So far, I’ve talked about structural limitations imposed on the capacity of socialist electeds to get things done, as well as pitfalls that might lead to socialist electeds unnecessarily self-moderating too much, and considerations about what situations might make it strategically useful for socialists to want socialist electeds to strategically and temporarily self-moderate.

This section, however, is about how we might self-impose certain goals and focuses within socialist legislating, to aim our elected officials’ actions toward creating a responsible and democratic socialist revolution by the empowered mass working class. This necessarily closes the doors on some other strategies and tactics—so in that sense these are self-imposed limitations on our socialist electoral strategy.

The revolutionary endpoint of any socialist legislative reform

Let’s imagine if our legislative dreams came true. If we were to get to a point where a (vast) majority of our elected officials were socialist, we would have a great amount of power to achieve working class goals: primarily, large experiments into the broad legal expropriation of the means of production from private control into the control of the workers of the relevant industries and the control of the rest of the affected communities. We would also be able to achieve more coordination for the state-led-production and maintenance of public goods and services.

Government would essentially transform into a set of institutions, values, and norms which exist to coordinate and democratically solve collective action problems among the only remaining economic class, the proletariat. This is essentially what it means for the State to wither away—it would not exist as a power above and separate from the people, and would simply be those large-scale collaborative parts of everyday productive and social life.

It is possible for socialists to gain total legislative power through a sudden political revolution—that is close to what happened with the socialist revolutions of the 1900s: the USSR, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and so on. These revolutions also usually had significant proletarian and peasant movements behind them, rebelling against feudalist social relations and imperialist domination and exploitation.

But these revolutions certainly did not follow the Orthodox Marxist blueprint of the mass working class adopting and taking control over the socialized relations of production which capitalism itself had developed. Instead, those revolutions are better characterized as revolutions in which the country’s communist party saw their chance for political revolution and leaped on it in a kind of (non-derogatory) political opportunism. In the Marxist-Leninist revolutions of the 1900s, a party of communists seized control and hoped to build a technocratic economic revolution after they had successfully achieved a political revolution in the name of and with the consent of the working class.

I think we should focus more on the development of socialized productive forces which tend to lead to socialism, and less on a political-capture-first strategy.

Perhaps there will be a time where such a large political crisis will occur in the USA, when communists can achieve something similar to those socialist revolutions which upended feudal/imperialist relations. But to me, this seems unlikely in the USA. We should not rely on such a political crisis to occur, and there are almost certainly better strategies in these material conditions towards which we should direct our time and energy.

I think we would probably prefer the path to socialist revolution which comes through a mass change in social relations, which is itself spurred by the development of highly efficient democratic productive relations within capitalism. Instead of trying to figure out and develop the positive elements of socialism after the more immediate capture of political power, we might want to focus on developing productive and social relations in the womb of capitalist relations first.

Within capitalism, socialist revolutionaries would aim to build:

• Socialized productive forces. Productive forces are the actualized knowledge and material enablement of practices which create useful goods/items, services/aid, and enjoyable/satisfying environments and lives. Socialized productive forces are those collaborative productive forces which are amenable to socialist social relations, wherein the working class has effective democratic control over the productive forces. Socialized productive forces functionally promote material relations in which the working class engages our capacity for mass coordination and the specialized skills we each develop to solve organizational and collective action problems (particularly in terms of the material reproduction of society), without the need for social relations of domination, violent/deprivational coercion, and exploitation.

• Working Class Organizing Capacity / Socialist Social Relations. I think the main way we build the revolutionary capacity of the working class is by promoting material and social relations in which the working class has informed, inclusive, deliberative, democratic, consequential, and empowered decision making. This allows us to direct more of our labor power for the purpose of revolution. This includes directing our labor power toward actions which break down bourgeois institutional, economic, and social limitations on elected representatives, and which set up more democratic institutional alternatives.

• Class consciousness. This is the conscious awareness of the necessity of class struggle. It is the conscious awareness of the ways that capitalist circuits of production and realization are restricting the effective use of our productive forces to meet our social needs, and restricting our freedom to determine how we want to develop society and ourselves.

The development of these factors would ultimately manifest a socialist revolution. These factors have self-supporting tendencies—socialist productive forces tend to result in socialist productive relations which build more working class organizing capacity and class consciousness, which builds more socialist productive relations, and so on, in a virtuous cycle. It seems likely to me that, in practice, capitalist developments in productive efficiency have tendencies to two kinds of developments in our productive forces (1) more automation and (2) more production relations which rely more heavily on democratic deliberation for information processing in the production process. Both of these can be very amenable to the development of socialist relations and class consciousness.

Notice that I am not advocating some kind of accelerationism. Accelerationism as I understand it is the idea that we should develop of any and all forms of capitalist excess, in the hope that this triggers a massive crisis. My position is clearly not that. I think that a Marxist view of revolutions includes organizing to strengthen and advance the development of what we believe to be more-socialized productive forces, in ways that develop the capacity of the working class to autonomously coordinate production. This is a common and essential practice in socialist organizing, in the promotion of revolutionary unions, worker cooperatives, and social programs. It is also, ultimately, what builds the possibility for a mass movement of the working class to carry out a socialist revolution.

The alternate strategy of political-revolution-first-and-figure-out-the-economic-details-later would force us to play catch-up in terms of building socialist productive forces. While this may have been the only way to achieve a socialist revolution in feudalist and imperialized nations, the historical conditions for socialist revolution are different for the working class in nations in the Global North—that is, nations which have a highly developed form of capitalism and benefit from neo-colonial/imperialist relations.

