by Today, the dominant mode of electoral work in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is oriented towards achieving reforms. However, by prioritizing reforms above our long term goals, we adopt tactics that implicitly follow the logic of the liberal theory of change. This aleleads us to take fewer strong stands for fear of alienating moderate voters or burning too many bridges with the Democrats. We also accept the liberal individualistic framing for how elected officials are supposed to act: as leaders over and above the movement that created them.
When our elected officials fall into this trap, they may compromise on our program or principles, leading to feelings of betrayal, over-corrections, and bitter denunciations from the left. In order to end this cycle we need a different strategy, one which places our principles and the ultimate goal of socialist transformation in the drivers’ seat. Such a strategy, however, will also need to be done in a way that will not alienate us from the real movement of workers. Socialists in Office Committees (SIOCs) are a step in the right direction, but in order to fully realize this style of electoral politics, we will need concrete examples to learn from.
We can find one such example with the Bolsheviks, whom revolutionaries the world over have looked to as a model for electoral work. Contrary to their popular depiction as insurrectionists and ideologues who eschewed electoralism in favor of direct action in the streets, elections were central to the Bolsheviks’, and in particular Lenin’s, broader strategy.
The Bolsheviks considered participation in elections a very important tool for advancing the socialist movement in Russia and used it to fight for reforms. However, they did not do so with parliamentary actions (i.e. passing legislation) or through what they referred to as “parliamentary illusions”: they did so using a confrontational class struggle approach. Bolshevik officials acted as workers’ tribunes, using their platform and party newspapers to grow worker class consciousness. But they did not stop at mere rhetoric. Their elected representatives also helped to organize mass campaigns of strikes, protests, and mass demonstrations to fight for reforms that were always in service of the higher goal of workers taking power through revolution.
The party as a whole argued that it was the fight for undiluted reforms, rooted in class struggle and backed by the active threat of revolution, that was the most effective way to organize workers and build class consciousness. To remove the final goal of revolution from their agitation and demands would be to abandon the fight for socialism entirely.
It can be difficult to have a clear picture of what is meant by a revolutionary approach to work around and within the legislature, as it is so foreign to how we are taught to think about politics. I hope that by shedding some light on how the Bolsheviks approached this task, I can help demystify their approach and reasoning.
Reform or Revolution?
One of the most fundamental debates within socialism is whether socialism can be achieved through reforms alone, or whether a revolutionary rupture is necessary. Many of today’s arguments, made one way or the other, are the echoes of socialists past; voices from over a century ago.
For example, in the article “Once Again About the Duma Cabinet” Lenin describes a common argument made in favor of reformism that would not be out of place in a debate today:
“We must choose”—this is the argument the opportunists have always used to justify themselves, and they are using it now. Big things cannot be achieved at one stroke. We must fight for small but achievable things. How do we know whether they are achievable? They are achievable if the majority of the political parties, or of the most “influential” politicians, agree with them. The larger the number of politicians who agree with some tiny improvement, the easier it is to achieve it. We must not be utopians and strive after big things. We must be practical politicians; we must join in the demand for small things, and these small things will facilitate the fight for the big ones. We regard the small things as the surest stage in the struggle for big things. That is how all the opportunists, all the reformists, argue; unlike the revolutionaries.1
In this quote, Lenin describes a common refrain among reformists: that in order to win, we must attract the widest possible base, and to do that we need to find reforms so mild and inoffensive that no one would object. Today we hear this often in debates whenever the left holds to its principles. In response, the mainstream media will call us sectarian, allergic to power, unserious, etc. etc.. This logic is used to justify compromising to achieve small wins, which for socialists often come at the cost of subsuming the long term goal of a future where workers are in control.
As our society is hegemonically liberal (in the classical sense), the dominant mode of thinking about elections is also liberal. The liberal theory of change, present in progressivism, is one where progress increases roughly linearly over time, as groups with differing interests negotiate between one another and society finds a balance between forces. In essence, society ‘reforms’ itself to become better over time. This mode of change places a high emphasis on collaboration between classes, which means that candidates are expected to play nice and negotiate effectively. In elections this results in a political triangulation, where politicians attempt to follow the present consciousness rather than building a new one.
