<< But anyway, I read marxist social science and I realized a couple of years
ago that much of it lacked an adequate theory of social change because it
inadequately conceives of the relationship between the individual and society.
>>
Depending on what you mean by "much of it," I respectfully disagree, though your concern does accurately characterize many Marxist parties that flourished in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Neither Karl Marx nor his effective followers suffered this affliction. Perhaps the following will help address your request for "more detail."
Among the key insights of Capital, volume one, is commodity fetishism, showing how relations among people are disguised as relations between people and things. Reification of commodity production as the principal human social activity then defines the relation of the individual to "society" -- that is, both to his or her own class, and to his or her class enemies. Marx's theory of change rests ultimately on the instability and turmoil of those relations, but elaborated more elegantly than a quick summary can do justice.
During their lifetimes, Marx and Engels participated in and supported an astonishing range of political, economic, and military vehicles in advancing the causes of emancipation, national liberation, and proletarian revolution, but only one, the Commune, actually succeeded (for a historical moment) in exercising proletarian class rule, their exemplary "dictatorship of the proletariat."
Lenin and Gramsci built onto Marx's essential insight the refinement of dual power. Marx's proletariat -- united, disciplined, and organized by the very process of capitalist production -- needs not only a way to comprehend its condition of exploitation and servitude, which is easily accomplished (and which nearly every Marxist sect regards as its key task, when in fact this aspect of class consciousness requires virtually no radical agitation to flourish).
The proletariat, to become self-conscious and revolutionary, needs also a way to see itself exercising class power, in order to overcome its internalized bourgeois world view (Gramsci's "hegemony," which in the recent LBO debate expressly embraces white supremacy, male supremacy, and the rest of bourgeois political and cultural habits that infect the proletariat). That is why, for both Lenin and Gramsci, the exercise of class power through Soviets became both the vehicle for radicalizing the working class -- transforming it in the process into a class capable of ruling -- and eventually for overthrowing capitalism. This alone is what makes it possible to sweep away the "muck of ages" that weighs on us all.
Naturally, a wooden and formalistic application of this theory is as inadequate and potentially suffocating as simplistic class-struggle agitation. Soviets were a historically specific vehicle for exercising dual power in Russia, Italy, and a few other places (such as Seattle). Later revolutions, particularly those that arose from sustained armed struggle and guerrilla warfare, created very different but equally effective vehicles of dual power. And those who toil in the greatest capitalist colossus of all must create examples of our own, suitable to challenging and defeating both the bourgeois infection within our class, and in overcoming that, smashing the institutions of bourgeois power.
Not every worthy struggle holds the potential for dual power, though organizations such as DRUM and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers found creative ways to keep this potential at hand during the sixties, which merit our esteem and respect. In the meantime, solidarity actions, whether of an emergency and defensive nature (Mumia, anti-intervention) or in support of rising revolutionary movements in other places, are often more effective means of political transformation than are those of traditional class conflict. For that reason alone, those who label these interventions as "identity politics" or as somehow divisive are both wrong-headed and reactionary.
Ken Lawrence