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    What Is To Be Done? Class Struggle in the 21st Century
    What Is To Be Done? Class Struggle in the 21st Century
    What Is To Be Done? Class Struggle in the 21st Century
    Ebook150 pages3 hours

    What Is To Be Done? Class Struggle in the 21st Century

    By Steve Clark

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    After roughly 500 years on earth, industrialism has reached the limits of its sustainability. Ecological destruction in combination with economic and social polarization has brought civilization to the brink of a new dark age. Deforestation, species extinction, oil depletion, climate change, food insecurity, epidemics, migrations and soaring violence – these now are the markers of our planet’s future.

    Already bearing down in the harshest possible way on millions of the world’s people, this looming catastrophe – this truly existential crisis – is broadly dispiriting to progressive and reactionary forces alike. None offer a fresh, practical, revolutionary way out.

    Instead, while the world’s oil giants aggressively promote a “war on terrorism” that only exacerbates the crisis, the big banks, under cover of austerity, retreat from real investment that might re-stabilize community life through global full-employment. Driven all the more by fierce competition in today’s catastrophic times, all corporations necessarily put their own profits ahead of human need, social service and ecological accountability.

    Meanwhile, despairing Boomer progressives, watching corporations take evermore thorough control of governments all over the world, imagine only a dystopian future in which good people survive in local, self-made, self-reliant communities. But, younger activists, still with energy and long lives ahead and bearing witness to the crisis at hand, cannot abide such gloom. Mobilizing through social media, they rise periodically in spontaneous rebellions against the corporate empire, momentarily occupying its squares but unable to secure lasting and decisive victory. Their vitality begs better vision and leadership from their elders.

    Revitalizing V. I. Lenin’s pen name, What Is To Be Done? cuts against all hopeless and debilitating responses with a penetrating update and application of Marxist class analysis. Embracing Marx’ philosophical materialism – “[Humankind] always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve” – American leftist Steve Clark asserts that, like other historic world systems (hunting/gathering, agriculture) that reached their sustainability limits, industrialism has already created the forces of its own succession.

    Those forces are the service class, the people who provide the services that make contemporary life possible: teachers, doctors, nurses, accountants, lawyers, counselors, entertainers, artists, designers, planners, economists, journalists, systems operators, food servers, clerks...the list goes on. These are not the proletarians of Marx and Lenin’s time. These are the productive forces of a new age, the Service Age.

    Service production is inherently oriented to solve problems. It has no intrinsic drive to exploit labor or nature. One server serves another who, in turn, serves others. All are dependent on others for the services they need to survive. It is a new way of life with the potential to put everyone on earth to work solving the social and ecological problems of their own community.

    Clark asserts that the Service Age is already here, but its power and potential is masked by the continuing cultural oppression and political domination of corporate capital. Denying the possibility and rejecting the goal of overthrowing modern-day states and nationalizing corporate assets – that is, redefining the objective of revolutionary class struggle for the emergent Service Age – Clark explains how the structure, positioning and linkages of service production open a different revolutionary alternative, one that Marx and Lenin could not foresee but would certainly welcome.

    At 75 pages, What Is To Be Done? is a compact revolutionary manifesto for 21st century class struggle. Every Marxist, nay, every person concerned about civilization’s future on earth can gain perspective and guidance from its exposition.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSteve Clark
    Release dateMay 19, 2015
    ISBN9781310334344
    What Is To Be Done? Class Struggle in the 21st Century

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      Book preview

      What Is To Be Done? Class Struggle in the 21st Century - Steve Clark

      What Is To Be Done?

      Class Struggle in the 21st Century

      Servers of the World, Unite!

      V.I. Lenin

      Published by Steve Clark at Smashwords

      Copyright 2015 Steve Clark

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

      Table of Contents

      Author’s Note

      Preface

      Chapter 1: Revolutionary Situation

      Chapter 2: Social Contracts and Revolution

      Chapter 3: Dark Age Beckons

      Chapter 4: From the Womb of Industrialism

      Chapter 5: Corporate Indifference

      Chapter 6: The Service Class

      Chapter 7: Force, States and Revolution

      Chapter 8: Social Contract for the Service Age

      Chapter 9: Organization of Revolutionaries

      Postscript

      About the Author

      Acknowledgements

      Endnotes

      Author’s Note

      In 1917, V.I. Lenin (1870-1924) led the revolutionaries who deposed the Tsarist regime and, then, the Provisional Government in Russia.

      Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a young lawyer from a middle class family in Simbirsk, adopted the pen name Lenin when he moved to St. Petersburg in 1893 and joined the revolutionary movement. Six years earlier, his older brother, charged with plotting the Tsar’s assassination, had been hanged by the regime.

      In What Is To Be Done? Lenin foretold the path and defined the tasks of the Russian revolution. He is rightly enshrined in history as the greatest master of revolutionary science and technique, a man of evident ruthlessness, yet one capable of forging a creative social collaboration of unprecedented scale. He made the vision of Marx and Engels real when he led the revolution that founded the world’s first socialist state.

      Lenin is my political avatar and alter ego. I am a white, male American of the world’s Boom Generation who was profoundly influenced by the worldwide political and cultural upheaval of the Sixties. Resigning from the U.S. Air Force Academy and joining marches against the war in Viet Nam, I was drawn to Marxism after President Nixon and the American political establishment labeled me and other protestors communists. I found Lenin’s exposition on the nature of state power deeply edifying and joined a study group to see what else Marxism had to offer. Eventually, this led me to the definitively Leninist but (what proved) outdated notion of building a revolutionary party in the U.S. Before my comrades and I realized the futility and abandoned the effort, we forged the Communist Workers Party (CWP), which survived into the 1980s.

      After we abandoned party-building, it made no sense to self-declare as a communist, and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China provoked further questioning of the socialist vision. Yet, the on-going calamities of capitalism provided constant evidence of its own systemic failures and desperate future. During these and subsequent years, I was active in a host of progressive and grassroots struggles, none of which dispelled the Marxist finding that political power results from class-based economic realities and, therefore, revolutionary class struggle is necessary for political progress.

      I suspect that I am not unique, that there are legions of progressive activists worldwide who know today’s real problem is class-rooted political power. It is to this political peer group that the present essay is addressed. Knowing what we know and seeing the world slipping ever deeper into crisis and chaos, we ask what is to be done?

      This is the question of every revolutionary situation, and, now, it is the question of our time.

      Lenin died in 1924, only 56 years old and less than two years after the establishment of the Soviet Union. While he cannot be absolved of all responsibility for how the Communist Party ruled after his death, show trials and the gulag were instruments in Stalin’s consolidation of power, after Lenin was gone. Overall, socialism in the Soviet Union proved a highly effective means to rapidly advance the prosperity and culture of the impoverished peasants and workers of the Tsarist empire. Socialism embodied a social contract between peasants fleeing rural destitution for factory jobs in the cities and the proletarian leaders and state planners who reorganized the economy after the revolution.

      This social contract served the Soviet people for generations, but like its later-arriving Western counterpart – known variously as social democracy or the New Deal – socialism eventually ossified, turning stagnant and regressive relative to the people’s advancing numbers, needs and capabilities.

      Unfortunately, the people of the old Soviet Union now endure a government committed to the profit-making interests of the opportunists who seized state-owned assets to create corporate oligarchies in the wake of the U.S.S.R.’s collapse after 1991.

      Today, just like people in other nation-states all over the world, they bear witness to civilization’s implosion and ask what is to be done?

      A century ago, in a similarly catastrophic and revolutionary time, Lenin, a revolutionary social scientist of the first order, made the most of what was possible in Russia where a lesser leader might have failed.

      Today, facing a new and far broader challenge, civilization is again looking for the way ahead, for a new social contract, and again asking what is to be done?

      Who better to answer than V.I. Lenin?

      Steve Clark

      May 2015

      Back to the Table of Contents

      Preface

      Exiled from Russia in 1907, I found myself stuck in Switzerland – along with a cadre of other Russian revolutionaries – when World War I (WWI) engulfed Europe after July 1914. While we maintained contact via couriers and newspapers with in-country Bolsheviks, we could not secure safe passage across German-controlled territory to return our homeland.

