to stake one’s principles on an actual political claim. In contrast to the cliched coming together and falling apart of Marxist projects around various theoretical and organizational ideas which, as Gant R. puts it, “[raise] the question of class struggle abstractly without presenting a coherent political challenge to the existing state,”[19] MUG’s perspective identifies a concrete political goal with which to anchor a Marxist project in the current conjuncture of US politics.[20]
Despite its boldness, I believe MUG’s proposal of a Constitutional revolution falls short of an adequate conjunctural analysis for two reasons. Firstly, it implies, by its privileged position in their agitational repertoire (even if it is never argued explicitly), that state power is located in the features of a particular legal document (though an exceptionally important one, as legal documents go). This framework misrepresents the real location of state power, which is in ideology, or the construction of consent among the dominated and intermediate classes around the class project of a particular cohort. In other words, the Constitutional revolution thesis does not sufficiently identify a particular sector of capital as the effective ruling class of the existing state, and as the necessary and principal target of our political program (a matter to which I will return later).
To be clear, there is no doubt that those in MUG already understand the inherent class nature of the state, and recognize that the prerogative of capital is the supreme law of the land as things currently stand, irrespective of any written law. Their agitational emphasis on the Constitution is thus surprising to me and does not, I argue, adequately reflect a Marxist understanding of power. Of course, a person knows they are expected to feign interest when “the Constitution is under attack,” but sincere deference to its strictures is the domain of liberal columnists and political hacks. The Constitution wields a certain symbolic power—sure—but the hard core of ideology is located elsewhere.[21]
The second reason I am skeptical of the Constitutional objective is that it doesn’t take account of popular moods as articulated (however immaturely) in the major social movements of the last couple of decades—movements which point neither primarily, nor secondarily to Constitutional concerns (despite Gil Schaeffer’s claim that “we are already in the middle of a mass democratic political movement against the Constitution that began in earnest in 2009”),[22] but which do point to a deep resentment toward the existing state. To interpret, appreciate, and properly articulate the desires of mass movements is not ‘tailism,’ as Mike Macnair suggests in his critique of Bloom.[23] It is rather the starting point for any revolutionary project that aims to transform a society made up of active human beings.