“Can Socialists Govern a Capitalist State?” Max Elbaum’s recent article in Convergence poses a sharp question about socialist strategy. We’re organizing a round table of responses to explore, debate, and develop these ideas. All views expressed are the authors’ own. In this contribution, Tom Goodkind argues that the fight for governing power requires socialist organization. It takes organized leadership to draw collective lessons from our victories and defeats. This piece was written shortly before the midterms, which have only increased the urgency of Max’s contribution and this discussion.
Interested in contributing to the discussion? Contact submissions@liberationroad.org
By Tom Goodkind
In today’s socialist left, there are those who acknowledge the need to fight for “governing power” and those who believe it’s a trap. Those who believe it’s a trap are not just talking through their hats, since one could argue it’s a trap into which many social-democratic and even communist parties have fallen in the past. Even among those who endorse fighting for governing power, there are many concerns, questions, and divisions. One of the most significant current divisions, for example, is between those who believe the fight for governing power must restrict itself to economic issues only (the “affordability agenda”), and those who believe in extending that fight to include a range of broader democratic issues such as mass deportation, voting rights, trans rights, reproductive rights, imperialist war, and more.
With his exploration of governing power, Max Elbaum has done our movements a great service. He has given us a persuasive description of “governing power,” including its uses and inevitable hazards, and articulated its strategic significance for the socialist left both in this current fraught conjuncture as well as for our long-term aims both domestically and internationally. And he frames the positive vision driving today’s governing-power-building strategy as a broad “Third Reconstruction,” which I think is exactly correct.
Here I want to explore some of the concepts introduced by Max, and mention a few places where he may skip too lightly over some of our challenges. I’ll try to provide a little additional theoretical foundation for the “governing power” concept, and I’ll argue that:
Governing power is not just a quick ticket to winning reforms or spreading socialist ideas (though it is critical to those aims). It is a terrain on which socialists must learn to organize, build alliances, exercise responsibility, and develop leadership and organization in order to deepen our roots among the working-class, deliver real blows against the enemy, realize structural reforms, and prepare a socialist transition.
Fights for governing power can engage the masses in their millions, but experience alone does not automatically produce political clarity: movements need deeply based, unified, centralized organization and leadership to help people draw lessons from struggle.
In our deformed democracy, stamped by slavery and settler colonialism, movements for what Lenin called “consistent democracy” will inevitably seek redress through the parliamentary state apparatus, and those efforts at federal, state, and municipal levels must play a central role in any revolutionary strategy.
Governing Power is not State Power
Max is clear that a “measure” of contested power, both legislative and executive (i.e., “governing power”) is not the same as “state power.” But what then is “state power”? Sometimes socialists have thought of the state simply as an “instrument” which can be seized and wielded, or perhaps (like Marx in 1871) a machine which can be smashed and replaced with something brand new. In both cases the state is understood as little more than “armed bodies of men” plus a bureaucratic parliament, executive offices, courts, and prisons. And both tendencies have often seen it as a collection of “organs” operated in unity by an executive brain (the ruling class).
Especially in this period of highly developed and intrusive imperialist states, it’s more useful to think of the state as a complex web of apparatuses/institutions permeated and structured by class struggle. Each apparatus has both repressive and ideological aspects, and it is through this web that a ruling class alliance asserts its hegemony, and within which ruled classes and class fractions may struggle to contest that hegemony.
Discussions of governing power are mostly about contesting within the parliamentary/representative apparatuses at federal, state, and municipal levels. But state power is also exerted and ruling class hegemony also molded through many other apparatuses: the courts, the administrative state (Max includes a good discussion of the “welfare state”), the schools (from preK to graduate school and beyond), religious institutions (very differently in the U.S. than in European countries with “official” state religions), media and cultural institutions, the trade unions (nobody would have questioned this designation during the 24-year reign of George Meany, first president of the AFL-CIO), the family, and certainly in those “organs” of capitalist repression, the police, military, and prisons (which also have both repressive and ideological aspects).
Insofar as a ruling class or alliance of ruling class fractions exerts power and constructs hegemony through these apparatuses/institutions, they can all best be understood as terrains of class struggle (and not simply struggle between workers and capitalists, but among all the class actors in a particular social formation).
