Not by Popular Power Alone

Institutions of popular power are important for effecting a socialist transition. But it’s important not to neglect other elements — like maintaining wide popular support for a socialist government.

In my most recent post for Left Notes, I argued that democratic socialists differ from contemporary social democrats in terms of their end goals. Democratic socialists aim at ultimately abolishing capitalism by bringing most of society’s productive assets under collective or worker ownership, whereas social democrats are content with a reformed, worker-friendly version of capitalism. 

In a follow-up piece, Neal explored another important division within the socialist camp, on the question of strategy. Partisans of an insurrectionary road to socialism believe that socialists are most likely to achieve their goals through a popular, extralegal uprising that overthrows the existing state. Believers in a democratic road to socialism think the path to building a postcapitalist society most likely runs through the democratic election of a socialist government.

On this question of strategy, though — what Neal calls “the transition question” — we can and should make further distinctions. Even if you and I agree that the road to socialism runs through democratic election of a socialist government, we might have all sorts of disagreements about what a socialist government should do once it’s elected. 

Here I just want to take up one set of questions: a socialist government’s relationship to building popular power, and the implications that has for the pace at which a transition to socialism might be carried out and the conditions for its success.

Popular Power

I agree with many on the Left who emphasize the need to build institutions of working-class power at the grassroots, independent of the state. Such institutions of popular power might include trade unions (or sectoral or national trade union federations), workplace cooperatives, tenants’ unions, and democratic assemblies (from the neighborhood level to larger geographic units, like cities or regions).

For proponents of a democratic road to socialism, such institutions of popular power play two important roles¹:

First, in a society that has not yet transitioned beyond capitalism, they are workers’ means of fighting back against the power of capital. Through organizing themselves in unions, tenants’ councils, and the like, working-class people are able to use their collective strength to resist exploitation — by, say, striking for higher wages or withholding rent to demand housing improvements. Such institutions can also act as a counterweight to capitalist pressure on the state, mobilizing to get governments to pass pro-worker reforms and, ideally, to bring more of the economy under collective ownership and control.

Second, these institutions are essentially seeds of the new order inside the old, and they become the muscle behind a socialist transition. Socialists often argue that, as more of the economy is socialized, popular institutions of workplace and neighborhood democracy can and should take on a greater role in ordering our everyday lives. The experiences of the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile, and various citywide general strikes are seen as offering glimpses of what such a popular, democratic reordering of society might look like.

Beyond Popular Power

But popular power alone is insufficient to effect a socialist transition.

First, socialists have to win and hold majority support for our project. Building popular power is not sufficient for maintaining majority support, because even in the most optimistic scenario the activist base that makes up the core of institutions of popular power will always be a minority of society. Socialist governments must also try to pass popular policy reforms to bolster their legitimacy and popularity, potentially strengthening their hand in pursuing more radical economic transformation down the road.²

Second, state policy is necessary for certain fundamental aspects of a socialist transition. It falls to the national government, for instance, to nationalize (certain) firms and industries, to set up needed public banks, and to establish and enforce regulations governing everything from financial transactions to environmental stewardship to workers’ rights. These sorts of questions can’t feasibly be addressed by institutions of popular power alone (though a democratic socialist government would certainly incorporate their input or assign them decision-making authority as appropriate).

Moreover, a socialist government can play an essential role in promoting and developing institutions of popular power. By using their public platform and their legislative authority to build up such institutions, they help workers expand their collective power and begin to lay the groundwork for a more fundamental transformation of the economy and the state.³

Popular Power and the Chilean Experience

The overthrow of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity (UP, Unidad Popular in Spanish) government in Chile in the early 1970s is a source of cautionary advice as we think about the tasks of a socialist government. In a 2023 article for Catalyst, René Rojas persuasively argues against a common analysis on the left that the UP government was overthrown because Allende did not push hard or fast enough — in particular, that Allende did not sufficiently mobilize or empower the organs of popular power that supported the government.⁴

Some on the left say that the UP government was fatally compromised by a large-scale capital strike, which might have been prevented had Allende moved more quickly to expropriate private property. Yet as Rojas points out, the UP government and its supporters (often acting on their own initiative) were actually nationalizing and expropriating firms at a rapid pace: “By 1973, over half of the total national output was accounted for by the public sector, including banking, mining, foreign trade, basic industry, and even important light manufacturing sectors like textiles and key foodstuffs.”

In addition, Rojas convincingly argues that Allende had not secured a popular majority for a more aggressive program, and concerns at the time about the loss of popular support if the UP government exceeded its mandate were reasonable. Rojas notes that Allende’s government was elected on a pledge to begin the transition to socialism — which meant “accomplish[ing] critical transformative and redistributive reforms that would better position working people and the labor movement to carry out more comprehensive anti-capitalist restructuring” down the road — not to complete it. Most of his base was not ready to support some kind of revolutionary confrontation with the capitalist class.

Finally, Rojas contends that workers would not have been practically prepared for such a showdown:

Rising popular power organs — such as the cordones, comandos, and local supply and price boards that combated hoarding and took control of the distribution of consumer goods — were key instruments that workers built to confront measures deployed by elites against the Chilean road’s progress. Yet they were erected atop organizational and strategic capacities that generations of workers, poor people, and their parties had painstakingly struggled to develop. Faced with the prospect of an unwinnable civil war, Allende was compelled to avert a useless bloodbath. As the campaign for socialism was to be fought over the long haul, Allende and popular militants understood the need to preserve and nurture these capacities. His unwillingness to risk their destruction in a premature and hopeless final battle reflected a commitment to promoting workers’ interests in a manner rooted in the class’s demands and preferences.

Rojas makes a compelling case that Allende’s best chance for averting a coup lay in shoring up support among the significant portion of the working class loyal to the Christian Democrats (CD). This required coming to an agreement with leaders of the party’s left-wing faction (which was broadly supportive of the UP’s “road to socialism” up until right before the coup); such an agreement would have  “meant restricting the scope of ongoing expropriations, tamping down on preparations for armed confrontation, and making explicit assurances of enduring political pluralism and civil liberties.” The failure to come to such an agreement reduced the UP’s working-class support and allowed right-wing, pro-coup CD leaders to marginalize their party’s left.

The Allende experience therefore suggests that a socialist government needs time and broad political alliances to develop its project, including the building up of popular power. There is every reason to think that the alternative, racing to a direct and final confrontation with the capitalist class, will likely be disastrous. Of course, this perspective — emphasizing the need for a longer transitional period between capitalism and socialism, and the need to forge compromises with more moderate forces — has plenty of critics among people who also say they believe in a democratic road to socialism.

1. Proponents of the insurrectionary road also think such institutions are important (they often call them institutions of “dual power”). But insurrectionary road-ers think of them primarily as built up for the purpose of displacing the state, rather than as institutions that coexist productively alongside it.

2. In addition, if governments can pass policies that increase the freedom, dignity, and well-being of ordinary people, such reforms are worth enacting for their own sake.

3. Such a perspective is broadly in line with the strategy of “revolutionary reformism” of Ralph Miliband and the democratic socialist strategy developed by Nicos Poulantzas in his later work.

4.  Miliband, for instance, argued that Allende erred in refusing to arm his peasant and working-class supporters.