Strategy returns

The French socialist writer Daniel Bensaid recently announced the “return of strategy” as
a topic for discussion among progressive and radical forces. According to Bensaid, a long
defensive period is drawing to a close: “We are coming to the end of the phase of the big
refusal and of stoical resistance … [characterized by] slogans like ‘The world is not a
commodity’ or ‘Our world is not for sale’. We need to be specific about what the
‘possible’ world is and, above all, to explore how to get there.”i Bensaid argues for
renewed discussion, not of “models” for radical change, but of “strategic hypotheses”:
“Models are something to be copied; they are instructions for use. A hypothesis is a guide
to action that starts from past experience but is open and can be modified in the light of
new experience or unexpected circumstances.”ii

Such a debate will have to grapple with the impasse reached by the global justice
movement after its first exhilarating wave, symbolized by the mass demonstrations in
Seattle and Genoa. The decision made by activists to target international gatherings of
political and corporate elites was prompted by the increasingly globalised nature of
capitalism. No longer, it was argued, could the progressive left limit itself to challenging
a single national government. Ellen Meiksins Wood sums up this line of thought as
follows: “If globalization has made the national state increasingly irrelevant, anti-
capitalist struggles must move immediately beyond the nation state, to the global
institutions where the power of global capital truly lies.”iii

This perception had a firm basis in reality. For at least two decades, the global reach of
capital had constrained the efforts of those working for social reform and transformation.
Colin Leys describes the new terrain from a UK perspective: “The main causal links no
longer converge conveniently – in the case of Britain – in Westminster and the City of
London, but run off the edge of the national map to Washington, Brussels, New York and
Tokyo, not to mention manufacturing hubs like Detroit, tax havens like the Bahamas, and
innumerable other places abroad.”iv Awareness of these new challenges led many to
believe that it was essential to by-pass national political structures and take the fight to
the next level. The summit protests offered a means of doing so.

But after the initial shock, elites worked out how to contain the raucous counter-
demonstrations. Massive security operations, often by-passing all legal conventions and
making grossly disproportionate use of force, allowed the summits to carry on without
interruption. The experience drove home a broader lesson: while capitalism may function
on a planetary scale, there is no “Winter Palace” that can be seized at global level, either
by insurrection or electoral victory. The first steps taken by any project of social
transformation must have a national foundation. In the words of Russian campaigner
Boris Kagarlitsky: “Leftists need to have their own international economic strategy, and
to act in a co-ordinated way on a regional scale, but the instrument and starting point of
this new co-operation can only be a national state.”v

The eclipse of the nation-state, so often proclaimed by superficial theorists of

globalization, has not in fact taken place, as Ellen Meiksins Wood argues:
“The world today is more than ever a world of nation-states. The political form of
globalization is not a global state or global sovereignty. Nor does the lack of
correspondence between global economy and national states simply represent some
kind of time-lag in political development. The very essence of globalization is a
global economy administered by a global system of multiple states and local
sovereignties, structured in a complex relation of domination and subordination.”vi

Radicals and reformers can certainly not ignore the globalised, inter-dependent nature of
the world economy: this reality must be integrated into their perspectives, and the
emergence of new forms of co-operation and solidarity across national frontiers will be
critical if any attempt to construct an alternative to neo-liberal capitalism is to be
successful. But the point of departure must be the nation-state.

If this argument is accepted, the next question which arises is clear: how can progressive
movements come to exercise power at a national level, and use it to good effect?
Kagarlitsky insists that it would be fool-hardy to concentrate simply on taking over the
existing political structures, as “the new situation demands the radical transformation of
the state, of its institutions and of its social nature. Traditional bourgeois democracy has
shown that it cannot act as a serious counter-weight to trans-national capital, and it is
therefore essential to step outside these bounds.”vii

Labour and socialist movements in the industrialised North have been dealing with the
challenges posed by bourgeois or capitalist democracy for many years. These questions
are now of equally pressing interest beyond Europe and North America, as various forms
of capitalist democracy take root from Brazil to South Africa. A “strategic hypothesis” of
the sort argued for by Daniel Bensaid must address the opportunities and difficulties
which such political systems present for the Left.

Classical perspectives

The body of thought generally referred to as “classical Marxism” can be of limited use
for any survey of capitalist democracy, and for obvious reasons. Marx and Engels died at
a time when absolute monarchies still dominated European politics and universal suffrage
was a rare phenomenon. The leading thinkers associated with the Russian revolution and
the Communist International witnessed a period when parliamentary democracy appeared
to be in danger of extinction. As Eric Hobsbawm recalls: “The twenty years between
Mussolini’s so-called ‘March on Rome’ and the peak of the Axis success in the Second
World War saw an accelerating, increasingly catastrophic, retreat of liberal political
institutions … the only European countries with adequately democratic political
institutions that functioned without a break during the entire inter-war period were
Britain, Finland (only just), the Irish Free State, Sweden and Switzerland.”viii

Karl Marx himself expressed contrasting views on the possibilities which universal
suffrage and parliamentary government might open up for working-class movements. In a
much-quoted speech, he suggested that “there are countries, such as America or England,
and if I was familiar with its institutions, I might include Holland, where the workers may
attain their goal by peaceful means. That being the case, we must recognise that in most
continental countries the lever of the revolution will be force.”ix On another occasion, he
responded sceptically to a reporter’s suggestion that the British political system made
violent revolution unnecessary, predicting that any attempt made by an elected
government to uproot capitalism would encounter the same ferocious opposition met by
Abraham Lincoln in the southern states of the USA: “The English middle class has
always shown itself willing enough to accept the verdict of the majority so long as it
enjoyed the monopoly of the voting power. But mark me, as soon as it finds itself out-
voted on what it considers vital questions we shall see here a new slave-owners’ war.”x

By the time of the Russian revolution, matters had become a little clearer, and Lenin
devoted a good deal of time to analysing the parliamentary systems of Western Europe.
But his writings were marked by a strong reaction against the tendency of his social-
democratic rivals to take the claims made on behalf of bourgeois democracy at face
value. As a highly sympathetic critic puts it: “All too often, Lenin used the term ‘formal’
in the sense of illusory, unreal and ‘purely formal’, presenting democratic rights and
liberties under capitalist regimes not as partial, truncated and manipulated rights, but as
straightforward ‘lures’, ‘swindles’ and ‘hollow phrases’.”xi

Lenin’s ally Leon Trotsky went on to consider these questions at much greater length and
depth in a remarkable series of pamphlets and articles inspired by the pressing need for
German workers to organise against Nazism before it could seize powerxii. Trotsky made
short work of the argument (put forward by the leadership of the German Communist
Party) that there was no difference between capitalist democracy and fascist dictatorship,
and his analysis is still of great value. However, the conditions of terminal economic and
political meltdown endured by Germany’s Weimar Republic between 1929 and 1933
have proved to be exceptional, and cannot be used as the basis for a theory of capitalist
democracy under more typical circumstances without taking this into account.

Two socialist leaders and theorists whose work became highly influential in the 1960s
and 1970s, Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci, also have their limitations for the task
at hand. Luxemburg showed a peerless understanding of the importance of democracy for
the working class and its organisations. Her writings are very much a product of their
time, though, “a period in which bourgeois democracy, where it survived, was subject to
severe strain and pressure and, where it did not, made way for the most murderous
variant of capitalist rule … she did not see beyond this grim and extended reality to the
era of renewed capitalist stabilisation and expansion which followed it and in which
bourgeois democracy was better able to prove its capacity for survival and renewal.”xiii
Luxemburg did not anticipate the lengthy co-existence between capitalism and a certain
form of democracy in the states of Europe and North America – still less its spread to
what was then the colonial periphery.

Antonio Gramsci, the leader of the Italian Communist Party in its early years, has been
almost universally acclaimed as one of the great Marxist intellectuals of the twentieth
century. In particular, his writings have been credited with offering the basis for a
socialist strategy appropriate for Western Europe (this was a popular theme among
supporters of the Eurocommunist project in the 1970s). But as Richard Bellamy notes,
“there was always a certain incongruity about the fact that the supposed champion of a
revised Marxism suited to the advanced economies and political systems of the West
came from a peripheral region of one of the West’s least industrialised nations and most
fragile liberal democracies.”xiv Gramsci could hardly have been expected to chart a course
through the new political conditions prevailing after the collapse of Europe’s main fascist
dictatorships (including the one that hounded him to his death).

Since 1945, capitalist democracy has become the dominant political order in the
developed world, gradually integrating the whole European continent as the fascist and
communist regimes which held sway in southern and eastern Europe have been
dismantled. It has been equally predominant in North America, Japan and Australasia. As
noted already, bourgeois-democratic systems have also taken root in the global South to a
greater extent than ever before. During this period, labour, socialist and communist
parties have held government office, on their own or as part of broader coalitions, and a
large stock of practical experience has been accumulated. This experience badly needs
analysis of the sort necessarily lacking in the classical Marxist tradition.

Gateway or bastion?

There is no shortage of such analysis: many gifted political thinkers have devoted their
attention to the subject. But such work has not received the same attention as the Marxist
“classics” – even though it has the potential to shed a great deal more light on these vital
questions. This essay will concentrate on two socialist intellectuals, Ralph Miliband and
Ernest Mandel, summarising their views of capitalist democracy, the ways in which it has
been or might be approached by labour movements, and the likely political architecture
of a socialist society.

The choice of Miliband and Mandel is not arbitrary. They share a number of biographical
coincidences. Both men were Belgian Jews who narrowly escaped the Holocaust and
took part in the struggle against Nazism – Miliband as a sailor in the British navy,
Mandel as a partisan of the Belgian resistance. Both were distinguished scholar-activists
who nourished the work of political militants while gaining broad respect within the
academy. And both found that their radicalism put them at odds with the main working-
class parties of the countries where they made their home: Miliband, who settled in
Britain for most of his adult life, became a fierce critic of the Labour Party after a brief
spell as a member in the 1950s; Mandel was expelled from the Belgian social-democratic
movement when its leadership found his criticisms of their policy too irksome.