Triangulation and the progressive mode of change lacks a cohesiveness: without overarching goals, the strategy becomes chasing any opportunity for a small reform that arises or, more frequently, fighting fires to hold back regressions on any secured gains. This logic, when applied to the socialist movement, is disastrous. The capitalist class is highly organized and can work towards its goals over timescales longer than a human lifespan, meaning that in order to win we cannot merely be reacting to what is in front of us. Instead, we need to plan and mount counterattacks that bring us beyond merely defending what we’ve gained. We must build lasting organizations that wage the fight for our long term goals over the same time scales that capitalists can, towards our final goal of ending capitalism.
This hegemonic liberal tradition is present when Zohran Mamdani decides to apologize to the New York City Police Department for calling them racist in order to not get on their bad side, and in the calls of the DSA right that he needs to “actually govern.” In fact, such a demand is just shorthand for bargaining and playing nice with liberal interests. It was present when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decided to confirm that the Biden administration was working tirelessly for a ceasefire in order to get greater access in the halls of power. It places winning a particular seat, in order to build a larger bloc in the legislature, over building the consciousness and organization of the working class.
Unfortunately, DSA often falls back into this strategy in the sense that, unless we consciously counteract it, DSA defaults to the liberal framing. In particular, our elected officials face enormous pressure from media, peers, and constituents to conform to this framing and, absent strong support from DSA to try something different, such pressure can be overwhelming.
But what makes socialists effective in our fight for the working class is not our proficiency in beating liberals at their own game, nor our aptitude for bargaining and convincing other elected officials to support our policies. It’s not because we “want it more” (though we do), because if it were, then at least some progressive organizations would have had DSA’s success by now. We’re not just “more liberal,” socialists fight for something else entirely.
Likewise, it is not just because we use class struggle campaigns, because left-liberal unions participate in class struggle regularly.
The difference is that we fight for reforms using class struggle campaigns directed towards the goal of a workers revolution, with workers taking power and implementing socialism. Or as Rosa Luxemburg put it succinctly in her pamphlet Reform or Revolution?, responding to the reformist Eduard Bernstein:
Can we contrapose the social revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms? Certainly not. The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal—the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labour. Between social reforms and revolution there exists for the Social Democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim.
But since the final goal of socialism constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing the Social-Democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and from bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming the entire labour movement from a vain effort to repair the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, for the suppression of this order – the question: “Reform or Revolution?” as it is posed by Bernstein, equals for the Social-Democracy the question: “To be or not to be?” In the controversy with Bernstein and his followers, everybody in the Party ought to understand clearly it is not a question of this or that method of struggle, or the use of this or that set of tactics, but of the very existence of the Social-Democratic movement.2
To be or not to be? Rosa argues that by choosing to hide that we fight for workers seizing power, we are abandoning what makes us socialists and what makes us effective fighters for the working class.
The Revolution is the aim; the struggle for reforms, the means of achieving that aim. Where the reformists in the DSA right reject the aim, some of the left and ultra-left go too far to forget the means. Indeed, we want elected officials to be a worker’s tribune, using their position for propaganda to expand consciousness among workers and DSA’s worker-leaders. However, they must also expand the struggle for reforms through mass campaigning in the streets — through strikes, combined with agitation and propaganda — and center the fight in class struggle, not “parliamentary illusions.” The mechanism by which our agitation and propaganda actually takes hold is by connecting it to the active experience by workers, which socialist tribunes can and should help to foment.
The specific activity of such tribunes — their relationship to our party structures, the dialectic movement between workers’ agitation and legislative work, and the propagation of socialist demands — are key questions. So too is the specific form of such demands, which socialists put forward during their combined struggles in the streets and electoral arenas.
These debates have been going on for more than 100 years, and the arguments we hear today are eerily similar to those heard back then. It stands to reason that we can find some answers to those questions by looking at how revolutionary parties engaged in electoral work in a non-reformist way.
If the liberal method of fighting for reforms is ineffective, then what is the revolutionary way? In order to better understand what is meant by taking this “revolutionary” approach to work in legislatures, we can explore how the Bolsheviks handled work in the Russian Duma under tsarism.
