For a Revolution-in-Stages
Lens, Sidney
An authority on radical movements proposes some strategic objectives for transforming America For a Revolution-in-Stages SIDNEY LENS A revolutionary situation occurs, Lenin wrote in...
...The vaunted American standard of living is dependent on the billions of dollars expended by the Government on militarism and compensatory spending...
...first, because the revolution here was not destined to follow the Soviet path, and second, because it isolated the Left from millions who might have listened to it if they were not required to give up their sense of national identity to do so...
...The importance of proposals for popular participation is not merely that they whittle away at the power of ruling elites but that they replace the individualist elan with community concern and community responsibility...
...For a half century or more the average American has considered radicalism a foreign import because it was not related to the American experience...
...Furthermore, the power of the multinational firms is a threat not only to foreign nations, especially the weaker ones, but to America itself...
...4. The formation of shadow legislatures made up of experts and interested parties from the grass roots, to sanction or withhold sanction for legislation in their designated fields...
...But above all they put forth a transitional program which is simultaneously reformist and revolutionary...
...there are few progressive issues that cannot be related to American annals...
...Socialism may not be a Twentieth Century Americanism, but Americanism is not so entirely alien to socialism as Leftists insist...
...But, like it or not, the majority—the white populace—is imbued with an implacable sense of identity as Americans that is almost religious...
...6. National indicator planning that uses monetary, import, resource-allocation, and other controls to direct production into more useful channels and is charged particularly with redistributing income and wealth in favor of the lower classes...
...the 1912 Lawrence strike...
...They continue to work for traditional reforms within the system, such a$ higher minimum wages or higher social security payments...
...Since the process of radicalization will probably take place over a considerable period of time, it is folly to expect sizable numbers of people to adhere to the revolution ary cause if they must give up their feeling of national identity...
...the militant strikes of 1875 in the Pennsylvania coal fields...
...But unity can be costly, because in its wake inefficient industries of the least productive country are driven to the wall...
...Nor should it be circumvented...
...That is not really as difficult as it sounds...
...This is not isolationism, for it would be replaced by nation-to-nation economic aid...
...Nor did the revolutionaries of Russia find much allegiance left for czarism by 1917...
...In the Russian Revolution it was necessary to tear down the old order and forge a totally new one, because there was little of countervailing power on which to build...
...On the one side we take it for granted that Government has no obligation to provide free bus service, but on the other we accept as "normal" that it provide free research and development subsidies and free reports on commerce, shipping, and a thousand other items for entrepreneurs...
...It remains for the Left merely to prove that these goals are incompatible with the principle of profit maximization...
...No wonder that the majority of the members of the Communist Party in the 1920s were foreign born—men and women, in other words, who had not yet developed their sense of identity with the United States...
...2. Elected bodies of ordinary citizens to consult with city, state, and Federal representatives regularly and to exercise a veto over their votes...
...the Declaration of Inde pendence...
...the anti-British sentiment was overwhelm ing...
...Another indicated revision of radical strategy for the advanced countries, and in particular for the United States, has to do with the national sense of identity...
...That period of waiting need not be an empty hiatus Sidney Lens, a Chicago-based writer and labor leader, is an experienced activist in peace and radical movements...
...the labor parties of the 1820s...
...it cannot be spun out of thin air...
...7. Nationalization of banks, credit institutions, and utilities as a necessary supplement to planning...
...corporations overseas and stringent measures to curb, then liquidate, the great multinational corporations...
...It is not necessary to pigeonhole the writings of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and Castro, but they must be correlated, where possible, with the writing and struggles of Americans...
...In factional disputes they invariably referred to the writings of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and occasionally Rosa Luxemburg as the ultimate justification for their positions...
...On the social and political front the new radical crusade will focus on creating dual institutions that allow for popular participation in decision-making—from the precinct and factory to Washington...
...the Union Leagues and Negro militias of reconstruction days...
...It also showed that basic modification became progressively easier as the balance of world power shifted against the old system...
...The problem, then, is how to put forth a radical program which calls for the disbanding of the present institutions without requiring the average citizen to give up his psychological link to the American past...
...indeed, decent people have always had to violate immoral laws to redress their legitimate grievances...
...There would have been no change in the plight of blacks if Martin Luther King had slavishly adhered to "legalism," and probably no truce in the Indochina war if it hadn't been for the willingness of young people to "illegally" burn their draft cards and commit a dozen types of civil disobedience...
...the political preachings of Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, and Benjamin Rush...