For our purposes, the main value to be found in a comparative examination of the two
writers is their powerful advocacy of two contrasting approaches to capitalist democracy.
Norman Geras described these as the “gateway” and the “bastion” hypotheses: “The road
of social revolution … either runs through [the institutions of parliamentary democracy]
as a gateway or, being blocked in the attempt, shows in practice that they are not one, but
are a fortress rather, a bastion against social revolution, just or democratic as may be; and
shows the location of a genuine gateway at the same time.”xv Ralph Miliband himself
elaborated on this choice of perspectives as he reflected on the terminal decay of Soviet
Communism:

“Marxists and other revolutionary socialists have always insisted that bourgeois
democracy is fundamentally vitiated by the class context in which it functions, and
by the degree to which the whole democratic process is undermined by the visible
and the invisible power which capitalist interests and conservative forces are able to
deploy vis-à-vis society and the state. Bourgeois democracy, in a context of class
domination, is more often than not turned into an instrument of that domination …
there is, however, a different critique, which complements the first one, and which
is, in some ways, even more fundamental. This is that the kind of representative and
parliamentary system which is an essential part of bourgeois democracy is in any
case, and whatever its context, undemocratic, and that socialism requires more
direct forms of expression of popular sovereignty and democratic power.”xvi

As we shall see, Miliband and Mandel shared a great deal of common ground: their views
of the bourgeois-democratic state and of the main tendencies in the European labour
movements converge in many respects. But a crucial distinction remains between the
“gateway” and “bastion” positions. A survey of two left-wing thinkers can thus illustrate
one of the key questions for progressive social movements operating within a capitalist-
democratic order.
Capitalism and democracy – an unhappy marriage

Many political commentators in Britain have noted the ironic parentage of David and
Edward Miliband, two bright stars of New Labour who rose under the benevolent watch
of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Some articles have teased out the contrast between the
Marxist father and his “post-socialist” off-spring in a most illuminating mannerxvii. But
more typical has been the comment of one journalist, who assured readers that “for all his
skills as a sociologist, it’s unlikely Miliband ever imagined that his boys would grow up
to assume key roles at the very heart of the democratic state of which he was such an
implacable critic.”xviii

Miliband might have relished the irony: having devoted much of his work to identifying
the barriers to genuine democratic control embedded in the structures of the British
political order, he now finds himself posthumously caricatured as the opponent of a
“democratic state” whose virtues are presumed to be self-evident. The writer would
perhaps have responded with the same terse rebuttal of the merits ascribed to systems of
the British type that he addressed to Francis Fukuyama, prophet of the “end of history”:

“Capitalist democracy is a contradiction in terms, for it encapsulates two opposed

systems. On the one hand there is capitalism, a system of economic organization that
demands the existence of a relatively small class of people who own and control the
main means of industrial, commercial, and financial activity, as well as a major part
of the means of communication; these people thereby exercise a totally
disproportionate amount of influence on politics and society both in their own
countries and in lands far beyond their own borders. On the other hand there is
democracy, which is based on the denial of such preponderance, and which requires
a rough equality of condition that capitalism, as Fukuyama acknowledges,
repudiates by its very nature. Domination and exploitation are ugly words that do
not figure in Fukuyama’s vocabulary, but they are at the very core of capitalist
democracy, and are inextricably linked to it.”xix

The use of the term “democracy” in reference to such political systems, without any
qualifications, is itself a form of propaganda, “for it leaves out of account the fact that
Western-style political democracy operates in the context of a capitalist social order, and
that this imposes severe, even crippling limitations upon the meaning of democracy …
Western-style democracy does not generally cross the threshold of the corporate
boardroom.”xx

The conflict between political freedom and economic autocracy is seen by Miliband as
the most compelling deficiency of this political form. Against those who present the
typical capitalist economy “as if it consisted of a vast scatter of small and medium firms,
all fiercely competing with each other, and none of them with much influence and power
beyond the confines of their own narrow domain”, he insists that “contemporary
capitalism is on the contrary dominated by giant conglomerates and trans-national firms,
and the people who control them are able to make decisions which are of the greatest
importance not only to the firms themselves, but also to their city, region, country, and, in
many cases, to people and economies far beyond their own borders. A crucial feature of
these decisions is that the people most affected by them have little or no control over
them.”xxi

Defenders of capitalist democracy will argue that the unequal distribution of economic
power created by a free-market economy is compensated for by the existence of political
equality. All citizens have the same right to vote, whether they are poor or wealthy, and
the government will thus reflect the desires of the population as a whole. If the workings
of a capitalist economy create social problems that require the mitigating impact of
government intervention, such intervention will become public policy if the majority
supports it. If, on the other hand, the majority view is that the benefits of a laissez-faire
approach outweigh the costs, the capitalist economy will be allowed to function with little
or no interruption.

This “pluralist” theory of politics is viewed by Miliband as a mystification of reality:

“Pluralism means a lot more than the existence and recognition of a plurality of groups,
interests and associations in society; it also means, and is intended to mean, the existence
of a rough equilibrium of power between contending interests and social forces. This is
precisely what is not present in the configuration of power in advanced capitalist
societies.”xxii The resources on which big capital can draw in the struggle to influence
state power are vastly greater than those available to its rivals. Those who seek to
constrain the power of capital, or abolish it altogether, enter the field of parliamentary
democracy at a great disadvantage.

The defence of the status quo is conducted within “civil society” by a well-disciplined
alliance of opinion-formers. With the decline of organised religion (a force which
“tended to preach acceptance and obedience rather than questioning and rebellion”xxiii) in
most developed societies, the slack has generally been taken up by the print and
electronic media, whose private organs are overwhelmingly under the ownership of large-
scale capitalist interests: “Whatever else the immense output of the mass media is
intended to achieve, it is also intended to help prevent the development of class-
consciousness in the working class, and to reduce as much as possible any hankering it
might have for a radical alternative to capitalism.”xxiv Owners expect their staff to operate
within “a well-understood ideological spectrum of thought, which stretches from mild
social democracy at one end to far-right conservatism at the other.”xxv

This tacit censorship of opinion within the mass media takes place largely without the
threat of imprisonment or similar measures. The carrot is deployed as much as the stick:
“There are considerable rewards to be had for remaining within the frame-work of
acceptable opinion … within that framework, there are jobs, grants, promotion, travel,
prestige, even fame. Outside it, there is likely to be trouble, discrimination, harassment,
even persecution.”xxvi

According to Miliband, the dominance of capitalist interests over state policy is not
simply a product of the unrivalled megaphone which those interests possess in the form
of the mass media, or indeed of their huge expenditure on lobbying and donations to
political parties – important as those factors undoubtedly are. The nature of the state itself
is crucial. The summit of the class structure in advanced capitalist societies is crowned by
a “power elite”, made up of two distinct fractions: on the one hand, those who control the
major firms which dominate economic activity; on the other, those who control the
institutions of the state. As he elaborates:

“State power is controlled by the people who occupy the command posts of the state
system – presidents, prime ministers and their immediate ministerial and other
colleagues and advisors; top civil servants; senior officers in the armed forces, the
police and the surveillance and intelligence agencies; senior judges; and the people
in charge of state enterprises, regulatory commissions and similar agencies.”xxvii

These individuals must all be considered among those “who have done very well out of
the existing social order and who quite naturally have every intention of continuing to do
very well out of it, for themselves and their off-spring.”xxviii By income and status, if not
by social origin (and the latter qualification is very often unnecessary), they belong to the
upper classes, and will thus lean heavily towards a certain way of looking at the world:
“A common social background and origin, education, connections, kinship, and
friendship, a similar way of life, result in a cluster of common ideological and political
positions and attitudes, common values and perspectives.”xxix These “common values and
perspectives” are likely to include a strong attachment to the existing social system and a
skeptical, not to say hostile, view of those who seek to transform it. Differences can and
do occur among those who share this broad out-look, of course – but those differences are
almost certain to melt away in the face of a serious challenge from those who do not
share the assumptions of the power elite.

This does not mean that the bourgeois-democratic state is simply a “tool” of the capitalist
class. In fact, “its agents absolutely need a measure of freedom in deciding how best to
serve the existing social order … what to concede and when to concede – the two being
closely related – are matters of some delicacy, which a ruling class, with its eyes fixed on
immediate interests and demands, cannot be expected to handle properly.”xxx

Welfare state and police state

Against this radical critique of capitalist democracy, two obvious and related points are
likely to be made. One is the fact that labour and socialist parties which base themselves
on the support of working-class people have been elected to office on many occasions in
bourgeois-democratic states. The other is that governments of this type (or indeed
conservative ones, in certain situations) have often introduced welfare programmes of
one kind or another which improve the living conditions of the working classes.

The first point will be addressed at greater length in the next section, which discusses
Miliband’s view of social democracy. For now, let us note his argument that “the
ideological distance which separates most social democratic leaders and ministers from
their conservative opponents must not be exaggerated … the presence of social democrats
in the state system has not been nearly as damaging to the cohesion of the power elite as
rhetoric might suggest.”xxxi Regarding the emergence of the “welfare state”, Miliband is
not inclined to dismiss its positive effects: “Such services and benefits raise expectations;
they enhance the notion of state responsibility and social rights against the notion of
individual competition and striving; they render their beneficiaries in the working class
less vulnerable to the rigours of the market and to the dictates of employers.”xxxii But he
makes a number of critical points.

Firstly, “the working class itself mostly pays in direct and indirect taxes for the services
and benefits which accrue to it. What occurs is very largely a redistribution of income
within the working class itself.”xxxiii Secondly, the adoption of such reforms, while it may
bring welcome benefits to many workers and their dependents, does not eliminate the
systemic exploitation vital to capitalism: “These measures do in some degree affect the
ways in which exploitation and domination are experienced, but do not destroy or
threaten the system of which exploitation and domination are the essence. What the state
does in this area is a response to promptings and pressures upon which it is alone
empowered to act, and upon which it acts in the conviction that its response serves to
strengthen, not to undermine, the system.”xxxiv

Above all, the social reforms adopted by the bourgeois-democratic state in response to
mass pressure “from below” have to be compatible with the demands of economic elites:
“Whatever the state does by way of provision and management of services and economic
intervention has to run the gauntlet of the economic imperatives dictated by the
requirements of the system – and what emerges as a result is always very battered.”xxxv

If the “welfare state” is thus less significant than the conventional view would maintain,
that view greatly under-estimates the role of the state as a check on political dissent:

“In periods of serious social conflict, this repressive aspect of the bourgeois-
democratic state is very quickly deployed; and there are large sections of people to
whom this aspect … is very familiar at all times, including times of relative social
peace. To these people – the poor, the unemployed, the migrant workers, the non-
whites, and large parts of the working class in general – the bourgeois-democratic
state does not appear in anything like the same guises as it appears to the well-
established and well-to-do.”xxxvi

The repressive functions of the state are directed against those who step outside the ruling
consensus: “Left activists do get arrested, beaten up, and killed by police and military or
para-military forces in demonstrations, on picket-lines, in police stations or barracks; and
repressive action is almost always ‘covered’ by ministers.”xxxvii This does not mean that
capitalist democracies are indistinguishable from police states, but “they are certainly
very highly policed states, in which phone-tapping, mail-opening, surveillance, and
internal spying, as well as direct and physical repression by state agencies, have become a
familiar, habitual, and increasingly accepted part of the political scene and culture.”xxxviii
The use of physical force against social movements by the state is justified on the
grounds that it is required to uphold “the rule of law”. Miliband’s observation about the
unequal resources available to different social groups seeking to influence the political
process supplies one answer to this point: the particular law whose “rule” is being upheld
may itself contain a crude class bias. But equally to the point, “what is, and what is not,
within the law is precisely the subject of a great deal of discretion, so that what is legal is
very often what the police or magistrates or judges choose to consider legal … these
decisions are inevitably laden with powerful ideological assumptions and prejudices.”xxxix

