Dual Power and The So-Called Alternative to DSA's Right Wing

There is a problem amongst the left-wing of socialism. These comrades correctly fight against opportunism, and their intended program is, broadly, this – a clean break to form an independent party from the Democrats, militant trade unions and strikes to bring capital to heel, and international solidarity that does not haggle over ridiculous questions like whether Hamas are the good guys or not. There are, however, 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 history, we are doomed to repeat all of its failures, including the victory of fascism. I will elaborate this history and explain its relevance to the minimum program above.

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. Tying 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. One of the SPD’s main principles at this time also says that their parliamentary work should abstain from any support for government programs (“not a farthing for this government”).
3. While street-fighting is obsolete, revolution is not abandoned — and revolution is not achieved through elections.

There was another change that made these previous forms of struggle obsolete – the first instance of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In 1871, France and Prussia had 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, declared war when the new French democratic government tried to disarm them. They established a new republic, the Paris Commune, founded on common property and an end to class society, first organizing co-operatives, aiming to bring them under “one great union,” as well as largely disenfranchising 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 trade unions and mere reforms post-1848. No, 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 when he says “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 in a particular way, one that is 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. It does not matter if you mean well or not; it is not some moral claim about why someone does things, although careerist opportunists do exist.

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, as opposed to directing their activity towards the constant changes in markets and government, and
3. an ability to change their tactics with developments in the class struggle – their organizing is not based on eternal validity of this or that strategy, but if and how it is effective, and if it has been outmoded by new developments.

Nearly all of this was completely lost on the Second International, a group of socialist parties across Europe that collapsed when most of the constituent parties supported their governments’ entries into World War I, effectively supporting war on their comrades. The parallels to today are enormous. Let us examine how these lessons were ignored or misunderstood.

The Failure of Social Democracy

The SPD 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 the bourgeois parties, worked with trade unions – and became an opportunistic party. 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 and states that trade union and electoral work are only means of raising class consciousness that teach the working class how to lead so that, when revolution occurs, it can lead. She goes along 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 the spontaneous uprising of the masses, which will be 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. They say, in multiple works, 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 (edited by Kautsky) says that there will be a “decisive day” when revolution occurs, which indicates that there will be a spontaneous eruption of the proletariat over a crisis that then ends capitalism.

But there are major problems with the SPD’s understanding. Firstly, when is this decisive day? When a crisis occurs. Ok, why hadn’t previous crises outside of the Commune led to socialist revolutions, even ones with socialist parties 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 that a revolutionary party would lead when such a spontaneous uprising occurs.

Today, literally every spontaneous uprising shows this does not happen. You could point to the October Revolution or others that arose from crises, but this misses what actually turned these from protests or bourgeois movements into socialist revolutions – revolutionary consciousness in the working class built by a revolution making party, contrary to orthodoxy. We see here that 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 class consciousness. You need revolutionary activity to build widespread revolutionary class consciousness. 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 class 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 the workers here have 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. If you want to teach socialism to most of them, you need revolutionary activity. 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 socialists. This work then leaves no way for the majority of workers to assimilate a revolutionary horizon since their activity is directed towards issues that frequently come and go.

Opportunists also win them over in these areas, meaning we’re competing for their 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. It’s a major issue the SPD had, breaking with its own principles by catering to conservative trade unions that did not care about revolution and trying to make social reforms in a bourgeois government, which also created an environment where more and more party cadres were openly reformist or followed the revolutionary spirit of Marxism in words but not in deeds.

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, revolutionary or not, between disconnected pushes. So, the framework of much of the masses from the start of this sudden event is not revolutionary while the party has been compromising on revolution, and millions of people rising up at the same time cannot possibly assimilate a revolutionary horizon fast enough in a situation like this. Engels said “the masses themselves must also be in on it” for a reason. They cannot learn to lead this way or develop widespread revolutionary consciousness, contrary to Luxemburg’s position.

What we see is all of these issues arise from the type of class consciousness workers and the party have. There is an alternative. Bourgeois revolutions were by-and-large spontaneous in the 19th century, and successful. The issue is that the bourgeoisie had built up their political and productive capacities for centuries, so that when they spontaneously arose, it was feasible to take power because generalized commodity production was already widespread. Their economic power translated to political power. We have no such assurances precisely because you cannot build an economy based on socialized production without commodities within a global economy that is entirely premised on commodity production.

Instead, you build this through dual power, a scenario where a genuine proletarian power exists parallel to the bourgeois state. 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. 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 generalized this experience in China, showing how to start and spread soviets as distinct territories. It requires that the vanguard (not a section of the vanguard, but the vanguard as a whole) is ideologically developed in Marxism. The vanguard establishes a region of dual power and, within it, workers manage their own affairs and disenfranchise the bourgeoisie. This fusion between the vanguard and the workers forms the basis of a communist party truly capable of leading a revolution. They then expand this against the bourgeoisie, which is revolutionary precisely because it is expanding a sharp break with capitalism.

Revolution becomes the proletariat’s life. 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 strategy, its underlying basis, and the history of spontaneity 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 never required.

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 when soviets spontaneously formed in Germany. In the end, despite their commitment to revolution, spontaneity was their downfall. The 1918 German Revolution was led by opportunists, and the 1919 German revolution was a complete failure. Luxemburg was summarily executed after being tortured by mercenaries employed by Friedrich Ebert, leader of the SPD, a noted anti-theory “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 the lessons laid out at the end of the first section, but with even less justification — they did not have the past century to learn from like

we do now. 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”? We want progressive candidates for “non-reformist reforms,” as if these will do anything meaningful, and to engage in trade union work that might lead to a mass strike with no revolutionary horizon, only reforms – M4A under capitalism and/or a likely return to the slower Palestinian genocide pre-2023. When this moment isn’t what we hoped for, we, jaded, will keep meeting workers in the daily struggle because we don’t know what else to do after this, never fully connecting with them. 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 that knows it has interests separate from the bourgeoisie instead of consciousness that wants to permanently end 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, you must first break with the obsolete mode of class struggle inside yourself. 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 impossible, otherwise.

This is not reading books for the sake of reading books – spreading this consciousness 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, not just one organization in one country. Without a hegemonic Marxist revolutionary political line, opportunism (including honest opportunism) will reign and we will never have a revolution.