Peaceful Transition and The Mass Strike Method
One thing that might put a lot of "moderates" off revolutionary theory is the part where French people build barricades and start beheading royals. It's a little disproportionate for modern times (at least it seems that way on first glance). The usual response should be that there are many forms of revolutionary work, most of which don't involve pitchforks or guillotines, but the vision of a peaceful transition period out of capitalism - the entire point of Social Democrats - is usually dismissed as a pipe dream by a majority of revolutionary Marxists.
In 1906 Rosa Luxemburg wrote The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, chronicling the role of the Mass Strike in the then recent social gains in Germany, and Russia to a lesser extent. This choice in subject is intuitive, as Germany was - at the time - understood to be the most socially progressive democracy, something that at that time may well have been true, and the relatively recent revolution in Russia had kickstarted the drive towards positive social reforms in neighboring nations. She goes through the motions that such a work usually entails, albeit engaging a little more amiably with the role of the anarchists in the process. Her point in writing this work is to give an opening for workers to do revolutionary organizing without having to partake in the usual hard work that is also often considered criminal. It also possibly puts Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic into action nicely, I don't really know, I haven't properly read that yet. It also lays the groundwork for understanding how Capital deals with change.
The idea of reformists, often (perhaps harshly, but not without reason) maligned as revisionists, is to use legal processes and the political apparatus to drive change. Utilizing methods like the mass strike, that is debilitating protest, technically falls into this category, with the added bonus that it doesn't encroach on the pacifist ideals most social democrats seem to have when it comes to driving political action. Upholding this approach as the one true and correct method for social change however is misguided, as was documented by years and years of attempts, but the details of this is often complicated circumstances which - to some - justify violent intervention by police and/or military. Luxemburg sketches the mass strike of railway workers in Kiev during late July 1905, during which they sat themselves down on the tracks and blocked rail traffic. They took their wives and children along, under the assumption that the social democratic political arm would make sure they remained protected from excessive state violence. To quote:
During the night two delegates of the railwaymen were arrested. The strikers immediately demanded their release, and as this was not conceded, they decided not to allow trains to leave the town. At the station all the strikers with their wives and families sat down on the railway track – a sea of human beings. They were threatened with rifle salvoes. The workers bared their breasts and cried, “Shoot!” A salvo was fired into the defenceless seated crowd, and thirty to forty corpses, amongst them women and children, remained on the ground.
To pretend this is not the reaction of the state is, as often correctly identified, revisionist. The consequences of this and similar incidences build the foundation with which police still interact with protests.
On this becoming known the whole town of Kiev went on strike on the same day. The corpses of the murdered workers were raised on high by the crowd and carried round in a mass demonstration. Meetings, speeches, arrests, isolated street fights – Kiev was in the midst of the revolution.
The workers won their demands following the incident, technically carried by the fruits of a peaceful demonstration. However, advocating for this method is asking the members of the proletariat to first let themselves be shot, before getting the chance to buy enough bread for a month. Readers of my other essays will doubtlessly know my stance towards police, so let's not get into my preferred "rules of engagement" with the lot again. Instead let's think about the framework within which this thinking has to exist in to even be viable.
I will do my best to be nice to this dream of the social democrat. One isn't usually revisionist on purpose, unless one works for the state, and most social democrats at heart, are very much part of voting people. This means, I'll go with the most charitable interpretations of their concepts as I can muster.
The idea that all changes in policy are principally able to be brought about through parliamentarian means alone has some precedence after all, considering the diametrically opposed extreme of the political spectrum has a history of doing so already. Mark Bray’s Antifascist Handbook includes a rather comprehensible five-point list about fascism and how it proliferates within modern structures of power, the first of which goes as follows: “Fascist revolutions have always failed. Fascists gained their power legally.” and it is certainly hard to deny the past formations of fascist regimes. In the light of this, it should be technically possible for a hypothetical socialist (not social democrat, mind you) to take power legally and remain so for at least one legitimate legislative period.
This ignores the positions fascist movements and parties were before they were handed the keys to the kingdom. Not only were most of them not democratically elected into their first term, but rather gained them through highly undemocratic “failsafes” built into a nominal republic by the usually bourgeois (or soon to be) members of the state systems, but they tended to have the backing of capital before they even became prominent within the circle of statesmen (and it usually was men) that would later capitulate to them. In fact, having capital as an ally had the (un)fortunate side effect of bringing these would-be rulers from their groups of local fascist organizing into direct contact with the parliamentary body proper.
Similarly, figures working within a state apparatus are far more likely to have fascist sympathies than structurally productive working-class sympathies. In the cases of the Edward Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists and Chiang Kai-Shek, figurehead of the counter-revolution against the PLA for example, both were in a system position of political power and even though the latter only explicitly positioned himself as fascist after the PLA’s victory, both encouraged fascistic rhetoric and behavior within their base even before they were officially entrenched in armed conflict with militant anti-fascists and/or revolutionaries.
Advocacy movements of pro-working class social change then would require the backing of either capital or an equivalent force within strictly capitalist structures, the difficulty of which will surely not be lost on the reader. Still, this doesn't mean we won't try.