There always remains the danger that, if the dominant class perceives a threat to its
fundamental interests, it will choose to set aside the real if limited constraints which
bourgeois democracy imposes on political repressionxl and support an openly
authoritarian regime – as happened in many European states between the two world wars.
Such developments have been rare in European politics since 1945, but “this absence of
an authoritarian threat to bourgeois democracy cannot unfortunately be taken to mean
that the propensity to authoritarianism of traditional elites has been finally subdued. It
means rather that there has been no need for them to give serious thought to an
authoritarian alternative.”xli

The Left should always be aware of this “propensity to authoritarianism”. In the wake of
the miners’ strike in Britain and the mobilisation of the police and the secret services by
Thatcher’s government which it prompted, Miliband argued that “Mrs Thatcher is the
first British Prime Minister to convey the very strong impression that she could, in
suitably fraught circumstances, very comfortably play the role of a Pinochet.”xlii

The failings of social democracy

The dominant form of working-class politics in the advanced industrial states has of
course been social democracy, and Ralph Miliband offers one of the most comprehensive
and penetrating critiques of the political strategies adopted by social-democratic
movements. This critique does not claim that social democracy has delivered nothing of
any merit: “It would be quite wrong to ignore or undervalue the reforms which social
democracy has helped to achieve in capitalist societies over the years, or the important
role which its presence and pressure have played in forcing issues and policies on the
political agenda which otherwise would have been ignored or differently handled.”xliii But
these achievements cannot obscure the many negative features of its record.

Miliband argues that, rhetoric aside, social democracy has never seriously attempted to
replace capitalism with an alternative system based on social ownership and control of
the economy: “The most it has ever striven to achieve is capitalism with a more human
face: the record is consistent across time and countries and continents – from Attlee to
Wilson and Callaghan in Britain, from Leon Blum to Guy Mollet to Mitterand in France,
from Ebert to Brandt to Schmidt in Germany etc.”xliv This approach imposes serious
limitations on the reforms which can be achieved by social-democratic governments.
Far from recognising those limitations, most social-democratic leaders have tended to
argue that “capitalist society (in so far as the existence of capitalism is acknowledged at
all) is not a battlefield on which opposed classes are engaged in a permanent conflict,
now more acute, now less, and in which they are firmly on one side, but a community, no
doubt quarrelsome, but a community nonetheless.”xlv Armed with this perspective, they
have usually ignored the structural bias of the bourgeois-democratic state in favour of the
dominant class and rejected the only effective means of countering that bias: mass
mobilisation of their supporters outside the normal routines of parliamentary politics. In
fact, the leaders of such parties have greatly encouraged de-mobilisation of their
supporters:

“Social democracy has generally been deeply concerned to narrow the scope of
political activity, to confine it as far as possible to carefully controlled party and
parliamentary channels, to restrict and stifle grassroots activism except in the
service of the party’s electoral interests. Much of the energy of social-democratic
leaders has been devoted to the containment and channelling of the energies of their
rank and file, and to the control of that rank and file by the party apparatus; and
much the same concern has been evident among trade union leaders as well.”xlvi

As a result of this approach, “social-democratic organisations have been both major

agencies for the advancement of demands from below, and also major agencies for the
containment of those demands.”xlvii The grand hopes which their advances raised have
been repeatedly dashed: “Again and again, social-democratic governments have been
elected with substantial, sometimes sweeping, parliamentary and popular majorities, on
programmes of extensive reform and renewal, in a climate of genuine enthusiasm and
support, and have very soon flagged and dissipated that enthusiasm and support.”xlviii

When reform has been achieved, Miliband insists, it is largely because of pressure from
the supporters of left-wing parties – despite the best efforts of such parties to minimise
that pressure. Sometimes mass action can force the passage of major reforms by the state
even without the mediation of a left party in office: “The degree to which the key factor
is the intensity of pressure from below is well illustrated by the experience of the Sixties
in the United States, where no social-democratic party of any consequence exists, save in
the very weak (and unacknowledged) version constituted by the Democratic Party.”xlix If
the US anti-racist movement had confined itself to seeking the election of candidates
sympathetic to its agenda, abstaining from marches, boycotts and other forms of civil
disobedience, its achievements would have been a great deal less significant than they
were.

The belief that it was sufficient to win a majority in parliament in order for a reform
programme to be successful, and the failure to make the crucial distinction between
finding oneself in office and actually exercising power, crippled the efforts of reforming
governments: “Even when circumstances were most favourable, for instance in the years
after World War II in such countries as Britain and France, when popular readiness and
support for radical change was very high, it was timidity rather than boldness, submission
to convention rather than innovative zeal which characterised social-democratic
reforming measures.”l The evolution of social democracy saw its ambitions become more
and more limited, until those parties discarded “any interest in transcending capitalist
social relations, and marginalised in the 1980s even those within them who had always
sought to re-establish socialist ideals and practices.”li

Defenders of social democracy would probably offer a number of arguments in response.

Foremost might be the claim that any more radical course of action would have led to
violent confrontation between conservative and socialist forces, raising the grim prospect
of civil war. Social democrats have often presented commitment to non-violence as a
dividing line between themselves and rival tendencies in the labour movement. However,
Miliband notes that “social-democratic recoil from violence and bloodshed has been
extremely selective. Social democracy everywhere has not felt the same qualms when a
‘national’ struggle, as distinct from a class struggle, was at issue.”lii

This forms another part of the indictment of social democracy drawn up by the writer.
Famously, the social-democratic parties of Europe lined up behind their own ruling
classes when the Great War began in 1914, providing valuable political cover for
imperialist policies which they had repeatedly condemned during peace-time. This
complicity with imperialism was a recurrent feature of European social democracy: the
British Labour Party and the French socialists presided over bloody colonial wars against
nationalist movements in Africa and Asia. Social democracy also took the side of
Washington during the Cold War, endorsing “the global counter-revolutionary crusade
which capitalist governments have been waging since World War II under the leadership
of the United States.”liii It should have been possible for social-democratic parties to
oppose the anti-democratic policies of the USSR in Eastern Europe, without giving its
blessing to equally harmful US interventions in Latin America or East Asia.

So far as domestic political conflicts are concerned, Miliband does not consider the
selective “recoil from violence” of social democracy to be entirely admirable. Not that he
ridicules an aversion to civil war, arguing that “it is only people morally and politically
crippled in their sensitivities who would scoff”liv at such a feeling. But it can sometimes
pave the way for exactly what it is meant to avoid: “There are circumstances when the
best – even the only way – to avoid civil war is to mobilise all available forces for the
struggle, and thus compel the Right to pause and possibly to retreat; and preparing for
struggle is also a condition for winning, if a confrontation becomes inevitable.”lv

Radical alternatives

Social democrats have often argued that whether or not it would require violence to bring
about a socialist alternative to capitalism is academic: popular support for such an
alternative is lacking in the developed capitalist societies, and those who remain
intransigent opponents of capitalism will also remain trapped on the margins of political
life. Against this view (now very much part of the “common sense” which underpins
mainstream political debate), Miliband insists that the historical record tells a different
story: “The notion that very large parts of ‘the electorate’, and notably the working class,
are bound to reject radical programmes is a convenient alibi, but little else.”lvi

This claim is certain to be contested, and requires a good deal of clarification. First of all,
Miliband argues that it would be wrong to identify support for radical change with the
desire to carry out an armed insurrection against the state: “It may well be that class-
consciousness and revolutionary consciousness must eventually come to encompass a
will to insurrection … but the will to insurrection which this would entail must be seen as
the ultimate extension of revolutionary consciousness, as its final strategic manifestation,
produced by specific and for the most part unforeseeable circumstances.”lvii To insist that
workers must be willing to mount barricades if their support for socialist goals is to be
assumed sets the bar much too high, and does not get to the heart of the matter:

“The real issue has mostly been the more humane management of capitalism on the
one hand, or radical reform on the other. On this issue, it cannot be said that ‘the
electorate’ has spoken with an unequivocal voice. In fact, a majority of voters has
quite often, especially since WWII, given electoral support to parties precisely
committed to programmes of radical reform. The problem does not lie with the
voters, but with leaders who do not themselves believe in the radical programmes
they find themselves saddled with; and they are therefore all the less likely to defend
them with the vigour and conviction which the advocacy of such programmes
requires.”lviii

This is not a simplistic tale of “bad leaders” betraying the working class. As we have
seen, Miliband identifies the structural features of the bourgeois-democratic state which
make it such an unreliable tool for programmes of radical reform. Social-democratic
parties which are committed to playing the game of capitalist democracy by its rules, and
make no attempt to mobilise their mass support once electoral victory has been secured,
will sooner or later be forced to abandon such programmes.

If support for radical reform has been available (not at all times, of course, but frequently
enough to be counted on), why have leaders of staunchly “moderate” leanings remained
in charge of social-democratic parties? The immersion of these parties in the established
political structures is one important factor, as “bourgeois democracy greatly fosters
‘moderation’, both in trade union leaders and in parliamentarians of social-democratic
disposition.”lix Those leaders come under intense pressure to abandon radical objectives:
“For those who submit to it, there is advancement, praise, honour; for those who resist it,
there is denunciation, often of great virulence, from a multitude of sources.”lx

The same hierarchical structure which gives parliamentary leaders a commanding

position of authority over their supporters has often been replicated inside the social-
democratic parties. Miliband disagrees with the view that all mass organisations are
bound to undergo this process, thanks to the so-called “iron law of oligarchy”. In the
working-class parties of Europe, the development of “oligarchy” has largely been driven
by the need for moderate leaders to prevent radical supporters from influencing key
decisions: “It is easy to see why leaders want and need more power: that power is
required in order to contain and defeat the pressure exercised by left activists and others
of similar disposition.”lxi

When left activists attempt to challenge these barriers in a determined manner, the leaders
of social-democratic parties have another trump card to play: support from the mass
media. Right-wing and establishment media outlets will invariably take the side of the
“moderate” leadership against their grassroots opponents: “While they may not support
with any enthusiasm social-democratic leaders in struggle with left opponents, they can
be relied upon to attack left critics with great violence. A climate of opinion is thus
created which is highly favourable to leaders, and this is likely to have an effect on large
numbers of activists.”lxii This goes a long way towards explaining why social democracy
has remained under the control of leaders who sometimes pay lip service to programmes
of radical reform, while lacking the will or the means to put them into practice.

