Dual Power and the "Alternative" to DSA's Right-Wing

There is a problem amongst the left-wing of socialism. Admirably, these comrades fight against opportunism, and their intended program is, broadly:

• A clean break to form an independent party from the Democrats
• Militant trade unions and strikes that can bring capital to heel
• International solidarity that does not haggle over ridiculous questions like whether Hamas are the good guys or not

However, there are issues with this program, one of which is that it has been obsolete for over a century. Its historical origin is in Social Democratic politics, and if we don’t learn from this precedent, we are doomed to repeat its failures, including the victory of fascism. Let’s see why.

Pre-Social Democratic Politics

Marx and Engels formed the basis for Social Democratic politics. To them, “progressive” did not mean “better relative to current conditions,” but historical progress towards communism. The strategy they believed should be employed changed over time.

In the revolutions of 1848, the Communist League led the proletariat in armed conflict, often street battles. Its goal was cohering the proletariat as a class and refusing any developments by the then-revolutionary bourgeoisie that would weaken the emerging working class’s independent political power. But in his 1895 introduction to The Class Struggles in France, Engels reflects on the obsolescence of this revolutionary strategy. The socialist parties of Europe had largely won the right to operate legally, and Germans had recently won universal suffrage for working men. Connecting this obsolescence to improvements in the state’s military technology and organization, he says:

“The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in on it . . . And if universal suffrage had offered no other advantage than that it allowed us to count our numbers every three years; that by the regularly established, unexpectedly rapid rise in our vote it increased in equal measure the workers’ certainty of victory and the dismay of their opponents, and so became our best means of propaganda; . . . To keep this growth going without interruption until it gets beyond the control of the prevailing governmental system of itself, [...] but to keep it intact until the decisive day, that is our main task . . . And if we are not so crazy as to let ourselves be driven to street fighting in order to please them, then in the end there is nothing left for them to do but themselves break through this dire legality . . . If, therefore, you break the constitution of the Reich, [the Social-Democratic Party of Germany] is free, and can do as it pleases with regard to you. But it will hardly blurt out to you today what it is going to do then.”

There are three important things to note here:

1. Revolution must involve the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat and the proletariat is not conceived separately from the party.
2. Elections are tools to measure your strength via popularity and propaganda meant to raise revolutionary consciousness.
3. While street-fighting is obsolete, revolution is not abandoned — and revolution is not achieved through elections.

The first instance of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was another turning point that made previous forms of struggle obsolete. In 1871, France and Prussia fought a war which France handedly lost, ending with a siege on Paris. After Paris surrendered, the National Guard stationed there – composed of much of the city’s able-bodied proletariat – and the rest of Paris, angry after decades of poverty and now a war, rose up when the new French democratic government tried to disarm them. The city became the Paris Commune, founded on common property and an end to class society. They organized co-operatives, aiming to bring them under “one great union,” and largely disenfranchised the Parisian bourgeoisie.

The Commune was crushed by the forces of Versailles after only a few months, and while Marx and Engels criticized many of the specific measures taken by the Commune — especially how they didn’t march on Versailles — they recognized that the class struggle had fundamentally changed. No longer was the working class stuck in the realm of unions and mere reforms post-1848. The working class could establish a world where it was in charge, dismantling class society under a new, proletarian state that had smashed the bourgeois state. This is what Engels is referring to above when he says “then Social-Democracy is free, and can do as it pleases with regard to you.” The proletarian state would then wither away as its functions as a mediator of class antagonisms become irrelevant with the disappearance of those antagonisms.

This is a much different goal than the daily struggles of trade union activity and electoral reforms that were arising at the same time. Marx, in Value, Price, & Profit, critiques unions for being stuck in the daily changes of the market, and in the 1891 Critique of the Erfurt Program, Engels defines opportunism as tied to these daily struggles:

“This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences, this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present, may be ‘honestly’ meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and ‘honest’ opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all!”

Opportunism is, then, seizing upon immediate opportunities for momentary “progress” that does not progress us towards socialism at all and dedicates time and resources away from the overarching goal. Good intentions are irrelevant.

Altogether, what we see from both Marx and Engels are:

1. A commitment to an independent proletarian party composed of revolutionary masses and not just a group of dedicated revolutionaries on the outside, capable of leading a revolution.
2. A commitment to a historically progressive vision of revolution that guides how they engage in any activity, rather than directing activity towards the constant changes in markets and government.
3. An ability to change their tactics with developments in the class struggle – organizing is not based on eternal validity of this or that strategy, but if it is useful and not obsolete.

Nearly all of this was completely lost on the Second International, a group of socialist parties across Europe that collapsed when most of the parties supported their governments’ entries into World War I, effectively supporting war on their comrades. The parallels to today are enormous.