Elections, the Bolshevik Way
Contrary to popular belief, the Bolsheviks regarded work in the representative bodies of the tsarist state as an important aspect of class struggle. Polemicizing against ultra-left tendencies that saw parliaments as obsolete, Lenin argued against boycotting them during non-revolutionary periods:
We Bolsheviks participated in the most counterrevolutionary parliaments, and experience has shown that this participation was not only useful but indispensable to the party of the revolutionary proletariat, after the first bourgeois revolution in Russia (1905), so as to pave the way for the second bourgeois revolution (February 1917), and then for the socialist revolution (October 1917).3
However, the Bolsheviks went about electoral work in an entirely different way than we do in the US. Theirs was a strategy focused on on combining legal and illegal party work to realize the primary goal of worker’s seizure of power through revolution:
The main tasks of our Party in the elections, and equally of the future Social-Democratic group in the Duma itself—a task to which all else must be subordinated—is socialist, class propaganda and the organisation of the working class.4
The Bolsheviks insisted upon raising, and not hiding, the maximum demands of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), which called for an eight-hour day, confiscation of the landed estates, and a democratic republic.
These demands, as directed by the party central committee, informed the work of the Duma deputies. Under conditions of full party illegality they maintained coordination and control over their elected officials. The Bolshevik Central Committee and Lenin provided the Bolshevik deputies, referred to as “the six,” with instructions at their party conference before the convening of the 4th Duma.
The workers’ deputies must use the Duma for agitation and help to develop the revolutionary movement by exposing both the tsarist government and the hypocrisy of the so-called liberal parties. The workers’ deputies must be heard by the entire working class of Russia. But activity in the Duma was only a part of the work of the fraction; as an integral part of the Party the Bolshevik “six” must take part in the vast work to be done outside of the Duma. The organisation and guidance of Party groups and activity in the Party press and in the trade unions were among the important duties of the workers’ deputies and demanded from them continual work and effort.5
To arrive at this electoral orientation Lenin had to contend with several groups within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) and convince his party and the workers that it was the correct course through steady persuasion over multiple Duma incarnations. His views were not hegemonic until Lenin could prove them in practice.
On his right he dealt with the Liquidators (and Mensheviks) who opposed maintaining the illegal activities within the party. This would have meant hiding the maximum demands of the party and moderating its activities.
On his left he contended with the Recallists (Otzovists), Bolsheviks who felt that the Duma representatives were not fulfilling the party objectives and should be recalled immediately. He argued that the deputies could be corrected with strong guidance from the party, through its newspapers, and through specific directives decided by a party conference. Lenin was strongly opposed to the recallist sentiment, going so far as to threaten to leave the Bolshevik faction if their line won out.
They adopted this approach because, similar to our own democracy in the United States, in Tsarist Russia worker representation was rigged. The Russian Duma was a representative body created by the first Russian constitution as a concession won through the Russian Revolution of 1905. However, from the outset it was highly rigged against workers and functionally prevented them from having proportionate representation. It was designed with a tiered structure of delegates meant to blunt popular energy and ensure landlord and bourgeois dominance. Alexei Badayev, a metalworker who was elected as a Bolshevik representative to the 4th Duma, writes about his experience and describes the system in place:
Special attention was paid to [disenfranchising] the workers, and the number of electors in the workers’ curiae was greatly reduced. However, the framers of the new electoral law did not dare to go so far as to prevent the workers from having any representation in the Duma at all.6
As a result of these anti-democratic measures, a majority of the Duma’s representatives were made up of Black Hundreds deputies, who represented the most reactionary elements that wished to see a return to tsarist absolutism. The next biggest section were the liberal cadets, who ostensibly supported the new democracy but in practice usually sided with the government. Consequently, these liberals opposed the goals of the Bolshevik deputies.
These barriers meant that winning reforms through parliamentary means were all but impossible which meant that their primary goal was organization and preparation of the working class to take power. In Russia there was no freedom of assembly: however, the Duma platform included special privileges, including parliamentary immunity which allowed for freedom of speech, a carve-out which proved incredibly valuable. While we do not have all the same barriers today, the US democratic system nonetheless has more subtle but still effective means of preventing reforms. For example, even though we have freedom of speech, our ability to broadcast that speech is highly limited by a media environment dominated by a few billionaire-owned corporations. Nevertheless, public office provides a powerful platform to cut through the noise of capitalist media, allowing us to reach many more workers, while also giving us credibility as leaders in the movement.
True Representatives of Workers
A key factor in the Bolsheviks’ success was that they fought for and won the loyalty of Russian workers, who came to see the Bolshevik fraction as their strongest representatives in the Duma. The Bolsheviks’ insistence upon maintaining their independence from the liberal parties and bourgeois influences was an integral part of winning and maintaining that trust.