We have not yet mentioned what may be the most significant reason for the dominance of
“moderate” currents within the labour movements of the developed world: namely, the
evolution of the Communist parties (CPs) which had been founded to challenge social
democracy. The authoritarian nature of the Soviet state, and the subordination of the
Communist movement to that state, did much to discredit the whole idea of socialism:
“One of the great triumphs of dominant classes in the West has been their appropriation
of democracy, at least in rhetoric and propaganda; and it can hardly be doubted that
Communist practices, from elections with 99.9% majorities to the brutal suppression of
dissent, have been of the greatest help in the achievement of this appropriation.”lxiii

Regarding the CPs themselves, Miliband identifies two key deformities, “their total
subservience to Stalin’s policies and purposes … [and] closely related to this, their mode
of organization … the combination of sectarianism and opportunism which characterised
Stalinism, together with sudden changes of policy imposed from Moscow, blighted their
politics and blunted their political effectiveness.”lxiv While the CPs of Western Europe
began to distance themselves from Moscow after Stalin’s death, and could no longer be
described as “subservient”, their internal structures remained deeply marked by the
Stalinist era. Whatever liberalization did take place was strictly circumscribed:

“There was a time, not so long ago, when the need for discipline was invoked to
silence all criticism inside Communist parties, and to expel the critics. This is no
longer the common practice. Criticism is tolerated, so long as the critics do not try
to render themselves effective by seeking to come together, and by together pressing
their views upon the party … the contradiction is blatant between Eurocommunist
protestations of commitment to democracy on the one hand, and commitment to
undemocratic practices inside Communist parties on the other.”lxv

The association of Communism with the most repulsive features of the Soviet
dictatorship, and the tight regimentation imposed by CPs on their own members, proved
to be extremely damaging in the contest with social democracy that spanned much of the
twentieth century. Countless people who might have found a radical alternative to the
social-democratic parties attractive were alienated by the actually existing Communist
movement.

Revolutionary reformism

The deficiencies of the Communist parties prevented them from playing the role desired
by Miliband as the agents of “revolutionary reformism”. This apparently paradoxical
term calls for explanation. While Miliband firmly insists that mass support has been
available for radical change in the developed capitalist world, he is careful not to
exaggerate the revolutionary character of this backing: “It is undoubtedly futile to expect
any large measure of popular support for programmes whose central premise is that a
clean sweep must be made of everything to do with the existing social and political order,
so that it may be replaced by a totally new social order whose shape and character tend to
be only very loosely and vaguely sketched out.”lxvi

For Miliband, account must be taken of “the extremely strong attraction which legality,
constitutionalism and representative institutions of the parliamentary type have had for
the overwhelming majority of people in the working-class movements of capitalist
societies”lxvii. He describes the “rejection of insurrectionism” as “the largest and most
important fact about the working class in advanced capitalist countries since 1918”lxviii.
This does not mean that the working class has been uncritically supportive of the existing
political regime in those countries:

“The rejection of insurrectionism must not be taken to signify an enthusiastic

endorsement of bourgeois democracy, parliamentarism and representative
institutions. On the contrary, there is very deep and widespread scepticism about all
of this, and the chances are that it has always been so. For the working class in
general, it is probably the case that ‘politics’ has been a term charged with many
negative and suspect connotations. But this scepticism about bourgeois politics has
never meant any kind of commitment to its obverse, namely the politics of
insurrection and violent revolution.”lxix

It was this popular rejection, rather than the dictates of Moscow, which drove the
Communist parties of Western Europe to abandon insurrectionary politics. To be sure, the
Soviet leadership encouraged this turn for its own reasons, but “if it had not corresponded
to very powerful and compelling tendencies in the countries concerned, the abandonment
of the strategy would have encountered much greater resistance in revolutionary
movements, notwithstanding Moscow’s prestige and pressure and repression”lxx. If
insurrectionism is off the agenda, what, then, is the nature of the alternative suggested by
Miliband?

“Revolutionary reformism”, he argues, will involve “intervention in class struggle at all

point of conflict in society, and pre-eminently at the site of work. It also involves
electoral struggles at all levels and conceives these struggles as an intrinsic part of class
struggle, without allowing itself to be absorbed into electoralism and parliamentarism”lxxi.
A full engagement with electoral politics is required: “The alternative, amply
demonstrated by long experience, is for parties intent upon radical change to remain
confined in a very narrow political space.”lxxii The belief that it is possible to by-pass the
representative structures which already exist, or to engage with them in a marginal and
tokenistic manner, is illusory. Radical socialists must take those structures very seriously
and build up support within them, while conducting “a permanent critique of the
limitations and shortcomings of bourgeois democracy, of its narrowness and formalism,
of its authoritarian tendencies and practices.”lxxiii.

Is this not simply a re-packaged version of the “parliamentary road to socialism” which
dominated social-democratic perspectives in the early years of the movement? Not quite.
Miliband is keenly aware of the danger that such electoral engagement will lead to
“unprincipled compromise, the opportunistic dilution of programme and purpose” but
argues that such perils “may at least be greatly attenuated by a democratic, open,
responsive party life, with leaders and representatives truly accountable to the members
of the organisations which had made their election possible”lxxiv. Nor does his strategy
rule out extra-parliamentary struggles – in fact, they are to play a critical role in socialist
advance.

Perhaps the most crucial difference is that Miliband’s favoured course “does not postulate
a smooth and uneventful transition to socialism by way of electoral support and
parliamentary majorities. It acknowledges that, in the context of capitalist democracy,
such a transition requires a massive degree of popular support and commitment …
‘revolutionary reformism’ is also bound to be very conscious of the fact that any serious
challenge to dominant classes must inevitably evoke resistance, and will be determined to
meet that resistance with every weapon that this requires.”lxxv

The starting-point for a transition to socialism, in this perspective, must be an electoral

victory and the formation of a government committed to radical reform. A radical
commitment of this nature is essential, as “minority participation by the Left in an
essentially conservative government is most likely to have as its main result the
compromising of those on the Left who enter into it”lxxvi. Any radical government elected
in one of the advanced capitalist states would most likely be a coalition, which would
need “a core, a solid centre; and this would have to be provided by the representatives of
a socialist party able to exercise a major influence in the coalition, without any
presumption of a privileged position”lxxvii

The goal of socialists should be to establish an economic system “where the commanding
heights of the economy, including its strategic industrial, financial and commercial
enterprises, and some of the lesser heights as well, come under one form or another of
public or social ownership, under the scrutiny and regulation of a democratic state, itself
strictly accountable”lxxviii. This model would be clearly distinguished from the East
European version of a planned economy by its democratic character, but also by the fact
that “state ownership need not be thought of in terms of single, monopolistic
corporations, but rather as areas of economic activity ruled wherever possible on the
principle that more-than-one is better than one”lxxix. Social ownership could assume
different forms, and the system as a whole might be termed a “mixed economy” – but one
in which the balance between public and private ownership was reversed.

As the new government moves towards this goal, initiating far-reaching anti-capitalist
reforms that undermine the power of economic elites, it will have to except ferocious
opposition. Crucially, this opposition will come from within as well as outside the state
system: “By far the larger part of the state personnel at the higher levels, and at least a
very large number in the lower ones as well, are much more likely to be ideologically,
politically, and emotionally on the side of the conservative forces than of the
government.”lxxx There can be no illusion that the machinery of the state will lend itself to
radical purposes as readily as if it was called upon to act in defence of the social order.
The new government and its supporters must recognise that “to achieve office by
electoral means involves moving into a house long occupied by people of very different
dispositions – indeed it involves moving into a house many rooms of which continue to
be occupied by such people”lxxxi.

One of the most urgent tasks, then, will be to change the personnel administering the
state:

“It is not realistic to believe that the project can be advanced if people in key
positions in the state apparatus – most of whom could be expected to be ranged in a
spectrum encompassing bitter hostility at one end and lack of enthusiasm at the
other – were not replaced with people who believed wholeheartedly in it, and who
were willing to bend all their energies and intelligence to its success.”lxxxii

But merely re-shuffling the personnel at the top levels of the state is not nearly enough.
Against a powerful alliance of conservative, anti-socialist forces, whose class power will
not have been liquidated by an electoral defeat, a radical government can only prevail if it
is able to rely on strong popular support. Even that will not be enough, however, if such
backing is not mobilised effectively – hence Miliband’s call for a strong partnership
between the government and new structures that will give its supporters real decision-
making power. A transition to socialism must involve “radical changes in the structure,
modes of operation, and personnel of the existing state, as well as the creation of a
network of organs of popular participation”lxxxiii.

Miliband uses the term “dual power” when referring to the relationship between these
new structures and the state. This is a departure from the original understanding of the
term by Marxists in the early twentieth century, who had in mind a situation which saw
new organs of working-class power confronting a parliament dominated by conservative
forces and seeking to overthrow it. Miliband argues instead that the new structures will
be “intended not to replace the state but to complement it … the organs of popular
participation do not challenge the government but act as a defensive-offensive and
generally supportive element in what is a semi-revolutionary and exceedingly fraught
state of affairs”lxxxiv. Despite their pragmatic origins, the structures of “dual power”
should become a permanent feature of the new political order taking shape.
The “semi-revolutionary and exceedingly fraught” conditions which the new government
is likely to encounter deserve some attention. We have already noted Miliband’s
argument that “there are circumstances when the best – even the only way – to avoid civil
war is to mobilise all available forces for the struggle”. He does not believe that civil war
is the inevitable outcome of any attempt to uproot capitalist social relations. But he
considers it very likely that there will be at least some violent clashes during the
transition. Against those who see this as sufficient argument against any project of radical
change, Miliband would doubtless point to the routine violence of the status quo, even in
the most stable bourgeois-democratic states, which his work carefully itemises. To accept
the capitalist order is to accept this violence.

