Prophecy, Prediction and Socialist Strategy

“In reality one can ‘scientifically’ foresee only the struggle, but not the concrete moments of the struggle, which cannot but be the results of opposing forces in continuous movement, which are never reducible to fixed quantities since within them quantity is continually becoming quality. In reality one can ‘foresee’ to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result ‘foreseen’. Prediction reveals itself not as a scientific act of knowledge, but as the abstract expression of the effort made, the practical way of creating a collective will.” 

Antonio Gramsci.

Some socialists have used the above quote to rule out making political predictions. They create a false choice between God-like perfect knowledge and a day to day tailing of the immediate. There is another way. Socialists can make predictions without surrendering to the fatalistic idea that social laws are as unbending as the laws of nature. We do not have to fall into the opposite error of refusing to offer predictions, instead surrendering to freneticism and permanent immediacy.

There is a path we can navigate between the mechanical Marxism of reformist socialists like Karl Kautsky and surrender to tailing the chaos of what’s immediately presented to us day to day. The whole point of building a revolutionary socialist minority in the working class is to point the way to the future revolution and to find a path to it in the everyday struggles of the working class – avoiding moralistic abstention from struggle or opportunist surrender to immediate struggles. After all, didn’t the great socialist thinker James Connolly state that the true prophets are those that “create the future”? 

The idea that social laws are akin to natural laws leaves no room for organisation – for human agency in changing the world. We could just wait for the evolution of the “economy” to churn out socialism. But society doesn’t work that way and fatalism just leads to the victory of reactionary forces. Circumstances create moments where opposing forces clash to decide the outcome – which is not preordained.

The October Revolution might not have been organised – particularly if cowards like Bolshevik strike breakers Zinoviev and Kamenev had had their way and abandoned the revolution. The result would have been confusion of the working class movement and that would have assured the victory of counter revolutionary forces. Fascism would have been born in Russia in 1917 and not Italy a few years later. 

But while Gramsci in the quote above is arguing against mechanical Marxism in the name of a free Marxism that accounts for agency, freedom can’t just be opposition to fatalism in the name of surrender to the immediate – which is itself a mirror image twin of that fatalism. The immediate is a form of thinking that remains trapped within the capitalist system – socialists have to fight to break the veil of the immediate and help workers connect the everyday to the need for revolt. There is a danger of bending the stick too far and dismissing the ability to have any medium to long term strategy, after all Gramsci ends his quote by stating that: 

“In reality one can ‘foresee’ to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result ‘foreseen’. Prediction reveals itself not as a scientific act of knowledge, but as the abstract expression of the effort made, the practical way of creating a collective will.” 

You can foresee to the extent that you fight for influence over the course of events. This was one of Lenin’s key arguments against the reformist Mensheviks. He argued revolutionaries should “make the revolution!” to which they replied: the revolution is a product of social evolution and you cannot just “make” a revolution. They accused Lenin of “voluntarism” – an accusation that he made the revolution a product of willpower alone. That was a gross caricature of Lenin’s position. Lenin was scathing in his distaste for their fatalism:

“Can the working-class movement (as a whole) be timed? No, it cannot; for that movement is made up of thousands of separate acts arising from a revolution in social relations. Can a strike be timed? It can, despite the fact—just imagine, Comrade Martynov—despite the fact that every strike is the result of a revolution in social relations. When can a strike be timed? When the organisation or group calling it has influence among the masses of the workers involved and is able correctly to gauge the moment when discontent and resentment among them are mounting. Do you see the point now, Comrade Martynov and Comrade “leader-ist” of Iskra, No. 62? If you do, then please take the trouble to compare an uprising with a people’s revolution.”

