Revolution is outdated and no longer a realistic means to achieve socialism according to Nora Belrose, a DSA member who writes a popular blog. Is revolutionary politics now only an idealistic fantasy? Jonah Martell argues otherwise.

‘Revolution’ is a peculiar concept. Few words in the English language have been so thoroughly stripped of substance, yet it retains a near universal appeal. Liberal hacks fantasize about a great blue tide of ‘Resistance’ sweeping Donald Trump out of office; Tea Party wingnuts dream of ‘fighting big government’ with AR-15s and Fox News talking points; even Elon Musk is fond of ‘revolution’ as a buzzword: he uses it to market his Tesla cars.

Everyone loves revolution—except for Nora Belrose, a DSA activist from Indiana. In her increasingly popular blog, she argues that American socialists must “put down their pitchforks” and accept that revolution is no longer relevant in advanced capitalist countries. She challenges the basics of Marxist political strategy and advances a pacifistic alternative centered on electoral engagement within the Democratic Party.

As a Marxist, I welcome Belrose’s challenge. We should never cling to political views that do not hold up to scrutiny, even if they are widely cherished. But Belrose’s legalistic road to socialism does not solve any of the problems that it claims to address. On the contrary, it is profoundly naïve, manipulative, and undemocratic. What we need instead is a renewed commitment to revolutionary struggle, updated to the 21st century and adapted to American political conditions. Only revolution can bring us to our ultimate goal: a socialist America in a socialist world.

I

In this piece, I will pass over Belrose’s more peripheral ideas, including her pop-psychology rejection of free will, her sci-fi speculations about human extinction, and her belief that automation will “kill capitalism” by making workers obsolete. I will focus instead on her core political principles and their implications.

Belrose’s most distinctive political stance is her cheery enthusiasm for the two-party system. Many socialists have given up on fighting two-party rule, but very few of them actually support it. Belrose is a peculiar exception. “The two-party system,” she declares in her blog’s second essay, “is actually good.”

It is true, Belrose concedes, that many leftists consider two-party rule undemocratic. But a richer democracy is not her primary goal: her goal is to “make the state do things that benefit workers” and “transform the economy in the direction of democratic socialism.” Apparently, this would take too much effort in a multiparty system:

In countries with proportional representation (PR) and several viable political parties, it’s nearly impossible for any one party to gain an outright majority in parliament. This forces parties to join together in coalitions and make compromises. While this may sound good in the abstract, it makes it much more difficult to get any kind of radical socialist program enacted … The ideal for the Left is to realign the American party system in such a way that there is one right-wing capitalist party, and one left-wing social democratic or socialist party.

How will we produce this polarizing realignment? By taking over the Democratic Party. Because American political parties cannot directly control their candidate nomination process, Belrose believes that “labor-based parties are illegal in the U.S.,” so we may as well roll over and give up on building one. Instead, we should create a loose “network of civil society organizations” to run candidates in Democratic primaries, conquering the party from within. This would be easier than building our own party anyway since the working class is too ignorant to handle independent politics:

Most voters are working-class people who have little time to research each candidate in detail—so they use candidates’ party identifications to get a general idea of what they likely stand for … Because of this, candidates running on Democratic or Republican Party ballot lines can effortlessly win thousands of votes based on party identification alone. Any third party or independent candidate will needlessly have to work much harder … We shouldn’t make it gratuitously harder to get leftists elected—it’s hard enough as it is.

A brilliant plan! With cunning and patience, a socialist network wins control of the world’s largest capitalist party. Its members rise to state power on a wave of busy, ignorant voters who back them out of loyalty to the Democrats, and use the state to implement their program. Auguste Blanqui would be impressed: Belrose has found a way to implement his conspiratorial path to socialism without spilling a single drop of blood.

The only problem, of course, is that Belrose’s plan will never work, for two critical reasons. The first is that the clean-cut ‘conquest’ of the Democratic Party that she envisions is impossible. The party’s neoliberal establishment is utterly ruthless and its members have billions of dollars at their disposal. Even consistent primary defeats will not eliminate them as an organized political force (unless guillotines are part of Belrose’s long-term strategy). If left-wing reformers continue to advance within the Democratic Party, the party establishment will begin to retaliate with increasingly dirty maneuvers. They will file frivolous lawsuits to keep reform candidates off the ballot, a move they already tried (unsuccessfully) against Julia Salazar, a DSA candidate for the New York State Senate. Where this fails, they may push legislation to close up their primary elections, or even use their limitless resources to set up a breakaway political party. The result will at best be a fragmentation of the existing party system, not a simple polarization.

