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.

The following article has three main goals:

1. To critique MUG’s call for a Constitutional revolution, with a proposal for an alternative ‘intermediate’ goal that is based more firmly on popular struggles and the class composition of the contemporary US state;
2. To reflect on recent revolutionary experiments in the United States such as the Marxist Center, and to link their dissolution to the lack of an adequately defined intermediate political goal; and
3. To suggest another ‘rediscovery’ of Lenin, departing from Lars Lih’s framework, and instead taking up Alan Shandro’s Lenin as thinker of the strategic logic of hegemony. Shandro’s framework defines hegemony in a way that differs from neo-Kautskyan perspectives, and may help clarify disagreements in the present debate about the path to workers’ power.

A Summary of the Argument

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]

Although I will address some of the entries in this ongoing debate directly, I also aim to challenge MUG’s basic assumptions about the meaning of hegemony and the dictatorship of the proletariat in a way that may disturb the ‘superstructure’ of MUG’s main theses. In this sense, my article is not a properly immanent critique, but could instead be read as a kind of attack from the outside.

A Summary of the MUG ‘Constitutional Revolution’ Thesis

The Marxist Unity Group has consolidated itself around a theoretical perspective with four fundamental features: (1) the belief that the only viable form that a proletarian state can take is the ‘democratic republic,’^[7] (2) the identification of the Constitution as the decisive and perennial obstacle to achieving a democratic republic in the United States,^[8] (3) a call for a minimum-maximum program, within a workers’ party, that does not ‘tail’ spontaneous movement demands, but instead posits an alternative form of rule that can actually implement the social transformations we need,^[9] and (4) their commitment to a strategy of patience,^[10] i.e., working class self-activity through independent institutions, and prefigurative self-governance within the workers’ party, in preparation for the working class to rule effectively in the aftermath of a democratic revolution.^[11]

The first point is based on a historical reading of the Marxist movement that accounts for the perceived failure of socialist experiments to retain power (or to even come close to obtaining it). A revolutionary authority based directly on soviets, or on mass strikes, could not rule effectively because the tasks of government exceed the capacities of those forms of association (i.e. both ultimately devolve into bureaucratic forms of rule in which a minority substitutes itself for the class). Thus, the argument goes, a government based on radical democracy, in which workers effectively rule as they are the majority (and at this point are very well-organized after a long process of maturing independently as a class), becomes the logical horizon of struggle.

To the second point; the Constitution, for MUG, is a principal enemy because, as Daniel Lazare observes, the repeated failure of social movements to overthrow the minoritarian Constitutional order and replace it with something else has cosigned every counter-revolution in US dating back to the Reconstruction period.^[12] Lazare describes how the built-in mechanisms of the US Constitution make it near-impervious to any political challenge. Its architects accomplished this through the “miracle of complexity, i.e. the division of the polity into so many sub-units and sub-sub-units that political movements will wind up dashing themselves upon the rocks.” Majority factions are by design unable to “pervade the whole body of the union.”^[13] The Constitution is thus, for MUG, fundamental to the defensive infrastructure of capitalist power in the US. If the working class is going to take power in the form of a democratic republic, the so-called “Constitutional democracy” must first be abolished.^[14]

The third point, the call for a revolutionary minimum-maximum program as our organizational structure, articulates a path to the desired form of workers’ government (i.e. the workers’ party leveraging its “electoral majority as a mandate for socialism”),^[15] and posits an alternative to the more aggressive ‘transitional’ programs which, it is argued, succumb to premature bids for power and lead to the concerns articulated in the first point (i.e. substitutionism).

The fourth point posits a theory of hegemony that rejects one or another form of minority substitutionism (putschist or right-coalitionist) in situations where, as yet, the “workers’ party had not won a majority.” It is based on a comprehensive analysis of the history of socialism and on Marx’s own concerns about the working-class movement coming to power too soon.^[16]

An important feature of this model of hegemony is a reading of Lenin as, fundamentally, a devotee of the leading (pre-war) German Social-Democratic theoretician (and architect of the official strategy of patience) Karl Kautsky. According to Lars Lih, if Kautsky was considered “the Pope of Marxism,” Lenin was a “socialist missionary”; even “a Bible-thumping, table-pounding revivalist.”^[17] In light of Shandro’s argument, however, the Lenin of Lih’s framework, depicted as a simple Social-Democrat, must be abandoned. This aspect of the debate is not a matter of merely correcting the historical record, but of constructing a theory of hegemony that is useful for our times.

“A Coherent Political Challenge to the Existing State”

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.