In contrast, the use of “state” in the otherwise helpful slogan cited by Max, “with the state, against the state, beyond the state,” taken from the terrific “No Shortcuts” article by Gunnett Kaaf and Mazibuko Jara, is a narrow one: the “state” is pretty much synonymous with “the government.” That’s fine, so long as we understand that bourgeois state power is wielded well beyond the governmental apparatuses, and grasp that a socialist left aiming to create a historic bloc capable of doing the same must carry out its work in every apparatus through which capitalism rules, alongside those few truly independent working-class institutions which we are able to stand up (such as a deeply mass-based socialist party).
Engaging the Parliamentary/Representative State Apparatus
That said, if “the government”—in particular the parliamentary/representative apparatus—is one of many apparatuses through which the ruling class rules, it is not just one of many: it is critical to our efforts in the other apparatuses and institutions: not only to undermine and defend ourselves against the most repressive apparatuses, but also to root out the ten thousand ways in which the capitalist-dominated state exerts power throughout our society. This is one way to understand Max’s directive that “every possible step is taken to weaken the state structures that are most tied to maintaining capitalism, whatever amount of governing power the Left holds at a given time.” And this emphasis on weakening these critical state structures is one component of what it means to say, as Lenin did, that “politics takes precedence over economics.”
We socialists have a great deal of experience in the contest for hegemony within certain apparatuses dominated by capitalist ideology and regulation—for example, the trade union and educational apparatuses. It’s not difficult for us to imagine contesting for power in other apparatuses as well, such as the media, faith institutions, the courts perhaps, and even the family (thanks to the movements of oppressed genders). But do we imagine contesting within those apparatuses whose main function is repression—the military, police, and prisons? Less so today than in the days of the Vietnam War, but we must: these predominantly repressive apparatuses are being and will be used against us, and ultimately organizing mass discontent within those accessible to that kind of organizing—the military, the national guards, the prisons—will be critical to neutralizing their effect. Finally, as Max has argued, despite the fear and loathing of many socialists, we must contest for power within the parliamentary/representative apparatus, including in both its legislative and executive functions.
Terrains of Struggle
If “the modern state is…a terrain of class struggle,” as Max asserts (following Nicos Poulantzas), it’s worth thinking about how diverse and enormous that terrain is: it includes all those apparatuses and institutions through which the ruling class rules. The terrain is the territory on which and in which we live and engage our friends and enemies in a protracted war of position. It’s the landscape we study, interact with, and alter through struggle. In labor organizing terms, it is the landscape of workplaces whose product is bourgeois hegemony, and we have to colonize all of them. In this landscape, there are indeed mountains beyond mountains.
But if that’s “terrain,” then what is “struggle”? Think of “the point of production.” Nearly all socialists recognize at some level that the workplace is a terrain of class struggle, and one from which we cannot abstain if we wish to build any kind of powerful working-class movement. But there have over the years been many different approaches to “struggle” even on that particular terrain. One of the most common differences in the 1970s was between those newly minted socialists who entered the factories and shipyards and spent years learning and embedding themselves in attempts to build up a radicalized workers’ movement, and on the other hand, those less patient comrades who would turn up at the factory or shipyard gates with their newspapers filled with exclamation points.
There are those who might grant that the state is a “terrain of class struggle” but interact with it as if it were a factory gate ripe for outside agitation and propaganda only, rather than a terrain on which—like all terrains of class struggle—direct observation, study, engagement, and organization must be coupled with the inspirational speeches and lessons delivered to the masses. It’s the difference between “inside” and “outside.”
In the particular factory (some might say “sausage factory”) of bourgeois political rule that is the parliamentary apparatus, we must be prepared to labor there not so much because there is significant working-class representation there now, but because there must eventually be in order to disrupt the production of bourgeois hegemony, not to mention make real changes in the working and living conditions of our class. And laboring there bears some similarity to the laboring many of us have done in workplaces: it can take a long time, it requires a lot of observation and experimentation, and it must all be connected to what Max calls a “full-spectrum struggle”—that struggle on all fronts which helps drive advances on this terrain. Work here demands organizing, alliance-building, leadership development, mass messaging, creativity, flexibility, and a willingness to exercise power built on a bedrock of socialist principle.
Is there a danger of reformism in this kind of burrowing into a state apparatus? Absolutely. Ideally this work is done collectively, in close coordination with a broad-based socialist organization with unified aims and a commitment to collective summation and self-examination. But it is easy to get waylaid in an arena which thrives on individual celebrity and is rife with corruption. And even those comrades impervious to those temptations can fall prey to the illusion that their activities represent the whole path to power, rather than just one (essential) stretch of it.
