by On December 19, 2020, Leo Panitch passed away, leaving a legacy of writings which grapple with applying Marxism to the world today in the spirit of Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas. In their book The Socialist Challenge Today, published first in 2018 and then as an updated version in April 2020, Panitch and Sam Gindin examine three of the biggest challenges socialists faced over the last decade: Syriza, Corbyn, and Sanders. The book was warmly received among leading voices in the Democratic Socialists of America, particularly those around Jacobin magazine, which broadly subscribes to the central theoretical conclusions reached by the authors, a strategic framework they call the “democratic road to socialism.”
The contemporary theory of “a democratic road to socialism” has long historical roots, notably developed by the late British sociologist Ralph Miliband and the Greek-French sociologist Nicos Poulantzas. As Panitch and Gindin reference and follow the ideas of the late Poulantzas very closely in their approach to today’s challenges, it’s well worth looking at the underlying theories and their application in Gindin and Panitch’s book together.
I focus here particularly on the ideas Poulantzas developed in his later ideological evolution, represented for example in his book State, Power, Socialism.The chapter “Towards a Democratic Socialism,” published independently in the New Left Review in 1978, offers a good summary of these ideas.
An earlier version of this article was published in German, for the Marxist magazine Lernen im Kampf.
1) “A Long Process”
Gindin and Panitch begin their analysis with the diagnosis that social democracy and Leninism are no longer viable strategies for winning a socialist world. The alternative is a “long process” that builds democracy within the capitalist state.
Gindin and Panitch put forward this idea of the “long process” in contrast to what they characterize as two failed strategies: the hard limitations and creeping reformism of social democracy on one hand, and the risky “insurrectionary” strategy of revolutionary rupture (associated with the October Revolution in Russia 1917) on the other. This includes a rejection of the working class building new institutions of “dual power,” or workers’ councils, as instruments to “smash” and replace the capitalist state’s machinery.
Poulantzas explains in his book State, Power, Socialism:
The democratic road to socialism is a long process, in which the struggle of the popular masses does not seek to create an effective dual power parallel and external to the State, but brings itself to bear on the internal contradictions of the State.
In The Socialist Challenge Today Gindin and Panitch present their approach in referencing Nicos Poulantzas:
Notably, Poulantzas went back to Luxemburg’s critique of Lenin in 1918 to stress the importance of socialists building on liberal democracy, even while transcending it, in order to provide the space for mass struggles to unfold that could “modify the relationship of forces within the state apparatuses, themselves the strategic site of political struggle.” The very notion of taking state power “clearly lacks the strategic vision of a process of transition to socialism—that is of a long stage during which the masses will act to conquer power and transform state apparatuses.” For the working class to displace the old ruling class, in other words, it must develop capacities to democratize the state, which must always rest on “increased intervention of the popular masses in the state … certainly through their trade union and political forms of representation, but also through their own initiatives within the state itself.” To expect that institutions of direct democracy outside the state can simply displace the old state in a single revolutionary rupture in fact avoided all the difficult questions of political representation in the transition to and under socialism.
Without agreeing with the way Gindin and Panitch as well as Poulantzas present the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg, let’s follow the argument for now.
For Poulantzas, building democratic working class footholds within the capitalist state is not just a tool to transform society, but a precondition.
Applying this approach, Gindin and Panitch write:
While leaders like Tsipras, Iglesias, Corbyn, and Sanders all have pointed beyond Third Way social democracy, their capacity to move beyond it is another matter. This partly has to do with their personal limitations, but much more with the specific limitations of each of their political parties, including even the strongest left currents within them, and their failure to prepare adequately for the challenge of transforming state apparatuses. The experience of the government in Greece [Syriza, 2015-2019] highlights this shortcoming, as well as how difficult it is for governments to extricate their state apparatuses from transnational ones.
Without sharing this assessment, let’s dive deeper into this analysis.
2) Economic Change–Within Certain Limits
In the framework of “a democratic road to socialism,” the length of the process does not only apply to interventions in the state, but also to economic policies. Poulantzas argues that this approach would allow for a smoother transition, prevent economic collapse, and avoid provoking the capitalists.