In a lecture reflecting on the 1905 Russian Revolution, Lenin says “every ‘minor’ crisis [that a] country experiences discloses to us in miniature the elements, the rudiments, of the battles that will inevitably take place on a large scale during a big crisis.”^[24] To understand our political trajectory is thus to study the recent sequence of minor crises and see what they can teach us about the points of failure in the ruling class’ project of consent.

We should ask ourselves, then, what we can learn from the major recent social struggles: Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders primary campaigns, and the George Floyd rebellion. Upon interpretation, it is quite clear that there exists a deep resentment toward the most parasitic sectors of the bourgeoisie which currently wield the major levers of state power—the hedge funds, the private equity firms, the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical monopolies, etc.; as well as a widespread contempt for the particular expropriation and humiliation of racialized populations, driven in large part by real estate speculation: the foreclosures on predominantly Black and Latino homeowners, gentrification, spatial segregation, etc., contributing to the absorption of whole communities into the obscene carceral system.

What all of these minor crises point to is mass, cross-class discontentment with a particular form of capitalist state at a particular moment in a nation’s history. I believe that MUG’s program has not taken adequate account of these minor crises, nor of the class composition of the US state, and that the current debate around the Constitutional revolution in general has not properly addressed the question of how the social movements and the non-proletarian classes relate to our revolutionary project.

What’s needed is an articulation of existing social struggles, which are themselves not distinctly proletarian, into a political project through which, in an alliance of diverse social strata, decisive proletarian leadership can make a ‘proletarian imprint’ upon the state.^[25] For Lenin, this meant the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ in the bourgeois-democratic revolution. For us, the revolutionary alliance will take on an original character. But like the Bolshevik project, ours must recognize that it is only through stages of revolutionary struggle, each marking a “transfer of sovereignty and a rupture in the general form of the state,” in Donald Parkinson's terms, that “a new phase of class struggle” may be “inaugurated”, and mass consciousness transformed.^[26] In some of his clearest rhetoric on the question of stages, Lenin himself describes the overthrow of the Romanovs, for instance, as the “first stage of the first revolution,” though “certainly not the last.”^[27]

It should be said that speaking of stages does not imply a schema about the precise features of every future sequence of struggle. The term simply acknowledges that a workers’ state will likely not be the direct outcome of the next sequence of revolutionary struggle in a strong bourgeois state like the United States. It is in this sense that I take issue with Bloom’s critique of MUG’s stageism,^[28] while at the same time recognizing the equivocation he points to within MUG’s conception of a Constitutional revolution: i.e. the simultaneous understanding that a more immediate horizon of struggle is necessary and the proposal of a horizon which remains too obscure.

Impasses of the ‘Workers’ Republic’ Thesis

The Marxist Unity Group’s notion of a ‘workers’ republic’ is undertheorized because, despite its strength as a strategy of real rupture, it is unclear how such a government comes into power, and it is unclear how it relates to other classes.

Regarding both points, Alan Shandro’s research provides necessary counsel. Shandro’s conception of revolutionary leadership does not insist on a universal, supra-historical form of organization, nor a standardized programmatic format, nor, importantly, a specific form of workers’ government. All such organizational concerns comprise a smaller circle within the larger circle of politics. Thus, the socialist vanguard finds itself situated in a political reality defined by the ‘irreconcilable antagonism’ between capital and labor, which traverses every aspect of society, producing a circumstance in which the bourgeoisie holds a certain degree of hegemony over the state, and the proletariat holds a commensurate inverse degree of hegemony. Hegemony is always defined as influence over other classes. For Shandro, and for Lenin, the vanguard’s task is to show the proletariat how to lead other classes in the struggle for state power.^[29]

In the Russian context, Lenin spoke of “two paths” in the democratic revolution: the proletarian path and the bourgeois path.^[30] Which path is taken is, in part, decided by the subjective interventions of political actors, and is the critical factor determining the relative hegemony of capital and labor over society. To restrict working class activity to institutions of self-governance in anticipation of the revolution “up ahead,”^[31] to put it in Shandro’s terms, is to forego February; a stage of rupture which posed new crises for the bourgeoisie and opened new avenues in the struggle for hegemony, which the proletariat seized upon in October.

