Socialism from below   

In this talk, originally given as part of Tempest’s 2025 education series, Charlie Post outlines Tempest’s commitment to socialism from below. For Tempest, socialism is inseparable from democracy and working-class self-activity. Neither social-democratic reformism or Stalinist authoritarianism, both of which proceed from the top down, socialism is a society in which working people, through democratic institutions of their own creation, collectively decide how to organize their social and economic life.

Socialism cannot be handed down by social-democratic politicians or through the rule of a party-state bureaucracy. Both of these approaches have failed spectacularly. Real socialist possibility only emerges from the struggle of the working class in all of its racial, national, and gender diversity. When workers organize and struggle collectively against capital and the state, the experience of struggle both transforms workers’ consciousness and builds the only power that can successfully challenge capitalist rule.

Tempest will continue to publish talks from this year’s education series, including primers on Marxism, Anti-racism and abolition, internationalism and anti-campism, the rank-and-file strategy, feminism and LGBTQ liberation, and others. These talks are intended to serve as an introduction to Tempest’s core political agreements.

 

As Sean Larson explains in his essay “What is Socialism from Below?,”  the central premise of Tempest’s politics is that socialism is the “complete democratization of society.” Socialism is a society where working people, through democratic institutions of their own creation, collectively decide how to organize their social and economic life.

The only road to socialism is the self-organization and self-activity—independent, democratically-directed struggle—of the working class in all its racial, national, and gender diversity. We do not look to the working class as the main agency of social change because workers are necessarily more radical than others at any given historical moment. Instead, we argue that when workers organize and struggle collectively against capital and the state, the experience of struggle both transforms workers’ consciousness and builds the only power that can successfully challenge capitalist rule.

This understanding of the centrality of the working class to the struggle for socialism distinguishes our tradition from the two main variants of “socialism from above”—social-democratic reformism and Stalinism, the single-party, bureaucratic dictatorships of the 20th century that masqueraded as socialism. Both are forms of substitutionism.

Rather than looking to workers democratically organizing their own struggles against capital as the source of our social and political power, the reformists substitute “socialists” holding office in the existing state; union officials handling grievances, negotiating contracts and, on occasion, calling strikes that remain within the boundaries of legality; and the staff of various movement “non-profits” and NGOs engaging in lobbying sympathetic politicians and organizing symbolic actions.

Stalinism, in all of its variants, substitutes the rule of a self-appointed elite that claims to rule “in the name of the workers” for working people democratically deciding how society uses its resources to meet human needs like healthcare, housing, healthy and adequate food and clothing, meaningful education, and increased free time for each individual to develop their creative capacities. Both social-democratic reformists and Stalinists see workers’ independent organization and struggle as a threat, either to the reformists’ ability to negotiate with capital and the state, or to the Stalinist bureaucracy’s class privileges. Both have not hesitated to use violence to suppress militant workers movements, if they cannot derail these struggles into “safe” boundaries.

Our commitment to socialism from below has both an ethical-moral and a strategic-theorical element. While some Marxists, legitimately concerned that the introduction of ethical and moral issues will undermine the scientific and materialist foundation of our politics, we believe that Marxism does not eschew a morality that rejects exploitation and oppression.  On an ethical-moral level, socialism from below rejects the elitism and authoritarianism of both social-democracy and Stalinism. It allows us to envision the capacity (without any guarantee they will act on that capacity) of ordinary working people to successfully organize against capital and the state and to rule themselves through their own democratic institutions. While advocates of socialism from above will, on occasion, recognize their moral-ethical deficits, they respond by accusing those who embrace socialism from below of being impractical or utopian. Reformists claim that parliamentary maneuvering, routine and legalistic collective bargaining, and lobbying and court action are the only realistic ways  to defend working people under capitalism. Stalinists make similar arguments about their class rule: Only the ruling party can defend “existing socialism” from its internal and external enemies.

Stalinist “realism”?