...And it waits for the inevitable crisis that is the backwash of imperialism, militarism, and economic anarchy to produce a radical consciousness at home...
...troops and equipment from overseas...
...Mahatma Gandhi had little difficulty in uniting all classes in India against British rule...
...Is it possible to do this without totally dismembering the present system...
...the crusade for black liberation initiated by William Lloyd Garri son, Nat Turner, Wendell Phillips, and John Brown...
...5. A government-financed program to convert privately owned apartment buildings, supermarkets, and department stores into self-managed cooperatives...
...They are still bewitched by the notion that the economic motor can be fueled by material greed...
...Some type of subsidy is therefore needed to sustain these industries and their workers in the period of transition, while they retool for other types of production...
...the Uto pian socialist experiments of Robert Owen, Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, and Brook Farm...
...In the foreign program, as in the domestic one, the revolution-in-stages strives not merely for reforms but for reforms that have revolutionary implications...
...the nobility of such men as Eugene V. Debs...
...There is no reason why the same thing can't happen in the present period of capitalism, as world socialism grows stronger...
...Adams worked inside the system, by running for and serving in the Massachusetts House of Burgesses, but also outside, by forming Committees of Correspondence, Committees of Safety, the Continental Congress...
...The revolution-in-stages, then, is not merely a reform movement but a reform movement outside and against the system—a movement that seeks revolutionary transformation...
...Power will be taken from them piecemeal, in cadence with their decline and the growing willingness of the American people to challenge them...
...Some segments of the American society —notably the black, brown, and red—are sufficiently alienated from it to constitute true national minorities...
...2. Multilateral negotiations for total disarmament...
...America would be no less safe and doubtless much happier with a vanishing stockpile of weapons than with $100 billion in its arsenal and new expenditures of $80 billion a year...
...Such a transitional platform requires concrete study of the specific circumstances of Arnerica in the 1970s...
...America and Americans deserve cred it for the revolution of 1776...
...The limited liability company, the corporation, was damned by our forefathers with just as much emotional fervor as it is damned today by foreign or native Marxists...
...The strategy for a revolution-in-stages begins with the recognition that there probably will not be a single lunge for power but a protracted struggle to change the ratio of power...
...Old Leftists knew far more about the 1905 revolution in Russia than the 1776 revolution in America, more about the revolt of the sailors of the Potemkin than the 1894 Pullman strike...
...so did Adams with his Minutemen...
...it is, in fact, a social duty...
...6. Economic aid to encourage nations to coalesce into common markets and common sovereignties...
...Nationalism is outmoded as a form of state rule—humanity must move beyond it to the global community— but it is very much alive as a culture, a tradition, and a unifying force...
...They aid with all their might the revolution abroad...
...8. A national (and hopefully international) ecological plan to mesh with the overall economic plan...
...Bodies of experts and concerned citizens, functioning parallel to elected legislatures, would pump vitality into them and make it possible for them to ward off encroachments by the executive branch of government...
...Participation and community concern, along with a reform of the educational system, are some of the tools that will help reorient this thinking and help forge a new human being, without which no revolution can be complete...
...3. The purchase of corporate stock by the Government over a period of years—say ten per cent each year, as is currently contemplated in one of the Scandinavian countries—and its assignment to workers employed by that corporation, to consumer groups, and to the public at large in an agreed-upon ratio, until the corporation is socially managed...
...By referring to those elements of the American heritage that are compatible with socialism, the Left can make it possible for millions to retain a sense of identity with their own culture and still be radicals...
...unless they are amalgamated into internations they cannot be modernized...
...There has always been, to be sure, a conservative and reactionary strain in American life, but there has also been a radical one worth emulating...
...It would be a mistake in any case, but it would be doubly futile in a revolution that unfolds in stages...
...5. Termination of all military aid, both because it is inherently immoral and because it buttresses dictatorships...
...What distinguishes the revolution-in-stages is that the transformation of institutions is more evenly-paced and goes on intensely even while the old classes are in the saddle...
...It can be fostered and sustained without forcing the would-be radical to give up his feeling of association with the American past...
...Americans do not yet see the connection...
...In our society we have taken for granted that the individual must provide for himself...
...In the coming American revolution it will be necessary to tear down part and transform other parts of the old order, because there are some things we must and should carry forward—such as the Bill of Rights—even if they are modified...
...It waits for the already established socialist countries to deepen their revolution in the direction of humanism and thereby give encouragement to people who have doubts about socialism...
...it can and should be one of transformation...
...3. Active support to popular revolutions by making available economic aid to developing countries in proportion as their governments institute social reforms...