It is unlikely that Belrose’s informal “network” could survive this upheaval with its head intact. She cites Momentum, Jeremy Corbyn, and the UK Labour Party as an example of her realignment strategy working in practice, but in fact it illustrates just the opposite. Momentum is a useless fiefdom controlled by a single man named Jon Lansman, and the Corbyn movement has repeatedly capitulated to the party right’s anti-Semitism witch hunts. Even in intra-party struggles, formal, democratic organizations are indispensable, and the Labour Left is learning this the hard way.

A more serious issue with Belrose’s strategy is its obvious lack of commitment to principled majoritarian politics. She appears to believe that the path to socialism should be ‘easy’ and that the Left must pursue elected office at any cost. This leads her to endorse clever political maneuvers over the hard game of long-term organizing—a sort of electoral Blanquism. She even argues that progressive politicians should be welcome to call themselves democratic socialists without backing social ownership of the economy, because “at this stage, it is more important to popularize [democratic socialism] … than it is to fill it with clear anti-capitalist content.”

Revolutionary Marxism is more sensible and pragmatic than Nora Belrose. It recognizes that socialists cannot hold power sustainably without conscious majority support. As Friedrich Engels wrote in his 1895 introduction to The Class Struggles in France:

The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for [with body and soul]. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work which we are now pursuing, and with a success which drives the enemy to despair.

Proportional representation (PR) is a valuable goal for socialists who value this patient approach to organizing. Under PR, a party’s representation is tied directly to its percentage of the vote, eradicating the spoiler effect forever. In the short term, it would help us run candidates under a distinctive ballot line, with full independence from the Democratic Party. In the long term, it would force us to win a conscious majority to our program before we gain any democratic mandate to govern.

Belrose may be surprised to learn that PR has a rich history in the United States. It was used for decades by over two dozen local governments, including New York City—until Cold War redbaiters scrapped it to disenfranchise black and Communist voters. They were wise to take it away from us, and we would be wise to take it back.

Belrose objects yet again that this fight would be too hard. After all, winning PR and other electoral reforms would require us to “embark on an ambitious project of electoral reform in almost every state in the Union.”

Precisely! As I discussed in my previous article, The Conquest of Ballots, a nationwide struggle for electoral reform would be a boon for the American Left. It would certainly be difficult, but it would also be a powerful organizing catalyst that could lay the foundations of an independent working-class party. Belrose warns that attempting to gain control over our ballot line by abolishing primary elections would turn the entire public against us. However, we can always frame the issue as one of “free association” and combine it with a package of more immediately palatable reforms. We could even put the demand on the backburner entirely and find ways to work around it. Howie Hawkins has suggested that socialists form a party based on a dual legal structure, with a state-recognized skeleton party under the de facto control of a more formal membership organization. The Socialist Party of America used this tactic in the early 20th century, and although it is not ideal, it could be used again.

There is no easy shortcut to socialism—only the long, hard battle of democracy. In an age of court-rigging, gerrymandering, and mass voter suppression, we should be fighting it now more than ever.

II

Belrose’s brand of socialism also features a noxious affinity for the capitalist police. In her fourth essay, she declares in large bold print that “police officers are actually good.” She claims that abolishing the police is “utopian thinking” that could never work in the real world, and takes issue with the idea that the police are servants of the ruling class: if their purpose is to crush popular revolt, then why do they “spend most of their time preventing theft and assault”?

Belrose acknowledges that police brutality is real, but she claims that it is a purely American issue. Police in other countries such as the UK are benevolent because they “almost never kill civilians,” and things could be the same in the United States. She offers up several policy proposals to reduce American police violence, including universal legal care, drug decriminalization, and mandatory body cameras. In the meantime, we should recognize that “police are public servants, just like teachers and firefighters.” What’s the difference?

The first is that teachers do not shoot puppies or murder children with impunity. The second, snark aside, is that police are hitmen for the ruling class, whether Belrose likes it or not. Modern police forces were first developed in the early 19th century to crush strikes, riots, and slave revolts. Their purpose has always been intrinsically repressive, and even their mundane work “preventing theft and assault” serves capitalist interests. How could anyone make money in a society overrun by violent criminals? Day-to-day law enforcement also prepares police for the more spectacular acts of brutality that define their profession. It desensitizes them to violence, gives them a sense of self-legitimacy, and allows commanders to handpick the most ruthless cops to lead their riot squads.

This is not a uniquely American problem. Capitalism in the United States is sustained by a vicious racial hierarchy, which gives its police a particularly brutal disposition, but oppressive policing exists even in Europe, Belrose’s social-democratic utopia. In the United Kingdom, black people are stopped by police nearly six times as often as whites, and in France, cops brutalize North Africans with tear gas, beatings, and sexual abuse. For every outright murder committed by police, there are hundreds of pat-downs, baton swings, and other daily indignities that Belrose completely overlooks.

