In the popular mind, “violence” and “revolution” go together like the engine and the car; revolution necessarily implies violence, and cannot happen without it. In a revolution you capture the government, dispossess the ruling class of their control over the means of production, and break their ability to resist; and since no ruling class is going to lie down and do nothing while they are being dispossessed, so the logic goes, they can only be defeated by violence.
The World Socialist Party advocates revolution (i.e., the capture of state power by workers, the dispossession of the ruling class, and the abolition of wage labor-capital relationships) without at the same time advocating violence to achieve it. This does not mean that we oppose violence on moralistic grounds, like Richard Nixon or other, genuine, pacifists or that we are fake revolutionaries who dream of a better world without being willing to do what is necessary to get it. Neither does it mean that we think the revolution will be an amiable middle-class tea party in which everyone writes the name of his candidate on the ballot, and the Nixons, Agnews, and General Kys of the world retire gracefully to their country clubs because their terms of office have expired.
Winning power
The World Socialist Party position on violence flows logically from our objectives and from our analysis of why the capitalist class are able to maintain their power and what must be done to dislodge them. Our objective is to abolish production for sale and re-organize the world’s industries and labor solely to fulfill human wants and needs. We say that wage workers are the only social class in present day society capable of carrying out this task. The socialist revolution, therefore, must be a process in which workers themselves, not leaders or vanguards, take political power and use it to abolish private property in the means of production.
The question of violence enters when we discuss how workers are to win power. The means necessary to win power are obvious once we understand why workers do not have power now. If it were true that the only reason the ruling class stay in power is their ability to terrorize workers, then it would make sense for socialists to accumulate weapons and fight terror with terror.
But their primary means of staying in power is not force; it is their control over working-class heads. This would have to be true in a system of society where workers outnumber capitalists 99 to 1, produce all the guns, clubs, bombs, planes, tanks, and napalm, and even man the armies and police forces. Workers also construct the highways, transport vehicles, communications and supplies that make it possible to use violence. The implements and methods of government violence are social in nature. They require the co-operation of masses of workers before they can be set in motion. It is clear that the ruling class hold power primarily because they are able to get that co-operation by methods other than terror, not because they own buildings full of weapons.
The ruling class control the heads of workers by controlling the nature of the ideas and opinions they hold, and by controlling the channels through which these ideas are passed on. The ideas themselves are of two main types: a) those which directly or indirectly justify capitalism or encourage behavior that capitalism requires in order to function; and b) those which blame the problems of capitalism on something other than the capitalist system, and hold out solutions other than socialism. The channels for conveying these ideas are of three types: a) established institutions, such as schools and churches, where workers go to receive formal instruction; b) mass communications media, such as radio, TV, books, films, and periodicals, that reach workers informally and are not necessarily a part of their job or social training; c) organizations which are dominated by capitalist values, such as the Boy Scouts, Junior Achievement, Knights of Columbus, American Association of University Professors, American Medical Association, and any number of company unions.
Since it is by these methods that the ruling class are able to maintain power, it follows that the chief task of a socialist revolutionary should be to undermine ruling-class ideas and values and replace them with the ideology of socialism. For without the consent and participation of the working class, it would not be possible to manufacture implements of violence, much less set in motion the troops which use them. Neither would it be possible to abolish production for sale.
The best defense
The World Socialist Party advocates the ballot as a means of achieving power because, once ruling-class ideas are defeated, no other method on a mass scale should be necessary; and if those ideas are not defeated, no violent method can be successful. This is not to say that violence will never occur at any level in the process of transforming society from capitalism to socialism, or that the ruling classes will make no attempt to resist their demise. What it means is that, once they lose control of our heads, resistance on their part will be futile. If they choose to resist, the people themselves will decide at that time the most efficient way to handle them.
In the process of trying to save their ideas from defeat, the ruling class may well issue bans on socialist activity, hire thugs to beat up members who attempt to distribute leaflets, and smash meetings and organizations of workers. As we do not oppose violence on moralistic or metaphysical grounds, it is impossible to argue that socialists should refuse to defend themselves against this kind of attack. But the best defense is to do our ideological work well enough so that workers themselves will allow and even assist us to go on functioning as socialists.
The measure of our success will be the extent to which workers refuse to co-operate with the ruling class in their attempts to cripple the socialist movement. It is useless to waste time accumulating guns for the day when the ruling class become fascist, when we could be accumulating the much more potent defense of sympathizers, supporters, members, and a pro-socialist public opinion.
The main battleground of the socialist revolution will be ideological. This is a battle that socialists can have every confidence in their ability to win. While it is pro-capitalist ideology’ which enables the ruling class to go on doing what they do to the world, at the same time ideology is the weakest link in their armor. The fact is that pro-capitalist values and explanations for what is happening to us do not fit reality. They are in no way capable of accounting for or dealing with the pollution of the air and sea, poverty, famine, waste, unemployment, war, and the general decline of the quality of life on this earth.
It makes sense, then, to attack the ideas of the ruling class, where they are weakest, rather than their armies, weapons, and administrative methods, where they are strongest. And the most valuable ideological weapon in the socialist arsenal, because it stresses the unity of all knowledge, because it provides a rational frame within which to interpret seemingly unrelated bits of information, because it fits the fact better than any other theory of society, because the dozens of books written to refute it have proven by their very number to be worthless; this most valuable weapon is the materialist world outlook.
Stan Blake
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