Nevertheless, at this moment, the main risk comes not from those who wish to experiment on this terrain, but from those on the left who believe such activity is permissible only so long as we restrict ourselves to acting as agitational “tribunes of the people,” leaving untouched the innumerable organizational, leadership, and complex alliance-building tasks associated with struggle on this particular terrain. That one-sided, dogmatic, and fundamentally abstentionist emphasis is akin to leafleting outside the factory gates, which remains a path of guaranteed isolation.
As Max notes, there are a number of practical reasons for engaging in the fight for governing power. For example, he makes the undeniable point that “insurgent campaigns in Democratic primaries have clearly contributed to the spread of anti-capitalist ideas and the growth of radical and socialist organizations. Left-wing electeds— Mamdani in particular—have produced gains for (and mitigated harms against) workers and the popular majority while promoting immigrant rights, anti-racism, and opposition to US support for Israel’s Gaza genocide.” I would add one more justification that seems especially relevant for a growing but still underdeveloped and uncoordinated socialist movement: in addition to power-building agitation, organization, construction of alliances, winning of reforms, and spreading socialist ideas, elections also provide measures of our strength, identifying where geographically and socially we are strong and where weak. Some may be astonished to learn that even at the height of the Russian revolution, the Bolsheviks insisted on running candidates in November 1917 for the Constituent Assembly, and they paid close attention to the geographic and social/class distribution of the numerical results (see Lenin, “The Constituent Assembly Elections and The Dictatorship of the Proletariat”).
Rupture, Rapture, and the Conscious Portion
While citing positive examples of our early experiments with governing power, Max doesn’t shy away from the fact that “…holding governing power in a capitalist state creates a contradictory and unstable situation.” He goes further, stating correctly that “for good reason, there is doubt that electoral victories, even when backed by powerful grassroots-based organizations, will get us to socialism.” He also asserts, “Most socialists, while participating in these fights, have concluded from their theoretical reflection and historical analysis that socialism will not be achieved via elections.” (While I agree with Max’s conclusion about the limits of electoral politics, I’m not as sure as he that “most socialists” would.) And he argues—again correctly, in my opinion—that “There is overwhelming evidence that the fight for governing power within capitalism is a stage of struggle that cannot be skipped. Rather, it is necessary to develop a working class-led movement broad enough, rooted enough, savvy enough, and positioned well enough to bring about a ‘revolutionary rupture’ that dismantles the capitalist state if and when conditions to do so…arise.”
But this emphasis on a revolutionary rupture in turn raises important questions. I think there are many reasons to argue that “socialism will not be achieved via elections,” which is to say will not be achieved without extreme violence inflicted on our people by the ruling class. And Max is correct when he points out that attempts “to overturn a developed capitalist state solely by acting outside the state…have never gained as much strength as projects that have fought for influence inside as well as outside the capitalist state.” But the fact is, even among those more well-rounded, wider-spectrum projects, exactly none within highly developed capitalist states with traditions of bourgeois democracy have led to that desired revolutionary “Rupture,” which so far remains as evasive as the “Rapture.” Clearly there remains a lot of experimentation to do.
Speaking of things that history demonstrates, I was struck that Max’s description of the working class-led movement which would bring about the revolutionary rupture—”broad enough, rooted enough, savvy enough, and positioned well enough”—doesn’t say “organized enough.” And when he refers to “the most conscious portion of the popular insurgency [which] understands that holding governing power in a capitalist state creates a contradictory and unstable situation,” there seems to be a symptomatic silence about what that “most conscious portion” actually is, how it is assembled, how it organizes itself to lead, and how it understands anything at all. I am of course raising the hoary issue of the so-called “conscious element,” the “vanguard,” or whatever we wish to call the unified formation of advanced leaders of the working class—always necessary, but especially so in such unstable situations as Max describes.
This is particularly problematic because so much of Max’s argument—with which I agree—relies on the fact, stressed by Lenin himself, that the working class will only learn the true nature and limitations of bourgeois democracy through their own experience (but not without help!); or as Max says, “…the mass of the working class and its allies learn that lesson through their own experience; that is, through traveling the electoral route and pushing it to its limits.” He does allow that “left propaganda plays an important role in driving home the point,” but it’s not propaganda alone which makes sense of the working class’s lived political experience: it’s coordination, mobilization, organization, agitation, popular collective summation, and all the things which only a leading socialist organization can provide. In the U.S., which lacks that kind of unified and deeply based leading organization, fights for governing power are an essential part of the work necessary to construct one. But its lack will always hamper those fights, because it will be difficult to connect them to the full-spectrum struggle and correct our inevitable mistakes as we go. Without that kind of centralized leadership, composed precisely of “the most conscious portion of the popular insurgency,” I’m afraid the lessons learned from the experience of millions will be partial at best and destructive at worst.
