Developing socialist parties of a new kind will be required to overcome the crisis of the working class. It was the exhaustion of both Social Democratic and Communist parties as agents of social transformation that in good part fuelled the radicalism of the New Left in the 1960s. Although the student radicalism and industrial militancy of the late 1960s led to a sharp turn by activists to extra-parliamentary forms of activity, the reverberations were bound to be felt in the parties as well. This entailed, first of all, a revival of a democratic socialist discourse in party debates. In particular, the language of ‘class’, of ‘movement’, of ‘capital’, of ‘exploitation’, of ‘crisis’, of ‘struggle’, of ‘imperialism’, even of ‘transformation’, while never entirely extirpated from Social Democratic parties, had certainly become marginalized within them in the decades after the Second World War. By the early 1970s, all this was again within constant earshot at party meetings and conferences. Even the term `social democracy’ was often used pejoratively, and one suddenly found even many of the most jaded leaders now calling themselves `democratic socialists’.
But more than language was involved: there was a programmatic turn as well, in which the questions of taking capital away from capital through major extensions of public or workers’ ownership (or at least through radical measures of investment planning and industrial democracy) and the pursuit of a foreign policy independent of the United States, came onto the agendas of some of these parties. Certainly only the most naive observer or participant could have thought in the 1970s that these parties had actually been transformed into effective vehicles for a socialist transition; the more cynical remained convinced that these parties were in the process of reconstructing their viability as mediating agencies for the consensual reproduction of capitalism and the containment of industrial militancy and radical structural reform. Nonetheless, the new discourse and programmatic thrust did carry with it an explicit critique of established social democratic practice.
The question remained, of course, of whether socialism could be placed back on the agenda, not only of these parties, but in the broader political arena. It certainly cannot be claimed that there was a ready-made groundswell of socialist electoral opinion just waiting to be tapped: it needed to be created in the interplay between party discourse and popular experience. The eventual victories in the early 1980s of the French, Greek and Swedish parties on the basis of the most radical programmes put before their electorates at least since the 1940s certainly invalidated simplistic claims that parties which advanced such a programme were inherently unelectable. Yet if a socialist alternative was to not only avoid conjuring up a negative electoral reaction, but to produce the popular support needed to sustain a socialist government’s radical thrust, this depended on a sea-change in the organizational and ideological practices of parliamentary socialist parties themselves. They had to become unified around the socialist alternative; they had to find the means to be effective vehicles for a transformation and mobilization of popular attitudes; they had to develop mechanisms to ensure that their leaderships not only mouthed a socialist discourse that the activists wanted to hear at party meetings, but shared a commitment to radical change and maintained such a commitment even once subject to the conservatizing pressures of office.
It was a tall order indeed. The programmatic changes that occurred in a number of social democratic parties in the 1970s were obviously developed with some awareness of these questions: as in the emphasis placed on industrial democracy alongside nationalization and investment controls, or on the decentralized socialization of capital through trade-union and community-administered wage-earners’ funds. These policies were conceived with a view to popularizing a socialist alternative via obviating its association with the authoritarian practices of Eastern European ‘actually existing socialisms’ as well as the bureaucratic practices of state-owned enterprises in the West. But this was itself a small first step. For even to make this credible and popular, fundamental organizational changes within the social democratic parties themselves were necessary to make them effective vehicles for a democratic socialist alternative.
In every case the established forces in these parties succeeded in seeing off the challenge this represented. In some case this happened quickly, as with the expulsion in the early 1970s of the Young Socialists in the German SPD and the Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada in the New Democratic Party; in other cases, it took over a decade, as in Sweden with the watering down of the wage-earners funds project for socializing capital, or in France with the U-turn of the Mitterand government in the early 1980s. The most promising and most protracted intra-party struggle occurred in the British Labour Party around the Alternative Economic Strategy and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy running through the 1970s until the defeat of the Bennite insurgency in the early 1980s, aided by a coalition of old left parliamentarians and union leaders.13
These intra-party struggles, including those between the Eurocommunists and the old guard in the Communist parties, fuelled a much broader discussion on the European left, represented by Gorz, Magri, Benn, Miliband, Poulantzas, Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright among others, oriented to discovering new strategic directions. They pointed beyond both the Leninist and Social Democratic ‘models’ which, despite taking different routes, nevertheless evinced in their practices a common distrust of popular capacities to democratize state structures.14
This was especially well articulated in Poulantzas’s, ‘Towards a Democratic Socialism’.15 ‘There is no longer a question of building “models” of any kind whatsoever. All that is involved is a set of signposts which, drawing lessons of the past, point out the traps to anyone wishing to avoid certain well-known destinations’, not least the ‘techno-bureaucratic statism of the experts’. This was the outcome not only of the instrumentalist strategic conception of social democratic parliamentarism, but also of the ‘Leninist dual-power type of strategy which envisages straightforward replacement of the state apparatus with an apparatus of councils’. In both cases, ‘[t]ransformation of the state apparatus does not really enter into the matter’:
first of all the existing state power is taken and then another is put in its place. This view of things can no longer be accepted. If taking power denotes a shift in the relationship of forces within the state, and if it is recognized that this will involve a long process of change, then the seizure of state power will entail concomitant transformations of its apparatuses … In abandoning the dual-power strategy, we do not throw overboard, but pose in a different fashion, the question of the state’s materiality as a specific apparatus.