The Failure of Social Democracy

The Social-Democratic Party of Germany was the most advanced socialist party in the world before WWI. Like us, it advanced its own electoral candidates, swore up and down against capitalism and bourgeois parties, worked with trade unions, and even had party-led schools for cadres. It then became an opportunistic party that abandoned the class struggle and supported Germany’s entry into WWI. Why?

The answer largely lies in class consciousness. In her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution?, SPD-member Rosa Luxemburg rejects fellow member Eduard Bernstein’s lack of belief in revolution. She argues that union and electoral work are only means of raising class consciousness so that when revolution occurs, the working class knows how to lead. She aligns with SPD theoretical-leader Kautsky’s phrase that the SPD “is a revolutionary party, not a revolution-making party,” i.e., a revolution must be a spontaneous uprising of the masses, brought about by a crisis. After the 1905 Russian Revolution, she advocated for the mass strike as the way for the working class to start this spontaneous revolution: mass economic action to make revolutionary political demands.

It is easy to see where she got this from Marx and Engels. In multiple works, they say that the burgeoning contradictions of capitalist society will lead to a crisis that the proletariat will then exploit to make revolution. The earlier quote from The Class Struggle in France (originally edited by Kautsky) says that there will be a “decisive day” when revolution occurs, spontaneously ending capitalism. There are two major problems here.

First, when is this decisive day? Luxemburg would answer “when a crisis occurs.” But why hadn’t previous crises outside of the Commune led to socialist revolutions, even when socialist parties were present? Luxemburg has no answer for this, leaving the revolution to chance. She and many others said that this spontaneity could become revolutionary without fully explaining how, only saying that a revolutionary party would lead it.

Today, every spontaneous uprising demonstrates this does not happen. You could point to the October Revolution or others that arose from crises, but this misses what turned these from protests or bourgeois movements into socialist revolutions – revolutionary consciousness in the working class built by a revolution-making party, contrary to Kautsky and Luxemburg. It is not sufficient to have an independent party with some revolutionary horizon; this party must also start a revolution, not wait around to lead one.

This leads to the second point: your consciousness is determined by your social environment and activity. Spontaneous activity will not build revolutionary consciousness. You need revolutionary activity to build that. This should seem obvious, but the fact that Rosa says, “trade unions and elections are not revolutionary activity” and then implies that they are somehow capable of building broad, revolutionary consciousness amongst workers should stand out as contradictory.

Consider what would happen in a spontaneous uprising where there is a “revolutionary party” but not a revolution-making party. Why would workers gain revolutionary consciousness? They have myriad beliefs in any spontaneous situation, and almost none of them understand what socialism really is, assuming that is the preference of even some workers. You need revolutionary activity for the majority to believe in revolution. But if you’re waiting for revolution, all you can do is spontaneous activity that workers are already doing themselves – workers don’t need a socialist party to unionize or protest and, as we see today, are active in electoral politics with or without us.

Opportunists also win them over in these areas, meaning we’re competing for workers’ trust without presenting anything new. This leaves us stuck in the daily struggle, i.e., opportunistic work, running around in circles in the midst of capital’s relentless onslaught of basic rights and compromising with cynical opportunists to get anywhere. The majority of workers will have no way to assimilate a revolutionary horizon since their activity is directed towards issues that frequently come and go.

Even a mass strike cannot teach this horizon. The sporadic work in the vague “lead-up” leaves most activity to party members, giving the masses hardly any activity themselves, revolutionary or not, between disconnected pushes. Millions of people rising up at the same time cannot possibly assimilate a revolutionary horizon here. Engels said “the masses themselves must also be in on it” for a reason, and he did not mean “only on the ‘decisive day.’” This is a major issue the SPD had, breaking with its own principles by catering to conservative trade unions and making reforms in a bourgeois government, which created an environment where more and more party cadres were openly reformist or only Marxist in words, not deeds.

Here lies the rub. Spontaneous activity in the 1800s had a historical purpose. It was not for revolution itself, but for workers to realize that they had different interests from the bourgeoisie and could take action over it. This work was essential because for people to realize they can free themselves by ending class society, they must first recognize that class society exists and that they are the oppressed class. But once most of them have this initial consciousness – as they did in Germany by the 20th century, and as they do today – dwelling here is a road to nowhere.

Luxemburg and others across the Second International understood that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a necessary step and that the right wing of their movement would hold workers back from revolution, but they didn’t have a good alternative to get there. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, but they had not broken fully with a form of consciousness that lends itself to opportunism – spontaneous consciousness, rooted in the daily struggle. Because of this, they could not move beyond being a “revolutionary” party, whose “strategy” could only be the daily struggle and waiting for spontaneous uprisings. This is the limiting contradiction that blew up once WWI erupted as the conditions of class consciousness had changed and were not properly dealt with. Today, it is a mistake on our end precisely because we should be aware of where this inflexibility led.