In his book State, Power, Socialism, Poulantzas writes:
[…] the democratic road to socialism refers to a long process, the first phase of which involves a challenge to the hegemony of monopoly capital, but not headlong subversion of the core of the relations of production. A challenge to monopoly hegemony already presupposes significant modification of the economic apparatus as a whole. But during this phase, change cannot go beyond certain limits without running the risk of economic collapse. Over and above the breaks involved in the anti-monopoly phase, the State will still have to ensure the working of the economy–an economy which will remain to a certain degree capitalist for a long time to come.
Therefore, according to Poulantzas, the challenge of democratic socialists in power is to walk a line between two traps–on the one side, the threat of economic resistance in the form of capital flight, “strikes,” or sabotage, and on the other side the danger of self-sabotage by going too fast. From State, Power, Socialism:
Although transformation of the state economic apparatus seems necessary in order to prevent and counter such sabotage, it should be apparent that one is walking on a tight-rope. At no point should changes lead to actual dismantling of the economic apparatus: such a development would paralyse it and accordingly increase the chances of boycott on the part of the bourgeoisie.
Panitch and Gindin apply this to the Syriza government by positively referencing Costas Douzinas. They write in The Socialist Challenge Today:
Costas Douzinas, another prominent London-based Greek intellectual newly elected as a Syriza member of parliament in the fall of 2015, outlined a year later the “three different temporalities” through which the radical left must “simultaneously live” once it enters the state. There is “the time of the present”: the dense and difficult time when the Syriza government—“held hostage” to the creditors as a “quasi-protectorate” of the EU and IMF—is required “to implement what they fought against,” and thus “to legislate and apply the recessional and socially unjust measures it ideologically rejects.” This raises “grave existential issues and problems of conscience” that cannot go away, but can be “soothed through the activation of two other temporalities that exist as traces of futurity in the present time.” The second temporality covers “the medium term of three to five years,” when time for the government appears “slower and longer” as it probes for the space it needs to implement its “parallel program” so as not only to “mitigate the effects of the memorandum” but also to advance “policies with a clear left direction … in close contact with the party and the social movements.” The third and longest temporality, “the time of the radical left vision,” will be reached “only by continuously and simultaneously implementing and undermining the agreement policies.” As this third temporality starts unfolding, freed from the neoliberal lambast, “the full programme of the left of the twenty-first century” will emerge. It is a case of escaping into the future, acting now from the perspective of a future perfect, of what will have been. In this sense, the future becomes an active factor of our present.
The mental gymnastics involved in this position serve to cover up for Syriza’s disastrous strategy. The advice seems to be that a left administration in Greece should implement cuts and attacks on workers’ living standards, while gesturing rhetorically to a different future, in order to keep workers’ movements alive–movements which are now, in practice, mobilized against this very “left” government.
What Panitch and Gindin do not reflect on is that being part of an administration–in this case, leading it–while pretending to support the movements against it will rupture any left or working class party relatively quickly, and rightfully so. The splits from Syriza following their capitulation to capital in 2015, and mass disillusionment of their working class base, testify to this sharp contradiction. This does not seem to be a recipe for a “long process” on the road to socialism.
In a nationwide video conference presentation of their book to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Leo Panitch further outlined that breaking with the austerity imposed by the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF) and therefore being kicked out by the EU “would entail a much greater austerity.” Smaller reforms could have been implemented; bigger steps, however, would bring “considerable economic disruption” with capital flight and strikes.
The advice seems to be to implement austerity yourself to avoid the threatened attacks by the European Union and international capital if Syriza had continued to fight back. Panitch and Gindin miss a key element: when governments internationally attack a left government for standing firm behind anti-austerity policies, the moral authority of that left government in the eyes of working people internationally will dramatically rise. This provides a basis to actually build movements and appeal to workers internationally (in Syriza’s case: in Spain, Italy, and Ireland–all of whom faced similar austerity demands from finance capital–as well as the working class in Germany, whose ruling class viciously attacked the Greek masses) to undermine the diktat from Brussels and Berlin. If you choose to reduce living standards yourselves–as Syriza has done and as Douzinas’s present “temporality” seems to support–then you are selling yourself out, and your value in future movements is rightfully lost.
