Back in 2020, the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders was sold as a political revolution; the hyperbole characteristic of such claims notwithstanding, the Bernie revolution would produce the least change of any in history. Militarism would continue, petrodollar imperialism would continue, the corporate colonization of democratic forms and solidification of their rule in the name of democracy would continue, the deep state would continue. Such facets of the power structure operate well beyond the control of any elected President to do anything about, even assuming any of them want to in the first place, the pretences of those who promote personality politics without reflection or substantiation of their guiding assumptions notwithstanding.
While democratic mythology leads us to believe that we officials we elect can run the machinery of state in our interests, experience and history tells us that the converse is true. It demonstrates that the machinery of state controls those with whom it comes into contact, and at that because the democratic state has from the outset had one essential function — to ‘defend the minority of the opulent from the majority’ (James Madison).
Defending class and social privilege is not a matter of personality or policy; it is woven into the fabric of the institution. We can no more elect someone under capitalist democracy to abolish privilege and special interest than we can make a car fly by handing the keys to a pilot. Pilots make the idea of flying sound great, and the more we listen to them the more enthusiastic we are about getting up into the air and more convinced that we can. But alas remains the one essential function of the car. In the face of this, the profound social change that the world needs so badly remains permanently deferred.
The project of capitalist democracy was founded on slavery, genocide and exploitation, and such remain essential facets. The mythology of capitalist democracy tells us we are constantly moving forward towards freedom, that while the past might have been regrettable we should keep the faith because improvements are being made. Like the American Civil War, for example, when Lincoln abolished slavery. But then what of the Southerners who criticized him on the grounds that when you owned your slaves and they were your property you looked after them, but when you rented them you just used them until they wore out, then threw them out and got another? We do not have to agree with this line of argument to see that it was telling.
History is written by the victors. What if the history of the American Civil War was told from the point of view of the entrepreneurs who wanted to innovate in capitalist production by divesting the national economy of capital intensive investment in chattel slave labour, and free up that capital for investment elsewhere by leasing their slaves instead? As Eugene Debs once pointed out, those who lead you into freedom can lead you right back out again, and it would seem that that was actually what happened. True freedom, by contrast, can only ever be taken, for that reason precisely. No one in the history of the world has ever given up power voluntarily.
Anyone interested in the reasons why many of the major revolutions in history have failed to deliver their promised freedoms would do well to focus on this line of thinking as well. The American Revolution was fought as much against the influence of the Bank of England as the taxation policies of the English crown; said Benjamin Franklin, ‘the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament which has caused in the colonies hatred of the English and . . . the Revolutionary War.’ But then the poverty caused by the bad influence of the Wall Street bankers on Congresses and Parliaments has caused amongst the subject classes hatred of the financier classes and makes revolution a necessity in the present. Furthermore, and if Gerald Horne is to be believed, the Revolutionary War was fought to liberate the white ruling class from the anti-slavery policies of the English; it certainly did not liberate chattel slaves from their role as a source of Cheap Natures (Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life).
On the contrary, the equal protection clauses in the fourteenth amendment to the US Constitution, added in the aftermath of the Civil War to guarantee the civil rights of slaves — formerly owned, now rented — became instead in 1886 the basis of the rise of corporate power, as corporations argued they should be treated like persons (Thom Hartmann). In lieu of any actual legal decision to that effect, the pretense of a precedent became the next best thing, corporations and their legal counsel effecting a fait accompli upon a capitalist democracy already bloodied by colonial theft and genocide, one that now necessitates a revolution to overturn. The dividend junkies on Wall Street too busy chasing the dragon to notice that they were almost about to crash the global economy in 2008 will not go clean of their own accord.
When has anyone ever? The French Revolution began as a popular uprising against the Monarchy and the rights and privileges of the feudal Ancien Régime, an expression of the desire of the mass for progress as articulated in foundational documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1798). Rather than instituting the hoped-for Republic and the fulfillment of the principles of ‘liberté, egalité, fraternité,’ the Revolution, in handing the keys to a pilot and expecting a car to fly, produced the Committee for Public Safety and the guillotine instead. In this instance ‘public safety’ referred apparently to that of anyone whose head they didn’t lob off first. With Robespierre leading the way, the Revolution proclaimed the guillotine for the enemies of France and designated the ‘enemies of France’ to be anyone who stood in the way of the Jacobins. It was not so much of a surprise then that the ultimate product of the revolution was the dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not that much of a change from the autocracy of Louis XVI.
In a not dissimilar vein, the Russian Revolution began as a popular uprising against the reactionary power of Tsar Nicholas, the Bolsheviks lead by Lenin and Trotsky proclaiming the dictatorship of the proletariat and the abolition of classes via the formers’ pronouncement in 1918 that all power should go to the soviets, or workers’ councils directly controlled by workers in industry. Upon seizing power however, the Bolsheviks began to agglomerate power to themselves in the name of fighting the Civil War against the White (Tsarist) reaction, arguing that such was necessary to protect the gains of the revolution and ensure the integrity of the new communist state. At the same time, and in the same manner as the Jacobins had done before them, they proclaimed revolutionary justice for counter-revolutionaries and then designated ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to be anyone who opposed their increasingly absolute grip on power.