      Meanwhile, the war imposed disastrous, unbearable consequences at home. Then, on International Women’s Day, March 7, 1917,¹ in a starving city with husbands conscripted and away at the front, a group of workingwomen in Petrograd² called a strike for peace, land and bread. Hitting a nerve, it spread rapidly across the city, shuttering all factories and bringing 150,000 marchers into the streets. When the Tsar ordered troops back from the front to suppress the protests, the soldiers mutinied. On March 12, the Petrograd Workers Soviet declared itself in command of the city. Facing an insurmountable crisis, the Tsar abdicated on March 15. On the 16th, a rump group of Duma politicians declared themselves the Provisional Government, yet they affirmed plans to continue the war. Looking to weaken their resolve, Germany suddenly agreed to let us Bolsheviks travel across the continent and home to Russia.

      Rushing across war-torn Europe by train, we arrived at Petrograd’s Finland Station on April 16, 1917. The deep, dark cold of Russia’s winter had opened into spring, warmed more by the enthusiasm of the city’s revolutionary workers than by the slow retreat of Father Frost. Yet, the revolution was obviously stymied and incomplete, and I knew the Petrograd workers, though elated by their initial success, remained at a crossroads. Obviously, a decisive political moment was at hand, but what was to be done?

      With the answer clear in my own mind, I disembarked before a large crowd of cheering proletarian revolutionaries! Oh, what a powerful inspiration they provided. But I was not enthralled by the welcome of Nikolay Chkheidze, the Menshevik who served then as President of the Petrograd Soviet. Turning my back to him and facing the throng of workers who commanded my attention, I addressed the question of the moment. Throwing down the gauntlet, I declared, All Power to the Soviets! (Вся Власть Советам!)3 The workers roared, and six months later, on November 7, we Bolsheviks led the Soviets to power in our homeland.

      Though the answer must be different for these different times, I have titled the present work What Is To Be Done? (Что делать?) because, no doubt, this is the chief question on the mind of every concerned and forward-looking person on today’s earth. Civilization teeters on the brink of a dark age. Human suffering is pervasive and rapidly escalating. The planet’s ecosystems are under unprecedented stress. Life, including human life, is widely endangered. Nation-states are flailing and failing. What is to be done?

      In the present work, I address this question by explicating the subtitle: Class Struggle in the 21st Century. Once the class struggle is understood, the inevitability and path of revolution becomes apparent, and activists can hope to advance the cause. We aim to advance the class struggle, and our slogan is Servers of the World, Unite!

      Of course, I appropriate that slogan from Marx and Engels’ famous call in The Communist Manifesto (1848): Workers of the World, Unite! (Пролетарии Всех Стран, Соединяйтесь!). It was the motto of the Soviet Union, on all our coins. Today, as I recount in the present work, the class struggle has moved on. The proletariat is no longer the vanguard. In its place, the rising and leading class in social regeneration and revolutionary change is the service class.

      It is, therefore, necessary to update Marxism, the science of classes and class struggle. That is a fundamental purpose of the present work.

      Class science is the one great weapon, along with our numbers, that we revolutionary masses possess. With class science, we can identify and mobilize our class sisters and brothers, build class alliances, target class enemies and, eventually, restructure class power so it works in the people’s interests for generations to come.

      That illuminates the second, and far more important purpose of this work. While updating Marxism, I will also summarize what the science indicates about the present world situation, its potentials and the tasks of revolutionaries.

      The present work, of course, is named after my most famous essay, What Is To Be Done? (1902), written in the lead-up to Russia’s 1905 revolution. Though that uprising failed, it launched and propelled the revolutionary movement that overthrew the Tsarist regime and its bourgeois successor in the great revolutions of 1917. In What Is To Be Done? I addressed the crucial task of forging theoretically clear and practically strong leadership for the impending revolution.

      That, again, is my purpose in the present work. Let us begin.

      Lenin

      May 2015

      Back to the Table of Contents

      Chapter 1: Revolutionary Situation

      Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.⁴

      I wrote these words in 1902, in the first edition of What Is To Be Done? The expression has become my most enduringly recognized insight and for good reason. However, in 2015, at the outset of the present work, with more than 100 years of revolutionary experience since, the phrase needs both

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