This points to the utopian nature of Poulantzas’ theory in general: For a left government like Syriza–or, for example if Corbyn or Sanders had won their elections–carrying out such a long process would require maintaining an impossibly precarious balance over a long period of time. The experience of Syriza in 2015-2019 demonstrates the unviability of balancing between, one the one hand, the “external” power of movements, organized labor, and other expressions of people power, and, on the other hand, the very gradual transformation of class power within the capitalist state. According to Poulantzas, this would then lead us carefully and gradually toward transformations in the capitalist economy and, at a certain point, to a final, decisive “rupture.” Such an idealized process does not have much in common with the sharp struggles and turns any government like Syriza’s will experience, the hostile domestic and imperialist forces, the necessary push of movements with their ups and downs, and the waves of revolution and counterrevolution any such process is subjected to.
This theorized balancing act is also the essence of Gindin and Panitch’s approach to Bernie Sanders’s campaign. They mention the focus that Bernie’s campaign brought to a class-struggle approach and the need to win the working class to democratic socialism. They speak about the fact that this requires a break with the Democratic Party, and that “in the long run, an alternative political pole will have to be constructed around which social struggles can condense.” They celebrate the growth of the DSA out of the Sanders movement. At first glance, they criticize Bernie for being too modest in his economic approach and too close to Elizabeth Warren–for example, with his demand to break up the banks, “rather than turn them into public utilities.” The authors correctly reject the “workers’ share models” that aim to give workers more stake in capitalism without giving them more power to fight back.
However, the whole framework is one of incremental change toward more workplace democracy. Given where the socialist movement and the labor movement is starting from in the US at the moment, this is not the worst starting point. However, it’s disappointing in that it fails to formulate exciting points of rupture that the movement could and should fight for. Where’s the call to take the energy companies and the fossil fuel industry under democratic public ownership? Where’s the actual call to take over the banks? Panitch and Gindin leave us with an abstract critique of Sanders’s aims, but do not offer concrete proposals of how to push the movement forward.
Similarly, the authors critique the Corbyn movement in Britain:
In contrast with the New Left insurgency of the 1970s, there is a marked avoidance today of openly discussing the question of the need to turn the whole financial system into a public utility. In the absence of this, effective socialist economic and social restructuring of Britain, let alone decentralization of significant democratic decisions to the local community level, cannot be realized.
This is not to say that merely calling for sweeping immediate nationalizations really addresses these strategic problems. As Tony Benn told the 1979 Labour Party conference in speaking for the NEC against adopting Militant’s [that is the Socialist Party of England and Wales predecessor as an organized tendency within the Labour Party] “resolutionary” posture of demanding the immediate nationalization of the top two hundred industrial and financial corporations, this simply failed to take seriously what it meant to be “a party of democratic, socialist reform.” While averring he was a “Clause IV socialist, becoming more so as the years go by,” Benn nevertheless rightly insisted that any serious socialist strategy had to begin from “the usual problems of the reformer: we have to run the economic system to protect our people who are locked into it while we change the system.
Gindin and Panitch’s approach consists of first making the case for the nationalization of the whole financial system, and then afterwards arguing against it. Their reasoning is that the “people who are locked” into the system would benefit from its gradual reform instead of immediate rupture, which seems to follow closely from Poulantzas’s approach.
Panitch and Gindin write about this dilemma and what they believe is “feasible”:
This stark dilemma was also seriously addressed by Seumas Milne (the former Guardian journalist who became Corbyn’s right-hand man) in his 1989 co-authored book, Beyond the Casino Economy. On the one hand, the book argued that “one of the necessary conditions for a socialist society would be to turn [the top] few hundred corporations into democratically owned and accountable public bodies.” On the other, it conceded that “in the foreseeable circumstances of the next few years, the socialization of all large-scale private enterprise seems highly unlikely,” which limited “what can plausibly be proposed as part of a feasible programme for a Labour government in the coming years—even one elected in an atmosphere of radical expectations.”
Both Marx and Engels understood that any society, built on the sharp contradictions of capitalism and based on the politics of what appears “feasible” in the “foreseeable circumstances,” will necessarily face ruptures. Feasibility and usual foresight might rather belong to the world of “sound commonsense,” on which Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: “Only sound commonsense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research.”
3) A Marxist Theory of the State
Poulantzas’s theory of the state begins with echoing Marx and Engels: the state, in its totality of repressive and non-repressive organs, is an indispensable part of a tense, contradictory class society as a whole.