However, we would argue that the proponents of “socialism from above” are the ones who are unrealistic and utopian. Let’s start with Stalinism in power. There is no question that bureaucratic rule in both Russia and China brought significant material benefits for working people—free universal health care, public education, inexpensive public housing, access to cultural activities, etc. However, the existence and improvement of these social provisions required continued increases in labor productivity, to both finance these programs and provide workers more free time to administer society and develop their myriad capacities.

The relationship between the ruling elite and the working class in all of these societies was a fundamental obstacle to the growth of labor productivity. Under Western capitalism, market coercion compels every unit of production to cut costs through the introduction of labor-saving methods and techniques — always at the cost of workers’ skills and control over production. Those that fail to cut costs are doomed to extinction—bankruptcy—in the competitive “war of all against all.” In the Stalinist societies, the state prevented bankruptcies, removing any compulsion for planners and managers to raise labor-productivity. Under a democratic, worker-run socialism, the workers’ own interest in reducing labor-time and increasing time for social participation and enrichment would lead them to find ways of both increasing labor productivity and making work a more meaningful experience. The absence of any workers’ control — whether at the level of the individual enterprise or, more importantly, setting the priorities for economic planning — deprived workers of any motivation to improve the productivity of labor.

The Stalinist ruling classes, after initially appropriating tools and methods from domestic capitalists they expropriated or importing machinery from the West, had only two ways of increasing labor productivity. First, they could rely on voluntarist exhortations and brutal repression to mobilize labor to build new industries and increase output. The first five-year plan and forced collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union (1928-1933) was the classic example. While the Chinese collectivization of agriculture in 1955 was achieved with the consent of the peasantry, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) involved the forced exile of urban dwellers to the countryside and was similar to other failed attempts to overcome the stagnation of the bureaucratic economy.

When moral exhortations failed to move peasants out of agriculture or obtain greater output from workers, repression and violence filled the gap. While statistics are extremely fragmentary, conservative evidence indicates millions lost their lives during bureaucratic attempts to jump start industrialization. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives were lost in Stalin’s prison camps between 1929 and 1953 and as a result of the famine induced by forced collectivization between 1929 and 1933; and in China’s Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Mao’s regime was only marginally less brutal. Nearly one million peasants perished during the collectivization of agriculture in the early 1950s, another two million died of the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, and another one million in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

When voluntarist appeals and repression failed to raise labor productivity, the Stalinist regimes swung to the use of “market criteria.” The various experiments in “market socialism”—Khruschev’s reforms in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, and in post-Mao China—were all responses to the failure of voluntarist attempts to overcome the stagnation of labor productivity in the bureaucratic economies. Bureaucratic “market socialism” made bonuses for workers and managers in any enterprise dependent upon cost-cutting, increasing inequality within and between the bureaucracy and the working class. However, the absence of the ultimate sanction for not obeying market signals—bankruptcy—meant that productivity gains were limited and not continuous. The constant swinging back and forth between voluntarism/repression and market mechanisms ultimately led most of the rulers of both the Soviet Union and China to opt for the restoration of market-based capitalism as the only means of both preserving their class dominance and promoting intensive economic development.

Both mass repression and “market reforms” required squeezing workers—long hours, fragmentation of tasks and speed-up of work processes, declining living standards through cuts to individual wages or factory or state supplied food subsidies, health care and the like. When workers in these societies resisted these attacks, or had the temerity to demand that they, rather than the ruling officials, should organize society, they were brutally repressed.