We may conclude, then, that for Lenin, the process of leading other classes, and the navigation of its requisite complications, is socialism. It is this hegemonic process itself (which Shandro identifies as ‘the politico-strategic logic of the struggle for hegemony’) that raises class-consciousness; consciousness is not, therefore, built through the self-activity of working class institutions alone. Furthermore, the victory of socialism is not reducible to the merger of the general principles of Marxism with the workers’ movement—i.e. the “condensation of a narrative” for the purpose of workers’ independent intellectual development—a framework that denies the struggle for hegemony as the primary arena of pedagogy.^[32] This ‘merger formula,’ integral to MUG’s neo-Kautskyan perspective,^[33] effectively conceptualizes capitalist society as a “mere static backdrop against which workers and revolutionary intellectuals strive to fashion a socialist project.”^[34] Instead, for Shandro, socialism is built in practice through an open-ended class struggle, whose original experience in national contexts cannot be fully anticipated by prior experiments or revolutionary theorists. The Leninism that Shandro discovers is thus understood, principally, through the logic of the art of war. It therefore rejects all prefabricated strategies of ‘patience,’ ‘intransigence,’ and the like.^[35]

From this perspective, then, socialism is also not necessarily a ‘democratic republic’ (or a so-called ‘workers’ republic’). The fact that a democratic republic cannot be a strictly ‘workers’ republic’ in a society with tens of millions of non-proletarians and a hostile bourgeoisie has haunted much of the discourse in this debate, and has produced certain ambiguities (some of which Bloom identifies in his letter “Focusing on Essential Issues”).^[36]

Part of MUG’s motive for setting the democratic republic as their horizon is explained by Gant R.’s observation that, “in the end, Civil War conditions [after October] prevented the immediate construction of a republic and worker’s councils proved a weak form of sovereign authority leading the Bolshevik Party to take on the functional role of governance.”^[37] It follows that the imagined solution to the problem of inevitable civil war is a mature, pre-existing workers’ movement for whom counterrevolution would be a minor enough setback in the construction of the democratic republic. And again, this perspective overestimates the gains in hegemony and consciousness that can be made independent of active workers’ participation in ruptural struggles on the terrain of the state.^[38]

A final note on the workers’ republic thesis is that its logic embodies an issue I raised earlier: namely, the failure to reckon with the problem of ideology. An error sometimes made by the extreme democrats is to equate radical democracy to workers’ power because workers are the majority. However, whether workers are powerful is not reducible to their aggregate status as objects in the labor process; workers’ power depends on their status as subjects capable of agency in that process. The right to vote in a radically democratic state, by itself, is not consciousness. Achieving consciousness requires fighting for leadership in a hegemonic struggle which, as I’ve argued, cannot be accomplished by the workers’ own self-activity in anticipation of conditions favorable for a democratic revolution.

On the Opposition-Only Strategy

Additionally, part of what I find problematic in MUG’s orientation to state power is its axiom, derived from Macnair’s book Revolutionary Strategy, that the socialist opposition should remain an opposition until the decisive moment in which it seizes power.^[39] As I’ve said already, this orientation fails to identify the actual process of achieving power, and to account for the problem of other classes which must consent to (or be coerced to accept) such a form of rule. Since other classes exist, and their interests will be at stake in the formation of any new government, the proletariat will either have to fight to represent their interests, or allow them to be represented by enemies. In practice, events will likely turn out more mixed, leaving significant sections of the population dissatisfied with the revolutionary government and more or less willing to sabotage it.

Anticipating the key intervention, then, as a timely proposal for a new Constitution so that the working class majority can rule according to its own prerogatives, overlooks the actual social forces that exist in society and their necessary consideration in any revolutionary project. Steve Bloom makes the point that “the primary programmatic elements that a revolutionary current needs to be focused on…will be those which directly address the injustices that are driving the social crisis itself, whatever they happen to be.”^[40] I agree with him on this point, and therefore disagree with Macnair’s critique.^[41] It is almost inconceivable that purely working-class demands, developed exclusively from a point of opposition, would initiate a decisive break in the social fabric of a society as complex as the United States. If such a scenario occurred, it would be even less conceivable that this state of affairs could be resolved quickly in the form of a democratic republic to which the vast majority of society consents—an outcome that Macnair’s thesis requires if the proletariat is to achieve hegemony.

Bifurcation Points

Instead of restricting ourselves to an opposition until the critical moment at which the Constitutional revolution becomes viable, I claim that getting to that stage will require a period of reflexive maneuvering against a class enemy, the forging of class alliances, and, likely, wielding political office and fighting for reforms that directly represent the desires of the revolutionary bloc. That is to say, it will require “managing capitalism” for a time.^[42]

Though not perfectly congruous to our context, the revolutions in Venezuela and Bolivia, to take two examples, would be unthinkable outside of electoral victories that achieved a mature enough hegemonic position for the proletariat and allied classes to initiate the kind of Constitutional revolution that MUG seeks. In the case of Venezuela, the question of other classes materialized as the recognition and utilization of fissures within the business class by the socialist leadership (under the direction of Luis Miquilena), which identified a ‘productive’ national bourgeoisie (“empresarios productivos”) that could be won over to immediate and intermediate socialist goals against the reactionary bourgeois Chamber of Commerce.^[43] This hegemonic restructuring was done from within the pulpit of the national government, all while “managing capitalism” as an incumbent party and not as an opposition.