The state emerges inevitably from class society, shaped first of all by the interests of the dominant exploiting class, but also by the class balance of forces as a whole. Its fundamental role is to regulate class conflict and congeal class relations, appearing to rise above class society as the legitimate and class-neutral arbiter. A Marxist theory of the state, therefore, explains how the state can simultaneously retain its capitalist character while still reflecting the power workers have won through struggle, with significant concessions enshrined in rights and laws, social welfare provisions, and democratic reforms. This is at the core of Poulantzas’ theory as well. And here, he first goes back to Marx and defends his analysis against different sets of ideas on the left. Poulantzas describes three currents that he rejects:
- One argues that the state “is equivalent to political domination”, its “activities emanate in their entirety from the will of the dominant class or from that of its hired politicians.”
- Another one would separate the state in two parts: a good one (social security, education, etc.) and a bad one (repressive forces).
- A third approach presents it as if “there is a free-standing state power which is only afterwards utilized by the dominant classes in various ways. Quite frankly, they should talk not of the class nature, but of the class utilization of the State.”
Poulantzas presents it as if Lenin were in the first camp. Yet, in State and Revolution, one of Lenin’s main works, he clearly defends the original Marxist conception of the state. He approvingly presents the following quotation from Engels:
The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ‘the reality of the ethical idea’, ‘the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.
The state is for Engels, Lenin, and Poulantzas an expression of and a necessity for a society that is torn by contradictions and can not exist without being held together by a force seemingly above the battling classes. This force reflects the class struggle with all its aspects, including the fact that one class is dominant and ruling. The state is never neutral. Poulantzas explicitly signs off on that and argues that “state power (that of the bourgeoisie, in the case of the capitalist State) is written into this materiality.”
Unfortunately, Poulantzas’s approach remains very abstract, especially when he turns to the question of how working class parties fighting for socialism can use elections and elected office within the capitalist state.
Hidden by his general term of “state power,” Poulantzas erases a long tradition of debate and experience within the Marxist movement which deals with these questions concretely and in a very differentiated way:
1) Taking part in elections within a capitalist state and taking positions in parliament: Marxists generally agree that this is part of a wider struggle for working class power.
2) Taking part in the formation or executive functions of a capitalist government: Marxists have generally opposed this, following Rosa Luxemburg’s sharp critique of Millerand in 1898.
3) The fight for democratic reforms: Marxists generally support this as part of fighting for the best conditions for the class struggle, but do not believe that this should replace the struggle for socialism.
4) A complicated debate about a workers’ government: Marxists agree with the possibility of a participation in such a government, even within the framework of a capitalist state, but only so long as they work to break the economic power of capital, base themselves on movemements and not the state institutions, and work toward smashing and replacing the old capitalist state.
On these issues, Poulantzas’s vague reflections on “state power” in general blur the skillful approach that Marxists developed over 150 years. Unfortunately, Panitch and Gindin do not improve Poulantzas’s approach.
4) Good-bye to Marx’s “verbal tricks”?
Poulantzas’s theory of the state then breaks with Marx’s conclusion that the working class has to replace the capitalist state with a workers’ state.
Poulantzas explicitly argues for “direct democracy” (for example workers’ councils or soviets) in stable coexistence with a capitalist parliament. He writes in State, Power, Socialism:
First, the expression “sweeping transformation of the state apparatus in the democratic road to socialism” suggests that there is no longer a place for what has traditionally been called smashing or destroying that apparatus. The fact remains, however, that the term smashing, which Marx too used for indicative purposes, came in the end to designate a very precise historical phenomenon: namely, the eradication of any kind of representative democracy or “formal” liberties in favour purely of direct, rank-and-file democracy and so-called real liberties. It is necessary to take sides. If we understand the democratic road to socialism and democratic socialism itself to involve, among other things, political (party) and ideological pluralism, recognition of the role of universal suffrage, and extension and deepening of all political freedoms including for opponents, then talk of smashing or destroying the state apparatus can be no more than a mere verbal trick. What is involved, through all the various transformations, is a real permanence and continuity of the institutions of representative democracy–not as unfortunate relics to be tolerated for as long as necessary, but as an essential condition of democratic socialism.