While the Soviet and Eastern European “Communists” claimed to be defending “socialism” from “foreign and domestic reactionaries,” they were in fact defending their class rule against working-class rebellions in Berlin 1953, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland in 1970 and 1980-1981. The same was true of the Chinese Communist Party’s repression of the Shanghai Commune of 1967. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, workers in Shanghai acted on calls from Mao’s wing of the party to “take ownership of the factories.” Workers in Shanghai took over their factories, established worker committees that both administered production within the plant and linked up with other committees to become a new, democratic working-class power. Mao quickly found common ground with his “capitalist roader” party rivals and unleashed military repression against the Shanghai workers. Mao’s successors were equally repressive, crushing the student-worker movement for democratic reforms at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The contradiction of the Stalinist economies led the ruling classes in these societies to transform the revolutionary movement in the capitalist world into instruments of their diplomatic dealings with capitalist states. Rooted in their nation states, the ruling officialdoms proclaimed the doctrine of “socialism in one country”—the notion that isolated non-capitalist societies could not only survive, but could actually develop viable economies and societies, surrounded by the capitalist world. This notion, originally formulated by Stalin, was thoroughly non-Marxist and had been rejected by all revolutionary socialists—including the Bolsheviks—before 1924. As a result, revolutionary anti-capitalists around the world came to identify the changing diplomatic needs of the bureaucratic societies with the struggle for socialism. Depending upon the type of economic strategy being pursued, the Stalinist ruling classes imposed different strategies on the anti-capitalist movement. During phases when the Stalinist bureaucracies relied on voluntarism and repression, they advised anti-capitalists in the West to adopt ultra-radical politics that eschewed any cooperation in struggle with other, non-revolutionary working-class forces. During phases when they relied on market mechanisms, they encouraged anti-capitalists to adopt reformist strategies of alliances with “progressive” capitalists (those amenable to diplomatic alliances with the Stalinists) and reformist trade union leaders and politicians to win gains and, perhaps, move toward socialism in some distant future.

Both of these strategies have been catastrophic for anti-capitalist movements around the world. During the global capitalist depression that began in 1929, at the same time as the launching of Soviet industrialization, the Communist International, the global organization of revolutionaries formed in the wake of the Russian Revolution, claimed that world capitalism had entered a “third period” since the end of World War I—the period of its terminal crisis.

In what they expected to be a period of rising working-class militancy, all the non-revolutionary forces—in particular the reformist social-democratic parties that still commanded the support of the majority of workers in the global North—were to be treated as objectively counter-revolutionary and as allies of fascism. Revolutionaries rejected a united front with social-democratic workers and their leaders in joint struggles in the workplace and the streets against capital and the growing threat of fascist street gangs—struggles that could have created the possibility of winning these workers to revolutionary politics.

The rejection of a united front proved disastrous in Germany. It meant the isolation of revolutionaries while the majority of workers relied on a coalition of liberals and labor leaders to stop fascism. In January 1933, the Nazis took power and crushed the oldest, largest, and best-organized workers’ movement in the world without any resistance—despite the fact that the social-democrats and communists had armed militias that could have easily defeated Hitler’s storm troopers.

Similar politics informed many of the attempts to hot-house guerilla struggles in many parts of the Global South in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerilla movement in Peru, predisposed to the ultra-left politics of peoples’ war and unable to win support from either the peasantry or urban working class, launched a war that targeted both the Peruvian state and the leaders of independent peasant associations and workers’ unions.

Today, those political currents—from the Communist Party to Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Fight Back, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation—that continue to identify with these regimes and their allies in the global South undermine the rebuilding of an anti-capitalist left. They reinforce the popular association of the failed, repressive and anti-working-class regimes of the Soviet Bloc and China with socialism. They have led anti-capitalist radicals to confuse opposing imperialism with political support for anti-popular governments, like Assad’s murderous regime in Syria. They have defended “progressive” governments like those in Iran, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Brazil when they unleash repression against working people in their own societies struggling to defend and improve their lives.  They also align with Russian imperialism against the struggle of the Ukrainian people for national independence and self-determination.

Any effective revolutionary politics must be based on an “internationalism from below”—on solidarity with all the struggles of working and oppressed people regardless of whether their enemies are aligned with or hostile to “our” ruling class.

Reformist “realism”?

