Richard D. Wolff

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three left(tists) do!

The place to start building an alternative social order by which the people hold economic and political power, is within the communities and the workplaces that people live and work within. by establishing Worker Cooperatives, and Community assemblies which represent an appropriation of political and economic power away from the capitalist and bourgeois-democracy directly into the hands of the people, you begin to build a working model of a completely alternative social order for people to live under. building such models at the grass roots model is the thing that will inspire people and cause people to question why we need capitalist to control the economy and become wealthy off of the labor of the working man, or why we need a bourgeois government, or even a ‘strong’ government at all. These are the roots for people to congregate together and to discuss how to build an alternative society, and indeed, how to directly challenge the current bourgeois social order. When an alternative model for building a new social order of society sweeps a great portion of the nation, it is inevitable that this would result in huge tensions between the predominate capitalist social order, and the struggle of the people to achieve a new society where people control their own communities and their own working lives, and reap the full fruits of their labor without it being appropriated by a ruling class and so on. In other words, a movement of the ultimate emancipation of humanity, with a working model for achieving such level of emancipation directly, Is a massive inspiration to the people everywhere, a call for struggle against the old social order itself and the establishment of one where the people themselves control the economic and political institutions and the resources of their communities, and indeed plan their own communities as a whole, rather than their communities being dominated by the interest of capitalist and corrupted bourgeois mayors. It is inevitable that through this struggle, the capitalist would seek to abolish these developments, initially through economic warfare and national politics, and when those prove unsuccessful, would result in military warfare, all in an effort to maintain their power over society and their domination over humans and communities and people within their labor. With a people that has reach a critical mass of consciousness against the current bourgeois social order, workers can seek to expropriate their own workplaces away from the capitalist and run the workplaces themselves, and people within their communities can seek to expropriate the institutions of political power within their communities, and establish community assemblies. Of course it is inevitable that the capitalist would strike back and wage war. This is why it is impossible to abolish the old social order without a revolution, because the former ruling class, in reaction to losing their power, will ultimately seek to take back power through military means. This is why at some point, people must organize militarily, and appropriate as many advanced military arms as possible, in order to defend against the bourgeoisie’s advancements against what is becoming the establishment of an entire new social order.

If we assume that the people are ultimately victorious in their struggle against the bourgeois and the military, then the question then becomes, how to defend against any further threats, including foreign threats that feel threatened by the revolution and the completely new social order established by it? The answer is actually relatively simple. If there is to be any sort of state in this new social order, it must be a state by which its powers are entirely derived from a mandate by the people. In other words, the state merely serves the mandate of the people, and would not be a ruling apparatus in itself. The people may decide that a revolutionary state may need to have the duties to build a military, or handle the construction of national projects and such, and thus the state would only be allowed to carry out these duties. Not only would the duties of state be determined by the people themselves, but the way the state acquires resources should also be decided by a mandate of the people. For example, if the state needs to produce military equipment, it would only do so by request of various factories on a need-basis. If the state needs a raw contribution of resources from communities or industries, it would do so by request on a need-basis. In other words, the communities and the workplaces would decide their own contributions in order for the state to fulfill its roles as determined by the mandate of the people. This is a completely different conception of the state than at any point prior in history. No longer is the state a ruling apparatus, and no longer does the state have the ability to concentrate power to itself and work against the interest of the people. Instead, the states functions are completely dominated by the mandate of the people themselves. This is the basis for a completely new constitution and a completely new social order.

Ask Prof. Wolff: No LEFT left, Democrats as cheerleaders for capitalism.