Let us return later to how the working class can, at the same time, defend the formal liberties of bourgeois democracy while fighting for their actual realization in the form of a workers’ democracy. But first we should be clear: for Karl Marx, smashing or destroying the state apparatus was not “a mere verbal trick.” In the book “The Civil War in France” Marx wrote about the experience of the Paris Commune in 1871:
But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.
Marx describes there the “centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature.” Marx describes:
The first decree of the Commune […] was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.
The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.
Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune.
Having once got rid of the standing army and the police–the physical force elements of the old government–the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the “parson-power”, by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. […]
The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.
The bourgeois state with all its functions is replaced–not laid hold of and added to–by a workers´ state.
In contrast to the state in France at the time of the Paris Commune 1871, the modern state often also organizes public health care systems, public education, transport etc. Does all of that need to be “smashed” according to Marx? Of course not, and Engels writes about that when he evaluates the role of the state in the economy toward the end of his life. However, that does not change the character of the state apparatus, the bureaucracies, or the administrative offices that compose a “deep state” enshrined into the structures of governing. Governments and “administrations” in the US come and go. The structurally pro-capitalist bureaucrats, regulators, organizers of the state, the real administration, the police, and the military line of command, all stay.
Confronted with those powers, for Marx, (and Lenin building on Marx’s theory), the aim was not simply to achieve “dual power,” but to overcome a dual power situation as quickly as possible with revolutionary politics. The conditions under which dual power arises is one of open class war, intense and highly pressurized. Maintaining a static balance of class powers under such conditions simply cannot last very long.
Marxists describe “dual power” as the coexistence of competing and irreconcilable attempts to enforce class power by two different classes; it is a fundamentally unresolved situation, a state of suspense, in which the balance of power is not decisively in the hands of either the working class or the capitalists. In this context, Poulantzas is actually advocating for a situation of dual power not to be resolved in the interest of the working class, but instead to prolong such a state of suspense over a long period of time. This would require forces outside of the capitalist state, such as workers’ councils, to hold the state in check for an extended period of time. In Poulantzas’s words, from an interview with Henri Weber in 1977 (reprinted in the “Poulantzas Reader”, chapter 14, and quoted from there):
There will be a rupture, there will be a moment of decisive confrontation, but it will pass through the state. The organs of popular power at the base, the structures of direct democracy, will be the elements which bring about a differentiation inside the state apparatuses, a polarization by the popular movement of a large fraction of these apparatuses. This fraction, in alliance with the movement, will confront the reactionary, counter-revolutionary sectors of the state apparatus backed up by the ruling classes.
Fundamentally, I think that at the moment we cannot repeat the October Revolution under any form.
The whole modern experience of left governments in power, however, points in the opposite direction. From the Allende government in Chile 1970-73, to the most developed social democratic experiments in post-World War II Europe, everywhere the power of capital over both the economy and the state machinery has successfully destabilized and thrown back any reforms which fundamentally threatened their class domination. The contemporary examples discussed by Gindin and Panitch, especially the experience of Syriza in Greece, also speak very clearly against their own conclusions.
5) To rupture or not to rupture
Poulantzas speaks about a necessary rupture, then proceeds to advocate doing whatever is necessary to avoid such a break. This combination is confusing, and to rest the hope for change on such an approach is utopian.
Poulantzas sees himself in the Marxist tradition of arguing for a rupture with capitalism and with the unreformable capitalist state. To give up on that clarity–of the need of such a rupture≠would represent to him a move toward reformism. He defends himself against the charge of “being reformist”:
[… R]eformism is an ever-latent danger, not a vice inherent in any strategy other than that of dual power–even if, in the case of a democratic road to socialism the criterion of reformism is not as sharp as in the dual-power strategy, and even if (there is no point in denying it) the risks of social-democratization are thereby increased. At any event, to shift the relationship of forces within the State does not mean to win successive reforms in an unbroken chain, to conquer the state machinery piece by piece, or simply to occupy the positions of government. It denotes nothing other than a stage of real breaks , the climax of which–and there has to be one–is reached when the relationship of forces on the strategic terrain of the State swings over to the side of the popular masses.
