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One big difference between the Jacobin left and the left of my generation is over the “road map”. In 1973 or so, nobody in the SWP or any Maoist, for that matter, had any idea of how a revolution could take place except in the most general terms. We all pretty much understood that the workers would not march under the banner of socialism, at least understood according to the Communist Manifesto, unless there was a profound change in American society that forced them to engage in uncompromising struggle such as that which took place during the Great Depression. It was up to us to engage in various struggles as they arose, from the right to an abortion to challenging the trade union bureaucracies, but we accepted the idea that as Marx put it in “The German Ideology”: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
In the late 70s, the SWP accepted the word of its leadership that revolution was on the agenda but there was no road map as such that described the specific routes. The entire membership was instructed to get blue-collar jobs because increasing class conflict was making the factories and mines like Columbia University and Berkeley were in 1968. This was delusional of course.
Then along came Bhaskar Sunkara who with his customary aplomb and self-confidence told his readers in the penultimate chapter of “The Socialist Manifesto”: “The dilemma for socialists today is figuring out how to take anger at the unjust outcomes of capitalism and turn it into a challenge to the system itself…Easier said than done. But this chapter offers a road map based on the long, complex, variously inspiring and dismal history of left politics—for challenging capitalism and creating a democratic socialist alternative to it.”
full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/04/20/jacobins-road-map-within-the-catacombs-of-the-democratic-party/
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