If you want to fundamentally transform society, you should probably read some Leo Panitch.
And now would be a really good time to start. Around the world, and even here in Australia, a growing movement of people are reviving the concept of socialism, after decades of soul-crushing ‘capitalist realism’. But what we mean by socialism today, and how we make it happen in the twenty-first century – all this has yet to be fully worked out.
This is where Leo Panitch, Canadian Marxist activist and academic who died late last year, comes in. Cutting through all the cheap sloganeering and culture wars, Panitch’s crystal-clear thinking has left us a framework for understanding what the structures of global capitalism are today, what the core principles of an alternative socialist society would be, what a transition to such a society might look like, and how we can start building power to eventually make this transition. Importantly, Panitch’s writings give us a reality check: the revolution, sadly, is not just around the corner. It’s not just one moment, but a long, difficult and dangerous process – so let’s get to work, patiently, and with a clear head for long-term strategy.
You won’t find in Panitch’s work a fiery moral condemnation of the abuses of capitalism, or a call to arms – that much is assumed. But if you’re a bit sick of the choice between either neoliberalism masquerading as ‘centre-left’ politics, or naive calls for ‘revolution’ (with little explanation of how that will happen), Panitch can help you find the right questions, the right critiques, the right concepts, and the right guideposts for building socialism.
While Panitch’s insightful analyses of current events is a tragic loss, he’s left behind a huge body of work through his journal Socialist Register, and through his collaborations with colleagues such as Sam Gindin, Greg Albo, and Colin Leys (this short book would be an excellent starting point). Below are just seven of the many lessons his writings have taught us here at Flood, specifically with regard to socialist strategy.
1. It’s not enough to just win elections
It’s understandable that, when most people think about how to make political change, they think of winning elections for people or parties that represent their values. Change the government = job done. But Leo Panitch’s first and most basic lesson for us is that this perspective is a dangerous illusion. It’s not just that bad people get elected, or good people get ‘corrupted’ by power; the problem is that the state is embedded in a capitalist framework that renders it incapable of carrying out radical reforms.
Panitch repeatedly points out that any elected government will have to rely on a functioning national economy to implement its reform program – requiring foreign investment, willingness to lend on the part of international creditors, and smooth integration with international trade agreements, not to mention a growing tax base, reliant on a decent rate of employment and profitability. This gives big corporations an enormous capacity to kneecap a radical government and its reform agenda. “An overriding limit”, Panitch and Gindin write, “in all the steps toward taking control over economic life, even in the case of relatively modest expansions of social provision, is the power of capital to exit and invest abroad (along with the refusal to keep coming in)”. The most obvious example in the West of this constraint was the tragedy of the socialist-communist coalition government of France in the early 1980s. In this instance, President François Mitterand ended up replacing his ambitious reform agenda with an austerity budget after an investment slowdown, a huge wave of financial capital leaving the country, and a brutal speculation against the franc, leading to an extreme devaluation of the currency.
Beyond this, and other enemies a radical government may face (the corporate media, right-wing think tanks, etc), Panitch makes it clear that the state in its current form is not set up to deliver a radical agenda. Facets of the state - such as the judiciary, military leaders, or parts of the civil service - would potentially resist such an agenda. And the kind of widespread democratisation of the economy needed to remove power from big corporations would require a very different set of state institutions.
What this means is that a radical left-wing party, winning government in our current situation, would not have the power needed to implement the program it was elected on. In fact, more often than not, the party begins to accommodate itself to these pressures well before it arrives in government, such that the status quo is no longer threatened when they get there. For most of the centre-left parties around the world, this accommodation process is so advanced that they themselves play a role in actively suppressing the growth of anti-capitalist ideas and movements.
2. But we can’t smash the state or expect it to go away
With all this in mind, some political groups claim that the alternative to electoral politics is to ‘smash the state’ and replace it with a new, ‘truly’ democratic state – or, alternatively, build movements and structures outside the state that render it ‘obsolete’. Panitch is equally critical of these perspectives, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it’s not possible. An insurrection overthrew the Tsarist ruling class in the Russia of 1917, under unique historical conditions and in the aftermath of an unprecedented global war. As early as the 1920s, however, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci was arguing that such an insurrection was not viable in a developed capitalist state. For Panitch it is out of the question that the state could be overthrown by force, or rendered obsolete, in a liberal-democratic state with an entrenched civil society and a highly-developed capitalist economy.