Reformism, in both its social-democratic and Stalinist “popular front” variants, rests on an unrealistic understanding of capitalism. Reformists reject the idea that the periodic economic crises of capitalism are the necessary outcome of capitalist competition and accumulation. Instead, they argue, crises occur because of contingent imbalances in class power. When workers are too strong— wages rise too high and labor productivity is reduced through workplace resistance—profits are “squeezed” and economic contractions ensue. When workers are too weak—wages fall while productivity increases—there is insufficient demand to buy back all the goods produced. “Underconsumption” leads to falling profits and crisis.

From the reformist perspective, capitalist crises with their mass unemployment, growing poverty, and political instability can be avoided if there is an institution that can “balance” the interests of capitalists and workers. For the reformists, that institution is the state—which they see either as “class-neutral” or as a “terrain of class struggle.” This supposedly  allows the state  to reconcile the interests of capitalists and workers to prevent crises by promoting labor-capital cooperation to boost productivity or spending to increase demand. With steady profitability guaranteed, the reformists believe that the state can be used to lessen exploitation and oppression and, in its more radical variants, open the way to a gradual, peaceful transition to a new society.

The reformists look to “pro-labor” politicians, union officials,and leaders of the bureaucratic organizations that speak “on behalf” of the oppressed to lead the struggle for reforms. Workers are reduced to, at best, extras in a play stage-managed by their leaders who give them their cues, direct their actions, and ensure they remain on-script. Working and oppressed people organizing themselves and engaging in struggles that transcend legality are potentially dangerous. These sorts of struggles could, if defeated, lead to the destruction of unions and social movement organizations that provide the politicos and union and NGO leaders with careers that are not subject to the alienation, deskilling, and despotism of work under capitalism. These “unconditional” reformists, whether they call themselves socialists, communists, or merely democrats, have been more than willing to derail or repress mass struggles.

The willingness of “democratic socialists” to crush workers’ struggles is evident whenever working and oppressed people engage in what they deem as “provocative” and “unrealistic” actions. In November 1918, German workers struck and sailors, many of them skilled machinists, mutinied, forcing an end to the First World War and overthrowing the German monarchy. Workers and soldiers across Germany, like their Russian counterparts in 1917, elected councils in the factories and barracks. These councils became a radically democratic counter-power to the self-appointed “Provisional Government” of reformist socialists who sought to organize a “democratic” form of capitalist rule. With the old German army in disarray, the social-democratic government recruited right-wing veterans, small business people, and jobless college graduates into the Freikorps, paramilitary groups that would were the training ground for the Nazis and other fascist street-fighting thugs.  When workers in Berlin launched a premature revolt, the reformist socialists unleashed the Freikorps in a reign of terror that took the lives of tens of thousands of radical workers, including their best-known leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Less than twenty years later, the Spanish Communists and their allies did much of the same, crushing a revolutionary upsurge in blood. After the disaster of the ultra-left “third period” in Germany, the Communist International shifted to the popular front strategy—not a united front of working-class organizations for struggle, but an alliance with liberal capitalists and the reformist officials to defend “democratic capitalism.” In the spring of 1936, the Popular Front alliance of Communists, Socialists, and pro-capitalist Republicans won the Spanish elections. Weeks later, General Francisco Franco launched a counter-revolutionary military coup to overthrow the Republican government and crush the workers’ parties and unions.

Under the leadership of anarcho-syndicalists and revolutionary socialists, workers across Spain seized their workplaces, raided police stations and army barracks and created their own armed militias that stopped the fascist offensive.  The Republican government hoped to both defeat Franco’s forces and suppress a revolutionary movement that threatened capitalist rule with the aid of the Soviet Union and the Spanish Socialists and Communists. The Soviets provided arms and military advisors to build a new army loyal to the capitalist republic, while the Socialists and Communists worked to disarm the workers, return businesses to “democratic” employers, and contain the revolution.

