Blanc has already noted the need for major democratic reforms, not least because electoral majorities are not the same as parliamentary majorities. The second, the very underpinning of the defensive parliamentary strategy, ignores the ordinary system of checks and balances in liberal-constitutional orders, be they bicameral legislative setups or the politically unaccountable judicial review. The first of these has already been discussed. There are constitutional majorities, parliamentary majorities, electoral majorities, class majorities, and of course the demographic majority.
The defensive parliamentary strategy does not recognize the existence of multiple kinds of majorities, whose individual distinctions are key to advocating any anti-capitalist rupture in an informed manner. History has shown, time and again, that small-d democratic routes to socialism are incompatible with liberalism and its insistence on the constitutional order.
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Whether it’s replacing elections altogether with sortition (demarchy), getting past fetishes regarding universal suffrage (which will be discussed later in the article), establishing separate legislative bodies for social policy and for economic policy, ensuring that every public official has standards of living comparable to the median professional worker, implementing multiple avenues to recall any public official where there has been abuse of office, or some other fundamental democratic change, the defensive parliamentary strategy evades the constitutional amendment question. Even further democratization of liberal-constitutional orders faces this as a major obstacle. Every country has a process to amend its constitution which requires much, much more than a simple majority. The defensive parliamentary strategy does not acknowledge constitutional limits. What follows is both a fuller criticism of this strategy and advocacy of post-insurrectionary strategy in a very specific form of party revolution: the mass party-movement making the anti-capitalist rupture on the basis of majority political support from the working class. The best of Kautsky the Marxist is not enough, not because it is not left enough but because its revolutionary centrism is not developed enough. While it should not be stated that its conceptions of “legitimacy,” “power,” “majority,” and “support” are crude, those same conceptions are too shallow. There are major problems with this defensive parliamentary strategy. In other words, socialists should win a majority in parliament, thus provoking anti-socialist forces to move against parliament, thus triggering a massive socialist response. case was simple: the majority of workers in parliamentary countries would generally seek to use legal mass movements and the existing democratic channels to advance their interests even when a desire for immediate socialist transformation was deepest among working people, support to replace universal suffrage and parliamentary democracy with workers’ councils, or other organs of dual power, has always remained marginal.
In his original article, Eric Blanc suggests the taking up of defensive parliamentary strategy, the basis of the Finnish Revolution, as the socialist model of revolutionary change in the most developed capitalist countries: It took a while for an article on Karl Kautsky (when he was a Marxist) to come out which got past the strawmen presented by the Eurocommunist-sounding James Muldoon and the Luxemburgist-sounding Charlie Post.
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Painting by Yuliy Abramovich GanfĮarlier this year a series of articles in Jacobin on the Marxism of Karl Kautsky triggered a discussion of socialist strategy.
Jacob Richter weighs in on the Kautsky debate centering around revolutionary strategy, arguing for a balance of power approach.
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