Every issue here arises from the type of class consciousness workers and the party have, but there is an alternative. Bourgeois revolutions were by-and-large spontaneous in the 19th century, and successful. However, the bourgeoisie had built up their political and productive capacities for centuries, so that when they spontaneously rose up, it was feasible to take power as generalized commodity production was already widespread. Their economic power translated to political power. We have no such assurances: you cannot build an economy based on socialized production, i.e., sans commodities, within a global economy that is entirely premised on commodity production.

Instead, you build this in parallel, through dual power. The Paris Commune was the first version of this, a scenario where a genuine proletarian power exists parallel to the bourgeois state. It lets workers manage their own affairs, disenfranchising the bourgeoisie and struggling to expand this power against them, which is revolutionary precisely because it is expanding a sharp break with capitalism. Revolution becomes the proletariat’s life, a “complete transformation of the social organization” that “the masses are in on,” like Engels said earlier. That is how you build revolutionary consciousness. That is how you make revolution and end capitalism. Mass strikes could never do this because they are too short in duration and do not lay the prior groundwork.

This is historically successful, but it took great effort on Lenin’s part to convince the Bolsheviks that the 1917 soviets were an embryonic form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. These workers councils saw the proletariat making their own legislation that the bourgeois provisional government could not ignore because it was backed by Russian enlisted soldiers who had just overthrown the autocracy. Winning them over was largely improvised because it was a new strategy and the soviets were not made by the Bolsheviks, but by opportunists who sought to use them merely to mitigate the bourgeois government’s power, not end it.

Mao built on this experience in China, positing that these new proletarian powers had to be birthed by the Communist Party. It requires that the vanguard as a whole (i.e., everyone who is actually fighting towards socialism, not limited to one organization) has struggled, ideologically, towards a new Marxism capable of launching revolution. The vanguard, once cohered this way (and please permit a leap across the chains that connect these two stages of revolution, as it would take a much longer conversation than can occur here), can establish regions of dual power and expand them. This strategy and its underlying basis make unions, elections, and protests obsolete unless you can properly place them as supports to dual power, but they are only a possible tactic and not a priori included.

Communists in Germany that still believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat either refused to accept the non-spontaneous strategy the Bolsheviks demonstrated or tried to apply it without the necessary ideological groundwork after they were caught on the back foot when soviet power grew in Germany. This is not to say that they should have waited around until this development was completed in the midst of an actively-occurring revolution, but that they were fundamentally limited in what they could achieve. Despite their commitment to revolution, spontaneity was their downfall. The 1918 German Revolution was led by the SPD opportunists, and the 1919 German revolution led by the Spartacists was a complete failure. Luxemburg was summarily executed after being tortured by mercenaries employed by the leader of the SPD, Friedrich Ebert, a “socialist” who cared about the day-to-day struggle. The SPD’s Weimar Republic did nothing to end capitalism, which opened the door for Nazism to arise. Revolutionary party, indeed.

Marx said that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please” due to circumstances handed down to them — even so, we still make our own history. History does not spontaneously make itself.

Clean vs. Dirty Break

Like the Second International, we have not learned these lessons, but now with even less justification — they did not have the past century to learn from like we do. We are still spontaneous, waiting for revolution, persisting in obsolete strategies, and orienting our activity around relative progressivism instead of historic progressivism.

Take the Clean vs. Dirty Break debate. Cleanly breaking is better, but what is our activity as a party after “breaking”? Progressive candidates for “non-reformist reforms,” as if these will do anything meaningful, and to engage in union work that might lead to a mass strike that has no revolutionary horizon, only reforms that will shuffle the status quo around: M4A under capitalism or a likely return to the slower Palestinian genocide. When this moment isn’t what we hoped for, we will keep meeting workers in the daily struggle because we lack connection with the working class and a point on the horizon to orient ourselves towards. We are one more party that claims to be a mass party, but our work is outside the masses, only intersecting instead of fusing, only building consciousness as a class with separate interests from the bourgeoisie instead of permanently ending class society, just like the SPD.

The “clean” break as envisioned now is not really a clean break – it might be an organizational break, but it is not a break in ideology or practice. We are merely providing different answers to the same opportunist questions. Instead of breaking with people and organizations from the start, we need to break with the obsolete mode of class struggle inside ourselves. This is why I went from being active in so many things across our chapter to focusing on political education, especially my own. Once you have laid foundations, you can support others in doing the same and bring this to the working class as a whole. It’s slow, but successful dual power is otherwise impossible.

This is organizing, not reading books for the sake of reading books – this knowledge is a necessary prerequisite to form a party capable of starting a revolution, and you will have to work with other like-minded comrades to conduct a two-line struggle against opportunism across the global left, instead of one organization in one country. Without a hegemonic Marxist revolutionary political line, opportunism will reign.