If Macnair perceives the Venezuelan project to be one of “capitalist restoration” (which I assume based on his characterization of socialist revolutions post-1959),^[44] then I simply disagree, on the basis that the proletariat became far more hegemonic, and remains so, against the parasitic pro-imperialist bourgeoisie which is now far more marginalized (though not at all conquered).

In an interview with Jacobin, former Vice President of Bolivia Álvaro García-Linera weighed in on the question of building socialism through initially democratic means:

The issue of how to deal with the oligarchy is a complicated one. Revolutions that were accomplished through military feats have never had to deal with the question—military victory settles matters by simply dissolving the oligarchy. On the other hand, where it is a matter of political transformation by democratic elections, this is a problem that will persist all throughout your time in government, because you have to coexist with the business class… and you don’t have the capacity to dissolve an entire social class.^[45]

He goes on:

[W]hen can a progressive movement go beyond this kind of tactical coexistence? When society itself is capable of overrunning the business sector; when society at large—not a progressive government, not a party—seizes on the possibility of democratizing wealth.

This is the decisive moment of dual power. It is in such a moment that, after a previous succession of smaller ruptures and consolidated gains, a mature “point of bifurcation” is reached and a critical blow can be delivered against the capitalist class, ushering in a new phase of class struggle in which the proletariat is decisively hegemonic.^[46]

The task of the vanguard is to make use of every available instrument to reach such a point, including acting as an incumbent political party that, for an indeterminate period of time, will have to “take responsibility” for government, to a certain extent, from that position.^[47] To paraphrase Shandro, no aspect of the field of social totality is off-limits from the strategic logic of hegemony, even participation in the governments of bourgeois states.^[48]

Linera’s framework of bifurcation points is a significant theoretical advance from the notion that a state must be either capitalist or socialist. This one-dimensional view of politics is one that Marxists must abandon if we aim to seriously contest ‘the whole of the modern social and political system’ over periods of ebb and flow in our relative hegemonic position against a powerful enemy.^[49] Linera’s perspective is especially valuable in that it maintains a closer relationship to the activity of the masses at various points in the course of the class struggle, recognizing the ruptural potential of movements that don’t yet call for the direct rule of the working class, but that may still advance the hegemonic position of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, in a sequence of smaller breaks, if the vanguard acts decisively within them.^[50]

Where I agree with the neo-Kautskyan framework, then, is that a revolution cannot be won overnight. Its critiques of cynical substitutionism deserve their day in court. What it misses, though, is that a successful revolution requires an active process of state ruptures—yes, stages—through which hegemony and consciousness are built in practice.^[51] The Marxist Unity Group’s Constitutional revolution thesis is, I believe, symptomatic of the deadlock of the neo-Kautskyan framework; by positing an intermediate horizon of struggle, it speaks to a desire to base itself in the energies of the mass movements, but its ankle is caught on a theory of hegemony beholden to a strategy of patience.

A “Real People’s Revolution”

In the same way that the capitalist state is the leadership by (certain sectors) of capital over the rest of the classes in society, the construction of the proletarian state is marked by a protracted process whereby the proletariat leads the entire bloc of classes that can be effectively recruited to the project of revolutionizing the existing state.

What this process points to is not a ‘strictly proletarian’ revolution, but what Marx himself referred to as a ‘people’s revolution.’ The following quote is taken from Lenin’s The State and Revolution:

In Europe, in 1871, the proletariat did not constitute the majority of the people in any country on the Continent. A ‘people's’ revolution, one actually sweeping the majority into its stream, could be such only if it embraced both the proletariat and the peasants. These two classes then constituted the ‘people’. These two classes are united by the fact that the ‘bureaucratic-military state machine’ oppresses, crushes, exploits them. To smash this machine, to break it up, is truly in the interest of the ‘people’, of their majority, of the workers and most of the peasants, is ‘the precondition’ for a free alliance of the poor peasant and the proletarians, whereas without such an alliance democracy is unstable and socialist transformation is impossible…^[52]

He continues:

Consequently, in speaking of a ‘real people's revolution’, Marx, without in the least discounting the special features of the petty bourgeois (he spoke a great deal about them and often), took strict account of the actual balance of class forces in most of the continental countries of Europe in 1871. On the other hand, he stated that the ‘smashing’ of the state machine was required by the interests of both the workers and the peasants, that it united them, that it placed before them the common task of removing the ‘parasite’ and of replacing it by something new.