Lenin argues that a strike wave is just as much about changes in “social relations” as a revolution – yet a strike can be timed, if you’re organised enough you can call or create a strike and as Lenin reminded us: “Was not the Prussian Minister for Internal Affairs, Herr von Puttkammer, right when he coined the famous phrase: “In every strike there lurks the hydra of revolution”?” In other words a revolution is the strike on a much larger scale. It may be a product of complex “social relations” but in the end victory in a revolution, as in war, belongs to those who can control the chaos and channel it as the Bolsheviks did in 1917. Lenin was fierce in his attacks on those who took the view that socialism would evolve automatically or that the working class would become fit to lead a revolution automatically: 

“But this is a slander of Marxism; it means turning Marxism into the caricature held up by the Narodniks (Russian groups based on the intellectuals and peasants who believed in individual acts of terrorism) in their struggle against us. It means belittling the initiative and energy of class-conscious fighters, whereas Marxism, on the contrary, gives a gigantic impetus to the initiative and energy of the Social-Democrat, opens up for him the widest perspectives, and (if one may so express it) places at his disposal the mighty force of many millions of workers “spontaneously” rising for the struggle. The entire history of international Social-Democracy teems with plans advanced now by one, now by another political leader, some confirming the far-sightedness and the correct political and organisational views of their authors and others revealing their short-sightedness and their political errors.”

Lenin understood that certain conditions needed to be right for a revolution to take place. But the ultimate key to success lay not just in the right objective circumstances, like the depth of an economic crisis or the length of a war, but in the preparations that had been made by revolutionaries before the revolutionary crisis. The “spontaneous” moments of rising anger had to be focused, multiplied and, above all else, made conscious by winning the workers to socialism. Lenin made a prediction based on his understanding of the role that Russian workers would necessarily have to play in a coming revolution – from that he deduced the necessity of organisation and was furious with any who belittled that task. Lenin was banging against the cage of fatalistic Marxism.

Lenin’s point was to remind us of an often forgotten truth: if you have sufficient organisation you can call a strike, a general strike and even a revolution. It’s a matter of the degree and the extent of organisation you have and the ability of that organisation to exploit the circumstances it finds itself in while constantly undertaking preparatory work before any historic moment arises, playing a part in bringing about historic moments. The Bolsheviks grew from a mass strike wave that took hold of Russia in 1912 – but most workers who were arrested for leading strikes were already Bolsheviks. They benefited from a circumstance that they had played a role in bringing about. It’s in that sense the date of an uprising can be predicted – if you’ve organised it. 

Alexandre Kojève in his “Introduction to the Reading of Hegel” compares a daydreaming child on the banks of the Rubicon river to Caesar – which I think helps to illustrate the point made by Lenin:

“As an example of an “historic moment” let us take the celebrated anecdote of the “Rubicon”. What is there in the present properly so called? A man takes a walk at night on the bank of a small river. In other words, something extremely banal, nothing “historic”. For even if the man in question was Caesar, the event would in no sense be “historic” if Caesar were taking such a walk because of some sort of insomnia. The moment is historic because the man taking a nocturnal walk is thinking about a coup d’etat, the civil war, the conquest of Rome and worldwide dominion. And, let us take care to notice: because he has the project of doing it, for all this is still in the future… Suppose the person taking the walk is a Roman adolescent who is “dreaming” of worldwide dominion, or a “megalomaniac” in the clinical sense of the word who is constructing a “project” otherwise identical to Caesar’s. Immediately, the walk ceases to be a historic event. It is historic solely because it is Caesar who, while taking a walk, is thinking about his project… Why? Because Caesar has the possibility… of realising his plans. Now, his whole past, and only his past, is what assures him of this possibility. The past – that is, the entirety of the actions of  fighting and work effected at various present times in terms of the project – that is, in terms of the future. This past is what distinguishes the “project” from a simple “dream” or “utopia”. Consequently, there is a “historic moment” only when the present is ordered in terms of the future, on the condition that the future makes its way into the present not in an immediate manner but having been mediated by the past – that is, by an already accomplished action.”