Not that Miliband is one of those radicals who likes to remark that “you can’t make an
omelette without breaking eggs”, as if that disposed of the question of violence (indeed,
he once responded to such arguments with the reminder that “you can break an awful lot
of eggs without making a decent omelette”lxxxv). His views on the subject are closer to the
maxim “those who wish for peace prepare for war”. In the aftermath of the bloody coup
against the radical Popular Unity government in Chile, Miliband carefully noted that the
pacific strategy of its leaders had in fact made the disaster more likely:

“Considering the manner of Salvador Allende’s death, a certain reticence is very

much in order. Yet, it is impossible not to attribute to him at least some of the
responsibility for what ultimately occurred … Allende believed in conciliation
because he feared the result of a confrontation. But because he believed that the Left
was bound to be defeated in any such confrontation, he had to pursue with ever-
greater desperation his policy of conciliation; but the more he pursued that policy,
the greater grew the assurance and boldness of his opponents.”lxxxvi

Radicals must be ready to take decisive measures against violent opposition to their
project, and “it is a typical class logic which denies to a government committed to radical
change the powers which all capitalist governments have assumed to prevent radical
change and to defend the status quo”lxxxvii. Such measures will have to be kept under tight
control, however, and peaceful opposition to a socialist government should be tolerated
without question: “The suppression of all opposition and the stifling of all civic freedoms
must be taken to represent a disastrous regression, in political terms, from bourgeois
democracy.”lxxxviii

As it takes shape, socialist democracy must “embody many of the features of liberal
democracy, including the rule of law, the separation of powers, civil liberties, political
pluralism and a vibrant civil society, but it would give them more effective meaning”lxxxix.
This will involve “the fostering of many centres of power outside the state, in a system of
autonomous and independent associations, groupings, parties and lobbies of every kind
and description, expressing a multitude of concerns and aspirations woven in the tissue of
society”xc. Socialist democracy is bound to assume different forms from one country to
the next, just as capitalist democracy does today.
Miliband departs from the view of many anti-capitalist radicals in arguing that the state
(albeit a radically transformed one) will not be abolished or “wither away” once
capitalism has been eliminated:

“The building and consolidating of socialist democracy will long require a state to
carry out essential tasks which the state alone can accomplish: for instance, the
decisions which must ultimately be made about priorities regarding the allocation of
scare and essential resources; the adjudication of a diversity of competing claims in
societies where division and conflict, though greatly attenuated, would continue to
occur; the ultimate guarantee of civic, political, and social rights which give much of
its force to the notion of socialist pluralism; and so on … just as society would check
state power, so too would the state, democratically invested with the capacity to do
so, constitute a check on the power of popular institutions and agencies.”xci

Finally, Miliband rejects the claim that any socialist experiment in a single country is
bound to fail, due to the globalised nature of the world economy and the pressure which
capitalist states can bring to bear against any departure from the established rules of the
game. Without denying the existence of a very real problem, he insists that a radical
government could overcome economic sabotage “if it adopted drastic measures, worked
out well in advance of the assumption of office, to protect the currency and the economy
from the de-stabilising operations of financial markets and hostile governments and
institutions”xcii. While the other capitalist powers would be sure to oppose the agenda of
the new government, they do not form a monolithic bloc with a unified strategy: real
divisions of interest among those powers could be exploited to create some breathing
space.

Moreover, “a radical government, confronted with national and international capitalist

hostility, would attract a good deal of support from labour and socialist forces in other
countries … this support would find translation into pressure upon governments at least
to desist from hostile policies and actions”xciii. In the period before the assumption of
power, it would be wise, indeed essential, to establish close bonds with progressive forces
in other states, making it easier to organise solidarity action across national boundaries.
The problems raised by the global nature of capitalism “are not insuperable, provided that
the government has the will to overcome them. Will alone is not enough: but it is the
absolutely indispensable point of departure”xciv.
Capitalism or freedom

After Ernest Mandel’s death in 1994, Robin Blackburn recalled the last time he saw the
Belgian revolutionary speak in public, at a debate with Felipe Gonzalez three years
earlier:

“The Spanish Prime Minister unwisely elected to lecture Mandel on the virtues of
constitutionalism and respect for human rights. Mandel drew a stark picture of the
plight of Europe’s thirty million unemployed and attacked social democracy for its
capitulation to the deflationary dictates of the Bundesbank. He also drew attention
to the contradiction between Gonzalez’s oration and the fact that several thousand
young pacifists were languishing in Spain’s jails as he spoke. There can have been
very few in the hall, or watching on TV, who did not see the frail, seventy-year-old
Ernest Mandel as the vigorous and principled defender of socialism and Gonzalez as
the miserable, compromised prisoner of power.”xcv

Having narrowly escaped death in the Nazi camp system during the Second World War,
Mandel was hardly likely to under-estimate the differences between bourgeois democracy
and the worst forms of authoritarian rule – indeed, he was always careful to reproach
socialists who failed to appreciate such differencesxcvi. But Mandel never ceased to
maintain that “private property and capitalist exploitation … result in the violent
restriction of the practical application of democratic rights and the practical enjoyment of
democratic freedoms by the big majority of the toiling masses, even in the most
democratic bourgeois regimes”xcvii.

The control over economic production exercised by the big capitalist firms is itself an
affront to democracy, and greatly limits the power of citizens to influence the state
through the ballot box: “In the face of so-high powered a concentration … the
relationships between parliament and government officials, police commissioners and
those multi-millionaires is a relationship burdened very little by theory. It is a very
immediate and practical relationship: and the connecting link is the pay-off.”xcviii Like
Ralph Miliband, however, Mandel does not see the disproportionate influence of the
capitalist class over state policy merely as a reflection of its much greater resources. The
bias is firmly rooted in the character of the state itself:

“The power of the state is a permanent power. This power is exercised by a certain
number of institutions that are isolated from and independent of so changeable and
unstable an influence as universal suffrage … the state is, above all, these
permanent institutions: the army (the permanent part of the army – the general
staff, special troops), the police, special police, secret police, the top administrators
of government departments (‘key’ civil servants), the national security bodies, the
judges, etc. – everything that is ‘free’ of the influence of universal suffrage.”xcix

The selection process ensures that people in the top ranks of the state system are likely to
come from a narrow social background. This is true even when entry to the civil service
is determined by apparently “meritocratic” examinations: “There’s a progression in these
examinations that gives them a selective character. You have to have certain degrees, you
have to have taken certain courses, to apply for certain positions, especially important
positions. Such a system excludes a huge number of people who were not able to get a
university education or its equivalent, because equality of educational opportunity
doesn’t really exist.”c

Even if men or women from a humble background are able to clear these hurdles, they
will ultimately be “absorbed and integrated into the bourgeois class, even if only through
the size of their incomes and the inevitable accumulation of capital to which they lead”ci.
The ideological conformity of the state elite will also be ensured by the simple fact that
they have to perform roles that are difficult to reconcile with a progressive or socialist
outlook: “One cannot be an effective prison guard desirous of promotion if one
systematically organises escapes of prisoners; history has never know a convinced and
practising pacifist chief of staff.”cii

The bourgeois-democratic state can be seen as an arbiter between different social

interests, but “the arbiter is not neutral … the top men in the state apparatus are part and
parcel of the big bourgeoisie. Arbitration thus does not take place in a vacuum; it takes
place in the framework of maintaining existing class society. Of course, concessions to
the exploited can be made by arbitrators; that depends essentially on the relationship of
forces”ciii. Welfare reforms should thus be seen as tactical moves intended to preserve the
social order, which do not change the class nature of the state, and may be retracted when
the balance of power shifts once more in favour of capital.

So far, Mandel’s critique of bourgeois democracy is very similar to that of Ralph

Miliband. But he introduces another element, arguing that the nature of parliamentary
democracy itself helps the capitalist class to maintain its position: “The characteristic
feature of bourgeois democracy is the tendency towards atomisation of the working class
– it is individual voters who are counted, and not social groups or classes who are
consulted.”civ As Mandel elaborates: “Within indirect representative democracy the
‘citizen’ – including the wage-earning citizen - is an atomised and alienated individual,
subject to the thousand and one pressures not only of bourgeois ideology but also and
more important of patterns of labour and consumption which are fashioned by capital and
dominate his entire existence.”cv

In the course of the struggle for socialist democracy, this atomisation will be transformed
by the growth of new political structures:

“Once the self-organisation of the masses is set in motion, and varied mechanisms of
direct democracy are created, the ‘citizen’ – and primarily the wage-earning citizen
– is no longer isolated and is less and less alienated. He becomes conscious of his
strength through force of numbers. He transcends his individual prejudices by
participating in collective decision-making. He is not content merely to drop a slip
into a ballot box. He participates in processes of decision-making, in the application
of these decisions, and the verification of their application.”cvi
Mandel’s argument for “council democracy” will be explored to a much greater extent in
the final section, summarising his views on the transition to socialism. It forms a critical
part of his arguments against bourgeois democracy – from Mandel’s perspective, it is not
just the uneasy co-existence of an elected government with the power of big capital that
compromises parliamentary democracy. Its structure is inherently flawed, quite apart
from the class context in which it has to function.

The illusions of reformism

Mandel describes reformism as “the illusion that a gradual dismantling of the power of
capital is possible. First of all you nationalise 20%, then 30%, then 50%, then 60% of
capitalist property. In this way the economic power of capital is dissolved little by
little”cvii. This perspective is entirely lacking in realism, because the capitalist class will
react furiously to “any real shift of economic power away from the banks and the big
monopolies … such a reaction generally takes the form of massive capital flight,
investment strikes, sabotage of production, and organised runaway inflation; and it takes
the form of preparation for a violent overthrow of the political regime”cviii. In the face of
such militant opposition, a left government must either radicalise its programme, taking
swift action to break the power of capital altogether, or retreat. The normal course
followed by social democracy has been one of compromise and accommodation to the
capitalist order.

If the permanence of the capitalist system is accepted by left-wing parties, this inevitably
limits the scope for reform. The best opportunities for social democracy have opened up
at a time when dominant classes feared that their power might be broken altogether
unless they made concessions. This explains why the period immediately after 1945 saw
extensive reforms adopted in Western Europe: “The war had exacerbated social
contradictions and radicalised the popular masses. The bourgeoisie and its power
structures emerged discredited by the whole of their conduct during the war. Radical
reforms were the minimum price to pay to avoid revolution.”cix Even at such a promising
moment, social democracy had to pay a heavy toll in return for the acceptance of reform,
lining up behind US capitalism in its clash with Moscow and sharing the responsibility
for colonial wars:

“There was a way open for the social-democratic leaders to refuse to take on joint
responsibility for the Cold War in Europe, while avoiding the Stalinist model: to opt
for a workers’ state based on the widest pluralist socialist democracy, maintaining
and extending democratic political freedoms. They deliberately rejected this choice.
They accordingly bear the responsibility, except in the neutral countries, of having
supported the imperialist Cold War.”cx

The Cold War itself was another factor prompting greater openness to reform, as the
western capitalist powers wished to reduce the attraction of the Soviet model: no return to
the conditions of the Great Depression could be tolerated. The long period of economic
growth that followed the war provided the necessary space for increases in wage rates
and social spending.

At one time or another, capital and labour may strike political bargains that involve
concessions to the latter. But there can be no permanent “social contract”, still less social
peace: “Periodically – not permanently, not at the same time in all countries – a sudden
sharpening of the class struggle is unavoidable under contemporary capitalism. It results
from the combination of many factors, which do not necessarily coincide with economic
depressions, although the decline of the rate of profit and the sharper economic
contradictions make new reforms unacceptable to the system as such and force it to
retract some gained in ‘better times’.”cxi If economic expansion creates more space for
reform, the contraction which must eventually follow does the opposite:

“Historically, the development of those public services in bourgeois society from

which the toilers primarily benefit is always linked to periods of rapid expansion of
production, incomes, and capitalist profits … the capitalists can make these
concessions only when the economic situation is good. To hope for such increases of
social services in an atmosphere of economic crisis and decline in the rate of profit is
an idle illusion. The only sort of public spending the bourgeoisie seeks to increase in
such an atmosphere is direct and indirect subsidies to capitalist companies.”cxii

Having retreated from any ambition to replace capitalism with a socialist economic
system during the post-war “Golden Age”, social democracy was caught unawares by the
global recession of the 1970s and forced to abandon reforming goals that clashed with the
need to restore profitability: “Imprisoned by their desire to run the economy in a purely
‘technical’ way, the socialist leaders approached the depression without any overall
economic project that was fundamentally different from the project of big capital. Indeed
for a long time, they obstinately denied the reality of the depression, or minimised its
extent. This led them to endorse the austerity policies advocated by the bourgeoisie. In
the countries where they were in power, they took the initiative themselves in
implementing these policies.”cxiii Social-democratic parties have now become complicit in
the erosion of reforms which they helped bring about themselves at an earlier stage.