The Bolsheviks were part of the Social Democratic fraction within the Duma, where they worked with the other major faction within the RSDLP, the Mensheviks. The two factions differed on how best to work within the Duma: what demands to raise, how to relate to the left-liberal parties, and how to approach reforms:
The Menshevik platform presented the three basic slogans of the Bolsheviks in a weakened form. Instead of ‘a democratic republic’ they demanded the ‘sovereignty of the people’s representatives’; instead of ‘the confiscation of the landlords’ estates’ they asked vaguely for a ‘revision of the agrarian legislation,’ etc. The entire Menshevik platform involved the substitution of slogans and demands adapted to the contingencies of a legal movement for those on which the revolutionary struggle of the working class was proceeding.7
The Mensheviks’ moderate approach was indicative of their more professional worker base, who had a relatively easier time within Tsarist Russia and therefore could be appeased by smaller reforms. They raised the partial demands from the RSDLP’s minimum program in the hope that less controversial demands would garner support from the left-liberal parties and avoid run-ins with the tsarist police.
The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, insisted on using the full RSDLP program. As representatives of the industrial workers, who would not see their lives much improved through the attainment of only partial concessions, they centered the party’s revolutionary demands in all their work. The divide between the two factions had been brewing for many years as a battle between reformism and revolutionary politics, coming to a head in 1913 during the fourth Duma.
The two factions were jockeying to be able to say that they were the true representatives of the workers. During the election to the fourth Duma, the Mensheviks managed to elect seven representatives compared to the Bolsheviks six. But a more detailed reading of the situation shows that the Bolsheviks were overwhelmingly preferred by the workers. Badayev describes how these results came about:
All the elections in the six workers’ colleges of the largest industrial areas had resulted in victories for the Bolsheviks. The Menshevik deputies, on the contrary, were elected from non-working class centres, chiefly the border provinces, where the majority of the population was petit bourgeois. The distribution of workers in the areas concerned shows for whom the working class voted. In the six provinces with workers’ electoral colleges there were 1,008,000 workers (in factories and mines), whereas in the eight provinces which returned Mensheviks there were 214,000 workers, or if we include the Baku province, where the workers were disfranchised, 246,000 workers. From these figures it is obvious that, in fact, the Bolsheviks represented five times as many workers as the Mensheviks. Only an electoral system specially designed to reduce the representation of the working class could bring about such a correlation of forces within the Social-Democratic fraction.8
So we see that even though the Mensheviks had elected one more deputy, they were not the preferred party of the workers, with workers voting for Bolsheviks five to one. They instead derived their base within the skilled professional class. The workers themselves also seemed to agree with this assessment that Bolsheviks should lead, with workers’ unions sending many resolutions affirming their support for the Bolshevik approach.
A Split in the Social Democratic Fraction
Throughout their time in the Duma, the Bolsheviks followed the strategy decided by the majority of the RSDLP and raised the demands of the party program; meanwhile the Mensheviks violated party discipline to push their own set of demands in contradiction with the party strategy. They would often use their one vote edge to block the Bolsheviks from being able to speak within the Duma, causing a deep rift between the factions.
When differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks within the Social Democrat Duma fraction reached their limit, the Bolsheviks gave an ultimatum: cease using your one vote edge to shut out the Bolshevik deputies, or we will have to split. After some stalling, the Mensheviks decided they could not agree to those terms, and so the fraction split on October 26th, 1913.
In the aftermath, the workers largely sided with the Bolsheviks: the majority of resolutions sent by workers’ committees expressed support for, and sent funds to, the faction. Over that period, the Bolsheviks received over two and a half times more resolutions of support, as well as five times the amount of funds, showing their commanding support within the worker class. As the split resolved in their favor, the Boleshviks found the workers turning to their deputies to fight for them within the Duma.
Indicative of that trust, throughout their tenure Badayev and other Bolshevik Duma officials received thousands of letters from workers and labor unions requesting that the worker’s deputies intercede on their behalf.
Every day I received a voluminous correspondence not only from St. Petersburg, but also from other cities, and many workers called to see me. In order that these consultations with the masses should continue, I published in Pravda the hours of my ‘reception’ at home. Some of these numerous visitors called on behalf of various organisations, while others came on personal matters.