When workers in Barcelona and other areas resisted in the spring of 1937, the Republican government unleashed a reign of terror. The Soviet-trained army killed hundreds of workers and radicals and the Spanish Secret Police, most of whose members were Communists, rounded up, tortured, and murdered anarchist and revolutionary socialist leaders. The crushing of the militias, which had been the most effective military force against Franco, opened the way to the Republicans’ defeat in early 1939.

After World War II, reformists derailed workers’ struggles that verged on taking power. The collapse of the German occupations of France and Italy in 1944 left a power vacuum, which the armed resistance, led by reformist Communists and Socialists, began to fill. Spontaneously, armed workers took power in cities and towns in both countries. These embryonic forms of workers’ power were quickly disorganized as the reformists convinced their followers that socialism would only be possible after capitalist democracy was stabilized. They disarmed the resistance, allowing the Allied forces and reorganized French and Italian capitalist military and civilian leaders to consolidate their rule.

Twenty-five years later, the reformists were able to derail revolutionary movements in France in 1968 and Portugal in 1974-1975. The largest general strike in history in France in June 1968, which saw some factory seizures and threatened the stability of DeGaulle’s Fifth Republic, ended when the Communists and Socialists convinced the majority of workers to return to work in exchange for wage increases that were quickly wiped out by inflation. In Portugal, an alliance of dissident military officers and mass workers strikes overthrew the fifty-year old Estado Novo dictatorship and ended Portugal’s colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique in April 1974. Workers took over factories and soldiers began to elect committees to oversee their officers, unleashing a dynamic that threatened capitalist rule in Portugal. Over the ensuing eighteen months, the Socialists and Communists combined repression against the most radical workers and soldiers with measures to blunt their struggles. Capitalist rule was restored in Portugal, ending the wave of workers’ struggles that shook capitalist rule in the global North in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Reformism led to disaster in the global South as well. China’s first revolution unfolded in 1927-1927, with massive peasant uprisings for land joining large-scale strikes in China’s urban and mining centers. Workers in a number of cities, including Shanghai were able to seize power in 1927. However, the Communist International had forced the Chinese Communist Party into an alliance with pro-capitalist, nationalist Guomintang. The nationalist leader, Chiang Kai Shek, demanded that the Shanghai workers disarm and allow his troops to enter the city. The local Communist leaders of the workers’ uprising reluctantly agreed, and Chiang Kai Shek unleashed a massacre of tens of thousands of Communists and workers militants. In 1965, the Indonesian Communist Party had organized mass peasant organizations and workers’ unions across the archipelago, threatening their alliance with nationalist forces under Sukarno. Under pressure from the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao, the Indonesian Communists began to demobilize and disarm their supporters. The head of the military, General Suharto, overthrew the Sukarno regime and unleashed a massacre of up to two million workers, peasants, and Communist militants.

In the U.S., where the working class has not only never threatened the rule of capital but has also been unable to organize its own political party, reformism has actively disorganized militant workers’ struggles. The years between 1933 and 1937 saw the largest, most militant and successful workers’ uprising in U.S. history. Truck drivers and auto, rubber, electrical machinery, and steel workers engaged in thousands of illegal strikes, ignoring court orders to end mass picketing and engaging in pitched battles with the police and national guards.

The upsurge peaked with a wave of factory occupations—sit-down strikes—in 1936-1937. Not only were these struggles able to win employer recognition for their new, worker-led industrial unions, but they forced the federal government to establish a legal framework for union recognition and collective bargaining, set a national minimum wage and a forty-hour work week, and launch the U.S. version of the welfare state with public pensions, cash assistance to single women with children, and unemployment insurance. The industrial struggles also sparked a movement for an independent, union-based labor party as an alternative to the Democrats. Radicals of all stripes, most importantly the Communist Party, played a crucial role in these movements before late 1936.