To put the point more succinctly, a socialist revolution is a proletarian revolution, but its necessary form of appearance is as a people’s revolution. The task for Marxists is, therefore, to understand both the balance of class forces and the specific contours of the next major rupture, and to position the working class to lead this next revolution. Whether, in this process, the proletariat succeeds in combating inevitable bourgeois counterrevolution, and shores up a hegemonic pole position, is not written in stone, and cannot be guaranteed by any prescriptive program or appeals to democratic republics. This is, again, the risk of being a Communist.

The Marxist Center

Marxists cannot expect to empower the proletariat without an articulation of its relationship to other potentially revolutionary classes, and without identifying an intermediate horizon of political struggle that is in view for the masses to see. One example of the lack of this kind of articulation is the Marxist Center experiment, which was a heroic effort, begun in 2018, to unify disparate revolutionary elements around a program and a plan of action. The debate around program predictably occupied an outsized portion of the founding convention, but did not identify an intermediate goal around which to collectively struggle. Instead, it produced points of unity about the meaning of socialism as something, effectively, “up ahead,” in language that could be interpreted favorably enough by diverse socialist perspectives.

The result was a largely diffuse base-building strategy, without much national cohesion,^[53] that did not identify a particular class enemy that could be strategized against from within a coherent bloc of class forces. In their appraisal of the founding convention, Parker McQueeney and Donald Parkinson aptly note the lack of “programmatic points of political relevance” in the Marxist Center’s vision, and that “to formulate a course of action, a destination must be set.”^[54] Such a destination was not set, and if we wish to avoid further errors in crucial projects aiming to achieve Marxist unity, one will be required. Namely, we will need to identify the particular state and the particular class enemy that masses of people are already struggling against today.

Clarifying our Particular State

A more thorough investigation of the class composition of the US state is necessary, and should be conducted by more capable analysts than myself. Suffice it to say that the enemy we confront today is not a legal document, nor is it ‘capitalism’ as such; it is the Lehman Brothers state; the state of dreary, derivative geographies and of a universalizing H&R Block aesthetic. It is the scam state, the Fyre Fest and Ticketmaster state, of crimes and indignities against the population that are far too numerous to be counted here, but that all take on the character of parasitic finance capital.^[55] This particular form of state contradicts the common sense even beyond the normal exploitation and inequality we have come to expect under capitalism, and is resolutely despised by the masses of people who produce actual value for society (or who are entirely discarded by the circuits of capital), not all of whom are proletarian.

What's needed in the Marxist movement is therefore a departure from the debate on programmatic format, as Bloom has already argued (minimum-maximum vs. transitional, etc.), or organizational form (‘mass party’ vs ‘vanguard party’), and instead a reframing of what is at stake in the political program of a Marxist organization. As I’ve said before, MUG’s centering of a concrete intermediate goal is already a qualitative improvement upon the familiar laundry-list style revolutionary programs. However, we need to distinguish between goals and obstacles. The Constitution is an anticipated obstacle to a goal or a set of goals, but is itself an inadequate political objective around which to rally significant forces. It is noteworthy that this concern is already reflected to a greater or lesser degree (Edward Varda and Gant R., respectively) within the MUG caucus itself.^[56]

What should principally concern us are the desires of the mass movements and the construction of proletarian hegemony within them. Preparing for a confrontation with Constitutional blockades is necessary, but we also have to be prepared for unpredictable permutations of class struggle once we deliver our initial blows against a particular (and cunning) class enemy—an enemy whose class character remains to be properly articulated by Marxist political organizations in the United States.

What animates people politically is a bold vision of a possible future—one that abolishes the indignities of life under the current social order by radical means. That is to say our political program should, principally, take aim at the horrors of the particular ruling class that governs us. That the ruling class is, to a significant extent, a tiny parasitic entity (though fortified within a vast system of alliances and consent), and that a potential revolutionary bloc comprised of the social movements and the productive and discarded sectors of society (which includes a broad array of small and middle capitalists) could be realistically assembled to defeat it, offers far greater hope for practical socialist politics than the various strategies of patience currently operative in Marxist circles.^[57]

It is true that advancing too soon to power risks the “managerial” degeneration that Macnair warns about.^[58] However, being vulnerable to degeneration (which we must clearly define as losses suffered to bourgeois hegemony) does not guarantee it, and no serious advance precludes the possibility of a necessary retreat later on.^[59]