Caesar and a dreaming teenager can stand at the same place at the same time and dream the same dream. One is a potential reality, the outcome of Caesar’s coup isn’t certain, but he was so certain of his previous work towards that goal that his prediction of victory was to be the culmination of many years’ work. The other standing at the river Rubicon is a teen with a head full of dreams, there is no possibility of accurate prediction because the child has no control over the course of history having done no preparatory work.

One of them steps across the river and nothing changes, there is no possibility of change because the boy has played no role in building the “moment” of the present by previously accomplished work in the past. Whereas Caesar has the real possibility of taking power – his foot crosses the river and the world changes. His present is a product of circumstances which include his own past labour towards an end. We can translate the above into socialist terms: Lenin arrived back in Russia in April 1917. One man arrives by train and changes the whole course of world history. He had predicted a Russian revolution many years before, but more than that, he prepared all day ,every day so that he could shape the outcome of a coming revolutionary crisis.

Lenin had the real possibility of making his prediction a reality because of years of hard work. The Bolshevik Party he had built over the course of 20 years was made up of some of the poorest workers in Russia and had a presence in thousands of workplaces. They’d been through the failed revolution of 1905 and absorbed that experience. The work Lenin had done in the past meant that his present provided a path to a future he could shape – the myriad of circumstances that formed the present moment included his past labour. The more the class struggle escalated the more the range of predicted outcomes narrowed – until the choice was the victory of the revolution or the victory of the counter revolution. It became that stark.

Either the movement ended in a second revolution or some Tsarist general would have hung every faction of the left from the end of the rope. Gramsci highlighted this when he said that “revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit, as being made up of a continuous series of violent tugs at the other forces of society – both active and passive, and they prepare the maximum of favourable conditions for the definitive tug (revolution).”

That doesn’t doesn’t mean an ultra left strategy of calling for revolution at any given moment – that in fact would not represent a real tug on the other forces in society because ultra leftism is usually a cover for not having purchase over significant forces – it’s verbal declarations of radicalism are cover for its isolation from the working class. If you are going to tug with real purchase then you have to be connected to social forces and capable of judging their mood, combativity and consciousness.

But neither is it true that we passively wait for a revolutionary period in order to propagandise for revolution  – the level of class consciousness, combativity and political organisation in the working class are contributing factors to the outbreak of an uprising. The “historic moment” isn’t simply a passive product of circumstances – the level of consciousness and organisation among workers is itself a factor in creating “circumstances”. No one planned the February 1917 revolution in Russia. But one month before it the Bolsheviks were out flyering on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Their leaflet of January 1917 called for mass strikes and the ousting of the Tsar. Lenin wrote that month:

“Just as in Russia in 1905, a popular uprising against the tsarist government began under the leadership of the proletariat with the aim of achieving a democratic republic, so, in Europe, the coming years, precisely because of this predatory war, will lead to popular uprisings under the leadership of the proletariat against the power of finance capital, against the big banks, against the capitalists; and these upheavals cannot end otherwise than with the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, with the victory of socialism.

We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution. But I can, I believe, express the confident hope that the youth which is working so splendidly in the socialist movement of Switzerland, and of the whole world, will be fortunate enough not only to fight, but also to win, in the coming proletarian revolution.”

A week before the February 1917 revolution broke out the Moscow Okhrana (the secret police) reported “the state of extreme agitation of the working mass and in social circles, the aggravation of the bread shortage in Moscow and the activities of revolutionary circles could create, under a new onslaught of strikes and demonstrations, a much more serious threat to official order and public security.” 

Without the Bolshevik Party the Russian Revolution could not have triumphed. One of their political opponents, the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov, acknowledged their key role:

‘(T)he Bolsheviks were working stubbornly and without let up,’ he recalled. ‘They were among the masses, at the factory-benches,every day without pause. Tens of speakers,big and little, were speaking in Petersburg,at the factories and in the barracks, every blessed day. For the masses they had become their own people, because they were always there, taking the lead in details as well as in the most important affairs of the whole factory or barracks…. The mass lived and breathed together with the Bolsheviks” The idea that revolution will be delivered spontaneously by circumstances that cannot be predicted is a comfort to small marginalised socialist sects because it insinuates the hard won task of political and organisational preparation can be put aside and they can just ride the wave of immediacy and the next social movement. 

Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs reminded socialists that the two positions -one that says we are subject to mechanical laws of history and another which says we can’t predict the spontaneous outbursts of mass action, that we are subordinate to immediacy – are actually saying the same thing: 

“However it would be a mechanistic application of Marxism, and therefore a totally unhistorical illusion, to conclude that a correct proletarian class-consciousness – adequate to the proletariat’s leading role – can gradually develop on its own, without both frictions and setbacks, as though the proletariat could gradually evolve ideologically into the revolutionary vocation appropriate to its class. The Impossibility of the economic evolution of capitalism into socialism was clearly proved by the Bernstein debates. Nevertheless, its ideological counterpart lived on un-contradicted in the minds of many honest European revolutionaries and was, moreover, not even recognized as either a problem or a danger. That is not to say that the best among them completely ignored its existence and importance, that they did not understand that the path to the ultimate victory of the proletariat is long and passes through many defeats, and that not only material setbacks but also ideological regressions are unavoidable on the way.”

Famous reformists like Edward Bernstein had suggested that changes in the economy of capitalism were evolving towards socialism. We just had to sit back and wait. Meanwhile, existing capitalism prepared for the wholesale slaughter of the World War. Those who opposed Bernstein in the German Social Democratic movement, like Rosa Luxemburg, laid emphasis on the role of spontaneous struggle from below. But this too was a reliance on an automatic evolution of the working class through struggle – only Lenin actually built a militant minority of class conscious workers who fought for greater purchase among the main body of the working class and were ready for the “decisive tug” when it came. This meant making strategic predictions in order to orient that minority and prepare it for battle. 

“The party’s role is to foresee the trajectory of the objective economic forces and to forecast what the appropriate actions of the working class must be in the situation so created.” Broad outlines had to be predicted in order to set goals and increase morale. Lenin predicted the outbreak of a Russian Revolution in his earliest writings. The reality of this coming revolution informed his approach to organisation. What couldn’t be predicted with absolute certainty was the exact moment of the revolutionary crisis. But to return to Connolly – the true prophets are those that create the future. The Leninists fought to escalate every social movement and bring it in behind the most conscious elements in the working class – the working class would then be “hegemonic” – meaning it would be the practical and intellectual leading force of the Russian Revolution. 

For years before the outbreak of the Russian Revolution Lenin had argued that it would be won by the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”.  By democratic dictatorship he meant that mass assemblies of workers and peasants would overthrow the Tsar and seize power. This provisional government, made up of mass assemblies, would hold down the resistance of the rich (hence the word “dictatorship” meaning in this case emergency powers taken by the majority of people against the rich minority) and convene a “Constituent Assembly” to write a new constitution for Russia.

Lenin did not trust the Russian capitalist class. He correctly predicted that the Russian capitalist class was weak and cowardly and was more likely to jump into the arms of Tsarism than challenge it. Therefore they were no allies of the coming revolution. This differed from the reformist Mensheviks who argued for alliance with the capitalist liberals because the coming revolution was a “bourgeois” revolution – its job was to remove the Tsar and transition Russia from feudalism to capitalism. But this meant fighting the revolution not for the victory of the working class but for the victory of the factory owners. Their chain of logic was – Russia is backward, the revolution is a revolt to progress from feudalism to capitalism, therefore we should ally with the capitalists. 

Lenin knew the capitalists would betray the revolution and on the basis of this prediction, made decades before, he had fought for the organisational independence of the working class and for an organisation of the most class conscious working class fighters. Lukacs remarked how Lenin’s thought combined serious analysis, strategic prediction and organisational preparation: 

“This alone makes the organizational independence of the fully conscious elements of the proletariat indispensable. It is this that demonstrates that the Leninist form of organization is inseparably connected with the ability to foresee the approaching revolution.” 