In the interview with with Henri Weber in 1977 Poulantzas outlines:
We talked about the rupture. But it’s not clear in fact that there will be one big rupture. On the other hand, it’s also clear that you risk falling into gradualism if you talk about a series of ruptures. Nevertheless, if we’re talking about a long process, we have to come to terms with the fact that it can only mean a series of ruptures, whether you call them successive or not.
What matters for me is the idea of a “long process”.
In summary, on the level of state power and economic relations, he argues for a very careful, soft transition. The result is to abandon any socialist practice beyond gradual reform. This is reformism.
Poulantzas was writing about his hopes of building democratic footholds in the capitalist state in the 1970s in Europe, when labor was relatively strong and social democratic parties seemed to be able to take over the administrations of different western European countries. At the end of the post-war upswing, it appeared that capitalism could be forced to offer some significant reforms under the pressures of the movement of the working class, even toward a socialist transformation, as people hoped for with Mitterand’s electoral success in France in 1981 (one year after Poulantzas death). Poulantzas’s hopes never played out; however they are more understandable in such a context.
Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch are writing in the 21st century, after the collapse of neoliberalism and the anemic economic development of capitalism. Under conditions of brutal attacks not just on the reforms won in the past, but also on the organizations of working class labor and workers’ parties, the idea of a “long process” is even less plausible than in the 1970s. At worst, as in Greece under Syriza, taking this approach results in the justification of continued cuts and austerity–a justification which requires complex metaphors and imaginary flights into future “temporalities” to avoid responsibility for defending the working class in the here and now.
6) Lenin, Luxemburg, and Poulantzas
Neither Poulantzas nor Panitch and Gindin accurately present Lenin’s and Rosa Luxemburg’s views on the capitalist state.
Lenin (or Engels via Lenin) was quoted above to present his actual view of the state in contrast to Poulantzas’s presentation of it. However, even after making this correction, there remains an obvious difference in approach between Poulantzas and Lenin. Poulantzas theoretically defends the idea that the capitalist state can’t be reformed into a workers’ state, but then moves on without drawing much of a conclusion.
Lenin writes about this approach in response to Kautsky, again in State and Revolution:
On the other hand, the “Kautskyite” distortion of Marxism is far more subtle. “Theoretically”, it is not denied that the state is an organ of class rule, or that class antagonisms are irreconcilable. But what is overlooked or glossed over is this: if the state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, if it is a power standing above society and “alienating itself more and more from it”, it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this “alienation”. As we shall see later, Marx very explicitly drew this theoretically self-evident conclusion on the strength of a concrete historical analysis of the tasks of the revolution. And—as we shall show in detail further on—it is this conclusion which Kautsky has “forgotten” and distorted.
Poulantzas, Gindin, and Panitch try to present Rosa Luxemburg as an opponent to Lenin on the question of the state. Paul Frölich, a comrade and friend of Rosa writes in his biography of her (chapter 11):
In ‘Perspectives and Projects’ (in Die Internationale, April 1915) Rosa just about tore Kautsky’s new book to pieces, particularly his views on imperialism. It is interesting to note that she firmly rejected his attempt to equate ‘modern democracy’, as the aim of socialism, with the parliamentary regime:
Has not Social Democracy always contended that “full democracy, not formal democracy, but real and effective democracy”, is conceivable only when economic and social equality, i.e. a socialist economic order, has become a reality, and that, on the other hand, the “democracy” of a bourgeois national state is, in the last resort, always more or less humbug?
In one of her last articles at the beginning of the German Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg wrote on December 17, 1918, about the need to fight for all power to the workers’ council and against any illusions in parliamentarianism:
“Today we are in the middle of the proletarian revolution, and today we have to put the axe to the tree of capitalist exploitation itself. Bourgeois parliamentarianism, like the bourgeois class rule which is its primary political purpose, has forfeited its right to exist. Now the class struggle comes into its place in its undisguised, naked form. Capital and labor no longer have anything to say to each other, they only have to seize each other with an iron embrace and decide in final battle who is to be thrown to the ground. […] What was previously considered to be equality and democracy–Parliament, the National Assembly, equal ballots–was smoke and mirrors! All the power in the hands of the working masses as a revolutionary weapon to crush capitalism–that alone is true equality, that is true democracy!”