Kautsky’s Retreat From Marx

One implication of the neo-Kautskyan framework is that the capital-labor antagonism is concealed by the complexity of classes, strata, and social conflicts that permeate in modern societies, and must therefore be excavated through patient pedagogical work as well as the maturation of the forces of production—a dual process which finally culminates in a pristine alignment of class forces at the moment of revolution.^[60] I have already referenced contemporary socialist movements which reject this framework and have made real political gains in doing so. Beyond this fact, the strategy of patience also fails to adequately represent Marx’s own position about how the fundamental class antagonism is expressed. Marx writes in The Grundrisse:

In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colors and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.^[61]

The capital-labor relation is presented here as the particular that changes all other particulars.^[62] What this means is that every grievance, every outrage, every indignity suffered is a potential site of struggle against bourgeois society writ large. Consequently, a deeper belief in the centrality of the capital-labor antagonism is required, and would allow us to see the class struggle in more varied forms. Such a framework invites the broadest layers of classes and strata into a long-term political project against a particular class enemy, whose specific features constitute an instantiation of the universal enemy, capitalism. The proletariat here is not its own self-advocate awaiting the point of crisis, but a consistent leader in the political struggle over the fate of the social totality.

Conclusion

In essence, what I am proposing is a shift in framework from determinations about the correct form of program or revolutionary organization, to the construction of what Gramsci called a ‘modern prince’: a class-conscious element that treats organizational questions themselves as political questions (thus subject to changing conditions), that understands the eventual horizon as socialist (i.e. decisive proletarian hegemony over the state, in whatever particular form that takes), and, most importantly, that appreciates the coordinates of the conjuncture as pointing toward an intermediate revolution against a particular form of capitalist state—a process through which proletarian hegemony can begin to be built immediately. Agreement on a specific interpretation of the conjuncture should be the basis for our collective effort as Marxists. For me, the answer is a broad people’s revolution against parasitic finance capital. Alternative conjunctural interpretations are, of course, welcomed.

If MUG's strategy of "giving legs" to the current DSA platform,^[63] which already centers a critique of the Constitution, has not yet borne fruit, perhaps the reason stems from the DSA membership's intuitive reading of the Constitutional revolution as an aim not yet capable of sparking mass movement activity. Instead of trying to make the DSA ‘more Marxist’ through organizational reforms, orienting it around a more viable intermediate goal could help it make sense out of what it is already doing, albeit in disjointed ways, and thus chart a path to political seriousness. The strength of the alternative conjunctural perspective I have outlined is that it is a logic around which the DSA, in its current form, with its valid sensitivities to matters concerning the social totality, could consolidate itself as a center of gravity for revolutionary activity.

The argument presented here is not without its problems and potential misinterpretations. The language of ‘intermediate revolution,’ to start with, is not meant to signal a compromise between the interests of different classes or sections of the Marxist camp. It is, rather, intermediate between historical conjunctures. Leadership within the current conjuncture is what gives the socialist camp, representing the proletariat, its political acumen. The intermediate revolution, in other words, is not a compromise, but is instead the thing itself.

The glaring concern, of course, which continues to plague socialist forces in the United States, is the immaturity of the workers’ movement. On this point I share MUG’s appreciation for the necessity of independent working class institutions. In its current, backward state, it is often argued, the working class is too weak to fight for hegemony, and its project will be lost among the ambitions of the vacillating classes in the process of alliance-formation. Here again I endorse what I understand to be MUG’s principle task: organize as many Marxist forces as possible, first, around a concrete political program. Crucially, though, we must also consult with the most advanced sectors of organized labor and the social movements to build consensus around a political project that speaks to the conjuncture. At this point, it will be a matter of calculation as to whether we begin this project in earnest, wagering on effective mass messaging and campaigning around this intermediate goal, to quickly develop stronger proletarian organizations that relate to the bigger project. This strategy is not without precedent. I think the Morena project in Mexico is a fine example of mobilizing and organizing poor and working people through the initiation of a visionary political project (“Put the Poor First!”).^[64] So, build the institutions, construct the social material for the revolution, and mobilize them in the strategic struggle for hegemony.

Another point of contention with my argument may be that the ruling class is not only parasitic. The tech sector, for example, is producing commodities and use-values that have the capacity to develop social infrastructure and increase the efficiency of labor in general. And, importantly, this sector is politically powerful. I would make two points here. First, the wager I am suggesting we make is not on a too-narrow characterization of the ruling class, but rather on the potential for a cleavage within the ruling class on which all of society will be compelled to take a position. If the productive sector of capital wishes to continue its alliance with the parasitic class, which expropriates the real producers of all wealth and in particular racialized populations, it will announce itself as an enemy of the people’s revolution. And this leads to my second point, that producing such a dynamic, which tempts even the productive big capitalists to ally with the pure parasites, exposes the parasitical character of capitalism in general, whose productive enterprises cannot function without the undemocratic extraction of surplus value. Exposing this contradiction would be favorable for our side of the class struggle.