However, as the Communists shifted politically toward the reformist popular front strategy—support for Roosevelt and the Democrats and an alliance with the bureaucratic leaders of the new industrial unions—these struggles were derailed. By the late 1930s, the industrial union movement, with the support of the Communists, abandoned mass strikes and illegal actions for reliance on the National Labor Relations Board and the Roosevelt administration. Rather than making new gains, especially after the end of the brief 1937-1938 recession, the unions began their long retreat. During World War II, the union leaders supported the U.S. war effort by ending all strikes in exchange for formal employer recognition. To enforce the “no-strike pledge,” the union officials with the Communists in the lead, stamped out unofficial strikes over working conditions and imposed the bureaucratic grievance procedure which forced workers to accept unfair or dangerous working conditions until the lengthy legalistic process had concluded.

The industrial unions emerged from the war more centralized and bureaucratic, with traditions of workplace militancy broken in most industries. Strikes after 1945 remained under the control of the officials and within the bounds of capitalist legality. While workers were able to make some gains in terms of wages and benefits during the long post-war economic boom, they experienced speed-up, work reorganization, and rising rates of work-related health issues.

Now firmly tied to the right-ward moving Democratic Party, the unions were unable to win any of their ambitious postwar political agenda of national health insurance, adequate public pensions, and a massive public housing program for all workers. The Communists, after years of loyal service to the industrial union officialdom, found themselves purged from the labor movement during the Cold War and without defenders among the ranks of the unions—many of whom remembered their wartime strike breaking.

Since the end of the post-war economic expansion and of the mass movements and strike wave of 1965-1975, reformism was no longer able to deliver even meagre reforms. By the late 1970s, the Italian Communist Party, the largest outside the Eastern Bloc, sought an “historic compromise” with the Italian capitalists in which they would agree to cuts in social services and labor protections in exchange for a possible role in government.

In 1981, Francois Mitterrand and a coalition of his Socialist Party and the Communist Party swept the French election on a program of radical reforms, including expanding social welfare, public ownership of banks and industry, and nuclear disarmament. In response, French capitalists launched an “investment strike” which forced Mitterrand and his government to reverse all their reforms and implement austerity. Across the world, the parties that were once associated with reform, both social-democratic and those surviving Communist parties, have moved to the right, embracing neo-liberal deregulation and austerity and adapting to the far right on immigration and the rights of women, queers and other oppressed groups.

How do we explain what Robert Brenner called the “paradox of reformism”—that the reformist strategy of electing pro-reform candidates, lobbying, court action, and legalistic protests and strikes, is unable to win or defend reforms? Reformism rests on an unrealistic understanding of capitalist accumulation and the class struggle—it is utopian. The idea that periodic capitalist economic crises can be avoided by state policies that balance the interests of labor and capital is simply wrong. The fundamental dynamics of capitalist competition and accumulation—the compulsion to cut cost per unit output through speed-up, wage cuts, and mechanization— produce both long periods of high profits and economic expansion and, inevitably, long periods of falling profits and economic stagnation. All of the substantial reforms workers and the oppressed have won under capitalism are the result of mass, disruptive, and often illegal struggles that compel capitalists and the state to make these concessions in order to restore social peace. The imperatives of capitalist competition and profitability make any and all reforms at best provisional—subject to roll-backs as struggles subside and profit-driven capitalist growth slows. Put simply, the reformist strategy cannot win reforms, and, in periods of stagnant profitability, its supporters go along when capital rolls them back.

Socialism from below in theory and practic

The reality of socialism from below is evident in every large-scale, militant struggle of working people around the world. The ability of workers to build their own independent and democratic organizations of struggle against capital and radically transform the world is clearest in the revolutionary upsurges that have exploded periodically in the last one hundred-fifty years. The Paris Commune of 1871; the Russian Revolution of 1917; the wave of revolutionary mass strikes that shook capitalist Europe in 1918-1923; the Chinese Revolution of 1925-1927; workers revolts in Cuba in 1933, Bolivia in 1952, 1970-71, and 1999-2000, Hungary in 1956, Chile in 1970-1973,  Portugal in 1974-1975, and Poland in 1980-1981 were among the high points of revolutionary struggle from below. All saw workers creating democratic organizations of struggle—councils in factories, offices, stores, neighborhoods, on farms, and in the military—as the basis of a new, democratic workers’ state.