Secondly, a complete rejection of liberal democracy is not desirable. While Panitch was a staunch critic of the state as we know it, he accepts that representative democracy itself has many aspects that should be preserved. He follows Rosa Luxemburg in arguing that things like multi-party elections, freedom of the press and association, and so on, are essential to the flourishing of a new society. It’s also important to recall that many of these freedoms, including universal suffrage, were not gifted from on high but won by working-class struggle from below. As such, the conventional counterposition of representative democracy and ‘real democracy’ or ‘direct democracy’ is a false one.
And this brings us to the final problem with the anti-statist perspective, according to Panitch: it fudges fundamental questions of representation that would have to be dealt with at some point in even a ‘post-revolutionary’ state. Drawing upon French socialist Andre Gorz, Panitch argues that, “to expect that institutions of direct democracy outside the state can simply displace the old state in a single revolutionary rupture in fact avoid[s] all the difficult questions of political representation in the transition to and under socialism”. These questions – of how decisions are made at scale, of how a democratic culture is fostered, of how to stop the emergence of a bureaucratic caste, of the relation between leadership and masses, between parties and the state, between different wings of the the state, between different geographical regions – all these will recur regardless of the ‘smashing’ of the previous state.
So, for Panitch, it is neither possible nor desirable to simply do away with the state, however deeply undemocratic it is. And this proposal does not really solve the problems it sets out to solve.
3. We need a strategy of structural reforms
But this doesn’t mean that Panitch was against ‘revolution’ – simply against an insurrectionary strategy in the developed world. In fact, Panitch articulates a ‘revolutionary socialism’ defined as a commitment to “a fundamental transformation of the social order”.
At the heart of this is a strategy of ‘structural reforms’. Again drawing upon Andre Gorz, Panitch and Gindin argue that the left needs to fight for reforms that allow for “further challenges to the balance of power and logic of capitalism,” and “thereby introduc[e] a dynamic that allow[s] the process to go further”. Unlike social democratic reforms, which are based on a compromise with capitalism, and are easily absorbed and hollowed out by it, structural reforms are fundamentally antagonistic to the interests of the capitalist system. They are intended to inspire working people to fight for and defend them, and to point a way to a society beyond capitalism. Such a reform program would not amount to a “smooth gradual road to socialism,” since setbacks and reversals would no doubt occur, and this program would “likely spark, or aggravate an economic crisis” that would threaten its implementation.
Panitch and his colleagues never wrote a ‘program’ for the precise reforms that would function as structural reforms, and rightly so: these would have to be worked out in each specific context. But he does offer us some guiding principles. Firstly, a structural reform should deliver “some material gains for working people” – critical in a time when inequality and precarity are reaching historic levels. Secondly, it should “expand economic democracy and public investment in infrastructure, transportation and utilities”, which would take away capital’s investment power and lead us towards a democratically planned economy – crucial at a time when we need to rapidly reorient the economy away from fossil fuels. Finally, such reforms should give working class people an increasing stake in an alternative society, and an experience of their own power within such a society. We in Australia might think of a legislated 4-day week with no loss of pay as one such reform, or nationalising the Commonwealth Bank, or a massive build of public housing.
4. We need a plan to transform the state
More than the specific reforms, Panitch was concerned with how to actually realise these reforms in a real-world situation. Analysing the catastrophic defeat of the left-wing Syriza government by the European Union in 2016, Panitch lamented the insufficient nature of the commonly expounded left-wing strategy in which a party gets into government, and then the social movements hold mobilisations to ‘defend’ it or to ‘hold it to account’. For Panitch that doesn’t go nearly far enough. What is needed is an ‘implementation plan’ that could deliver a program of deep social transformation despite the enormous opposition that it would provoke.