...Finally, a revolution-in-stages will work for such international goals as: 1. The closing of all military bases and withdrawal of all U.S...
...in which the American Left slumbers, Rip Van Winkle style...
...Most of the countries of the world are small and unviable...
...This is not as radical as it sounds, for even Congress admits today that it lacks the proficiency to study such matters as defense expenditures, the budget, economics, and many other problems on which it legislates...
...He will lobby for certain reforms within the august halls of Congress, but he will—like our radical forebears—attempt to develop a climate of "creative discord" outside Congress, through strikes and demonstrations...
...Like the all-or-nothing strategists, those who orient on a phased transformation do whatever is possible "within" the system, such as lobbying, but concentrate their main energies "outside" the system, on strikes, demonstrations, civil disobedience, vigils—acts of resistance and defiance...
...Thus the party that radicals build can be, and probably will be in America, an amalgam of antiwar coalitions, left-wing unionists, black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Indian organizations, radicalized consumer movements that will emerge from Ralph Nader's crusade or from such forces as the Citizens Action Program in Chicago, and others not yet existing...
...the I.W.W...
...The ruling elites may suffer grave difficulties in the face of various international and domestic crises, but they are not likely to crumble all at once or to find themselves so disoriented as to be entirely unable to rule...
...Such a thorough breakdown of the capitalist system in the United States is not in the immediate offing...
...Copyright © 1974 by Sidney Lens...
...Lenin forged a dual army...
...Other proposals would include judicial and penal reform, self-management of educational systems, autonomous operation of Indian reservations by native Americans, and many similar planks...
...the many la bor wars in the Rockies...
...the militancy of the Jeffersonians in defending the French Revolution dur ing the 1790s...
...It waits for Third Camp countries to move into the socialist phase of their national revolution...
...The radical forces either regroup into a new political party or restructure old parties to suit their purpose...
...There would have been no large labor movement today and no body of labor laws protecting the working person if there had been no violation of injunctions in hundreds of strikes from 1894 through 1938...
...The Old Left, for all practical purposes, turned its back on this heritage...
...That Americans are ready for most of these planks —properly studied and modified—is attested to by the enormous popularity of George Wallace's tirades against the tax structure, the plaints of liberals for a reordering of priorities, Ralph Nader's consumerism, and the ongoing discussion of ecology...
...In the malaise that envelops America the ordinary citizen is groping in his own way toward the correct medicine chest...
...A few forward-looking legislators have already formed such countervailing institutions...
...General Motors could certainly not have grown so affluent unless the Government built highways for its cars, winked at the automobile's pollution of the collectively owned atmosphere, and gave management tax breaks to modernize itself...
...Yet any reflection would have shown that Adams, for instance, was the equal of Lenin—considering the gap in time and place—as a revolutionary strategist...
...For example, a radical platform for economic transformation might include: 1. A 100 per cent inheritance tax above a certain level, combined with the liquidation and proscription of foundations that are designed to circumvent the inheritance tax...
...But it is possible to give some indication of programmatic demands that, if implemented, pinch off the profit-maximization principle and disembowel the military-industrial complex...
...This is the second article—the first appeared in the March issue—adapted from his new book, "The Promises and Pitfalls of Revolution," to be published this month by United Church Press...
...In colonial or undeveloped nations, where the class relations are rigid, there is a feeling of antagonism not only to the regime but society itself...
...They also function within the trade union movement as a left wing, seeking to reshape it and make it more militant...
...In the meantime the revolution waits...
...It is understandable, but it was a mistake nonetheless...
...5. A vastly expanded program of social construction —schools, low-cost housing, playgrounds, mental institutions, hospitals, and the like—under the supervision of community groups made up of professional experts and ordinary citizens with interest in each project...
...the sitdowns of the 1930s...
...and the grandeur of such pacifists as A> J. Muste...
...the railroad strikes of 1877 and 1894...
...2. A progressive income tax, without loopholes such as capital gains, interest payments, and depletion allowances, that establishes a confiscatory 100 per cent tax above a specified amount...
...It is understandable that Leftists should have been so enthralled by the first working-class revolution—in Russia—that they identified totally with its aims, strategy, even tactics...
...Admittedly there is litde to go on in planning the revolution-in-stages, for the only such revolutions that have succeeded have been bourgeois revolutions that have not been studied in any detail...
...Internations, moreover, are a necessary intermediary step toward the single global nation...
...They will doubtless form separate blocs within what is called the United States and within the radical coalition as well, and they will pursue a course, in each instance, peculiarly their own...
