ABCs of Socialism, Part 2: Getting There from Here

For those who may have missed it, Part 1 is here.

Now that we understand, in very general terms, what socialism is, the most obvious question is how to get there. How do we set ourselves free?

It may be tempting to prescribe simple answers to this question: “Build an independent labor party!” “Organize inside the Democratic Party!” “Support labor unions!” are commonly heard slogans. The reality is that taking and holding power to affect major changes in the way economic life is organized, what socialists call the relations of production, is not so easy. Although these slogans may have their uses, they are not enough by themselves. The changes needed to establish worker sovereignty and bring about socialism are of a vast scope, requiring the organization of millions of people with focus and discipline while also maintaining flexibility and accountability via democratic principles, what socialists call democratic centralism. The old political parties, the Democratic Party, the various labor parties, etc., are not up to the task. Building socialism requires a party of a new type, a cadre party.

A cadre party is not like the parties we are used to in the US, which are almost exclusively voluntary, oligarchic organizations. Cadre parties are made up of the most dedicated and knowledgeable socialists, those that recognize the level of discipline and ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ needed to build a new society. It is not something you could fill out an online form to join! Cadre parties are not organized this way out of some misplaced sense of elitism, but from the enormity of the task they undertake.

By design, cadre parties are relatively small. Historically, some have had founding congresses of fewer than twenty people. However, successful cadre parties form deep connections with other organizations that can offer mutual support and a mass base, such as labor unions. A properly operating cadre party is focused and disciplined, while also being flexible, democratic, and above all connected to its base, the working class. It takes a great deal of knowledge and skill to strike the right balance between discipline and flexibility; too much discipline, and the party risks becoming ultra-left and isolated from the working class; too much flexibility, and the party loses focus on its final goal of winning worker sovereignty and socialism, becoming politically opportunist. Needless to say, the right mix depends on the overall political situation a cadre party is operating under, sometimes called the historical conditions or balance of forces. These can change, sometimes quickly. Successful cadres (the organizational units that make up a cadre party) must learn to anticipate and adapt to these changes and adjust their work accordingly.

How does a cadre party undertake its work? What kinds of political tasks does it focus on? The answer to these questions depends on the aforementioned historical conditions. Generally speaking, party work is divided into two components: strategy and tactics.

Strategy refers to the overall plan, in broad terms, a party adopts in order to achieve socialism. Usually this involves building up popular support for socialism and encouraging workers to adopt socialist thinking, or ideology; that is, the set of ideas on which we build our understanding of the world.

Tactics are the particular means used to achieve strategic goals. For example, a solid strategic goal for a socialist cadre party in the US would be to extend Constitutional rights into the workplace. To achieve that goal, the party might promote this idea among workers belonging to a labor union deemed potentially receptive to it, trying to get the union to adopt the struggle for Constitutional rights officially. Success means not only the full realization of Constitutional rights, but also a change in workers’ thinking, from ‘worker=servant’ to ‘worker=citizen’. Put another way, a quantitative change, the extension of existing Constitutional rights into the workplace, leads to a qualitative change in the relations of production.

Quantitative and qualitative changes lie at the heart of socialist thinking. Together, they form a mechanism called the dialectic, which governs how changes occur in society and the wider world. The simplest example of a dialectical process is a phase change in matter: add enough heat to water (quantitative change), and eventually the water will turn to steam (qualitative change). In society, the abolition of slavery in the US is another example of a dialectical process: Wage labor grew in quantity to challenge slave labor, leading to a contradiction between the interests of industrial capitalists (the beneficiaries of the wage labor system) and slaveholders. This contradiction was resolved in the Civil War, which meant the end of the slave system and the extension of industrial capitalism to the entire United States. One set of relations of production was replaced by another.

Why does understanding dialectics matter? Because socialists approach political problems the same way engineers approach physical ones; socialists apply known principles to understand the problem and craft a solution in a scientific way, then evaluate the real-world outcomes of the solution and adjust it as needed. It is this method which makes socialism, or, more precisely, scientific socialism, a new type of political thinking. Rather than base its political actions on vague appeals to an undefined and subjective ‘rightness’, scientific socialism interacts with the political world systematically to achieve defined goals.