Build It Now by Michael Lebowitz

Author:Michael Lebowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2006-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Process of Socialist Construction

Socialism doesn’t drop from the sky. It is necessarily rooted in particular societies. And that is why reliance upon detailed universal models misleads us. (Think about how many left criticisms of the Bolivarian Revolution have their origin in the fact that it differs from the early Soviet Union!) Every society has its unique characteristics—its unique histories, traditions (including religious and indigenous ones), its mythologies, its heroes who have struggled for a better world, and the particular capacities that people have developed in the process of struggle. Since we are talking about a process of human development and not abstract recipes, we understand that we proceed most surely when we choose our own path, one that people recognize as their own (rather than the pale imitation of someone else).

We all start the process of socialist construction, too, from different places in terms of levels of economic development—and that clearly affects how much of our initial activity (if we are dependent upon our own resources) must be devoted to the future. How different, too, are the situations of societies depending on the strength of their domestic capitalist classes and oligarchies, their degree of domination by global capitalist forces, and the extent to which they are able to draw upon the support and solidarity of other societies that have set out on a socialist path.

Further, the historical actors who start us on the way may be quite different in each case: Here a highly organized working-class majority (as in the recipe books of previous centuries); there a peasant army, a vanguard party, a national liberation bloc (electoral or armed), army rebels, an anti-poverty alliance, and variations too numerous to name or yet to emerge. We would be pedantic fools if we insisted that there is only one way to start the social revolution.

However, to construct a socialist society in reality, one step in every particular path is critical—control and transformation of the state. Without the removal of state power from capitalist control, every real threat to capital will be destroyed. The capitalist state is an essential basis of support for the reproduction of capitalist social relations; and the army, police, legal system, and economic resources of the state will be mobilized to stifle every particular inroad that cannot be absorbed. Capital always uses the power of its state when challenged.

In contrast, a state determined to serve as the midwife of a new society can both restrict the conditions for the reproduction of capital and open the door to the elements of the new society. Winning “the battle of democracy” and using “political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie” remains as critical now as when Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto. By ensuring that the means of production come into the possession of the associated producers and are governed increasingly according to their logic and by using state mechanisms to channel resources away from the old and to the new, the workers’ state is an essential weapon for carrying out the struggle against capital.

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