What changes to the various investment arms of the state are needed to ensure their ability to deliver socialist policies, even in the context of economic crisis brought on by capitalist resistance to a transformative reform program? What changes to the personnel of public advisory boards are needed to truly represent working-class interests? What changes to the structures of the welfare system are needed to make it a site of solidarity and empowerment, not paternalism and degradation? What changes to the state itself would need to happen so that, for instance, nationalisation of industry wouldn’t just lead to faceless bureaucratic control? This list of such questions is long and daunting.
While Panitch only began to answer these questions, one of his greatest lessons was his insistence that the left eventually needed to find such answers. In ‘The Socialist Challenge Today’, he and Sam Gindin float several broad ideas for state transformation, though again these would be context-specific. They include changing the culture and explicit roles of civil servants so that they become agents of social change, rather than supposedly neutral bureaucrats; creating new representative bodies based on more democratic principles to ensure direct community power over local decisions; formalising emergent social-movement bodies to take over the running of aspects of the state or economy; and the repurposing of important civil society organs (e.g. schools) as community hubs for building collective power and solidarity.
For Panitch, then, the question is not “‘more state’ versus ‘less state’, but about a different kind of state,” a more democratic one, where working people have a much larger intervention in the running of society. Or as Queensland Greens MP Amy MacMahon said in her opening speech to parliament in November last year, we need to turn parliament ‘inside out’.
5. But we also need to build the capacities of the working class
This kind of democratic transformation can’t be decreed from above. For Panitch it was a lamentable, but undeniable, fact that the working class does not “inherently know what to do”, since “lifetimes of exclusion and atomization” have lead to a “passivity and deference” that renders us ill-equipped to run the many facets of the state and economy. At the same time, the ‘working class’ is fractured along numerous lines (sector and income, geography, culture, race, gender, and so on) and doesn’t often have a practical experience of finding common interests. As such, simple appeals to direct democracy, proportional representation, citizens’ assemblies, etc, are not sufficient. Instead we need to be able to develop working people’s ‘democratic capacities’: As he writes,
Rather than assume that communities of active, informed citizens are ready and waiting, the first task of a democratic socialism, in remaking the state, no less than movement building, is to actively facilitate the creation of democratic capacities. This must start with promoting the capacity of isolated individuals to discover common needs and interests with others in various diverse aspects of their lives.
This is not an academic question. Given the significant divisions within the working class, if we can’t foster the capacity for working people to identify their common interests and develop a strategy for achieving them, we will not win a sufficient constituency to support a radical program, nor will we be able to defend it when it comes under attack or runs into crisis. Panitch argues that,
Twentieth century Marxists like Lenin and Gramsci addressed the need for restructuring the state almost exclusively in relation to what would be done after coming to power. But if we are to develop the democratic administrative capacities and confidence in our abilities to govern ourselves, we must find ways to constantly engage the existing state.
Evidently, one of the first capacities the working class needs to develop is the capacity to struggle, to fight and win. In fact, the struggles actually occurring are for Panitch the precise starting point for a socialist politics. Yet we also need to develop the capacities to collectively think strategically, to identify collective needs and interests, to wield the apparatus of the state without becoming ‘institutionalised’.
6. To do that we need a new kind of party
If the working class doesn’t currently have the required ‘capacities’ to take over and run society, the question is: how can it acquire them? For Panitch, the building of a particular kind of political party is central to this work. Rather than simply ‘representing’ a supposedly pre-existing working-class identity and set of interests, as social democratic or labour parties have generally imagined themselves to do, the primary role of this different kind of party is to actually shape and create working-class identity, interests, capacity and agency.
Following Gramsci, Panitch’s party is therefore an ‘educator’. But, importantly, this conception of education is not that of clever socialist intellectuals coming from on high to wake up the sheeple masses. Instead, Panitch argues, this education happens when the party develops the capacity of its everyday members and supporters “to offer socialist leadership in their communities “in relation to multifarious forms of subordination, deprivation and struggle”. This also means building a new common sense through the “implantation of a socialist presence, at the moral, ideological, political and economic levels in the broadest range of institutions in society” from factories to offices, from media organisations to schools, from churches to community centres – work which the party must undertake, though in collaboration with unions, social movements, and various other organisations.
