As with most insurgent movements, the rise of Anglo-American ‘democratic socialism’ in the latter half of the 2010s was experienced in two conflicting ways by those of the left. On the one hand, both participants and friendly onlookers asserted its originality, newness, and shining potentiality. On the other, the sense that this had been tried before, that ‘democratic socialist’ policies barely aspired to more than watered down New Deal social democracy, and that participants were engaged in bad hope, brought on by political amnesia. In the first article in this series, we took seriously the democratic socialist claim that their strategy was a more or less original attempt to navigate between a straightforwardly revolutionary and a gradualist or social-democratic strategy, which thereby presented a solution to the failure of both routes in a capitalist-democratic context. To do so, we looked at that seemingly inescapable watchword of the democratic socialist movement during the period – non-reformist reforms. In this second article of three, we turn our thoughts to the democratic socialist strategy regarding the state.
In and Against the State
In Theory…
In the years 2015-2020, when discussions moved toward the question of the state, if it was not said explicitly, then it seemed as if the strategy of in and against the state would be expressed in some roundabout way, quite inevitably. But let us not be so roundabout and proceed, as we did with non-reformist reforms, to first briefly define this strategy.
The strategy of in and against the state begins by adopting a particular understanding of the state in capitalist society. According to this conception, the state does not simply exist as a monolithic institution with a single overarching function (e.g., repression of the working class) but is instead a crystallisation of the ever-changing class relations in society at large. It follows from this understanding that while the state is not class neutral, it is a terrain of struggle between contesting class forces within it, and its many activities and functions are continually fought over and reshaped by these forces. The state therefore also embodies within it the results of past class struggles and the inter-class squabbles of fractions of classes – financial capitalists, landlords, industrialists, etc.1 Nevertheless, since the capitalist class is the dominant class in society, all the particular apparatuses of the state become configured in such a way that states tend to organise the capitalist class as a whole while disorganising the working class.2 It also, therefore, broadly stands in a relation of dominance and control to individual members of that latter class.3
With this understanding established, we can see the strategy of in and against the state be quite intuitively derived: socialist actors must seek to modify the relationship of class forces within the state, thereby making progress toward the transformation of its functions, activities and institutions in favour of the popular masses rather than the capitalist class.4 Such an undertaking requires the interplay of two connected tasks. Firstly, in entering the state via elections, socialist actors must seek to undermine centres of concentrated bourgeois power manifested in particular institutions (e.g., the treasury) whilst expanding or creating centres of popular power. In practice, this means, amongst other measures, the democratisation of any number of state functions (budgeting, investment, welfare provision, etc.), the deeper, institutionalised involvement of state-employee unions in state activity, and institutions to facilitate the democratic input of users of state services. This, then, is the second task. Since the state exists more broadly as a condensation of class forces in society, a left government can only successfully tip the balance of power in favour of the working class with a mass class-based movement external to the state that also pushes the state in the same direction. A strategy of in and against the state requires socialist actors to “combin[e] the transformation of representative democracy with the development of forms of direct, rank-and-file democracy or the movement for self-management”.5 It is, in the final instance, the organic, productive relationship between mass working-class power and the transformed elements of the existing liberal state that is sufficient to create the new terrain of the state as a whole and lay the ground for a rupture or series of ruptures that proceed in a socialist direction.6
This, roughly presented, was the formulation made by influential New Left socialist Nicos Poulantzas in his 1978 book State, Power, Socialism,7 a conception of the state held by elements of the amorphous ‘libertarian left’ following 1968.8 Notably, it was this left in Britain that produced a pamphlet—In and Against the State9—which grapples with the position of public sector employees and their relation to the state. Once again, it was a key strategic concept from the days of the New Left that found itself amongst the democratic socialists of the US and Britain in the latter half of the 2010s.
… and in Practice
Let us inspect how this strategy was put into practice. We can see again how the democratic socialists, on the question of the state, attempted to plot a route between the social-democratic and the revolutionary.