The conversations and letters touched upon absolutely every aspect of the workers’ lives. I was kept informed of the work accomplished and of the persecutions incurred by the trade unions, of strikes, lock-outs, unemployment, and new cases of police oppression. I was asked to intercede on behalf of those arrested, and received many letters from exiles, who requested me to organise financial and other material relief for them.9
Here we find the familiar form of ‘constituency work’ that is common to any public representative. However, the Bolsheviks notably used these opportunities to materially further the cause of revolution. They took great pains in nurturing their role as true workers’ representatives, placing a high priority on answering every letter and strenuously defending the rights of workers through every means at their disposal.
Bolshevik Tactics
One of the primary tactics deployed by the Bolsheviks was the privilege of Duma members to hold “interpellations”, which allowed any Duma fraction to summon officials of the tsarist government to answer for their actions or inaction. They frequently used the privilege to criticize the government for failing to protect workers from breaches of the labor law or for infringing on the Duma representatives’ rights.
As the Duma majority did not want Bolsheviks speaking, and so would frequently interrupt them, they often had to resort to a tactic of chaining speeches together: when one Bolshevik deputy was cut off, another one would pick up the thread.
Their interpellations in the Duma were also tightly integrated with the work of their newspapers. Badayev was appointed by Lenin to be the editor of the Bolshevik paper Pravda in order to facilitate that integration. After every interpellation they would publish the speeches made -in full- into the pages of Pravda, reporting on any attempts made towards stifling their speech. They would use the pages to educate workers on how their work helped to further the cause of the workers movement.
The Duma representatives also enjoyed parliamentary immunity, which meant that they had more leeway in the work they could do for the party. They had immunity from prosecution, except by the Duma itself, meaning that they could say and do things that other party operatives could not. When most of the party had to operate in illegality, the Duma representatives were important centers of party organizing. They often used their offices and their personal residences as places for party operatives to meet and to store important party correspondence. From their offices they helped cover for the illegal work of the party.
They used their immunity to make speeches agitating amongst the workers. One such episode occurred when several factory owners acquired a bad batch of cheap rubber that off-gassed benzene, causing many injuries and several poisoning deaths in their factories. Not only that, but the owners insisted upon continuing to use the bad rubber, even after it was apparent that it was killing their workers. In response, the workers decided to strike. Backing up the workers, Badayev and the other deputies went to the factories to investigate the disaster, and hear reports from the workers, only to be rebuffed by factory managers. They later attended the funeral of the affected workers. Held on March 21, 1914, the funeral attracted over 3,000 attendees:
Closely watched by the police, the workers walked eighteen kilometres from the Obukhov hospital to the Preobrazhensky cemetery. Detachments of mounted police were posted at the gates of every works on the route to prevent more workers joining the procession; nevertheless the crowd continually increased.
On the previous day, the workers had asked me to attend the funeral. I did so, and as the coffins were being lowered into the grave I began my speech. ‘New victims have been torn from the vast family of the St. Petersburg workers. What do the stony hearted capitalists care?’ A police inspector approached me and demanded that I should stop; I ignored him and continued: ‘Exhausting toil, noxious gases in the workshop, premature death, and on top of all this, lock-outs – such is the lot of the working class. Lately the victims claimed by capitalism have become more numerous. Explosions, poisonings….’10
He was cut off by police soon after but managed to avoid arrest using his credentials as Duma deputy. By using speeches in this way, not only could the Duma representatives give voice to the plight of the workers, but they could make apparent that the parliamentary system essentially had no tolerance for true workers’ own voices.
In addition to speeches, the Duma representatives had a direct role in encouraging workers to strike, playing a vital part in the escalating strikes of 1914 and in the lead up to World War I.
Our Party conducts campaigns of revolutionary meetings and revolutionary street demonstrations. For this purpose our Party distributes revolutionary leaflets and an illegal newspaper, the Party’s Central Organ. The ideological unification of all these propaganda and agitation activities among the masses is achieved by the slogans adopted by the supreme bodies of our Party, namely: (1) an eight-hour day; (2) confiscation of the landed estates, and (3) a democratic republic. In the present situation in Russia, where absolute tyranny and despotism prevail and where all laws are suppressed by the tsarist monarchy, only these slogans can effectually unite and direct the entire propaganda and agitation of the Party aimed at effectually sustaining the revolutionary working-class movement.11
After each overreach by factory owners, workers would begin to strike and the Bolsheviks would use their papers and operatives to send word to other districts or cities to spread the action. Bolshevik party members agitated and campaigned among the striking workers, educating them on the necessity of revolution to achieve their aims. They called for strikes not only to raise workers’ wages or improve their conditions, but also for political demands like the defense of workers’ and representatives’ rights in the face of repression by the Tsarist state.