Failing to distinguish between their own power and the job control of workers in industry, it was inevitable that they would come to loggerheads with the proletariat sooner or later. In 1921 fate intervened as Trotsky sent the Red Army to suppress the Kronstadt Uprising, thereby slaughtering revolutionary workers and sailors in the name of defending them from those who would slaughter them in the name of defending autocratic power structures from popular ferment (Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers Control). The much-touted withering away of the state never happened, perhaps not surprisingly, the fast-developing habit amongst the Bolsheviks of identifying their own power with the revolution and conflating enemies of their power with enemies of the revolution paving the way for Stalinism. As in the example of Revolutionary France, the state worked to its own logic and those who seized control of it did not change it for their own purposes, but were changed for the purposes for which it came into being.
Outcomes were no different in the Spanish Revolution (1936–9), in which an attempted coup d’etat by fascist army generals lead by Francisco Franco sparked a Civil War. This became the basis for a thoroughgoing social revolution in the areas of Spain not under the military control of the generals thanks to the fact that the previous three to four decades had seen a marked period of social ferment and organizing under the auspices of a variety of socialist and anarchist organisations, not least of which being the anarcho-syndicalist Confederation Nacional del Tabajo (National Confederation of Labour). The problem in this instance is that, while millions established workers’ self-management of production for themselves through this revolution, the revolutionaries lost the war, and one of the reasons why they arguably did so was by joining the Catalan government, perversely, as ‘anarchist ministers.’
While many who subscribe to statist varieties of socialist thought point to this as evidence of the failure of libertarian socialist schools of thought, one could argue conversely that the anarchists failed because they departed from their principles — as opposed to the Bolsheviks, whose revolutionary project failed because they lacked principles to begin with. Either way, in this instance as in the others, state power followed its own logic, and not even dyed in the wool anarchists could change that fact.
The historical challenge posed in this case then would seem to be to stand steadfast by one’s principles in the face of exhortation by those who remain under delusions as to the nature of state power to give them up for perceived short term advantage. This seems to be the argument of Gilles Dauvé, who argues with significant justification, not least in terms of the kinds of facts alluded to above, that the solution to incremental fascism is not so much an appeal to the same kind of democratic mythology that left a window open for it to begin with, but to assert another kind of politics — one perhaps that recognizes the critical importance of maintaining a basic harmony between means and ends, on the grounds of the fact demonstrated quite unmistakably by history that means determine outcomes. In other words, we can hardly prepare ourselves for anything better than what the status quo offers us in the present, much less to say anything of the order of a basically sane and just society we might be able to win through revolutionary social change, by habituating ourselves to obedience and slavish deference to authority.
If history tells us anything, surely it is that freedom as a means begets freedom as an outcome, and slavery as a means begets slavery as an outcome. This being the case, both the traditional electoral forms of social democracy and of the socialist vanguard party can no more lead the masses to freedom than Lincoln lead the chattel slaves to wage slavery freedom. Eugene Debs had the final word on that matter.
Even under conditions of capitalist democracy, in theory the elected representative is supposed to ride on a wave of popular ferment and take advantage of that ferment to stay in close contact with the needs and wants of his or her constituency. In practice, this becomes the most impoverished form of the most impoverished kind of democracy around as our involvement in public affairs is reduced to the role of passive spectator even along the election campaigns during every election cycle. Afterward we return to our private lives, leaving our betters to govern in our best interests, trusting that they know our needs as well as or even better than we do. This is not freedom, it’s a spectacle and a circus in which an agglomeration of moneyed narcissists parade in front of the media and vie with one another for supply.
Neither can the traditional leftist party structure facilitate the kind of meaningful change the world needs and traditional institutions have rendered impossible through conventional means. In the Russian example the dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of the party, and ultimately the dictatorship of the Man of Steel. The entire approach of a vanguard party is built on the premise that daily life does not teach us implicit facts about the nature of the world around us, and that we need revolutionary theory to fill our minds like filling a vessel with water, one that is otherwise empty.
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Political theory can help us to make sense of the world around us, but it can never and should never substitute for our capacity to think and act for ourselves. Development of these abilities is the basis of the means by which we will reclaim control over the conditions of our own work, and then more broadly over our own lives. It will be the basis of the popular ferment that overcomes the tyranny of corporate oligarchy and the propensity of the latter to conflate the servicing of its own vested interests with servicing of the common good, while accusing anyone who challenges privilege as attacking the common good in the manner of Robespierre’s conflation of the ‘enemies of France’ with attacks on his own power.
If it follows, as history seems to suggest it does, that we need to maintain a basic harmony between means and outcomes on the basis that the former determine the latter, those of us who are enthusiastic about pursuing this project of reclaiming control over the conditions of our own work and our own lives need to keep this in mind. In the development of political strategy, this means that we no more rely on leaders to do our work for us, be they of a social democratic or revolutionary character, than we allow ourselves to get caught up in false binaries such as Party vs. Class, or make the mistake of reproducing authoritarian modes of thinking in the name of revolutionary ideas (eg. ‘if you question my authority the enemies of anarchism win’). The next revolution may not come in time to save us from corporate fascism or the increasingly acute effects of climate change, but if and when it does, one thing is clear: it will be carried out under conditions of freedom and autonomy, or not at all.