Notably, Poulantzas went back to Luxemburg’s critique of Lenin in 1918 to stress the importance of socialists building on liberal democracy, even while transcending it, in order to provide the space for mass struggles to unfold which could ‘modify the relationship of forces within the state apparatuses, themselves the strategic site of political struggle’. The very notion to take state power ‘clearly lacks the strategic vision of a process of transition to socialism – that is of a long stage during which the masses will act to conquer power and transform state apparatuses’. For the working class to displace the old ruling class, in other words, it must develop capacities to democratize the state, which must always rest on ‘increased intervention of the popular masses in the state … certainly through their trade union and political forms of representation, but also through their own initiatives within the state itself’. To expect that institutions of direct democracy outside the state can simply displace the old state in a single revolutionary rupture in fact avoided all the difficult questions of political representation in the transition to and under socialism.
Indeed, as André Gorz had already insisted in his pathbreaking essay on ‘Reform and Revolution’ a decade earlier, taking off from liberal democracy on ‘the peaceful road to socialism’ was not a matter of adopting ‘an a priori option for gradualism; nor of an a priori refusal of violent revolution or armed insurrection. It is a consequence of the latter’s actual impossibility in the European context.’16 The advancement of what Gorz called a ‘socialist strategy of progressive reforms’ did not mean the ‘installation of islands of socialism in a capitalist ocean’, but rather involved the types of ‘structural reforms’ or ‘non-reformist reforms’ which could not be institutionalized so as to close off class antagonism but which allowed for further challenges to the balance of power and logic of capitalism, and thereby introduce a dynamic that allowed the process to go further. In calling for the creation of new ‘centres of social control and direct democracy’ outside the state, Gorz was far-sighted in terms of what this could contribute to a broad process of new class formation with transformative potential, not least by extending to ‘the labour of ideological research’ and more generally to the transformative capacities of ‘cultural labour aiming at the overthrow of norms and schemata of social consciousness’. This would be essential for ensuring that ‘the revolutionary movements’ capacity for action and hegemony is enriched and confirmed by its capacity to inspire … the autonomous activity of town planners, architects, doctors, teachers and psychologists’.17
What this left aside, however, were the crucial changes in state structures that would need to attend this process. Poulantzas went to the heart of the matter, a decade later, stressing that on ‘the democratic road to socialism, the long process of taking power essentially consists in the spreading, development, coordination and direction of those diffuse centres of resistance which the masses always possess within the state networks, in such a way that they become real centres of power on the strategic terrain of the state’. Even Gramsci, as Poulantzas pointed out, ‘was unable to pose the problem in all its amplitude’ since his ‘war of position’ was conceived as the application of Lenin’s model/strategy to the ‘different concrete conditions of the West’ without actually addressing how to change state apparatuses.18 Yet it must also be said that Poulantzas, even while highlighting the need for taking up the challenge of state transformation, did not himself get very far in detailing what actually changing the materiality of state apparatuses would entail in specific instances. Lurking here was the theoretical problem Miliband had identified of not differentiating state power from class power, and therefore not specifying sufficiently how the modalities and capacities involved in exercising capitalist state power would be changed into different modalities with structurally transformative capacities.19 And as Goran Therborn pointed out, in envisaging an important role for unions of state employees in the process of transforming state apparatuses, it was necessary to address the problem that ‘state bureaucrats and managers will not thereby disappear, and problems of popular control will remain’, thereby continuing to pose ‘serious and complicated questions’ for the state transformation through socialist democracy.20
Socialists have since paid far too little attention to the challenges this poses.21 While the recognition that neither insurrectionary politics to ‘smash the state’ nor the social democratic illusion of using the extant state to introduce progressive policies became more and more widespread, this was accompanied with a penchant for developing ‘market socialist’ models in the late 1980s. And this has subsequently been succeeded by a spate of radical left literature that – in almost a mirror image of neoliberalism’s championing of private corporations and small business firms against the state – weakly points to examples of cooperatives and self-managed enterprises as directly bearing socialist potential.22 Replicated here is exactly what Poulantzas identified in the conception of those for whom ‘the only way to avoid statism is to place oneself outside the state. The way forward would then be, without going as far as dual power simply to block the path of the state from the outside.’ Yet by concentrating exclusively on ‘breaking power up and scattering it among an infinity of micro-powers’, the result is that the ‘movement is prevented from intervening in actual transformations of the state, and the two processes are simply kept running along parallel lines’.23