Through their tenure, they fought for reforms which were always directed towards the goal of revolution, never missing an opportunity to show how the system was rigged against workers.
One should note, however, that even amidst the Bolsheviks’ fight for reforms, they did not defer to legislative activity at all. Every wage raise and every repellation of attacks by the bosses came through the coordination of mass struggle and strikes, with the Bolshevik Duma deputies taking a leading role. Not only that, even when the strikes were broken, Bolshevik propaganda foregrounding the need for revolution inoculated the workers to those losses, helping them maintain their resolve. As a result, the number of workers striking and the support for the Bolsheviks continued to rise!
Our Party conducts revolutionary strikes, which in Russia are growing as in no other country in the world. Take, for example, the month of May alone. In May 1912, 64,000 and in May 1914, 99,000 workers were involved in economic strikes. The number involved in political strikes was: 364,000 in 1912 and (347,000 in 1914. The combination of political and economic struggle produces the revolutionary strike, which, by rousing the peasant millions, trains them for revolution.12
The Bolshevik’s tactics of class independence and fierce defence of worker interests against heavy repression positioned them to be able to grow rapidly, both in the lead up to and during the revolutionary situation that was accelerated by World War I. As a result of their anti-war agitation the Duma fraction was eventually arrested and sentenced to forced labor in Siberia. I hope to revisit the periods of the lead up to the war and the revolutions of 1917 in another article.
But America is Different…
Does the Bolshevik path apply to our conditions today? Can a revolutionary orientation be sold to American workers? With decades of unchallenged supremacy, liberal consciousness is very strong in the US, even among workers. The liberal theory of change that expects compromise and “playing ball” in order to bargain for reforms is seen as common sense. Elected officials taking a hard-line approach in the legislatures and “burning bridges” are called sectarian by Democratic organizations and the media. A legislator who passes few bills could be seen as not getting anything done for their constituents and face questions at the next election. Many in the US have learned not to expect anything good out of politics, to think that real reforms — anything other than minor tweaks to the system — are impossible.
One may argue that an important difference – and advantage – of our situation in America regards the legality of our political activity. While the Bolsheviks operated under conditions of illegality, revolutionary socialists currently have the ability to organize in the open.
However, illegality or legality can quickly change. As we socialists pursue our electoral, labor, and street agitational projects, our organizing conditions could easily become less favorable, as liberals seek to contest our more radical theory of change. Yet hope remains for our commitment to social change rooted in class struggle. Not only is such a struggle possible here, it is at the heart of all the most lasting reforms in our history.
The New Deal, one of the most important reform movements in US history, is often mythologized as a set of reforms handed down by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to ameliorate the conditions caused by the Great Depression. And while, in some respects, it was intended to do that, those reforms’ real driving force was the underlying class struggle that persisted through the early 1930s and the ruling classes’ fear of a revolution that may lay behind it. Tensions were rising: “In 1930 a total of 635 work stoppages were recorded; in 1931, 810; and in 1932, 841.”13 with stoppages expanding and developing consciousness later into the decade:
Strike activity was greater in 1934 than in 1933; it involved 1,470,000 workers in 1,856 strikes. A total of 2,014 work stoppages occurred in 1935, involving 1,170,000 workers. The major cause of the pre-1934 strikes had been the desire for higher wages and better hours, but the main issue in the majority of the strikes in 1934/35 was the desire for union recognition.14
With strikes increasing fourfold at the beginning of the 1930s, FDR was under much pressure to do something to relieve class tensions. The result was the New Deal reforms, which have built much of the public infrastructure that we still rely on today. However, the subsequent gains were both incomplete and impermanent: lacking adequate, organized leadership to guide it, revolutionary sentiment was successfully tamped down by the reforms: as a result, those wins continue to break down from steady erosion by the capitalist class as time wears on.
Several decades later, tendencies within the Civil Rights movement also relied upon confrontational struggle with the powers that be in order to win reforms, rather than through direct legislative action. Additionally, it was not a movement that sought to appease the white liberal.