Stalinism and Euro-communism

The Communist movement which offered an alternative to social democracy was

severely compromised by its subordination to the USSR. Writing in the 1970s, Mandel
referred to “the hideous mask the privileged and oppressive bureaucracy of the Soviet
Union has clamped on socialism for decades”cxiv. That “hideous mask” largely determined
popular views of Communism during the hey-day of Soviet power. The ruling
bureaucracy in the Soviet Union “transformed the Communist parties from instruments of
socialist revolution and defence of the world proletariat into instruments of the policies
and interests of the USSR”cxv. It would be many years before they were able to function
autonomously, and Communist links with Moscow were only sundered altogether by the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
When discussing the turn of the European Communist parties towards a parliamentary,
reformist strategy from the 1930s onwards, Mandel assigns a much higher responsibility
than Ralph Miliband to the dictates of Soviet policy: “The CPs made the turn of 1935 out
of fidelity to the Soviet Union as they understood it – in other words, loyalty to the Soviet
bureaucracy, on which they increasingly depended both materially and politically.”cxvi
This change of direction was not simply a response to political conditions in the countries
of Western Europe, but was ultimately determined by the needs of the Soviet Union.

Mandel was a leading critic of the “Euro-communist” project which emerged in the
1970s, as the CPs of Western Europe finally moved out of the shadow of the USSR and
began to articulate a line of their own. He summarises their key arguments as follows:

“The Euro-communists hope to avoid, at all costs, a head-on collision between the
bourgeoisie, with its state apparatus, and the working class and the masses.
According to the Euro-communists, such a head-on collision is harmful (it leads to
inevitable defeat for the working class), unnecessary (there are other ways to
eliminate capitalism), and contrary to the needs of a ‘democratic transition to
socialism’ (it forces the labour movement on a road similar to that which led to the
bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union). Consequently, it is necessary to
have a gradual transition to socialism, which respects the basic institutions of
parliamentary democracy.”cxvii

For Mandel, the idea of a legal transition to socialism, within the boundaries of the
established system, is a contradiction in terms: “Under the capitalist system, ‘legality’
protects capitalist private property. It conserves and sanctions hierarchy and blind
discipline within the army, gendarmerie and police.”cxviii To respect the law, ultimately, is
to accept the continued existence of capitalism, with all that entails. The structures of the
bourgeois state must be dismantled, above all its repressive bodies – otherwise they will
be used to strangle the workers’ movement.

Nor can a “head-on collision” between the working class and the bourgeoisie be avoided.
The Italian Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer had referred to the experience of
Salvador Allende’s government as proof that any such confrontation must end in a
crushing defeat. Mandel’s view, on the contrary, insists that “the Chilean defeat resulted
from unrealistic and treacherous attempts to avoid, brake, or fragment mass mobilisation,
mass self-organisation, and mass armament (including organisation of the soldiers and
systematic attempts to disintegrate the bourgeois army) in the face of unavoidable class
polarisation and preparation for an armed coup by the capitalists”cxix.

The orientation of the Euro-communists, according to Mandel, was not simply a case of
misguided strategic thinking. He notes the line of continuity between their project and the
Popular Front strategy adopted by the CPs at Moscow’s behest in the 1930s and 1940s
(the main difference being that the Euro-communists were now prepared to assert their
independence of the USSR and criticise the lack of democracy in the Eastern bloc). The
explicit adoption of a “parliamentary road to socialism” owed much to the fact that the
West European CPs had been deeply immersed in the reigning political system for
decades: “These powerful positions, and their length of uninterrupted tenure, inside the
institutions of bourgeois democracy have led to a phenomenon identical to that which
occurred during the 1910-20 period inside classical social democracy: the birth of a Euro-
communist labour bureaucracy integrated into bourgeois society”cxx.

This “labour bureaucracy” was unwilling to adopt a strategy that might endanger its own
status, and thus favoured gradualism. It could maintain its dominant position because of
the authoritarian internal life of the CPs. At the close of the 1970s, Mandel described the
features of that regime as it operated within the French CP in the following terms:

“An apparatus of full-time officials largely cut off from the working class and from
civil society, which does not see any other way of making a living than within the
apparatus itself. A leadership which manipulates the base, which assures its own
survival by automatic co-optation of the middle ranks of this apparatus. A right to
‘discussion’ of a base strictly partitioned into cells or local sections – a partitioning
powerfully reinforced by the rule of unanimity (of ‘collegial solidarity’) that the
members of the leadership observe in their dealings with the base. The myth of the
‘party which is always right’ or the ‘central committee which is never mistaken’,
which underpins ideologically the bureaucratic structure.”cxxi

A structure of this type gave massive advantages to the leadership and prevented
dissenting members from effectively challenging its line. This helps explain the weakness
of any challenge to Euro-communist strategies from within the CPs.

Dual power and revolution

Having condemned the strategies of social democracy and Eurocommunism, Mandel

must of course have his own answer to the obvious response: what do you propose
instead? Is there any realistic chance that your own strategy can be put into practice?
While he does not reject “insurrectionism” in the same terms as Ralph Miliband, he is
quite happy to acknowledge that some models of revolution are not likely to be relevant
in the heartlands of advanced capitalism: “There are going to be no repetitions of the
1918 German revolution or the 1941-45 Yugoslav revolution … are these particular kinds
of revolution the only ones which can achieve the overthrow of capitalism? Are
‘catastrophic’ conditions necessary? No.”cxxii Mandel puts forward an alternative scenario
for a radical break with the status quo:

“Workers will become more and more radicalised as the result of a whole series of
social, political, economic or even military crises … once they are radicalised, they
will launch more and more far-reaching campaigns during the course of which they
will begin to link their immediate demands with a programme of anti-capitalist
structural reforms, until eventually the struggle concludes with a general strike
which either overthrows the regime or creates a duality of powers.”cxxiii
The French general strikes of 1936 and 1968 are for Mandel classic instances of a
working-class protest movement that could have developed along such lines. The road to
social transformation does not, or at any rate need not, pass through the existing
structures of bourgeois democracy. Mandel agrees that “during periods of the normal
functioning of bourgeois society, the working class is indeed dominated by reformism …
but capitalism has not functioned normally throughout the past sixty or seventy years.
Periods of normality have been interrupted by the outbreak of crises, of pre-revolutionary
and revolutionary situations”cxxiv.

The role of socialists is not to stand around waiting for a major political crisis to fall from
the sky like a thunder-bolt. They should be active in the battle for social reforms at all
times. The difference between reformist and revolutionary socialists is not that the former
believe it is important to achieve reforms, while the latter consider them insignificant.
Rather, it is their approach to winning such reforms that marks revolutionaries out from
the reformist currents in the workers’ movement:

“Without rejecting or marginalising legislative initiatives, revolutionary socialists

prioritise the struggle for reforms through broad, direct extra-parliamentary mass
actions …without negating the need to take into consideration real social-political
relations of forces, revolutionary socialists refuse to limit the struggle for reforms to
those which are acceptable to the bourgeoisie or, worse, which don’t upset the basic
social and political relations of power … [they] educate the masses in the
inevitability of crises which will interrupt the gradual accumulation of reforms, and
which will periodically lead to a threat of suppression of conquests of the past, or to
their actual suppression … [they] will combine a struggle for reforms with constant
and systematic anti-capitalist propaganda. They will educate the masses in the
system’s ills, and advocate its revolutionary overthrow.”cxxv

Mandel favours the use of parliamentary elections as a platform to promote radical ideas.
But he rejects the view that socialists must achieve a majority, or even a big presence, in
parliament before the main struggle can begin: “In general a dual-power situation would
imply a revolutionary socialist current strong enough to win representation in parliament,
if parliamentary elections were held at that time.”cxxvi The qualification is vital, for “many
parliaments are elected for terms of four or five years [and] it is quite possible for there to
be great upheavals between elections, which alter the relationship of forces within the
working class drastically”cxxvii. Under such conditions, the revolutionary left might
become a major political force without having any significant foothold in parliamentary
politics.

Parliament need not remain the central battleground of political life, for “the legitimate
attachment of the masses to democratic rights and freedom is not at all an attachment to
bourgeois state institutions”cxxviii. The experience of fascism and Stalinism has often led
workers to identify democratic freedoms with those institutions. However, in
revolutionary situations, a choice can appear between two rival democratic legitimacies:
the old institutions of bourgeois-parliamentary democracy, and new structures based
upon workers’ and peoples’ councils that allow much greater scope for popular control
over decision-making. Under such conditions, “the workers must learn that the real
debate is not between democracy and dictatorship, but between the limited and repressive
character of bourgeois democracy and the extension of democratic freedoms by the
initiative and authority of the masses”cxxix.

When a situation of dual power arises, the goal of revolutionaries must be to out-flank the
bourgeois state and promote its eventual disintegration. This will take place if the
workers in the lower ranks of the state system, whose social condition is very similar to
that of the working class as a whole, begin to defy the established hierarchies and
command structures which hold the capitalist state together: “If the staff of the banks
reject the orders of the Finance Minister or of the Governor of the Central Bank in favour
of the workers’ council of the banking sector, then the whole administration is paralysed.
It is the same with the transport sector, and so on. If the phenomenon is widely extended,
to include even sectors of the police, it is clear that what is involved is a total paralysis of
the bourgeois state apparatus.”cxxx

Mandel does not claim that such an outcome can be achieved rapidly, at least not in
countries where parliamentary democracy has been established for a long period of time
and enjoys a good deal of prestige: “A period of six or seven months is much too short
for a proletariat like that of Western Europe to progressively abandon the legitimacy of
bourgeois democracy in favour of the new, higher legitimacy of proletarian democracy. A
longer period of dual power will probably be needed, which may be partial and
discontinuous and which may stretch over several years.”cxxxi One of the features of this
transitional period may be the formation of a left-wing government headed by reformist
parties, whose programme calls for extensive change but does not break with capitalism.

If this occurs, it is likely that “the masses will accord the parliamentary majority or left
government a relative, guarded and mistrustful trust – the contradictory formulation
expresses the reality well. At the same time, they will show a tendency to break out of the
limits to action laid down in advance by the reformist, class-collaborationist programme,
with its avoidance of a break with the bourgeois regime”cxxxii. Workers may think the only
“useful vote” they can cast at the parliamentary level is for one of the reformist parties: at
the same time, they will be prepared to take action independently of (and against the will
of) those parties.

