by The following article is an adapted excerpt from guest contributor Ishan Parasher’s forthcoming book, “The American Road to Socialism: the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy,” which explores how the socialist left can overthrow capitalism in the United States through a political model situated within the specific context of American life.
Revolution in a Democratic Society
This article is going to describe in detail all the ways in which socialism could bring about the “revolutionary transformation” of American society, but what exactly does that mean? The word “revolution” is a loaded phrase in this country, often carrying connotations of violence, chaos, and anarchy. For many on the reactionary right, the word is deliberately associated with totalitarian violence to discredit any transformative political project.
Revolution must indeed be violent at times, particularly in societies that are anti-democratic and deny the working class any peaceful means to affect political change. This type of revolution made sense in imperial Russia, Batista’s Cuba, or 1940s China where violence was the only means by which the masses could affect social change, but it has little bearing in the United States where we do possess some form of democracy, even if it is deeply flawed. For that reason, the American left must reject both the reactionary framings of “revolution” as being inherently totalitarian and the necessity of a violent workers upheaval in lieu of a definition of revolution that is democratic and collective. Revolution in the United States will be brought about by the sustained, democratic transformation of economic, social, political, and cultural institutions. This can’t be accomplished through a single dramatic event but through the cumulative construction of counter-hegemonic institutions and culture that progressively displace capitalist relations and while giving the American working class lived experience of democratic socialist values in their everyday lives.
Marx himself elevated this version of socialist revolution as an acceptable necessity in bourgeois democracies. In an 1872 speech delivered in Amsterdam, Marx declared that “you know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries—such as America…where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.” Friedrich Engels wrote in his 1847 work Principles of Communism that “In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists must … turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat.” Other prominent socialist thinkers of the twentieth century further elucidated on the concept of a democratic revolution. Italian communist Antonio Gramsci postulated the “war of position”—prolonged struggle over meaning, legitimacy and social norms conducted primarily through civil society—which argued that in advanced societies, revolution must transform civil society and cultural consciousness (achieving “hegemony”) before or simultaneously with transforming the state.
One cannot simply win an election and decree socialism into existence because the entire cultural, institutional, and ideological apparatus of capitalist society will resist and undermine that transformation. The revolution must therefore be embedded in everyday life through workplaces, communities, schools, media, and homes and then trickle upwards to create a sustainable socialist project. German communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg shared a somewhat similar perspective to Gramsci, arguing in works like Reform or Revolution (1899) that democratic reforms such as labor protections, social programs, cooperative legislation, environmental regulations are not the revolution itself but the terrain on which the revolution advances. Each reform that expands democratic control over economic life, strengthens working-class institutions, or shifts cultural consciousness toward solidarity and collective self-governance is a step in the revolutionary process. In essence, every workplace organized, every policy victory achieved, and every citizen convinced of the merits of socialism unlocks the revolutionary potential of the entire working class. The revolution is the cumulative result of these reforms and actions, reaching a point where the fundamental structure of economic and social relations has been transformed and the working class has come to understand their own position within the economic structure and the weight of their collective power.
Contemporary theorists have built on these foundations. Erik Olin Wright in Envisioning Real Utopias (2010) described this process as “interstitial transformation”—the building of alternative institutions within the cracks of an existing capitalist society that gradually expand until they displace the old order. Worker cooperatives, community land trusts, participatory budgeting experiments, and solidarity economies are all examples of what Wright called “real utopias,” or institutions that demonstrate the viability of democratic socialist organization on a small scale while creating the foundation for larger-scale transformation. Wright’s framework reinforces the ideas of Gramsci and Luxemburg that revolution in a democratic society is built from the ground up through the patient construction of alternatives to capitalism and not imposed from above through the seizure of state power. The question for American socialists today is how this framework applies specifically to the conditions of twenty-first-century America. It is from this question that an alternative theory of revolution emerges.
Revolution as a Collective Institution
This theory of leftist revolution shares this perspective that the choice between reform and revolution is a false dichotomy. Policy reforms that occur under leftist governance should be understood as the terrain on which revolution occurs. Each win makes the American working class more comfortable with the idea of socialism and alters the ways in which people live to be more in line with the practices and values of socialism. This is why revolution should be understood as a collective institution, one that is shaped by those who are participating in it. The revolution can be whatever we want it to be in terms of both rhetoric and practice and, as a result, can slowly shift American society in a more socialist direction through our activism, our interactions with those in our community, and our electoral organizing.
This understanding of revolution is what fundamentally distinguishes this theory of change from liberal or progressive reformism. Every progressive reform movement in American history has eventually succumbed to a rollback because they merely reformed capitalism without transforming the underlying structures of economic power that would lay the foundations for socialist revolution in this country. Their reliance on redistribution without democratization of ownership left their gains vulnerable to the next wave of reactionary backlash. It wasn’t a failure of specific policies, but a structural feature of reform within capitalism.
This is what Rosa Luxemburg meant when she outlined how reform is the terrain on which revolution occurs. Policy reforms alone cannot free the working class from the tyranny of capitalism. Instead, they are a tool of reshaping how people interact with economic and social institutions (the war of position), which then pushes America toward socialism.
The democratic revolution isn’t one action but many happening simultaneously across every domain of social life. It is the construction of cooperative enterprises that progressively replace capitalist firms. It is the building of labor unions that organize the working class as a political and economic force with collective revolutionary potential. It is the creation of popular assemblies that democratize community governance. It is the transformation of education, media, and culture to cultivate democratic consciousness rather than capitalist ideology. It is the pursuit of electoral power to reshape the state, while maintaining independent mass organizations that hold elected officials accountable and push them beyond what the system would otherwise allow. It is the restructuring of foreign policy around solidarity and anti-imperialism rather than imperial domination.
But it is also much smaller than that. The “revolution” is every door we knock in support of a socialist candidate running for office, every worker or tenant we organize into a union, and every mass protest movement we launch. It is every friend, loved one, or neighbor we agitate and organize, and it is every dollar we contribute to mass organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Yet, individual acts of organizing and agitation, however necessary, cannot by themselves transform a system whose institutions are structurally designed to resist that transformation. This form of revolution requires grassroots activism and a clear-eyed understanding of the state and its relationship to capital.
This is the framework the British sociologist Ralph Miliband outlined in his books The State in Capitalist Society (1969) and Marxism and Politics (1977). Winning elections in a capitalist democracy alone won’t bring about the end of capitalism because the capitalist state isn’t a neutral instrument that can simply be captured through elections, but a complex of institutions that are structurally biased toward capital. Miliband, however, rejects the Leninist framework of violent revolution for liberal democratic societies, instead positing a two-stage approach for democratic socialists of simultaneously contesting state power through elections while building popular power outside the state through movements and institutions. This dual strategy is at the center of this conception of political organizing.
The fundamental principle of Marxism is that only the working class can decide their fate. It is for that reason that the working class has the power to decide what their revolution looks like. This is the democratic promise of this alternate conception of revolution. It isn’t directed by a party, a leader, or a theoretical blueprint, but is directed by the collective deliberation and action of the American working class organizing in their workplaces, communities, unions, and democratic institutions. This is not a prescription for what the revolution must be but a framework for what it could become.
Ishan Parasher
Ishan Parasher is a fourth year student at the George Washington University studying International Affairs and Arabic. He is a member of Metro DC DSA and has participated in the Zohran Mamdani and Janeese Lewis George campaigns. Ishan is the author of an upcoming book, "The American Road to Socialism: the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy."