“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’” 15
King recognized that choosing partial demands in order to appease moderates was not an effective strategy, and this won him enmity among Whites in the US. Indeed, contrary to the mythologized version of the MLK story popularized today, the majority of white Americans did not approve of MLK or his tactics, and it was only after his death and subsequent “white-washing” that white public opinion turned decisively in his favor. In a 1966 poll, 50% of White Americans responded that he was hurting the civil rights effort, and only 36% said he was helping. He held a favorability rating of only 27%.16
Not only that, but King’s non-violent approach was bolstered by more confrontational and revolutionary movements that organized alongside him: e.g. the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The threat of social upheaval made by these movements made the non-violent fight for reforms relatively more palatable. It’s clear that the class struggle approach taken by the Civil Rights Movement got results, results that would have been unlikely with a less confrontational approach. Unfortunately, MLK was killed just as he was stepping further into revolutionary class struggle that might have pushed the movement to full completion.
More recently, class struggle is on the rise, exemplified by the rise of Bernie Sanders. Sanders, who remains the most popular public official in the United States, has built his support starting from years of consistent independence from the Democrats. His popularity among the working class, crossing the usual red/blue dichotomy, has come not from his proximity to the Democratic party but from his challenge to it. The plurality of his base comes from the “outsider left” who value his independence and radicalism.17 Additionally the beginning of DSA’s revitalization coincides with the rise of Bernie and of class struggle more broadly. Such a development indicates a rising appetite for radical change.
But while these historic movements had elements of revolutionary sentiment behind them, what they lacked was an organized leadership pushing for revolution to develop that consciousness further into a true revolutionary movement. Americans are more ready for class struggle and a revolutionary orientation than we think, and in order to go beyond the reforms of the past and ensure that they last, we need to build that revolutionary organized force.
Lessons for Today
To do this, DSA must build credibility as fighters for the working class by fighting for real reforms; as we do so, however, we must stress that any reforms we secure can be easily removed until workers win power. We must preserve our independence from the Democrats as much as possible, working with them only when it is incontrovertible that it will help the working class. At the same time, however, we cannot lapse into the failures of sectarianism.
The history of the left in the US is littered with sects that have separated themselves, not just from the Democrats, but from real worker movements for reforms. We on the DSA left must not brush off this risk, but reckon with it. We must not ignore the fight for reforms, or leave it to those on our right. We must teach the working class in the US that they can wish for actually good things, but that they should demand more.
We can do this by raising demands that express a deep need within the working class — e.g. more control over their lives and workplaces, shorter workdays, and job guarantees — but that cannot be granted within the capitalist system: in other words, we must put forward transitional demands. By using demands which connect present worker consciousness with the need for revolution, we can help them to come to revolutionary conclusions through their own activity.
For the left of DSA there is an opportunity to engage with the struggle for reforms, where they may truly be winnable, to put forward revolutionary, transitional demands, that will help to prevent the complacency of reformism. By pushing forward transitional demands, we can still be fighting for the things workers want and need, without sacrificing on the task of developing worker consciousness.
For our work in legislatures, these demands can be used to draft bills or amendments to Democrats’ bills, both raising those demands to a higher platform, and also revealing that the Democrats do not actually want the things they say they want. We can show that they will use backroom maneuvering or flimsy excuses to prevent reforms from passing. We must expose all these maneuvers to workers to show definitively that workers need to fight for their interests through their own power, through class struggle.
When fighting for transitional reforms that we likely cannot win outright until a revolution, as the Bolsheviks did, we must also pair it with vigorous propaganda work to explain why real reforms are not possible in this system and why workers need to seize power. We need to drown out the interpretations that the liberal media will broadcast, by greatly expanding DSA’s reach with our comms and published materials. Each chapter should have messaging that they coordinate with the work of our elected officials. Additionally, chapters should strive to have a platform for publishing articles and work to expand their publication’s reach with local workers. Chapters can provide perspectives on local news, labor updates, and help to provide a socialist interpretation to local politics, as a counterbalance to the capitalist media.
But the Bolsheviks did not merely use propaganda. So we must also build DSA’s ability to call for and organize mass demonstrations and -eventually- strikes. In order for our elected officials’ to be able to take confrontational stands against both the Democrats and Republicans, we require disciplined structures that can mobilize effective mass campaigns to back them up. Our socialists in office (SIOs) can help us build our capacity because, as visible representatives of workers, they can help to legitimize DSA’s mass actions and individuate DSA from the many liberal, sectarian, and social movement orgs calling for protests.