The Good Billionaire
This mythical being can be found in the pages of children's literature and the cover of forbes magazine, but has yet to be sighted apart from a number of blurry pictures made out of the windows of gold-plated private jets.
In all seriousness, the best approximations of good billionaires is a Frankenstein-ish combination of several dozen people whose best actions are highlighted every other PR opportunity. Under Marxist analysis, the notion of capitalists working to dismantle the very structures that make them god amongst men is nonsensical and even the occasional individualistic billionaire probably wouldn't be able to smash the state machine and his contemporaries that have a long history of hiring private military companies and mercenaries. Even aside from threats of death by other institutions of capital, socialist and communist billionaires will face a very simple problem, which is echoed in several of the liberal philosophies the less overtly fascist ones adopt. Effective altruists, for example, argue that they can do the most good by having a lot of money and investing it in such a way that it will do the most good (in a utilitarian sense). While there have been a number of effective altruists, we notice that of them, none have shown the capacity to get rid of their wealth within their lifetime (without getting arrested, mind you). A billionaire associating with socialist upstart politicians will know (probably intuitively) that helping them claim power will swiftly lead to them not being a billionaire for very much longer. Considering it's a major point of identity a lot of their narratives, I doubt there will ever be a mass movement among the ultra-rich to back revolutionary causes.
In case such billionaires do in fact exist, then I will invite the reformists to work alongside those and warn them to make sure that not only counter-revolutionary billionaires are left when they're done.
Institutions Beyond Capital
One would hope that in modern democracies there are institutions more powerful than just raw capital. We will ignore that in many cases capital and political institutions are so tightly married that they resemble the family tree of a 17th century royal family. Parliamentary democracies often find themselves before decisions whose central point of division is whether to prioritize the well-being of the proletariat or the short term economy. In most cases, the economy wins out. Neo-liberal and libertarian logic here is that when the economy profits, the effect of excess capital and goods will "trickle down" to the population. Here I don't have to keep to theory, because the comrades in the sources have already done the praxis for me. This is however a very convenient mindset, considering a lot of state institutions worry so much about budgets. Of course keeping budgets is nominally an important thing, but a strict adherence to it often restraints programs that are necessary for keeping a well-fed population. However, the budget, assuming it's currently always spent completely on necessary things (it's not) could be expanded significantly, if one were to apply several Marxist suggestions on statecraft. For one, payment to politicians being limited to that of the "working man" would free up a significant amount of funds. In this case, the politician would also hope that the working man is paid a livable wage and the ranks of acting statesmen don't calcify as easily, as the monetary incentive would be more or less eliminated, assuming one were to do away with rich-people-bribery i.e. lobbyism. Here we very quickly stand in a similar position as we did in the previous segment, in that those with power would have to actively dismantle the mechanisms keeping them there. In the case of party politics, a party is also quite capable of banning a number of politicians if they don't keep the party line anymore, which would probably be the case for the openly communist in most countries.
Looking For Handouts
Clearly then, revolution finds its necessity not in the nature of the change required to arrive at the struggle across all lines are a little far fetched when we accept the tendency of power to want to keep it. Marxists don't write in their books about the need to make exploitation impossible without reason. Waiting for power to relinquish itself by its own accord then is a nice thought, but at the very least unlikely. However, revolution is also unlikely without doing revolutionary work, so that's not a good enough argument for me. For the proletarian who is unwilling to actively do politics, working towards reform - I will call it reformist work for the remainder of the essay for the sake of legibility - is then limited to voting for the "correct" person. This would, in all fairness, give representational democracy its original positive meaning back, but beyond that, the role of the proletarian is then reduced to somebody actually waiting for a savior to come and give them rights. This doesn't really sit right with me, especially when in practice, many who are promising those things turn out working against proletarian interests (whether that was the intention or not). In these cases, what is a worker to do? I don't have the stomach to tell them to wait for a savior and starve. If I had, maybe I would still be a Catholic. No, I side with the revolutionaries. If the right to live isn't something a system isn't willing to grant anybody, I fully support their actions to fight the system for it.
Clearly, revolution finds its necessity not in the nature of the change required to arrive at a society desirable to the proletariat, but rather in the structures that capitalism upholds or that follow logically from capital's stranglehold on the facettes of the world. In a way then, those who are ready and willing to employ the method of the mass strike in this day and age are more courageous than any simple revolutionary, as they are willing to die for a chance to live afterwards and while I favour revolution, I do respect those for whom this is preferable. It's a line that is only available to workers and as I've mentioned before, revolutionary work must be done across all lines. This is also good news for those who are Social Democrats because they favour legislature to bricks. I too, technically prefer legislature to bricks, and in addition to that I can't throw stuff for shit, which is why I'm comfortably seated behind a keyboard or read books as my limited contribution of revolutionary work. Political organizing and drafting legislature is valuable revolutionary work as well and it's a vital part of the education of those proletarians that don't engage with revolutionary theory for one reason or another. It is so invaluable in fact, that in the optimal cases, it will build the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat that will form after the smashing of capital, and it's the best remedy against counter-revolutionary and/or revisionist backsliding post-revolution. If this is the avenue that one chooses to advocate for positive change, then the best course of action is to do so using an explicitly Marxist position (if not always their vocabulary), but in doing so one must be prepared to never win a major election before the revolution.