Lenin “adjusted course” as the reality of the 1917 revolution progressed. He entered the revolution with the idea of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” but returned to Russia in April 1917 calling for all power to go to the mass assemblies – a socialist demand. His previous strategic orientation allowed him to build an organisation embedded in the leading sections of the working class but the outbreak of the World War meant seeing the Russian Revolution as the trigger for a wider socialist revolution across Europe. Backward Russia could start the socialist revolution but the task of finishing it would have to lie with the more economically advanced nations like Germany.

This application of strategic decision making and it’s adjustment in the course of action is similar to the decision loops of modern military commands: “The OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is a four-step approach to decision-making that focuses on filtering available information, putting it in context and quickly making the most appropriate decision while also understanding that changes can be made as more data becomes available.” In order to look into the relationship between underlying trends, immediacy and agency more deeply we need to look at the dialectic of “necessity” and “contingency” as presented by Hegel in his great “Science of Logic”. 

It was Hegel’s generation that applied some of the greatest minds in history to the problem of human freedom. The growth of capitalism had encouraged some of the opposing ideas we’ve already seen infect socialists – on the one hand humans were seen as part of nature and subject to the laws of nature, a philosophy that makes real freedom nothing but an illusion. Natural laws and social laws were often conflated into a world where agency is a subjective fantasy. On the other hand the French Revolution showed that centuries old institutions could be torn down and replaced – encouraging ideas based on the viability of human agency. But how to connect the two worlds? A world of natural laws that is unfree and a world of human creativity that can act in the world and change it?

For Immanuel Kant the solution was to ignore the unfree world of the “thing in itself” and treat human ideas as free when they acted morally. This just parked the debate – it didn’t solve it. Those who followed fell back into subordination to nature or argued for freedom – but only in the realm of ideas.

Hegel said “everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.” If the world is our product then the laws that chain us are actually created by us – in other words the “Substance” of the world is created by a “Subject”. This was a huge leap forward because it put human activity back at the heart of philosophy. Human history was now a product of human action – although Hegel being a bourgeois professor held onto the idea of a “World Spirit” that alienated itself in the process of creating history and the final return from alienation was a process of “recognition”. For Hegel the ultimate Substance was thought.

Despite the weaknesses of Hegel’s solution to the dilemma facing his generation he pointed forward towards Marxism – the working class creates the capitalist system but we have to overcome this alienated product of our own action, not just by recognising our situation, but by fighting to overthrow the system and those who by virtue of their position in the system (capitalists and their supporters) will never break from alienation.

The circumstances we find ourselves in are our own collective creation – the present is always ordered by past labour and by understanding that we can fight to mobilise conscious elements of the working class to shape the future. Of course until revolution we revolutionary socialists are a minority and our labour can only enter into the great chain of events as a small component – the greater our purchase among workers the greater our contribution to the present and ability to construct the future – and therefore predict it. 

Hegel in the middle sections of his Logic explained the dialectic of contingency and necessity. This is a deeper dialectic than that of quantity and quality (referenced by Gramsci) because Hegel has moved beyond linear categories to tiered concepts. There is an underlying reality manifesting itself in outer appearances. By contingency philosophers mean “subject to chance” – if I describe something as contingent I mean it’s just a random event, it’s “accidental”. Under capitalism most histories are lists of “contingent” events – “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing”. A war broke out because a certain King fell out with his brother, an Empire fell because someone was in a bad mood on the day of a war and on and on.

But this view, one that makes history nothing but a jumble of accidental events, fails to find any underlying necessity in the events. Removing “teleology” (which means finding ultimate meaning – for example to say the world is made by God is teleological because you’re saying the world exists for a reason) is seen as the height of science. By necessary we mean: “needed to be done, achieved, or present; essential” or “determined, existing, or happening by natural laws or predestination, inevitable.” For Hegel we need to understand the relationship between both contingency and necessity and through this socialists can gain a deeper understanding of social processes.

