Revolution or Reform? Neither!

I was at the Ann Arbor Art Fair yesterday. In addition to looking at all the artwork on display, I wandered through the non-profit section, where various political and social groups have booths set up in order to spread information in support of their many causes. First I picked up a newspaper from The Spark, which is a Trotskyist organization. Then I took another newspaper from the Democratic Socialists of America. Those two groups, we are told, represent the only two options for change that people have available to them: revolution or reform.

The Spark is the more pathetic of the two. They still cling tightly to their holy trinity of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, even after all these years. Well, Marx has been dead for 135 years, Lenin for 94, and Trotsky for 78. The thought that any of them has anything relevant to say to people in 2018 is ludicrous. They were products of a bygone era. Strategies that were relevant to the Europe of 1917 are simply not going to have the same relevance 101 years later. The thought that antiquated notions like “class struggle” are going to be revitalized to the extent necessary to wage a successful revolution is simply preposterous. So The Spark limps along, 47 years after its founding, without having accomplished a single thing, and with no prospect of ever accomplishing anything even remotely resembling a revolution. It’s a wonder they still manage to find enough people who are willing to go to art fairs to pass out their literature.

Unlike the moribund anachronisms of Lenin and Trotsky, the Democratic Socialist of America seems to hold more promise. They’re currently buoyed by a wave of enthusiasm, stoked, in part, by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. They have a slate of upcoming candidates who promise to reform the system. But do they really stand a better chance than the old guard Leninists of ushering in substantive change? The answer is that while they may succeed in passing some changes on social issues, their chances of fundamentally altering the working of the capitalist economic system itself are nil. You need only to look around the world to see the many ostensibly “socialist” parties who have fallen victim to the Iron Law of Oligarchy and who now act as de facto guardians of the globalized neoliberal system.

The alternative to the above two approaches is the Utopian Socialist model of transformation. It doesn’t seek to take on the herculean task of transforming the whole system from the top-down in one fell swoop. Rather, it seeks to withdraw from mainstream society and start building parallel institutions, with substantive change being initiated within each individual unit as it’s created. Change can be introduced in manageable pieces that go on to act as a network of mutual support the further they go. This is the bedrock upon which lasting change can be firmly anchored. The results of these changes can be implemented, tested and perfected as you go, thus providing tangible, real world progress in the here and now. The task of building intentional communities, ecovillages, and organizations that support the first two, are the basis of the Utopian Socialist model in action. This is incremental change that can be started now, as opposed to having to wait for some future revolution or electoral victory. And even though these accomplishments largely fly beneath the radar of the mass media, there has been an impressive amount of work done in that direction. And I think the 21st century is primed to see a large increase in those efforts as we move forward.