SIOCs are a great start to building mass campaigning infrastructure. By acting as coordinating bodies for the SIOs and their chapters, these committees can organize large scale actions and support our socialist tribunes. SIOCs can aid elected officials to coordinate responses to their constituents’ requests, linking them to the work of DSA. With a strong program to guide the work of chapters and SIOs, and a revolutionary approach that does not incentivize opportunism, we can start to get past the continuous oscillations between unqualified praise and bitter denunciation we see of our elected representatives.
By providing a constructive outlet for feedback to SIOs, SIOCs can help representatives maintain strong connections with workers. That connection can prevent the political missteps or disconnects that inevitably occur amongst the pressures of our current environment. Likewise, SIOCs also can offer a conduit to redirect less disciplined feedback to the representatives, like the sniping that can occur online, and channel it in productive directions. With a clear and principled program, we can set expectations ahead of time and prevent avoidable miscommunications and make it clear where the red lines are.
In fact, one of the weaknesses of the Democratic party, and liberals in general, is the lack of a set of long term goals that coordinates action between elected officials. The SIOC can offer mechanisms that ensure precisely this coordinative work and ensure that it all follows the same north star. By uniting electoral projects with DSA’s other work — e.g. tenant organizing, labor organizing, Palestine solidarity, or ecosocialist work — we can demonstrate how those movements all relate back to class struggle, building a movement whose ultimate goal is placing workers in control. With multiple SIOCs, SIOs, and DSA chapters all pushing in unison for a democratically decided, revolutionary program, we would be a formidable force indeed.
The workers’ seizure of power was centered in all Bolshevik propaganda work. The active revolutionary approach employed by the Bolsheviks, with their slogans and concepts oriented towards expanding radical consciousness, put them in the best position to grow rapidly in the lead up to and during revolutionary situations. As we enter what may become another such situation, with Trump’s military actions in US cities, skyrocketing inflation, and a deepening economic downturn, a revolutionary orientation could position us to educate and expand consciousness in the coming few years.
As already mentioned, we do not operate under illegal conditions today: but we cannot take that luxury for granted in a country facing ever increasing repression. We must build partyist infrastructure now, through SIOCs and other structures, so that we have the capacity to fight back with our own independent power as workers, should our legal status change. By organizing this infrastructure now, we can be ready as new situations arise.
What takes an insurrectionary situation into an actual revolutionary situation is an active layer of the working class organized and disciplined enough to lead workers towards revolutionary aims. The layer must be in constant dialogue with the wider working class, to expand the number of active workers and reflect the demands of workers as they evolve. DSA must carry out this work.
To do so, we must internalize that the class struggle approach that DSA employs is effective precisely because it contains a threat of social revolution: the stronger that threat is, the stronger our class struggle tactics become. DSA, as a part of the advanced layer of workers, must help to expand that threat by actively explaining in all our work — through persuasion and action — that revolution is needed. We must overcome our liberal parliamentary illusions and strive for revolution in our legislative work, and in all of our work, today!
- Lenin, Once Again About the Duma Cabinet ↩︎
- Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution?”, 1 ↩︎
- Lenin, “‘Left-wing’ Communism – An Infantile Disorder,” 61. ↩︎
- Lenin: 1912/6thconf: ELECTIONS TO THE FOURTH DUMA ↩︎
- Badayev, “The Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma” ↩︎
- Ibid, ↩︎
- Ibid, 6 ↩︎
- Ibid, 29 ↩︎
- Ibid, 27 ↩︎
- Ibid, 149 ↩︎
- Lenin, Report of the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. to the Brussels Conference and Instructions to the C.C. Delegation ↩︎
- Ibid ↩︎
- Levine, “Class Struggle and the New Deal”, 56 ↩︎
- Ibid, 114 ↩︎
- King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail ↩︎
- https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/16/politics/martin-luther-king-jr-polling-analysis ↩︎
- https://www.ettingermentum.news/p/exclusive-why-bernie-sanders-is-so ↩︎
Michael LeGore is a member of Seattle DSA and helped lead Seattle DSA's 100k campaign as well as being a steering member of the chapter's Socialist in Office Committee. He is also a member of DSA's Reform & Revolution caucus.