Some examples will make these philosophical terms clearer. That I am human and have to die is necessary – it’s built into being human. If I get run over by a car on some particular day, this is accidental – it’s a contingent event. For Hegel “possibility” – that an event can possibly happen – is connected to contingency. A certain situation can give birth to a number of possible other situations – if there were not multiple outcomes possible then the situation would not be contingent, it would be necessary and there would be only one inevitable outcome. But in any given situation some possibilities are ruled out and others are more likely than others. This means that “real necessity” is connected to contingency because any outcome always depends on a number of chance or accidental factors. 

As author Charles Taylor writes: “What is really necessary is also, from another point of view contingent. B follows from A but A might not have happened.” But also the contingent is connected to necessity in that A’ could have followed A instead of B – this didn’t happen because of situation “F”. So if A is combined with F then the outcome is not situation B but instead situation A’. So real necessity is related to contingency – if certain contingent moments combine then an outcome becomes more necessary. So what Hegel is saying is that with a certain set of contingent circumstances a certain outcome becomes necessary.

Real necessity is connected to contingency. Some examples will make this clearer. Earlier I’d said death was an inner necessity and part and parcel of being human but that necessity can only ever enter into reality through a contingent event. Let’s say someone dies in a car crash – this is caused by a huge number of contingent factors from when they decided to leave the house to the speed they chose to drive to the weather conditions on that particular day. But the contingency of the event is still the only way an underlying necessity – that humans will die – is manifested in the world. 

Or to give a less generalised example, one from Marxist theory – the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall makes capitalism more crisis prone as the system ages, this is a necessary moment in the evolution of the system. They can’t escape this contradiction at the heart of their system. But that the low rate of profit led to investment bubbles, which led to real estate booms, which led to a banking crash in 2007 is a series of seemingly contingent events. But necessity is only made reality though it’s manifestation in contingency.

That an “accidental” or contingent event brought a necessary tendency to the fore doesn’t make that necessity any less fundamental – in fact historical necessity plays out through this surface contingency. There is no other way that underlying necessity is “activated” but though the interplay of the contingent and the contingent isn’t truly unrelated to the necessary because given a certain arrangement of contingent conditions an outcome becomes more necessary. 

Another example: The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28th, 1914, in Sarajevo was a contingent event that triggered a World War. But was the war an “accident” then, was it simply contingent? The pressure on profits in the key global capitalist powers meant they wanted to find outlets for capital – hence the huge acceleration of colonisation in the late 1800s. The boom bust cycle inherent in the capitalist economy led to the growth of giant corporations and the integration of finance and industrial capital. Britain solved recurrent crises through the brutal occupation and exploitation of colonies, Germany through the forced amalgamation of companies into massive corporations.

But recurring crises meant that Germany too had to begin exporting capital and required colonies – as a late comer to the game this inevitably meant conflict with the other world powers. The tensions accumulated, war became inevitable. All it needed was a contingent trigger to make the underlying necessity manifest in the world. 

Hegel differentiates between this “real necessity” that is dialectically related to contingency with “absolute necessity”. Absolute necessity is the entire system of contingent events, which when judged from the point of view of the totality is seen as resting on nothing but itself – the whole doesn’t rely on contingent events because it is the sum of all contingent events. Hegel doesn’t make the surface contingency of the world “unreal” and simply say it’s an illusion when you understand the underlying necessity, he maintains a place for contingency.

It’s true to say that the assassination of the Archduke did actually trigger a war – but it’s also true that that contingent event was the revelation and activation of underlying necessary tendencies. For Hegel the totality is both absolute necessity and also freedom. We tend to think of necessity as being in opposition to freedom. But for Hegel the totality is an agent – the world spirit creates the world. The necessity of that world spirit goes over into a contingent world but ultimately must recognise it’s own actions behind the interplay of contingent events and even behind the real necessity of the world that is tied up with contingency. 

