Towards a Strategy of Everyday Ruptures

In Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright describes the concept of the ruptural transformation of capitalism. The approach involves breaking with existing social institutions and structures, demolishing them, and then constructing new ones in their place. While Wright acknowledges the potential for limited ruptural moments within institutions, he argues that the strength and resilience of the state in capitalist democracies make large systemic ruptures unlikely. By focusing solely on systemic ruptures within state institutions, they may overlook smaller and more immediate weak points in capitalist hegemony and legitimacy. Ruptures should be viewed in a broader sense, encompassing moments of potential change in mass protests, social movements, as well as longer crisis events resulting from class antagonism, racism, and non-human factors like disease or natural disasters. These events may lead to temporary radical breaks or breakdowns in hegemonic politics and social functions, as seen in riots, environmental crises.

Critics of insurrectionary models of revolution, including Erik Olin Wright and Eric Blanc, argue that revolutionary forces pursuing such models will face opposition from the majority of the population. They contend that competing with the legitimacy of the capitalist state is challenging, as evidenced by the absence of successful insurrectionary movements in the West. Consequently, Wright and Blanc advocate abandoning the hope for an all-out attack on the capitalist state. Instead, they propose leveraging institutions of representative democracy in conjunction with an external labor movement to transform society. By adopting a broader vision of ruptures, one can exploit fractures in the state and gradually erode the legitimacy of state institutions through small bursts of direct conflict during these limited ruptural moments.

However, immediate engagement in direct conflict with state institutions or capitalists is deemed impractical. Organization becomes essential to build trust, mobilize workers, plan and focus attacks, and defend against reprisals.

To better conceptualize the process and its relation to struggles during moments of rupture, two related concepts from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci are borrowed: war of position and war of maneuver. The war of maneuver involves direct assaults on the enemy, while the war of position occurs when direct assaults are not possible, requiring the army to bunker down in trenches. This metaphor highlights the difference between revolutions in the east and west, where the capitalist state’s strength dictates the strategy. Gramsci’s ideas introduce the notion of a war of position, not as a slow slog through institutions, but as building up a military machine and developing supply lines. The war of position is not meant to be a permanent state of revolutionary struggle but makes the war of maneuver possible, representing the same base-building process emphasized by the Marxist Center in its strategy. This allows for fluid transitions from a war of position to limited periods of a war of maneuver and back.

During periods of a war of position, revolutionaries must build up both defensive and offensive structures, developing new working-class organizations like grassroots unions, radical tenants unions, mutual aid organizations, and cooperatives. These periods also serve to secure positions by building radical nucleuses in workplaces, communities, existing working-class organizations, and politicizing informal networks. This work aims to build up forces, deepen roots, and further politicize the working class in anticipation of the next ruptural wave.

When the next ruptural moment arrives, a shift into a war of maneuver occurs. In this phase, organizations and working-class communities where they have been working, living, and organizing are mobilized to fight for more ground. This “ground” may refer to sets of reforms improving workers’ lives, weakening the state or capitalist power, advancing popular working-class democracy, or shifting more power to workers. Beyond gaining ground, it provides opportunities to press the fractures and fault lines within the state. Each rupture period will be different, and possibilities during these moments will vary.

As the rupture moment begins to subside, rather than fighting to prolong it beyond sustainability, the shift back into the war of position begins. The focus is on securing the gains made: solidifying any increase in membership through political education and development, rebuilding from any losses suffered during the rupture period, and reflecting on the experiences of that period. This cyclical understanding of ruptures and lulls connects base-building work to a political and strategic context. Base building must be political; without a clear political component, it may create service provision organizations without increasing the political power and organization of the working class, leaving those efforts open to be co-opted by liberal sentiments of civic participation.

While predicting or noticing these rupture moments is challenging, base building and tools like the mass line and workers’ inquiry can train organizational fingers on the pulse of the working class. As organizations grow stronger and more entrenched in the class, they become more aware of pressing issues in the communities they work within, allowing them to press contradictions and arrive at an increasing awareness of points of politicization within emerging ruptures. Engaging in a protracted war of position, where base building is the primary organizing mode, can develop the needed capacity, organization, and deep roots to merge with the class sufficiently. This is in contrast to a war of position primarily predicated on elections, with extra-electoral work as secondary. Electoral campaigns are too ephemeral to create long-term infrastructure and consistently assess the state of the working class.