In Britain, the strategy was espoused quite explicitly. Perhaps most prominently, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell argued across speeches,10 interviews11 and articles12 for the necessity, for a socialist project, of going “within the state institutions to change the state relationship from one of dominance to democratic control”13 and “open[ing] up the doors of the state itself”.14 At TWT, in 2018 and 2019, the festival held discussions on the movement’s relationship to the state, with speakers, including McDonnell, Hilary Wainwright, and Leo Panitch, arguing for this strategy. Recommended reading leading up to the 2019 panel included Poulantzas’ key work on the in and against strategy, as well as the original In and Against the State pamphlet from the London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group and a 2018 article by Panitch and his collaborator Sam Gindin of the same name. Momentum co-founder James Schneider argues for the strategy in his 2020 series of articles, How We Win.
In the US, this strategy is less evident in that many of the manifesto-like texts contain only cursory outlines of such a strategy – often broadly asserting the state’s non-neutrality15 and the necessity of democratising it and its functions.16 However, where the question of the state is more explicit, we can see a range of Jacobin articles17 and debates in DSA caucus publications18 that advocate for this strategy. We might explain the difference between the British and US contexts by pointing to the fact that the democratic socialists of the Labour left felt more immediately the necessity of developing a theory of state since it was they (i.e. the left of the Labour Party) who may soon enter it as a government. In the US, there was no possibility of a government of DSA-aligned figures beyond the presence of a small number of affiliated lawmakers, and the question of what to do with the state was less pressing.
John McDonnell relates his in and against position to Labour’s policy on the Treasury. He told the 2018 Labour Conference that “for too long the establishment has used the Treasury as a barrier against putting power back into the hands of the people. [. . . ] So we will reprogramme the Treasury, rewriting its rule books on how it makes decisions about what, when and where to invest”.19 As part of this, the Treasury’s ‘Green Book’, the guidelines about how it approves decisions regarding state-funded projects, would be re-evaluated by a Corbyn-led Labour government,20 and the Treasury itself would be broken up, locating many of its functions to the North and devolving decision-making structures to regional and local elected officials there.21 McDonnell affirmed in 2018 that, under a Labour government, “the full weight of the Treasury will be used to take on any vested interests that try to thwart the will of the people”. Thus, the Treasury as a centre of capitalist power would be undermined, and the institution would be put in a relationship with a closer (though not direct) form of democratic participation, in theory beginning to transform its relation to the working class.
Though somewhat vague (how and to what extent would the Green Book be re-evaluated?), we can draw a distinctly non-social-democratic disposition from this policy. The archetypical social-democratic vision of the state paints it as fundamentally neutral and autonomous22. It is neutral because it is not affected by external societal or structural forces (such as business interests) beyond one-off instances of bribery, corruption, etc. It is autonomous because the state, led by a government, can act upon society from above it. Indeed, this is the strategy of the social democrat. Because the state is neutral, a social-democratic government can be elected unproblematically. Because it is autonomous, a social-democratic government can freely implement its policy of a smooth road to reform into society. McDonnell is quite clear that the state is not autonomous – it is not an effective instrument which, picked up and used, can simply enact socialist ends upon society because its institutions are oriented to perform a capitalist task – hence the need for radical treasury reform. Nor does such a policy indicate that the democratic socialist McDonnell considers the state neutral. The state is quite clearly on the side of the capitalist, whose interests are fundamentally minoritarian, and cannot countenance “power [in] the hands of the people” – hence the need to reshape the state’s non-neutrality toward the interests of the worker.
A well-documented23 problem with the social-democratic perspective on the state is its power to neutralise the social-democratic elements who enter it, even those with socialist aims. Vossing24 notes, perhaps more profoundly, that even the existence of a ‘high inclusion’ capitalist-democratic state reshapes the choices of labour elites such that they turn toward the administration of the state in slightly favourable terms as their prime aim and away from any revolutionary or even socialistic goal. The in and against strategy, on the other hand, reshapes the nature of this inclusion. By empowering organs of direct democracy while simultaneously pitting them against identified centres of elite power within the state, the inclusion of the workers’ movement seeks to polarise and radicalise rather than pacify. Indeed, the more the democratic socialists are brought into the state machine, the more intense the fight becomes. This is the argument presented by Wainwright,25 who cites the activities of the late Greater London Council as attempting to put this into practice – empowering community groups in London to create policy around service provision and local economics while polarising against the national Conservative government. It is this period of the GLC that John McDonnell explicitly references as inspiration for his in and against the state vision for a Labour government.26
Neither Reformism nor Revolutionism (Again)
In and against the state is not a social-democratic strategy, nor is it revolutionary in the straightforward sense. For the imagined archetypical revolutionary socialist27 – the state is utterly non-neutral and non-autonomous. It is not neutral because it is wholly aligned with the interests of the bourgeois capitalist class, in whose interest it exclusively operates, and it is not autonomous because it is completely submerged into the economic sphere, which imposes onto it its bourgeois character. The revolutionary perspective demands that the socialist treat the state as a fortress, building a movement that can surround it from the outside and creating a situation of dual power that can lead to its thorough smashing. This is entirely opposed to the democratic socialist strategy. However, it is not enough to say just that; it also attempts to avoid certain problems with the revolutionary strategy.