The fact that police do socially necessary work does not make them benevolent—or irreplaceable—as an institution. Marxists acknowledge the need for a process of law enforcement under socialism, but we insist that it take on a completely new institutional form: the people’s militia. Instead of relying on militarized goon squads to maintain the peace, we demand that the entire population receive training in gun use, self-defense, and non-violent conflict resolution. Under the militia system, every competent citizen will be able to serve in a democratic, self-managed community patrol.

The militia system does not mean an end to all law enforcement professions. There will still be a need for crime scene investigators, hostage negotiators, victim advocates and other specialties that most people are not trained in. The difference from the present system is that the people who work in these professions will still be civilians, accountable to the militia as a whole. The result will be a self-policed society, without the brutal authoritarianism of capitalist law enforcement. As society further develops towards communism, the need for prisons, policing, and other coercive institutions will gradually wither away.

It is striking that Belrose does not include community control of the police in her list of policy proposals. For all its limitations, community control could help us rein in the worst police abuses and initiate the transition to a popular militia. Of course, this idea is completely foreign to Belrose: her technocratic brand of socialism does not mesh with such radically democratic demands.

Belrose’s police apologia did not drop out of the sky. It reflects her broader belief that the capitalist state is a class-neutral entity. As she declares in her fourth essay:

The state isn’t inherently on any one “side” of the class struggle. Rather, the state mediates between various different social groups and tries (and often fails) to maintain a relatively peaceful coexistence among all of them. This does mean that the state will tend to protect the property of the rich—but it will also work to prevent individual crime, and it will even give protections to workers if it feels that this is necessary to maintain order. Despite its many flaws and shortcomings, working people are better off with the state than they would be without it.

This analysis is completely detached from reality, especially in the United States. Unlike most capitalist states, the American political system did not evolve naturally over time. It was crafted behind closed doors by a class-conscious ruling class, by aristocrats desperate to maintain their grip on power. To prove this, we need only refer to the writings of James Madison, who kindly informs us that the Constitution was designed to keep the unpropertied majority from enacting “a rage for paper money … an abolition of debts … an equal division of property … [or] any other improper or wicked project.”

Most Americans understand on an intuitive level that they do not live in a genuine democracy. Millions of people are disenfranchised; the president is not elected by the popular vote; the Senate overrepresents conservative rural areas; congressional districts are gerrymandered, and Supreme Court justices—appointed for life—claim the right to strike down legislation whenever they see fit. At best, the American state is a plutocratic republic. What limited democratic features it does possess were carved into it, by decades of militant struggle.

III

For Belrose, however, militant struggle is obsolete. Her strategy is based on a blanket rejection of revolution, as demonstrated by her most provocative article “Put Down Your Pitchforks: Why Revolutionary Politics Doesn’t Work.”

In this piece (which she later retitled to condemn “insurrectionary” politics), she declares that revolution is impossible in advanced capitalist countries because “the democratic state commands legitimacy.” Revolutions only occur in times of extreme tyranny, poverty, and degradation, and in all circumstances, workers will confine themselves to legal electoral struggle. Because the existing state has democratic institutions, we must strive to win power within it, on its own terms. When this happens, nothing can stand in our way:

When a popular movement wins a commanding majority in parliament, it immediately inherits all the legitimacy associated with the democratic state … As long as the elections are fair, no one can question that the new government is a reflection of the popular will.

Franco, Pinochet, and many others would beg to differ, but thankfully, Belrose does not present an immediate threat to them. Because she believes that immiseration is the source of revolutionary progress, she banishes socialist transition to the distant future. Capitalism will only be abolished by an extreme crisis, when the “rising tide of automation” has plunged millions of workers into grinding poverty. Until then, we should merely “push the boundaries of social democracy … preparing for the moment later this century when society will be ready to leap into the bright democratic socialist future.”

This is a peculiar combination of gradualism and catastrophism, but its rejection of a revolutionary break is not unique: it reflects the mainstream opinion of most American democratic socialists, including key writers for Jacobin Magazine. As Vivek Chibber declares in his article “Our Road to Power”:

The state has infinitely greater legitimacy with the population than European states did a century ago. Further, its coercive power, its power of surveillance, and the ruling class’s internal cohesiveness give the social order a stability that is orders of magnitude greater than it had in 1917 … Our strategic perspective has to downplay the centrality of a revolutionary rupture and navigate a more gradualist approach. For the foreseeable future, left strategy has to revolve around building a movement to pressure the state, gain power within it, change the institutional structure of capitalism, and erode the structural power of capital — rather than vaulting over it.

Underlying all of these arguments is the widespread belief that modern governments are omnipotent. In an age of tear gas, nuclear weapons, and the NSA, it seems outrageous to promote self-defense against the state, or any other break with legality. But beneath the surface, the reality is much more nuanced. Technological development has given states more eyes to see with, but it has also given them more streets to patrol. The same social media networks that enable mass surveillance also helped spark the Arab Spring, as well as the recent wave of teacher strikes in the U.S. More importantly, a revolution is not an act of brute physical force: it is a complex social process that can be relatively bloodless, especially if the military joins its ranks.