...This too, however, is part of the American tradition...
...History has shown that the middle classes and peasants in the past were able to force a number of institutional changes on feudal regimes— such as partial land reforms—before they were dismembered...
...No comprehensive program of this sort exists today, and I have none to offer here...
...the Anti-Imperialist League during the Spanish-American War...
...The rationale for nationalizing the railroads and telegraphs was put forth just as cogently by the Populists as by the Bolsheviks—in more colorful phrases...
...They are designed to weaken the military-industrial complex at home while chipping away at its influence overseas...
...The Old Left extolled other revolutionaries and other revolutions to such an extent as to make everything in the American experience seem irrelevant, even reactionary...
...Such a program might include: 1. Some form of neighborhood control of police and schools...
...4. A program for progressive redistribution of income through (a) cradle-to-the-grave insurance, paid for entirely from income and inheritance taxes, and (b) a guaranteed annual income approximately equivalent to trade union wages...
...Where the liberal insists that change must come about exclusively through "legal" action, the radical argues that legality itself, under capitalism, is a means of sustaining immorality—and in many instances, such as the flaunting of the Constitution by Presidents Johnson and Nixon during the Indochina war, of illegality itself...
...Violation of the law, the radical contends, is no crime when the law is stacked in favor of property rights against human rights...
...And they must be correlated not in the synthetic way that Earl Browder's Communists did in the mid-1980s when they called Communism "Twentieth Century Americanism," but out of actual recognition that the American revolution will have a distinctly American flavor, based on its own culture, history, and ethnic character...
...It is not as sensational a social phenomenon as the all-or-nothing struggle for power in 1917, but it conforms to the reality in America in the 1970s...
...The radical points out that virtually no major reform has ever been won through schematic adherence to "legality...
...All the wisdom of revolution was encapsuled in the head of Lenin (or Stalin or Trotsky), little or none in the heads of Samuel Adams, Tom Paine, Fanny Wright, Albert Parsons, Debs, or Big Bill Haywood...
...campaigns for free speech...
...Indeed, their techniques were uniquely similar...
...As of 1970 some 120 countries surveyed by the U.S...
...Arms Control and Disarmament Agency were spending the fabulous sum of $207 billion on arms, as against $168 billion for public education and $80 billion for health care...
...Some of it begins before the seizure of state power by revolutionary classes, most of it afterward...
...But there is a sense of pride among Americans in American history and cul ture that is not easily circumvented...
...It is an ongoing process to eradicate the private profit factor in the political economy and to eviscerate those institutions (such as the military, the judicial system, the government structure) which enhance it...
...if that fails, unilateral initiatives by the United States to disarm itself...
...This does not mean that the radical will meekly confine himself to the four walls of "legality...
...An authority on radical movements proposes some strategic objectives for transforming America For a Revolution-in-Stages SIDNEY LENS A revolutionary situation occurs, Lenin wrote in 1915, "when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule in an unchanged form," when the divisions in their ranks are so great and the wrath of the masses so intense that there is an outburst of "discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes...
...If the purpose is to win institutional changes over a period of time rather than prepare for a single lunge, the radical party can be broader and looser than the Leninist parties of the past...
...But all revolutions, in a sense, take place in stages, since it takes time to jettison old institutions and fashion new ones...
...4. A tax policy that would discourage private investment by U.S...
...Lenin worked inside the system on occasions— Bolsheviks ran for the Duma—and outside it, through his party and the Soviets...
...It waits to take root in countries where it has not yet begun, such as Brazil...
...the brilliant strategical leadership of Sam Adams...
...it has not yet occurred to us how completely our fates are interlinked, how dependent individuals and businesses are on what society as a whole does for them...
...Radicals must make it possible for potential recruits to continue believing in America, its people, and some or most of its heritage, while accepting the need to jettison the existing institutions...
...3. The addition of worker and consumer delegates to the boards of directors of non-nationalized companies until they constitute a majority...
...the eight-hour-day struggle and Haymarket...
...It is not our purpose here to present a full program but simply to indicate guiding principles for the revolution-in-stages...
...But the orientation of strategy is toward gaining institutional changes, one at a time and under the old order-runtil it is transformed...
...Apart from the fact that weapons no longer afford security for nuclear powers, this is immoral lunacy...
...the antiwar move ments during World War I and Vietnam...
...In the nomenclature of the Old Left, however, Adams was a bourgeois revolutionary who had nothing to teach socialist revolutionaries...
Vol. 38 • April 1974 • No. 4