In the US, DSA activist and theorist Eric Blanc argues explicitly for socialists (his audience being the DSA) to agitate to further democratise the US state as “a jumping off point for anticapitalist transformation”28 and does so against the revolutionary socialist impulse to write off the capitalist-democratic state as illegitimate. He and his comrades in DSA’s Bread and Roses caucus make such a call – giving as examples the abolition of the electoral college, the implementation of proportional representation, and the restriction of judicial and presidential powers over a newly empowered legislature29 – precisely because, though the US state is deeply undemocratic by modern standards, it nevertheless does have some legitimacy amongst the population. Because the democratic socialist strategy asserts the limited legitimacy of the state, particularly its hard-won democratic elements, this gives the socialist project legitimacy. This strategy is advantageous, or so argues Blanc, in a formally ‘high inclusion’ democracy like the USA, where there is popular suffrage and some union integration into the state. This is because the natural tendency of such a society is to produce a labour politics that is itself moderate and engages with the willingly cooperative state, a rational move for labour leaders who identify a success rate by this route. This is compared to intransigently anti-state revolutionary politics, which appeared rational to workers and labour leaders when there was no possible collaboration with an unwilling ‘low inclusion’ state but is irrational now that labour can have a say within state politics through elections and union/state collaboration. Given this setup, the democratic socialist state-strategy can, so Blanc hopes, create a third option, which allows the tendency for rational engagement with the high-inclusion state by workers, but while making such engagement disruptive in a socialist direction and such disruption, in turn, legitimate.30
With such legitimacy, the democratic socialist takes a preferable defensive position, as we saw with the non-reformist reform, against which the forces of reaction must attack to counter a popular mandate. Again, this opposes the revolutionary strategy, which must make a headlong offensive. Blanc mobilises the historical example of the Finnish revolution, which began with a socialist government instituting universal men’s suffrage. In response, anti-socialist forces dissolved the popular government and, in defence of that government and its reforms, the populace began a period of revolution.31 So again, we see pretty clearly that the democratic socialist strategy, in relation to the state, attempts to address some challenges presented by the social-democratic and revolutionary approaches. The former hops too easily into bed with the state bureaucracy and finds itself settling for a, perhaps, better-managed capitalism. The latter attempts endlessly to mobilise the population against a semi-democratic state that we, however resentful, have some attachment to, our (great) grandparents having fought for its better elements. In and against the state attempts to navigate between both.
Against “In and Against the State”
We can now dismiss arguments that simply read off the signifier of democratic socialism’s engagement with the state and make a simple equivalence with a social-democratic strategy. British communists of the AngryWorkers collective argue that “democratic socialist strategies are based on the [false] assumption that the state stands above ‘capitalism’ and could intervene in it as a politically neutral form”32 and that this is key to its failure. This kind of argument fails. With a proper view of the strategy, though, better critiques can be made.
We should first briefly relitigate the issue encountered by non-reformist reforms, which applies similarly to the in and against strategy. The power the strategy hopes to provide to the working class through ‘throwing open the doors of the state’ is, to a large extent, necessary for that very act of democratisation. How can the reconfiguration of the treasury, or the conversion of Congress into a parliament based on PR, empower the working class with the democratic capacity to defend those changes if it lacks the power to defeat the sabotage that will surely come before initial democratising reforms can be achieved? The successful example of the GLC seems quite different to an attempt to democratise the national state, where the will to sabotage will surely be much greater. However, there were also fewer structural and more specific issues with the strategy. Glaringly absent in the democratic socialist literature in the period was the consideration of the police and the army. Despite a senior serving general publicly predicting a coup should a Corbyn-led government attempt to shrink the armed forces or withdraw from NATO, the emphasis of democratic socialists of the Labour left remained on elements of the state that appeared more contestable, such as the Treasury, public services, and civil service. In the US, Blanc, discussing early-20th century ‘pope of Marxism’ Karl Kautsky’s socialist strategy,33 praises his position on the abolition of the army, but does not seem to take this forward into lessons for today.