At a time when the revolutionary left is too weak to take power itself, it may be a wise
tactical move to demand that the reformist parties form a government that excludes
bourgeois forces. Mandel argued for such an approach in the France of the 1970s, where
the Socialists and Communists were by far the most important organisations in the
workers’ movement. While it would be necessary to warn the working class “against all
illusions regarding the will (and the capacity) of the reformist leaders of the PS and the
PCF to truly break with the bourgeoisie, to satisfy the aspirations of the masses”,
revolutionaries must also recognise that “the great majority of workers still have these
illusions. They will only shake them off on the basis of their practical experience with a
PS-PCF government, and not on the basis of our educational propaganda alone”cxxxiii.
The failings of such governments will only lead to a positive response from their
working-class supporters if there is a strong challenge from those further to the left:

“Great expectations that prove to be unfounded can lead to great disappointment

and demoralisation. This is exactly why the existence of a credible left alternative is
so critical. The reaction of the working class to the ineffectiveness and betrayal of a
reformist government is as different as day and night depending on whether or not
such an alternative exists within the labour movement.”cxxxiv

As a prolonged situation of dual power unfolds, revolutionaries must seek to encourage

and expand all attempts by workers to organise themselves outside the structures of the
bourgeois-democratic state. Those experiments will bring more and more people into
conflict with the existing political system, which will attempt to stifle forms of popular
democracy that challenge its authority. Mandel insists that opposition to the bourgeois
state does not mean opposition to the public services which it currently provides: “No
revolutionary socialist would dream of doing away with free kindergartens or social
security, just because they happen to have been publicly organised before the overthrow
of capitalism. If anything, far from being characteristic of the bourgeois state, one could
call them cells of a future socialist society, which we do want to preserve and
expand.”cxxxv

As the nuclei of direct, popular democracy spread throughout society, they will clash
with the institutions of the bourgeois state: “This is not merely a matter of conflict with
the repressive apparatus proper and the summits of the ‘state machine’. Potentially it is
also a matter of a conflict – barring completely exceptional conditions – with the organs
of indirect representative democracy, which will desperately defend their monopoly of
‘sovereignty’.”cxxxvi Mandel spelled out what those “exceptional conditions” might be:

“We do not rule out the possibility, improbably but not impossible, that a very high
level of political consciousness among the masses, a qualitative expansion of the
political influence of revolutionary organisations, and a crisis of fragmentation of
the reformist parties could result, after a prolonged revolutionary period, in a
coincidence between a parliamentary majority and a majority in the organs of
direct democracy. All the better. But what seems to us inadmissible and contrary to
the interests of the proletariat is to subordinate the realisation of the revolutionary
programme to a prior and durable attainment of a stable parliamentary majority,
even when that programme is supported by a clearly expressed majority of
citizens.”cxxxvii

If it is necessary to by-pass an established parliament on the path to socialist revolution

(as long as an adequate democratic mandate has been secured from the emerging system
of councils), this does not mean that a parliament elected by the population as a whole
has no place in a socialist society: “We could calmly discuss whether or not an assembly
elected by universal suffrage is necessary, alongside a congress of workers’ councils, in
the framework of a socialist democracy. Once the economic power and state apparatus of
the bourgeoisie are broken, this is a conjunctural question and not a matter of
principle.”cxxxviii

Encroachments on the economic power of the capitalist class should be based on a policy
of “tit-for-tat”: as the capitalists attempt to sabotage production, the workers’ movement
should steadily take over the management of the economy. This will involve “the
occupation and take-over of factories followed by their co-ordination; working-out of a
workers’ plan of economic re-conversion and revival; the extension and generalisation of
workers’ control in the direction of self-management; the running of a whole number of
areas of social life by those directly concerned (public transport, street markets, crèches,
universities, agricultural land etc.)”cxxxix. Such radical moves imply that the period of dual
power must culminate in the overthrow of the bourgeois state, which will hardly permit
experiments of that nature without a struggle.

The repressive bodies of that state (police, army, secret police) are the nut which must be
cracked if socialism is to become a reality. There must be no expectation that the officer
corps will obey orders from a new socialist authority, even if it enjoys a clear
parliamentary majority. While “the proletariat will greet with open arms all those,
officers included, who come over to its side in the struggle for the overthrow of the
bourgeois regime”, it should be assumed that a great number of officers, especially at the
highest levels, will remain implacable opponents of revolutionary change. To prevent
those officers from using the army to execute a counter-revolutionary coup, the
revolutionary forces will have to encourage rank-and-file soldiers to organise themselves
and defy their superior commanders:

“An insurrection is only the final point of a revolutionary process, and if the
relationship of forces is favourable, it can be effected practically without casualties,
provided the armed apparatus of the bourgeoisie has first been morally and
politically disintegrated and the legitimacy of the workers’ and peoples’ councils has
been acknowledged by the immense majority of the population, including the
soldiers.”cxl

Council democracy in action

Mandel is anxious to avoid a repeat of the authoritarian systems that followed many
twentieth-century revolutions, and insists that anti-socialist forces should be given
freedom to organise. He argues that “any real constitutional or institutional defence of the
multi-party principle is impossible once you start introducing criteria that are subjective
… any party will be recognised that respects the socialist constitution in practice: it may
have an anti-socialist programme and carry out anti-socialist propaganda, but it will not
be permitted to throw bombs or organise civil war.”cxli. The legal code of a socialist
democracy will forbid “acts of armed insurrection, attempts at overthrowing working-
class power through violence, terrorist attacks on individual representatives of workers’
power, sabotage, espionage in the service of foreign capitalist states, etc. But only proven
acts of that kind or active preparation of them should be punishable, not general
propaganda explicitly or implicitly favourable to a restoration of capitalism”cxlii.

The need for a functioning legal system is strongly asserted by Mandel, who lists the
principles on which it should be based:

a) “The necessity of written law and the avoidance of retroactive delinquency. The
burden of proof to be on the accuser, the assumption of innocence until proof of
guilt
b) “The full right of all individuals to freely determine the nature of their defence;
full immunity for all legal defenders from prosecution for any statements or lines
of defence used in such trials
c) “Rejection of any concept of collective responsibility of social groups, families
etc. for individual crimes
d) “Strict prohibition of any form of torture or forceful extortion of confessions
e) “Suppression of the death penalty outside of civil war and war situations
f) “Extension and generalisation of public trial by juries of peers
g) “Democratic election of all judges, and the right for the mass of the toilers to
recall elected judges”

He adds finally that “the workers’ state can gradually eliminate a professional judiciary
by drawing the masses more and more into the judicial functions beginning at the local
level and for less serious crimes”cxliii.

The extension of democracy into all areas of public life is one of the key features of the
new socialist order as described by Mandel: “It is not only members of the deliberative
assemblies who should be elected. Judges, high-level functionaries, officers of the militia,
supervisors of education, managers of public works, should also be elected … this
electing of public officials must be accompanied in all cases by the right of recall, i.e.
voting unsatisfactory officials out of office at any time.”cxliv This must be combined with
strict limits on the privileges which accrue to those holding public office: “No official, no
member of representative and legislative bodies, no individual exercising a state power,
should receive a salary higher than that of a skilled worker. That is the only valid method
of preventing people from seeking public office as a way of feathering their nests and
sponging on society, the only valid way to get rid of the career-hunters and parasites
known to all previous societies.”cxlv

The new workers’ state which replaces the old bourgeois one will be “at one and the
same time, a state and not a state. It becomes less and less a state. It is a state that begins
to wither away at the very moment it is born”cxlvi. The nature of this “withering away”
becomes clearer as Mandel explains how the workers’ state will manage an economy
now brought under social ownership:

“It should be the [national] Congress of Workers’ Councils that takes decisions
concerning the allocation of national resources. For it is the working class that bears
the sacrifice of not consuming a share of what it produces, so it is up to the working
class to decide the extent of the sacrifice it is prepared to accept. But once it has
been decided to devote 7, 10 or 12% of national production to education or health,
there is absolutely no need for state management of the education or health budgets.
It is pointless for the Congress of Workers’ Councils to take on this task of
management, which can be much better assumed at the more democratic level of
school or higher educational councils, and councils of medical staff and patients.”cxlvii

As a result, decision-making power will not remain in the hands of a small political elite,
but will be exercised by large numbers of people at any given time: “This breaking up of
the functions of the central state means that dozens of councils will be meeting at the
same time and involving tens of thousands of people on a national and continental scale.
And as the same kind of process will be occurring at the regional and municipal level,
this ‘breaking up’ will allow hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to
participate in the direct exercise of power.”cxlviii

According to Mandel, this widespread diffusion of power will minimise one of the key
problems of Soviet-style planned economies: their wasteful and inefficient centralisation.
It will require a substantial reduction in the working day, for if people “work eight or
nine hours a day, plus two or three hours travelling time, then they will not be able to be
involved in management or administration. A long working day means the division of
society into those who produce and those who manage; it inevitably means the survival of
‘professional politicians’”cxlix. The socialist system “must allocate the majority of posts (at
least in bodies exercising central state power) to persons engaged in productive activity
… this is an indispensable safeguard, because ultimately bureaucratisation is based on the
professionalisation of management functions. The only way to check this is for a majority
of those exercising central political power to continue working in production”.cl

As noted earlier, Mandel does not rule out the question of a parliament elected by
universal suffrage taking its place in the structures of a socialist democracy: this should
be accepted “whenever and wherever the masses clearly express their wish to have
parliamentary-type power organs elected by universal franchise … these organs need not
supersede the power of soviets insofar as the masses have learned through their own
experiences that their councils can give them more democratic rights and more real
power than the broadest parliamentary democracy alone”cli.