To achieve this, it is of course important for the party leadership to be truly committed to this alternative conception of the party and of socialist transition – something twentieth century social democratic parties never really achieved. But perhaps more important for Panitch, and evident in his very early critiques of the UK Labour Party, was the need to ensure a robust internal party democracy and resist the tendency to ‘oligarchy’ within political parties identified by Robert Michels in the early 20th century.
The challenges of building this type of party should not be understated. How does a party achieve repeated electoral success while also maintaining a commitment to various forms of extra-parliamentary struggle? How are these different elements resourced? How do we keep our elected MPs accountable and engaged with the life of the party? How does a party become truly embedded in the day-to-day lives of working people? How do we bridge the (often significant) divides between different sections of the working class and build a stable social base for the party? Panitch didn’t provide simple answers to these questions - but that’s because they must be worked out not in theory, but by doing.
7. This is a long project, so let’s get cracking
One of Panitch’s great skills was to demonstrate how difficult our task of transforming society truly is, and to show how far we have to go. Even at the height of the excitement about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the UK Labour Party, Panitch was cautioning that it was unlikely the party had sufficiently overcome its historical limitations to even win the 2019 general election, let alone succeed in implementing its reforms if it attained government.
For Panitch the next stage of the democratic socialist project entails a ‘long war of position’ – Gramsci’s term for the phase of the struggle focused on accumulating power and influence in society, as opposed to the more decisive ‘war of manoeuvre’ phase, characterized by open class conflict. Over the next few decades, socialists should therefore aim at patiently building a new common sense through ever-increasing ‘implantation’ in society and its institutions. While it’s understandable to hope that a shortcut to social transformation will emerge (a spontaneous movement will come and overthrow the system, Joe Biden will embark upon an ambitious reform program, etc), the reality looks rather different. This is a hard pill to swallow when we’re staring down a growing ecological catastrophe, but the only way to begin to force capitalist states to act in ways that genuinely address the climate crisis requires building precisely the kind of working class power and capacities that are needed for a socialist transition. Panitch in particular warned against what he called ‘eco-catastrophism’: “It’s not just that some predictions of ecological disaster are overblown; one also shouldn’t underestimate the dynamic capacity for capitalism to persist even as it degrades life and nature, and indeed to develop new technologies and make profits in the very process of doing so”. Meanwhile, the belief that a moment of ecological crisis will emerge that is large enough to induce a revolutionary consciousness and capacity in the working class is another example of the kind of leftist wishful thinking that Panitch sought to dispel.
The good news is that wins beget wins. As Panitch and Gindin say: “Political hopes are inseparable from notions of what is possible. And possibility itself is intimately related to working-class formation … and the role of socialist parties in that formation”. Everyday people don’t support a massive overhaul to society because they understandably don’t think it’s possible. Every win that shows the possibility of an alternative, that links people in experiences of solidarity and that develops people’s capacities – every step makes the next step possible.
Despite the defeat of the Syriza government, the Corbyn project, and the Sanders movement, the democratic socialist project is stronger than it has been in decades – it has mobilised and begun to educate a new generation of campaigners. Panitch was optimistic that the old ‘social democratic’ compromise has been discredited to a much greater extent than before, and space is opening up for this new kind of politics.
Australia hasn’t yet had its ‘moment’ of democratic socialist resurgence. But it is coming, if we’re willing to patiently get to work. So while Panitch taught us to remain as sober as possible, he also wanted us all to raise our expectations and not become cynical, so let’s end this final lesson with comrade Leo’s words from before the Corbyn-Sanders experience: “[I]t is first of all necessary to dream. It is the task of getting people to think ambitiously once again that is the immediate challenge before the left today”.
Liam Flenady is a political organiser and humble beat farmer based in Brisbane/Meanjin. He is a member of the Greens and is recognised as Brisbane’s number 1 Ralph Miliband stan.