In the Global North, we don’t have a crisis of a revolution against feudalism and imperialism which we can co-opt into a socialist revolution. Even with environmental crises in global warming and biodiversity loss, the working class of the Global North is dangerously likely to try to seek safety by affiliating themselves with the capitalists of the Global North. Perhaps the struggle against fascism—insofar as the metaphor is true that “fascism is imperialism-turned-inwards”—will be a kind of political crisis which socialist organizers in the Global North can co-opt into a socialist political revolution. But that clearly didn’t happen in Italy, Germany, or Japan. In the United States, and the Global North in general, I think the more Orthodox Marxist approach of economic-revolution-first-leading-to-political-revolution is likely still the most viable way to go.

An economic-revolution-first strategy means practices of class struggle which put the means of production and realization effectively under the control of the mass working class. It means things such as building up worker unions and tenants unions, which gives us practice in coordinating against the capitalist class’ antagonist interests. It also means creating new worker, tenant, and finance cooperatives and converting capitalist businesses into such cooperatives. It likely also means the creation of more consumer cooperatives to exert control over capitalist businesses by selectively putting pressure on their methods of extracting and realizing profits. Even if cooperatives somewhat operate within the market, if they are revolutionary, they ought to also subsidize each other.

Additionally, cooperatives and their members should consciously aim to act, as much as viably possible, with regards to each other according to principles of rewarding people’s efforts and meeting people’s needs, and not according to exchange-value-accumulation-promoting market forces. As we grow the density of  cooperatives and working class institutions, we should be preparingto flip the switch to a that kind of economy based on socialist principles. That is a truly revolutionary position, and a viable end goal.

To some degree, the economic-first-strategy also means the creation of “state-controlled” market sectors, similar to the NHS in Britain. On one hand, these sectors aren’t ideal because the working class has historically only had indirect and mediated control, through government elections, of these sectors’ existence and management. An upside, however, is that state-controlled sectors can make use of the efficiencies of scale which push sectors like healthcare toward monopolization. To both of these points, sectors which are worker-controlled-as-mediated-through-the-state can be made more directly accountable to workers and their affected communities; and more-directly-working-class-controlled sectors also would not give up our efficiencies of scale.

As these revolutionary forms of socialist material and social relations grow, they will show themselves to be viable and desirable replacements to capitalist relations. However, merely gradual reforms to capitalist developments will not deliver us a socialist revolution. Nevertheless, as socialist relations gradually grow, and capitalism generates its own crises, we will almost certainly reach breaking points. When capitalist anarchy (profit seeking behaviors between uncoordinated capitalists trying to get one over on each other) creates its own crises, and socialist material and social relations are broadly known by the working class and are exemplified and advocated for by materially influential working class organizations; then the revolutionary establishment of mass socialist relations will be the obvious, viable solution for the mass working class. Imagine if we had a clear arsenal of socialist policies during the 2008 Housing Crisis—the practices of quantitative easing and bank bailouts would instead have been replaced with policies like the mass socialist redistribution of control over finance capital and the creation of large institutions of decommodified housing.

Revolutions in general...

Notice how this is similar to the capitalist economic and political revolution which overthrew feudalism. Capitalist production relations were developed within feudal ones, until capitalist relations became the dominant form of production. As this happened, capitalist production relations caused a change in our politics to match the needs of the capitalist class—particularly, their need to have a political-economic environment which supported the capitalist mode of production and realization. This meant changes to the political system such as:

• the overthrow of the monarchy and feudal lords for a government composed of representatives of bourgeois interests;

• a heavy emphasis in law on the protection of capitalist property and exchange contracts;

• the spread of free trade;

• fiscal and monetary policy to ensure a balance between effective demand and low wages;

• imperialist domination to supply raw materials and cheap labor power for production, as well as new populations to purchase goods so capitalists can convert their produced commodities back into monetary profit.

We can similarly build socialist relations within capitalism; albeit for the end of classes, not the mere replacement of one exploiter class with another. We would emphasize and develop seeds within capitalism which can grow into a socialist revolution. These seeds would be institutions, values, and norms of working class coordination to solve collective action problems. We would learn to solve problems and handle the production of socially useful items and aid without the need for capitalists—indeed, often in spite of capitalists. We would learn to coordinate among working class groups with less of a focus on the amounts of abstract value being exchanged, and more of a focus on rewarding people’s genuine efforts and creating useful things which meet people’s needs. These are the ultimate goals/results of democratic workplace unions, tenant unions, workplace cooperatives, tenant cooperatives, and other informed and deliberatively democratic community planning groups.

Eventually, with more of these possibilities being instantiated and clearly presented to the working class as viable options, we would likely see gradual economic and political shifts, and then a relatively sudden revolutionary shift to a political-economic environment which supports socialist material and social relations. “Socialist social relations” also doesn’t necessarily mean some form of representative government like we have today. Rather, I imagine it would more likely look like a federation of worker and community councils which help manage a highly automated production process according to the needs of society and nature.

But what do I know about the specifics—at best, I’m simply extrapolating from what I know about the tendencies toward socialized production. Of course, those tendencies have to be worked out and realized in practice, so instead of putting too much weight on utopian musings, let’s focus primarily on scientifically and practically building the world-wide proletariat’s effective control over our means of production.