A system based on council democracy will need political parties, for “as soon as political
decisions go beyond a small number of routine questions that can be taken up and solved
by a restricted number of people, any form of democracy implies the need for structured
and coherent options of a great number of related questions, in other words a choice
between alternative political lines, platforms, and programmes … ten thousand people
cannot vote on five hundred alternatives”clii. But a socialist party “cannot struggle within
the class other than with political means and not with administrative and repressive
means. All power to councils and committees, and not all power to the party: such is the
conclusion which imposes itself”cliii.
Is any such experiment doomed, regardless of its initial domestic successes, because of
the overwhelming power of global capitalism? Mandel argues that it would be especially
hard for the international bourgeoisie to blockade a socialist revolution if it took place in
one of the advanced capitalist states: “West Europe is not Cuba or Cambodia. It has a
formidable industrial, economic, and technological potential, with the most advanced
working class and technical intelligentsia in the world. It is also, from the capitalist stand-
point, the second largest market in the world, after the United States.”cliv

A great deal depends on the levels of international support and solidarity that can be
mobilised. The more attractive and democratic a socialist revolution proves to be, the
greater the prospect that labour and social movements in other states will take action to
frustrate the efforts of their own governments: “That will obviously not be so easy if the
revolution wears the hideous mask of Stalinist dictatorship. But if it presents instead the
smiling Communist face of sovereign workers’ councils – which is ten times more
attractive than the Prague Spring – then I do not think that it will be easy to mount such a
blockade against European socialist countries.”clv
i
Daniel Bensaid, “The Return of Strategy”, International Viewpoint February 2007
ii
ibid.
iii
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London, 2003) p.138
iv
Colin Leys, Market-Driven Politics (London, 2003) p.4
v
Boris Kagarlitsky, The Twilight of Globalisation (London, 2000) p.9
vi
Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital p.141
vii
Kagarlitsky, The Twilight of Globalisation p.26
viii
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes (London, 1994) p.111
ix
Karl Marx, The First International and after (London, 1992) p.324
x
ibid., p.400
xi
Henri Weber, “Eurocommunism, Socialism and Democracy” New Left Review July/August 1978
xii
Leon Trotsky, The Struggle against Fascism in Germany (New York, 1971)
xiii
Norman Geras, “Rosa Luxemburg after 1905”, New Left Review January/February 1975
xiv
Antonio Gramsci, Pre-Prison Writings (Cambridge, 1994) p.x
xv
Norman Geras, “Our Morals”, Socialist Register 1989
xvi
Ralph Miliband, “Reflections on the Crisis of Communist Regimes”, New Left Review September/October 1989
xvii
Andy Beckett, “In the house of the rising sons”, Guardian February 28th 2004
xviii
Andrew Anthony, “What would the old man say now?” Observer July 1st 2007
xix
Ralph Miliband, “Fukuyama and the Socialist Alternative”, New Left Review May/June 1992
xx
Ralph Miliband, “What comes after Communist regimes?” Socialist Register 1991
xxi
ibid.
xxii
Ralph Miliband, Divided Societies (Oxford, 1989) p.29
xxiii
Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford, 1977) p.47
xxiv
ibid., p.50
xxv
Miliband, Divided Societies p.145
xxvi
ibid., p.150
xxvii
ibid., p.30
xxviii
ibid., p.34
xxix
Miliband, Marxism and Politics p.69
xxx
ibid., p.87
xxxi
Miliband, Divided Societies p.37
xxxii
ibid., p.133
xxxiii
ibid., p.132
xxxiv
Ralph Miliband, “The New Revisionism in Britain”, New Left Review March/April 1985
xxxv
Miliband, Marxism and Politics p.97
xxxvi
ibid., p.91
xxxvii
Miliband, Divided Societies p.165
xxxviii
ibid., p.160
xxxix
ibid., p.125
xl
Miliband was always careful to warn against tendencies to ignore such constraints: “There is a permanent Marxist
temptation to devalue the distinction between bourgeois-democratic regimes and authoritarian ones. From the view that the
former are class regimes of a more or less repressive kind, which is entirely legitimate, it has always been fairly easy for
Marxists to move to the inaccurate and dangerous view that what separates them from truly authoritarian regimes is of no
great account.” Miliband, Marxism and Politics p.83
xli
Miliband, Divided Societies, p.158
xlii
Miliband, “The New Revisionism in Britain”
xliii
Ralph Miliband and Marcel Liebman, “Beyond Social Democracy”, Socialist Register 1985-6
xliv
ibid.
xlv
ibid.
xlvi
ibid.
xlvii
Miliband, Divided Societies p.69
xlviii
Miliband and Liebman, “Beyond Social Democracy”
xlix
Ibid., p.72
l
ibid.
li
Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch, “The New World Order and the Socialist Agenda”, Socialist Register 1992
lii
Miliband, Divided Societies p.81
liii
Miliband and Liebman, “Beyond Social Democracy”
liv
Ralph Miliband, “The Coup in Chile”, Socialist Register 1973
lv
Miliband, Divided Societies p.81
lvi
Miliband and Liebman, “Beyond Social Democracy”
lvii
Miliband, Marxism and Politics p.39
lviii
Miliband, Divided Societies p.78
lix
ibid., p.77
lx
ibid., p.77
lxi
ibid., p.68
lxii
ibid., p.84
lxiii
Miliband, “Reflections on the Crisis of Communist Regimes”
lxiv
Miliband and Liebman, “Beyond Social Democracy”
lxv
Ralph Miliband, “Constitutionalism and Revolution: notes on Eurocommunism”, Socialist Register 1978
lxvi
Miliband, Divided Societies p.217
lxvii
Miliband, Marxism and Politics p.172
lxviii
Miliband, “Consitutionalism and Revolution: notes on Eurocommunism”
lxix
ibid.
lxx
Miliband, Marxism and Politics p.170
lxxi
Miliband and Liebman, “Beyond Social Democracy”
lxxii
Miliband, “Reflections on the Crisis of Communist Regimes”
lxxiii
ibid.
lxxiv
ibid.
lxxv
Miliband and Liebman, “Beyond Social Democracy”
lxxvi
Miliband, “Constitutionalism and Revolution: notes on Eurocommunism”
lxxvii
Miliband, Divided Societies p.229
lxxviii
Miliband, “What comes after Communist regimes?”
lxxix
ibid.
lxxx
Miliband, Marxism and Politics p.184
lxxxi
Miliband, “The Coup in Chile”
lxxxii
Miliband, Divided Societies p.227
lxxxiii
Miliband, Marxism and Politics p.189
lxxxiv
ibid., p.188
lxxxv
Miliband, “The Coup in Chile”
lxxxvi
ibid.
lxxxvii
Miliband, Divided Societies p.228
lxxxviii
Miliband, Marxism and Politics p.189
lxxxix
Miliband, “Fukuyama and the Socialist Alternative”
xc
Miliband, “Reflections on the Crisis of Communist Regimes”
xci
Miliband, Divided Societies p.233
xcii
ibid., p.230
xciii
ibid., p.231
xciv
ibid., p.231
xcv
Robin Blackburn, “The Unexpected Dialectic of Structural Reforms”, in Gilbert Achcar (ed.), The Legacy of Ernest
Mandel (London, 1999) p.20
xcvi
“If the bourgeois state remains fundamentally an instrument in the service of the ruling classes, does that mean that the
workers should be indifferent to the particular form that this state takes – parliamentary democracy, military, dictatorship,
fascist dictatorship? Not at all! The more freedom the workers have to organise themselves and defend their ideas, the more
will the seeds of the future socialist democracy grow within capitalist society.” Ernest Mandel, “The Marxist Theory of the
State” (1969) -www.ernestmandel.org/en/works/txt/1969/marxist_theory_of_the_state.htm
xcvii
Ernest Mandel, “The dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist democracy” (1985) -
www.ernestmandel.org/en/works/txt/1985/1985.htm
xcviii
Mandel, “The Marxist Theory of the State”
xcix
ibid.
c
ibid.
ci
Ernest Mandel, From Stalinism to Euro-communism, (London, 1978) p.155
cii
ibid., p.155
ciii
Mandel, “The Marxist Theory of the State”
civ
Ernest Mandel, “Revolutionary Strategy in Europe – A Political Interview”, New Left Review November-December 1976
cv
Mandel, From Stalinism to Euro-communism p.164
cvi
ibid., p.164
cvii
Ernest Mandel, “The nature of social-democratic reformism” (1993)
-www.ernestmandel.org/en/works/txt/1993/nature_of_social_democratic_reformism.htm
cviii
Ernest Mandel, “A Critique of Euro-communism”(1979) -
www.ernestmandel.org/en/works/txt/1979/a_critique_of_eurocommunism.htm
cix
Mandel, “The nature of social-democratic reformism”
cx
ibid.
cxi
Mandel, “A Critique of Euro-communism”
cxii
Mandel, From Stalinism to Euro-communism p.142
cxiii
Mandel, “The nature of social-democratic reformism”
cxiv
Mandel, From Stalinism to Euro-communism p.90
cxv
Mandel, “A Critique of Euro-communism”
cxvi
Mandel, From Stalinism to Euro-communism p.19
cxvii
Mandel, “A Critique of Euro-communism”
cxviii
Mandel, From Stalinism to Euro-communism p.157
cxix
Mandel, “A Critique of Euro-communism”
cxx
ibid.
cxxi
Ernest Mandel, Reponse á Louis Althusser et Jean Ellenstein (Paris, 1979) p.17
cxxii
Ernest Mandel, “The Lessons of May”, New Left Review November/December 1968
cxxiii
ibid.
cxxiv
Ernest Mandel, Revolutionary Marxism Today (London, 1979) p.59
cxxv
Ernest Mandel, “The Marxist Case for Revolution Today” (1989) -
http://www.ernestmandel.org/en/works/txt/1989/marxist_case_for_revolution_today.htm
cxxvi
Mandel, Revolutionary Marxism Today p.36
cxxvii
ibid., p.36
cxxviii
Mandel, “The Marxist Case for Revolution Today”
cxxix
Mandel, “Revolutionary Strategy in Europe – A Political Interview”
cxxx
ibid.
cxxxi
ibid.
cxxxii
ibid.
cxxxiii
Mandel, Reponse á Louis Althusser et Jean Ellenstein p.55
cxxxiv
Mandel, Revolutionary Marxism Today p.56
cxxxv
Mandel, “A Critique of Euro-communism”. Elsewhere Mandel offered the following elaboration on this point: “We
must immediately add that the content of the education guided and controlled by the bourgeois state, the hierarchical
structure of the postal system, railways and public utilities, the interlacing of the administration of public works and the
private capitalist interests which take charge of their realisation, and even the exact placing of roads (greatly influenced by
the pressure of real estate groups and industrialists representing fractions of the ruling class) will undergo profound
upheavals.” Mandel, From Stalinism to Euro-communism p.154
cxxxvi
Mandel, From Stalinism to Euro-communism p.163
cxxxvii
ibid., p.165
cxxxviii
ibid., p.169
cxxxix
Mandel, Revolutionary Marxism Today p.40
cxl
Mandel, From Stalinism to Euro-communism p.172
cxli
Mandel, “Revolutionary Strategy in Europe – A Political Interview”
cxlii
Mandel, “The dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist democracy”
cxliii
ibid.
cxliv
Mandel, “The Marxist Theory of the State”
cxlv
ibid.
cxlvi
ibid.
cxlvii
Mandel, “Revolutionary Strategy in Europe – A Political Interview”
cxlviii
ibid.
cxlix
ibid.
cl
ibid.
cli
Mandel, “The dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist democracy”
clii
ibid.
cliii
Mandel, Reponse á Louis Althusser et Jean Ellenstein
cliv
Mandel, From Stalinism to Euro-communism p.215
clv
Mandel, “Revolutionary Strategy in Europe – A Political Interview”