This focus on the state’s less explicitly coercive and violent elements perhaps reflects the in and against strategy’s seemingly necessary charitability about the capitalist-democratic state despite its admitted non-neutrality. At the heart of the democratic socialist conception of the state is an emphasis on those elements won by working-class struggle – both democratic34 and social-provisionary. But the elements of the state that more directly face many working-class people, and particularly its racialised, immigrant and under-employed layers, are elements with no intuitive legitimacy and that do not represent a terrain of struggle that might be won: the police,35 prisons, invasive means-tested social security, and so on. Equally, how can we neatly separate the brutal violence of the US empire and its British lackey from the other state functions to maintain capitalist interests?36 If we begin with these elements of the state, we might arrive at a very different kind of state strategy, and one that does not act based on the semi-legitimacy of the capitalist-democratic state in comparison to absolutist, colonial or fascistic states. Perhaps an in and against strategy can be maintained here, but only if, like Blanc’s historical examples, the strategy takes just as seriously the abolition of the coercive elements of the state as it does the expansion of democratic elements. This, however, the democratic socialists of our period did not do.37
This was, perhaps, part of the reason for the democratic socialist retreat in 2020. When protests and riots began in the US in response to the murder by police of a Black man, George Floyd, and subsequently against the very role of police in society, and spread to several other countries, the democratic socialist under-emphasis of coercive elements of the state in the years prior became felt. While the DSA and democratic socialists in Britain supported the movement, their general optimism about the transformational possibilities of the state ground against the mood of the protests and left them poorly placed to capitalise upon them. Their strategy of engagement rather than an assault on the state also stood in total contrast with the burning of police stations and the creation of short-lived, unstable autonomous zones38 (the apparent irrationality of revolutionary politics in a ‘high inclusion democracy’ be damned). Theoretically speaking, the democratic socialists became suddenly in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What is apparent then is that a socialist approach to the state, whatever its theoretical intricacies,39 cannot ignore the brutality and violence that the state deals out. This is perhaps too obvious. However, we can see how bad hope can pervade when the irresistible opportunity for some control of that state arises. It is easier and nicer to think of how, in power, we might democratise childcare instead of a more thorny question of how we might begin to abolish policing and the armed forces. Nevertheless, if socialism is ever to become the expression of a working-class movement, it must reflect, in theory, that class’s real antagonism with the repressive arm of the state, where food riots and anti-racist uprisings are only the most dramatic example. But we need not invent new theories and strategies wholesale. Anti-militarism and abolition are an integral part of the history of socialist thought and practice, and this must return as a centrepiece of our strategy. Surely, we can aspire to the goals of our forebears of over 150 years ago who, in Paris, as their first decree in power, announced the abolition of police and army and “the substitution for it of the armed people”.40
Notes
1 London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, In and Against the State, (London: Verso, 2021) 54; Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, (London: Verso, 2014), 129-130.
2 Rooksby, Socialist Strategy, 38.
3 London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, In and Against, 52-54.
4 Poulantzas, State, 259.
5 Ibid. 261-262.
6 Rooksby, Socialist Strategy, 40.
7 Poulantzas, State.
8 Seth Wheeler, Interview with John McDonnell, in: In and Against the State, (London: Pluto Press, 2021).
9 London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, In and Against.
10 John McDonnell, John McDonnell speech on the economy and Labour’s plans for sustainable investment, 2019, https://labour.org.uk/press/john-mcdonnell-speech-economy-labours-plans-sustainable-investment/.
11 Seth Wheeler, Interview with John McDonnell, in: In and Against the State, (London: Pluto Press, 2021).
12 John McDonnell, We May Soon Have a Chance To Put Our ‘In And Against The State’ Theory Into Practice, Labour Briefing, 2018, https://labourbriefing.org/blog/2018/11/24/invs5xfwxmzx314gg2mqk3jtapq0wr?rq=in%20and%20against%20the%20state.