This Luxembourg has no relation to the one Poulantzas characterizes in an interview with Marxism Today, 1979:
The thing that Rosa Luxemburg opposed in Lenin was […] that he crushed all the institutions of representative democracy and left only the institution of direct democracy of the soviets.
Poulantzas, as well as Panitch and Gindin, refer to an unpublished manuscript that Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1918 about the Russian Revolution, which was made public three years after her assassination, in 1922. This work is contradictory on the question of whether or not to fight for shared power between a bourgeois parliament and workers’ councils. In chapter one, Luxemburg writes a passage that Poulantzas might not like to quote:
All power exclusively in the hands of the worker and peasant masses, in the hands of the Soviets—this was indeed the only way out of the difficulties which the Revolution had got into; it was the sword which cut the Gordian knot and let the Revolution out of the impasse into the free and open fields where it could continue to develop without restraints.
In further chapters, Rosa does argue against the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks, arguing that they shouldn’t have dissolved it, but have a new election instead. While remaining in strong support of the October Revolution and the policies of the Bolsheviks, Rosa feared that they might go too far in abolishing democratic rights.
This manuscript was written based on the information Rosa had in her prison cell in Germany and is a celebration of the Russian October Revolution, a call to action to the German and international proletariat. Rosa’s actions and struggles in the remaining time she had in her life–less than a year to her assisination–speak very clearly to how she solved the underlying questions: She fought for workers’ councils as the sole and central power of a workers’ state and a Communist Party in Germany, and presented those ideas as leading the working class to power in Germany. She also thought this would help overcome the isolation of the Russian Revolution (while not neglecting the need to take part in elections under capitalism when the balance of forces did not allow them to go further).
The contrast that Poulantzas created between Luxemburg and Lenin is artificial. Rosa and Lenin are in full agreement that “a democratic socialism must maintain formal and political liberties,” (as stated by Poulantzas in the 1977 interview with Henri Weber). However, Poulantzas argues:
“Lenin couldn’t have cared less about political and formal liberties. And Rosa Luxemburg, a revolutionary who can hardly be accused of social-democratic leanings, took him up on it.”
This mistakes the important distinction, made by both Lenin and Luxemburg, between meaningful political liberties and the hollow promises of capitalist democracy, for a disregard of political liberties altogether. In a number of articles that Rosa Luxemburg wrote during the German revolution, after November 9, 1918, she argues as Lenin did in Russia 1917 that in order to achieve a society that guarantees political liberties in a meaningful way, the working class must first decide in its favor the civil war imposed on it by the old ruling class.
In contrast, Poulantzas believes that liberties would be defended by capitalist institutions against proletarian institutions of power. In the interview with Henri Weber, Poulantzas wonders “whether today we can talk about political and formal liberties over a long period … without also having the institutions that can give life to and guarantee this plurality and these liberties?”
This is the point when Poulantzas abandons his own analysis of state. First, he argued that the institutions of the capitalist state reflect a balance of power–a balance which can sometimes force capitalists to grudgingly uphold rights workers won in the past–but are still fundamentally capitalist institutions, notwithstanding some concessions reflecting changes in the class balance of power. Then, in contrast to that, he sees those institutions as the guarantors of formal liberties! Poulantzas ends up as someone arguing for “class utilization” of the state, or even utilization of the state in a classless way, where institutions guarantee rights.
Lenin and Luxemburg both argued that in order to institutionalise democratic rights, the working class would need to take power. There is no doubt that both fought this battle with the slogan, as quoted above: “All power exclusively in the hands of the worker and peasant masses.”
Conclusion
It is extremely positive that the new socialist movement around DSA and readers of Jacobin are once again grappling with Marxist theory of the state. In part, the growing interest in the ideas of theoreticians like Poulantzas, Miliband, as well as Gindin and Panitch, reflect a healthy search for necessary updates that take into account the modern experience of left governments and parties.
At the same time, we find in their ideas mistakes and contradictions not dissimilar to the pioneers of s reformist socialism around the turn of the last century. In our view, the socialist challenge today consists of both avoiding the ultra-left caricatures of “revolutionary” politics, but also, crucially, of defending the fundamental Marxist idea that achieving genuine democracy, social equality, and a sustainable world will require the working class to organize itself for a revolutionary clash with global capital –and this time–to win.