Consistent Democracy and the Peculiar Nature of U.S. Capitalist Rule
Another point based in history, particularly our own in the U.S., and raised by Max in relation to the Third Reconstruction framework, is the centrality of white supremacy to bourgeois rule, and therefore its particular distortions of bourgeois democracy. For confirmation we need look no further than our constitution, a constitution of slaveholders. Has that foundational document, with its fundamental white-supremacist influences, made radical fights for governing power misguided?
Peter Frase, in an article cited by Max, highlights a fundamental contradiction underlying differing Left approaches to the Mamdani governing terrain. It is true that so long as socialists are working within a capitalist state—and even when they are working in a socialist state, since class struggle has been proven to exist in those as well—antagonistic contradictions will abound. But we are not without long and fertile experience navigating such contradictions. Think about our movements attacking key pillars of white supremacist bourgeois rule throughout U.S. history, including those aimed directly at white-supremacist national oppression as well as those aimed at male supremacy and heteropatriarchy. Could they have had any success without engaging the electoral and judicial terrains? Consider how the First Reconstructionists used the slaveholders’ constitution and the capitalist state apparatus—including its military—as shields behind which to organize their democratic struggle. Note how the Second Reconstructionists of the Civil Rights Movement fought and died for equal access to the deeply flawed representative institutions of bourgeois democracy. And on our enemies’ side, think about how the parliamentary and judicial apparatuses have been used today at both federal and state levels as powerful weapons to restructure white privilege in direct response to that Second Reconstruction. These represent antagonistic contradictions which we cannot hope to avoid or resolve by abstaining from governing power battles; in fact, in the history of our people’s long struggles for freedom and consistent democracy, battles around governing power have often been central—and that is not likely to change anytime soon.
Tides Flow and Ebb
As I write this, the Workers’ Party of Brazil has pulled off an amazing feat of mass mobilization, but we can’t be confident that it will stem the ebbing of Latin America’s Pink Tide. Brazilian leftists quickly drew lessons from the defeat in the first round of elections, and there are undoubtedly lessons to be learned from this stunning victory. No doubt there are many lessons to be drawn from events in Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and elsewhere. Were these radical experiments in governing power condemned to failure from the start? Is there a fatal flaw in every governing power strategy? So far, Mexico and Brazil say no, and whatever the answer, we U.S. leftists clearly have a special responsibility to resist and undermine our rulers’ imperialist designs on both countries and all of Latin America. But it’s also not a bad time to invoke former UK Labour Party leader and PM Gordon Brown’s observation that “In establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries are always the hardest.” That goes not just for the bourgeois rule of law, but for leftwing governing power, and—I’d argue—for socialism itself. And for the U.S. Left in particular, losing a pink-tide-level election with 45% of the vote as in Brazil’s first round—despite its pain and potentially devastating consequences—would represent an almost unfathomable advance.
Some folks cited by Max tend to portray governing power as a smooth, peaceful transition: “Over time,” suggest the authors of “Building Governing Power to Make the World We Need, “this will enable us to reshape the structure of the government itself, so that it can advance democratic control, redistribution and reparation.” I doubt it will be so. It will feel at times like a revolution. There will be glorious victories and devastating defeats. It will be a path to power populated by heroes but also littered with betrayals. And all the while, there will be those on the sidelines yelling, “It is impermissible to take responsibility for government! We must remain in opposition only!” They will be left behind, but those millions walking this path—which never ends, by the way—will stay on course only with the most resourceful, observant, creative, democratic, disciplined and well-organized of leaderships.
We still need to create that leadership. Some on our left may prefer to stand outside the gates of this governing power terrain, new and strange to many, with their virtual newspapers and exclamation points. For the rest of us, it’s time to put on our work clothes, pack our lunches, pick up our tools, walk through those gates, and set up shop. We don’t know exactly what will happen, but we’ll keep our eyes and ears wide open and learn as we go. We’ll have the benefit of history’s many lessons, both positive and negative, and we won’t be alone. We still have a world to build, and learning to build this kind of power is what serving the people means in this moment.
Tom Goodkind is a longtime machinist, rank-and-file labor activist, union president, and Liberation Road member.
i think this a great article, nuanced, perceptive and speaks to what I believe is the burning question