Because Chibber and Belrose fear to attempt the impossible, they refuse to fight for what is necessary. It is certainly important for socialists to work hard at winning elections, to fight for immediate reforms and build a majority mandate for socialism. But if this struggle is successful, it will eventually hit political limits that make revolutionary rupture the only path forward.

For the purpose of illustration, let us imagine that the year is 2028. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has won the presidential elections in a landslide and DSA candidates have taken control of the House of Representatives. The vast majority of Americans are ready for their program: Medicare for All, universal college, and a gradual nationalization of the Fortune 500 companies. Only two obstacles stand in the way: a Senate controlled by neoliberal Democrats and a Supreme Court dominated by the reactionary right.

President Ocasio-Cortez and her allies know that they have majority support, and they make every effort to enact their program. But time and again, the Senate Democrats block their proposals or water them down to the point of unrecognizability. Eventually, a compromise bill for healthcare reform makes it through Congress—only to be struck down by the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh gleefully writes the majority opinion, which declares single-payer healthcare unconstitutional.

At this point, the socialist movement stands at a crossroads. It can bow down to Brett Kavanaugh and work within the rules of the system, or it can demand the right to rule on the basis of its majority political support. Choosing the former can only mean retreat. Choosing the latter would spark revolutionary upheaval.

This scenario may be imaginary, but it displays the fragmented, reactionary nature of American political institutions. ‘Democratic’ legalism is a naïve fantasy in a state that is profoundly undemocratic. We must learn to embrace the more sensible course: revolution.

IV

American socialists need a revolutionary alternative to Belrose’s pacifistic reformism—a strategy that is principled, militant, and pragmatic. For decades, self-described ‘revolutionaries’ have prided themselves on meeting the first and second of these criteria, but they have never met the third. The failure of revolutionary politics in the advanced capitalist world is an extraordinarily complex topic, and no one will ever unravel it completely. It is rooted in a combination of historical conditions and strategic blunders by socialists that have mutually reinforced one another. We will never know if history could have taken a different path in 1914, in 1968, or in 2011. But we can learn from the mistakes of the past, and use them to forge a better strategy for the future. What could be some defining features of this pragmatic revolutionism?

Above all else, it would require a commitment to formal, democratic, majoritarian organization. There is no substitute for this—not a ‘Leninist’ vanguard party, not Belrose’s ‘network’ of left-liberal Democrats, and certainly not anarchist dumpster-diving collectives. At their core revolutions are not destructive, but constructive processes: they are moments in which the masses strive to consciously remake society. This requires formal discussion, debate, and deliberation. Most ‘revolutionaries’ in the developed world have completely failed to recognize this: they believe that revolutions are explosions set off by immiseration and incendiary rhetoric. Consequently, they reject all efforts at long-term institution-building. They promote a perpetual sense of emergency among their members and make efforts to turn every street demonstration into a revolutionary crisis. The result is a ‘workers’ movement’ that is completely detached from the working class, self-relegated to the fringes of political life.

The idea that immiseration by itself produces revolutionary change is profoundly anti-Marxist. Revolutionary moments have unfolded in many historical periods when people were not starving en masse, from the American Revolution of the 1770s to Chile in the early 1970s. The real source of revolution is more subjective: it is the development of a wide gap between what the working class has and what it believes is possible. The task of a socialist party is to do everything in its power to expand that gap.

To do this, it must be willing to engage with existing institutions without grounding its legitimacy in them. We can vigorously contest elections and fight for reforms while still acknowledging the limits of this struggle, acknowledging the need for an eventual break with the capitalist state. Our source of legitimacy must be majority support from the working class, not 18th-century constitutional protocols. Even as we send our representatives into Congress, we must build up our own institutions outside the state, from parties to unions to cooperative organizations, that can lay the foundations of a post-revolutionary society.

On a more prosaic level, we must abandon the fantasy of ‘conquering the Democrats.’ Even if this were possible, it would mean embedding ourselves in a two-party system that betrays our fundamental political values. The system of primary elections in the United States is in some ways uniquely democratic, and in the short term, we should make use of it by running socialists in both Republican and Democratic primaries. Running in both parties would help establish the fact that we are loyal to neither, and make it easier for us to build a mass constituency that cuts across existing party lines. But these efforts must be joined at the hip with a nationwide struggle for electoral reform. We must uphold the fight for a higher democracy, every step of the way.

V

Nora Belrose is not good at socialist theory. Her ideas are strategically bankrupt. But even so, she has done the Left a great service by presenting them in an honest, straightforward light. She never minces her words or dawdles in half-measures. With her effort to slaughter every sacred cow of orthodox Marxism, she has forced us to defend our views intelligently.

For that, she deserves our undying gratitude and respect.