Lastly, I want to make the observation that identifying a political enemy is not quite the same as establishing a positive program with clear demands. Whereas I think a Constitutional revolution is too abstracted from the demands of the mass movements, the identification of a ruling cohort as the real enemy of those demands is still somewhat abstracted. The essence of our project anchors to a claim about what must be done; an articulation of the desires presented by our generation of class struggle. That parasitic finance capital and its allies act in every moment to prevent what must be done will comprise an important piece of our program, but the identification of an enemy has to be linked back to the demands themselves.

1. Steve Bloom, “A Practical Roadmap for the Workers’ Movement in Taking Power,” Cosmonaut Magazine, September 30, 2023; Donald Parkinson, “The Revolutionary Minimum-Maximum Program,” Cosmonaut Magazine, May 5, 2021.

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2. Steve Bloom, “The Struggle for a ‘Democratic Socialist Republic’ and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” Cosmonaut Magazine, December 22, 2023.

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3. Mike Macnair, “Deal with the Arguments,” Weekly Worker, February 2, 2024.

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4. Alan Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle, (Haymarket, 2014).

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5. My emphasis on intermediate rupture, for example, is not taken directly from Shandro, but is inferred from his overall argument.

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6. One notable exception is Sean Mitchell, Lenin, Elections & Socialist Hegemony, (Rebel, 2021).

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7. “Seven Points of Unity,” Marxist Unity Group.

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8. Daniel Lazare, “US Constitution: Hiding in Plain Sight,” Cosmonaut Magazine, September 29, 2020.

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9. Parkinson, “The Revolutionary Minimum-Maximum Program.”

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10. Mike Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity (November Publications, 2008), 56.

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11. Cf. Donald Parkinson, “From Workers’ Party to Workers’ Republic,” Cosmonaut Magazine, October 17, 2018.

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12. Lazare, “US Constitution: Hiding in Plain Sight.”

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13. Ibid.

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14. Cf. Ben Grove, “Fight the Constitution! Demand a New Republic!” Cosmonaut Magazine, March 25, 2021.

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15. Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy, 55.

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16. Ibid.

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17. Lars Lih, “Lenin and the Great Awakening,” in Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, eds. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Zizek (Duke University Press, 2007), 284.

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18. Gant R., “Letter: Democratic Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a Response to Steve Bloom,” Cosmonaut Magazine, March 2, 2024.

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19. Ibid.

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20. Cf. Parkinson, “From Workers’ Party to Workers’ Republic.”

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21. It is not for nothing that the Ljubljana School has been propagandizing to us about the Big Other as the real (non-)location of power for the better part of the last half-century.

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22. Gil Schaeffer, “Who Makes the Laws?” Cosmonaut Magazine, January 10, 2024.

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23. Macnair, “Deal With the Arguments.”

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24. V.I. Lenin, “Lecture on the 1905 Revolution,” Marxist Internet Archive.

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25. V.I. Lenin, “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” Marxist Internet Archive.

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26. Parkinson, “The Revolutionary Minimum-Maximum Program.”

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27. V.I. Lenin, “Letters from Afar,” Marxist Internet Archive.

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28. Bloom, “The Struggle for a ‘Democratic Socialist Republic’ and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

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29. This remains Lenin’s orientation to hegemony throughout his life. “Be it remembered”, writes Lenin in What Is to be Done? (1902), “that in order to become the vanguard, we must attract other classes.” And the following quote from his July 1916 pamphlet, The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up: "The socialist revolution in Europe cannot be anything other than an outburst of mass struggle on the part of all and sundry oppressed and discontented elements. Inevitably, sections of the petty bourgeoisie and of the backward workers will participate in it—without such participation, mass struggle is impossible, without it no revolution is possible—and just as inevitably will they bring into the movement their prejudices, their reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses and errors. But objectively they will attack capital, and the class-conscious vanguard of the revolution, the advanced proletariat, expressing this objective truth of a variegated and discordant, motley and outwardly fragmented, mass struggle, will be able to unite and direct it, capture power, seize the banks, expropriate the trusts which all hate (though for different reasons!), and introduce other dictatorial measures which in their totality will amount to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the victory of socialism, which, however, will by no means immediately 'purge' itself of petty-bourgeois slag."