13 Ibid
14 Wheeler, Interview, 141.
15 Day and Uetricht, Bigger, 33.
16 Day and Uetricht, Bigger, 102.
17 David Broder, The State We Need, Jacobin, 2019, https://jacobin.com/2019/02/the-state-we-need; Eric Blanc, Why Kautsky Was Right (and Why You Should Care), Jacobin, 2019, https://jacobin.com/2019/04/karl-kautsky-democratic-socialism-elections-rupture.
18 Chris Maisano, The Constitution and the Class Struggle, The Call, 2018, https://socialistcall.com/2018/11/27/the-constitution-and-the-class-struggle/.
19 Dominic Brady, McDonnell reveals Labour plans to ‘reprogramme’ Treasury, Public Finance, 2018, https://www.publicfinance.co.uk/news/2018/09/mcdonnell-reveals-labour-plans-reprogramme-treasury.
20 McDonnell, Speech.
21 Josh Halliday, Labour would break up Treasury and create northern No 11, says McDonnell, The Guardian, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/07/labour-would-break-up-treasury-and-create-northern-no-11-says-john-mcdonnell.
22 Ed Rooksby, Towards a ‘Revolutionary Reformist’ Strategy: Within, Outside and Against the State, Critique 39, no.1 (2011).
23 Przeworski, Capitalism.
24 Konstantin W. Vössing, The formation of social democratic parties. Degrees of inclusion as external constraints and the strategic choices of labor elites, Ohio State University, 2008.
25 Seth Wheeler et al., In and Against the State with Seth Wheeler, Hilary Wainwright, John Holloway and Jamila Squire, housmansbookshop, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGz3r99St28.
26 Wheeler, Interview
27 Rooksby, Socialist Strategy; Panitch, Gindin, Maher, Socialist Challenge; Poulantzas, State.
28 Blanc, Why Kautsky.
29 Maisano, Constitution.
30 Blanc, Right Lessons.
31 Blanc, Finland.
32 Angry Workers of the World, Thoughts.
33 Blanc, Why Kautsky.
34 Though we lack space in this article, a further critique of the in-and-against strategy may be made on the basis of the kind of democracy that some democratic socialists pin to their transformational hopes of the capitalist state. As it has been pointed out, the more liberal conceptions of democracy adopted by some democratic socialists – of inalienable individual rights guaranteed by state – puts some limit on the extent to which they can argue for workers’ rule of society rather than pluralism, and the curtailing of property rights of capitalists and speech rights of press barons. Llorente lays this argument out more fully.
Llorente, Contradictions and Confusions.
35 Rajeev Syal and Alexandra Topping, Labour will put 10,000 extra police on streets, vows Jeremy Corbyn, The Guardian, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/01/labour-will-put-10000-extra-police-streets-vows-jeremy-corbyn.
36 Maxi Nieto, State, Democracy, and Transition: Is There a “Democratic Road” to Socialism?, Cosmonaut Magazine, 2022, https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/07/state-democracy-and-transition-is-there-a-democratic-road-to-socialism/.
37 This is in spite of the original In and Against the State pamphlet having a critique of those elements, written as it is from the perspective of public sector workers grappling with the coercive functions of the work they were undertaking. Those democratic socialists that mobilised this pamphlet (McDonnell et al) generally did so by a quite conservative reading that de-emphasised this critique.
38 Nate File, Philly’s Housing Encampments of 2020 Led to a Nationally Celebrated Deal. Then It All Began to Unravel, Philadelphia Magazine, 2021; Rosette Royale, Seattle’s Autonomous Zone Is Not What You’ve Been Told, Rolling Stone, 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/chop-chaz-seattle-autonomous-zone-inside-protests-1017637/.
39 Of course, a number of alternate theorisations of the state are available that may prove more fruitful for socialist strategy. One such view is laid out by Maxi Nieto specifically in response to the failures of the democratic socialist’s. Nieto returns to Marx’s Capital to draw out the basic necessary role of state in a capitalist society, eschewing the sociological-style view of Poulantzas, who tells us what may play out in the state, but not what the state is. Nieto, State, Democracy, and Transition.
40 Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, Marxist Internet Archive, 2009, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm.