This ruptural view has two other strengths. Firstly, it allows space for working-class initiative outside of the communist political organization, either through spontaneous initiatives of the class in response to actions of capitalists or the state (e.g., protesting) or by other working-class organizations and networks. Maintaining strategic flexibility while not devolving into protest chasing or movementism is crucial. Secondly, it provides a bridge from the present to revolution. By organizing around cycles of periodic rupture and lulls, with each cycle, power and organizational strength expand, and the balance of power shifts. The moment of revolutionary rupture becomes unique in the sense that it’s the cycle where the balance of power has decisively shifted, and capitalist forces are routed.

It is important to note that the outlined ruptural strategy allows confronting the realities of historical revolutions. Revolutions are hardly singular events or moments of rupture. During the Russian Revolution, in 1917, there were several major moments of revolutionary ruptures. The Chinese Revolution also consisted of periods of rupture, such as the revolutionary period of 1927, followed by protracted periods of base building and combat before the victory of communist forces in 1949.

The two general trends previously touched on in this piece both had definitive statements on the question of what to do with the capitalist state. For the electoral road, the existing state institutions are something to be taken over and transformed. In this process of transformation, they become more democratic and adapted to meeting the needs of society rather than the interests of capitalists and capital accumulation. In the case of dual power strategies, the state is seen as irreformable, capitalist to its core. It must be smashed and replaced by a new workers’ state, which will itself fade away as capitalism and the residue of its class order are done away with. Both of these, as seen, have clear limits.

The ruptural strategy for socialism adopts a flexible approach, emphasizing breaking the relations of power within the state. Instead of waiting for a final battle where the working class forces with its alternative state/power would smash the capitalist state, this strategy chips away at the state and the power it embodies. The build-up of working-class power becomes intricately linked to eroding the power of capitalists and the capitalist state.

This strategy does not relinquish the need to transform the state. However, it does not advocate for the wholesale transformation of existing state institutions. Rather, it recognizes that certain institutions like schools, public transportation, and public healthcare are unlikely to disappear, or at least creating a wholesale replacement is infeasible. These institutions already have the working class embedded in them. The struggles of the working class, as workers, students, patients, or transit riders, against those who run these institutions form the backbone of their transformation. Each moment of rupture opens new opportunities to push forward with the transformation and democratization of these institutions.

As working-class power expands and the power of the capitalist class, along with its control over society, comes under increasing threat, each cycle of rupture provides more space for the working class and revolutionaries to experiment with new forms of organizing society. Instead of creating a prepackaged new system of governance or waiting for these forms to magically appear, they are forged through cycles and ruptures. This involves stress-testing them, developing new ones as previous forms prove insufficient, or as new struggles present new opportunities.

Building Organization for Revolution

When discussing organization in the context of revolution, Marxists often revisit the concept of the party. The term “party building” is sometimes approached as if the word itself holds inherent power, implying that it encompasses all the structural and strategic information needed for the conversation. However, there is significant diversity within party forms, shaped by the strategies of the trends they originate from and the political terrain of the countries they operate in. Leninist parties like the Bolsheviks, the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the Socialist Workers Party (US) all operated on nominal democratic centralism, but their specific forms and operational methods differ. AROC, in its original critique of the Marxist Center, offers a preliminary definition of a party, asserting that “political parties are the institution of unitary political leadership for a class or fraction of a class.” This definition is broad enough to theoretically encompass various organizational types.

Given the lack of clarity on what a call to party building means, the question arises: Is party building desirable? Alyson Escalante, in her contribution to the debate following the founding of the Marxist Center, argues for its benefits. She highlights that despite the Marxist Center’s commitment to mass work and institution building, it hasn’t committed to a strategy for revolution, posing a significant weakness. Party building, according to Escalante, offers a next step beyond constructing new working-class institutions. It can provide a context for the Marxist Center’s mass work and serve as a foundation for the development of a revolutionary strategy. While the Marxist Center may face challenges in building the party akin to past movements, this isn’t an argument against making the attempt.