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30. Cf. Ibid, 9.

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31. D.L. Jacobs, “Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: An Interview with Alan Shandro,” Platypus Review, 154, March 2023.

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32. Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to be Done? in Context (Haymarket, 2008), 41.

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33. Cf. the “Tasks and Perspectives” page on their website: “Our task is to merge socialism and the workers’ movement.”

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34. Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony, 17.

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35. For more elaboration on Kautsky’s ‘strategy of intransigence’, cf. Ian Szabo, “The Adolescence of a Concept: ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ in Karl Kautsky’s Revolutionary Writings,” Cosmonaut Magazine, January 29, 2025.

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36. Steve Bloom, “Focusing on Essential Issues,” Cosmonaut Magazine, July 13, 2024.

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37. Gant R., “Democratic Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

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38. Disagreement on this point is what delineates the neo-Kautskyan explanation for the Second International’s catastrophic failure from the explanation corresponding to Shandro’s framework of the strategic logic of hegemony. Cf. Shandro’s discussion of the political implications of Kautsky’s theory of ‘ultra-imperialism’, in Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony, Chapter 8.

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39. Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy, 169-171.

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40. Bloom, “The Struggle for a ‘Democratic Socialist Republic’ and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

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41. Macnair, “Deal with the Arguments.”

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42. The exact phrase Macnair uses is “administering the capitalist regime”, in Revolutionary Strategy, 18.

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43. Steve Ellner, “The Implications of Marxist State Theory and How They Play out in Venezuela,” Venezuelanalysis, September 25, 2017.

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44. Macnair, “Deal with the Arguments.”

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45. Álvaro García-Linera, Martín Mosquera, Florencia Oroz, and Nicolas Allen, “An Interview with Former Bolivian VP Álvaro García Linera,” Progressive International, September 7, 2022.

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46. Álvaro García-Linera, “The State and the Democratic Road to Socialism,” The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century (Springer Verlag, 2018), 3-24.

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47. Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy, 170.

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48. Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony, 143.

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49. V.I. Lenin, What Is to be Done?, Marxist Internet Archive, 17.

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50. A point made excellently by Teresa Kalisz, “Everyday Ruptures: Putting Base-building on a Revolutionary Path,” Left Wind, April 24, 2020.

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51. Ben Grove’s Cosmonaut article “The Abolitionist Dirty Break,” October 30, 2024, is a phenomenal case study of this very type of not-yet-socialist state rupture.

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52. V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, Marxist Internet Archive, Ch. 3.

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53. Kalisz, “Everyday Ruptures: Putting Base-building on a Revolutionary Path.”

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54. Parker McQueeney and Donald Parkinson, “Building Revolution in the USA: Notes on Marxist Center Conference, 2018,” Cosmonaut Magazine, January 12, 2019.

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55. As Daniel Lazare puts it, “Capitalism is concrete,” in “US Constitution: Hiding in Plain Sight.”

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56. “Marxist Unity Group Debate on the ‘Democratic Republic,’” Cosmonaut Magazine, January 10, 2024.

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57. Although they differ with respect to conceptions of the vanguard and its relationship to the working class, most Marxist strategies today, whether neo-Kautskyan, Trotskyist, or otherwise, largely count on capitalism to produce its own inexorable crisis at some future point. They restrict themselves to recruitment in smaller crises, and avoid bids for state power that depend on allied blocs.

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58. Cf. Macnair, “Deal with the Arguments,” and Gant R., “Democratic Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

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59. In fact, the resilience of consolidated gains from not-yet-socialist ruptures are evident in Bolivia, in which the new general will survived the 2019 coup by ousting the temporary counterrevolutionary government. Cf. “An Interview with Former Bolivian VP Alvaro Garcia Linera.” In it, Linera says “Bolivia has taught us this: there may be coups and temporary setbacks, but you’ll win in the end, so long as the indigenous, popular government is the project of the subaltern sectors.”

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60. Shandro discusses this dual-process strategy in the context of the revisionist controversy in the German Social-Democratic Party in Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony, 69.

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61. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Marxist Internet Archive, 2015, 39-40.

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62. Ryan Engley’s definition of ‘universality’, from the “Competing Universalities” episode of the podcast Why Theory, July 4, 2020.

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63. Parker McQueeney, “Give the Platform Legs to Stand: The Case for CB8,” Cosmonaut Magazine, August 3, 2021.

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64. Cf. Jose Luis Granados Ceja, “Mexico Debates a Rising Political Party’s ‘New Deal’ for the Poor,” Al Jazeera, March 29, 2024.

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