From Marx to Gramsci

Summary, part 2

What will it take for a socialist revolution to succeed?

Marxists believe that a socialist revolution can and must come about through a successful labor movement made up of the working class. For the working class to be fit to take power, they must go through stages of development.

First, the working class will attack the instruments of production as an incoherent mass. Second, the working class will collide with capitalists and combine their efforts by making trade unions. Third, workers and trade unions of different localities will unite and centralize. Finally, since the class struggle is political, this united effort becomes an independent political party. 

What is the role of trade unions? 

Trade unions are organized associations of workers that represent and fight for workers’ interests. They can act as the school of war where workers prepare for the greater struggle.

Trade unions are not only about protecting workers rights (e.g., advocating for a 40-hour workweek, minimum wage, or better working conditions), but also about teaching people to “act deliberately as organizing centers for the working class in the broad interest of complete emancipation” (p. 57).

What is the role of the political party?

Since the fight against capitalism is also a fight for the working class’ political power, trade unions are not enough. Instead, trade unions must unite and form an independent political party. For there to be an international socialist revolution, each country’s socialist political party must also unite to form a transnational political party fighting against capitalism.

The political party would be the center of power for the Marxist movement. It must act as the vanguard (i.e., champion) for the working class.

Lenin understood that the working class is not a monolith and is made up of its own strata, therefore some working class members will lead the political party and others will not. Lenin believed a successful political party would have advanced workers who can win the confidence of the masses and devote themselves entirely to the proletariat’s education and organization.

These people will make up a ‘working class intelligentsia,’ who then give supporters (average members of the working class) political awareness through education and organizing efforts. Put simply, the revolution needs specialists that can devote themselves to bringing about the socialist revolution on behalf of the entire working class.

The same class consciousness must guide both trade unions and the political party. 

A socialist revolution needs good strategy. What is that strategy?

The working class must be revolutionaries, not reformers, which the capitalist establishment would prefer. Reformers are those who want to reform capitalism and diminish the exploitation of labor, whereas revolutionaries want to go further than reform and instead create systemic change with a socially owned economy and democratically controlled government that meets the needs of all (not just the capitalist class).

That said, revolution is not an act, but a process. There must be what Marxists call a transitional program to move the needle away from a reformist program to a revolutionary program. The transitional program intertwines three demands:

1. Decent living standards;

2. Democratic demands concerned with freedom of expression; and

3. Transitional demands that the masses find reasonable but cannot yet be implemented without undermining capitalism. 

Transitional programs work best in countries with a democratic state of society for two reasons.

First, because democracy is able to provide proletariat-friendly policies. Such policies include, but are not limited to progressive taxation and public education. Second, because the proletariat must gain control of the state (what some Marxists call class dictatorship or the proletarian democracy).

When self-government from the proletariat becomes normalized on a mass scale, the state is ready for socialism.