Even in mass struggles that did not directly challenge capitalist power—the industrial workers’ movement in the U.S. in the 1930s, the mass strikes in South Africa in the 1980s, the revolt of metal workers in Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s, the mass strikes in South Africa in the 1980s—and in non-workplace struggles like the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the U.S. in the 1960s—working people created their independent, democratically run unions and social movement organizations that were powerful schools of self-education in radical politics.

Mass struggles are crucial to the development of working-class organization and radicalism because they are dis-alienating activities. In periods of political quiescence, when it’s “business as usual,” workers experience life as individualized sellers of their ability to work for a wage. The demands of surviving in capitalist society—the day-to-day grind of socially reproducing themselves and their households—reinforces most workers’ feelings of social isolation and powerlessness. This lived experience is the basis for both the “conditional” reformism of most workers, most of the time, and of the appeals of racism, sexism, trans and homophobia, nativism and other reactionary ideas to some workers. Seeking the path of least resistance, most working people look to politicians, union, and non-profit officials to “deliver the goods” without the risks of engaging in mass disruption—in particular the loss of employment. When reformist methods are ineffective, as they become when capital is in crisis and collective organization of workers is weak, different groups of workers will try to defend their social position, not against the boss and the state who appear all powerful but against other workers in a weaker social position. As white, male, native-born, straight, and cis workers attempt to get ahead at the expense of non-white, female, immigrant, and queer workers, they adopt the ideas of the right.

In contrast, insurgent workers movements—uprisings to defund the police, rent strikes, workplace struggles, militant struggles against oppression—involve collective confrontations to win concessions from capital and the state. To win, these struggles require escalating actions and expanding solidarities. Participants have to engage in combative and often illegal actions that carry the risks of losing jobs and housing and of arrest and physical abuse by the police. In the course of these struggles, significant minorities of working people often develop new ideas and outlooks to make sense of their lived experience of struggle—new perceptions of friends and foes, of the state and struggle against it, and new solidarities born of struggle. Reaching out to other working-class people to build unity across racial, gender, and other divisions has the potential of opening people to anti-racist and feminist ideas. As they confront the employers and the state, they can begin to see capitalism as the problem and to understand that the state and law are not neutral. Time and time again, experience has shown that mass direct action against capital and the state has the capacity to build collective power, radical consciousness, and enduring, democratic organization among diverse groups of workers.

Clearly not all workers are in struggle all the time: working people cannot be on strike or occupying public spaces all the time because they must work for wages in order to survive. During the lulls in the class struggle, only a minority of working people remain consistently active. Many of those who remain active constitute a real workers’ vanguard—the militant minority who attempt to preserve and transmit traditions of mass struggle and political radicalism. It is this layer of militants who are the potential social basis for organizations committed to socialism from below. With sufficient size and organization these workers are the “human materials” for real revolutionary parties that, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg, “understands how to lead—how to drive things forward.” However, a minority of activists, along with middle class intellectuals who have access to cultural skills from which the bulk of workers are excluded, become the full-time officials of the mass organizations created by periodic mass struggles. This layer of full-time officials, fearing the destruction of the organizations that provide their distinctive and privileged social position, is the social foundation for the politics of unconditional reformism.

When capitalism experiences one of its inevitable crises of profitability and accumulation, past reforms come under attack and the conditional reformism of the majority of workers is undermined. In mass struggles, there will be political contestation over the direction of the movement. On the one hand, there are the already organized forces of socialism from above—the union officials, reformist politicians, and non-profit staffers—who will advocate reliance on elections, lobbying, and court action that will only sap the vitality and power of the struggle. On the other hand are the forces of socialism from below—the militant minority who promote democratically organized and militant struggle. Ultimately, it is the relative position and organization of these two forces that can determine the outcome of these struggles.

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Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”