We can’t reform away this hellish system: we need revolution
A generation is coming of age scrolling through footage of Palestinians starving to death in Gaza, skin clinging to protruding bones. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Penny Wong assures us that Australia sends only “non-lethal” parts of deadly F-35 fighter jets to Israel, billionaire media moguls tell us that it is pro-Palestine protesters who are the real problem, and police try to stop people standing up to genocide.
Given all this, it’s understandable that progressives look with hopeful eyes to the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani in New York, and the new left political party initiated by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and ex-Labour MP Zara Sultana in Britain. Both of these developments have shown that there are hundreds of thousands of people who want to get behind politicians who support Palestine, stand up for workers’ rights and fight back against the racism of the insurgent far right.
But to actually end the horrors of capitalism and win socialism, we will need more than electoral campaigns. The competition that drives capitalism, and the exploitation that is at its heart, cannot be abolished by parliaments. Only a mass movement of workers, taking democratic control of production, can bring about a society organised to meet human need rather than to generate profit for the few. Left-wing representatives can play a role encouraging such a movement, but they cannot bring about radical change on their own.
The horrors being unleashed in Gaza are accelerating a political polarisation in the Western world. A new generation are turning against the system, and the question of exactly what socialism is and what it will take to get there is relevant once again.
Socialism, as Marx described it, aims to clear the path to a classless, stateless society that operates on the principle of “from each according to ability, to all according to need”. To get to this form of society, productive resources like factories, mines, warehouses and supermarkets will need to be taken out of the sphere of private ownership by a few and placed under collective, democratic ownership. This is not the purpose of the capitalist state.
The state is, at its core, a collection of violent institutions that exist to uphold and protect the power of the capitalist class. These institutions, like the military, the police forces and the jails, are structured to serve the ruling class and are run by people loyal to that class. These institutions cannot be simply taken over by socialists; they need to be overthrown.
Parliamentary elections do not give workers actual power over the capitalists or the state. Elections do not determine who runs the entire state machine, but pockets of it. In Australia, for example, we elect the federal parliament, state governments and local councils. The generals who head our military and the officials who direct police forces are not elected. Nor are the vast bureaucracies that preside over the financial institutions, the energy sector, transport, industrial relations and every other central state-run aspect of society. If a socialist parliament were elected, these bureaucracies would resist any plans to democratise or push towards socialism.
The ruling class have myriad methods for getting rid of governments they dislike. In 1975, for example, Gough Whitlam’s Labor government was sacked by the unelected governor general, Sir John Kerr. In the lead-up to the Kerr coup, the media unleashed a vicious campaign against Whitlam. Big businesses stopped investing, threatening the economy. Crises like these will plague any government that attempts to stand up to the capitalist class.
Left-wing political parties or leaders that don’t have any plan to directly challenge the power of the capitalists frequently seek compromises with the ruling class in order to avoid being sabotaged by the existing bureaucracies or capital. This process is already beginning to play out for liberal Democrat Zohran Mamdani, who initiated meetings with top business executives immediately after winning the primary race to become the Democrats’ New York mayoral candidate. He has also announced that he does not plan to defund or reduce the head count of the New York Police Department.
Before Mamdani, there was Brandon Johnson. Johnson, a former member of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, is the current mayor of Chicago. His electoral campaign was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, and left magazine Jacobin wrote excited articles about his candidacy. Johnson has increased police budgets and backed away from his team’s initial plan to tax the wealthy. Then there’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “squad” of politicians who were elected alongside her to the excitement of American progressives. The squad became cheerleaders of the Biden administration while he helped Israel to slaughter the Palestinians.
And electoral projects well to the left of those mentioned have dashed the hopes of millions repeatedly over the past decade. Corbyn’s leadership of British Labour gave left-wing coherence to a generation enraged by austerity. When his 2015 bid to be prime minister was thwarted by his own party, he refused to break away from Labour and lead those around him into something new. At the time, those enthused by him were left demoralised and aimless. It’s only after being smeared, suspended and finally expelled by the party that he has agreed to form something new.
The Greek left party Syriza took government in 2015 in a context of mass strikes and demonstrations against austerity, creating a wave of excitement among the international left. The following year, under pressure from the international ruling class, Syriza signed a deal with the International Monetary Fund which would impose austerity on Greece until 2060.
Capitalists own and control all of the key industries and resources that make our world run. That gives them power over the economy, the lives of workers and the state. Our side can hope to defeat them only by taking away that power at the point of production. Workers must wrest their workplaces from the capitalists and bring the power that comes from controlling these industries into the hands of our class.
Rebellions over the past 25 years have confirmed the radical potential of modern workers. Street demonstrations and mass strikes shook Spain and Greece after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. In 2019, street revolts hit Sudan, Algeria, Iran, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Haiti, Ecuador and Chile. As many as 26 million people are estimated to have participated in the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, which reached the scale of an urban rebellion in Minneapolis. These didn’t advance into revolutions led by the working class, in part because of the decline in class organisation and left traditions. But they show that in vastly different countries, workers can participate in mass struggle.
Workers in Australia construct the buildings, drive the trains, staff the internet servers and procure the coal and gas that are central to energy production. Put together, those in these industries alone could crash the economy. But the working class needs to go beyond just crashing the economy and begin to organise society along socialist lines by creating new organs of worker democracy.
Soviets, or district-wide workers’ councils, are bodies elected directly at the point of production to coordinate and lead struggles and general strikes, and to wage political arguments. They are democratic institutions that allow the working class itself to lead a revolution. Ultimately, for a revolution to depose the capitalist class, these workers’ councils would need to carry out an insurrection to overthrow the existing capitalist state.
For the working class to build socialism, it needs to construct its own state to subordinate the capitalist class. A workers’ state is a formalisation of the democratic institutions that have been created through the course of revolution into a new government. Rather than a police force that exists to discipline workers, a workers’ state would require a workers’ militia to suppress the capitalists and enemies of the revolution through armed force. As well as that, a workers’ army would be required to prevent the invasion and suppression of the revolution by other capitalist armies. All of the bureaucracies who compose the state and govern things like water usage, energy and electricity welfare would be democratised, subordinated to the interests and the decision-making of the working class.
Capitalism is propelling us deeper and deeper into hell, and compromisers won’t drag us out. Now is a moment to be bold, to throw ourselves into political organising for a totally new world. Resistance is happening and will continue to happen: the question is: Will it win? This will be determined, in part, by whether revolutionary socialists can build forces of the scale necessary to take on the power of those individuals and institutions committed to defending the status quo. We have to meet the challenge. The pressing task of socialists in Australia and around the world is to build revolutionary parties that can lead revolutionary struggles for socialism.