This brings us back to the initial discussion on inevitable social laws as being the key to prediction – to which Gramsci counterposed a complex world where “quantity is becoming quality” and therefore accurate prediction of the concrete moments of struggle is ruled out: “In reality one can ‘foresee’ to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result ‘foreseen’.” You can predict to the extent that your actions are contributing to the future predicted. The sum of contingent events that make up the present include your own past actions. 

For Hegel you could not take a side in upcoming battles – he believed that the owl of wisdom only flew at night, that is after the event. He rejected being partisan in conflict. This was typical of thinkers from the bourgeois class (what we now call the capitalist class) because they believed the tide of history was going their way. They had all the wealth, education and were soon to possess political power. They could daydream of world spirits and applaud Napoleon as the world spirit made flesh while waiting for history to deliver for them. Fatalism and passivity is always bourgeois. But for the working class, as Marx said:

“History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” 

History is nothing but the activity of human beings. History is a product. We create the social world but we are chained in by forms of consciousness bound to the role we play in the economy (and our opposition to that role), the conflict with other classes and the level of political organisation in our own class. There is also a prevalence of ruling ideas and the extent to which they are accepted or resisted in an organised manner matters.

Therefore we can predict the outcome of events to the extent that there are conscious participants in those events who have played a role in creating those events. Lenin predicted there would be a Russian Revolution and spent all his time preparing organizationally for the outbreak of the revolt. He predicted the bourgeois liberals would betray the revolution and jump into bed with the Tsar. He predicted that the Mensheviks, as a petty bourgeois, or middle class, faction of the left would tail the liberals.

He couldn’t predict which contingent event would lead to the underlying necessity of the revolution becoming manifest in the world – in other words he didn’t know that the Russian Revolution would break out in February 1917. But what he did know was that when it did break out he had an organisation that could help to steer the course of events in a direction beneficial to the working class. He had prepared a lever by which he could turn the revolution - that lever was the Bolshevik Party.

The working class creates the capitalist system through our labour. It’s all in our hands. But the working class will never wake up to that fact all at once. Hence global insight and prediction is impossible – but that doesn’t mean all prediction is impossible. A revolution is necessary because the working class minority, who are aware of the nature of the system, can only awaken the majority by drawing them into action and debate. The choice, as I said at the beginning isnt between a God like ability to predict every single moment of the struggle or an opposing frenetic subordination to the immediate.

The debate between fatalistic Marxists (who say the economy is a series of laws that lead to predictable outcomes) and those trapped in spontaneous reaction to contingent events (who often argue that the working class can progress to consciousness, automatically, through struggle alone) is a false debate between two philosophies that remain trapped within the mindset of the capitalist system. We can predict the broad outlines of a coming period while preparing organisationally to best benefit from the contingent events that will make the underlying and necessary tendencies of the capitalist economy manifest.

The choice isn’t between surrender to fatalistic “laws” of the economy or a frenetic attempt to adapt to a constant flow of contingent events – but to develop medium and even long term strategies – while we build our muscle, sinew and nervous system in as many workplaces and communities as we can. Then we can accurately predict when those workers will protest because we are the leading voices in those workplaces and communities and we’ve built the protests. 

“Lenin was not alone in seeing this revolution approaching. However, he stood out not only by his courage, devotion and capacity for self-sacrifice from those who beat a cowardly retreat when the proletarian revolution they had themselves acclaimed in theory as imminent became an actuality. His theoretical clarity also distinguished him from the best, most dedicated and far-sighted of his contemporaries. For even they only interpreted the actuality of the revolution as Marx had been able to in his time – as the fundamental problem of the period as a whole. From an exclusively universal point of view, their interpretation was correct. They were, however, incapable of applying it and using it to establish firm guide-lines for all questions on the daily agenda, whether they were political or economic, involved theory or tactics, agitation or organization. Lenin alone took this step towards making Marxism, now a quite practical force, concrete. That is why he is in a world historical sense the only theoretician equal to Marx yet produced by the struggle for the liberation of the proletariat.” Lukacs.