Socialist Outlook : SO/02 - Winter 2003

Theory and History

Movements, Broad Parties and Revolutionary Parties

What kind of party do the anti-capitalist and working class movements need?
Dave Packer

Many in the new anti-capitalist and anti-war movements have expressed a suspicious attitude towards political parties and organisations. Here David Packer discusses the importance of political parties, both historically and today. He looks at the kind of party the working class and its allies need today and in the future. He asks if the Labour Party is a workers’ party, and compares different kinds of party, for example, Lenin’s conception of a revolutionary party and its relationship to the emergence today of broad anti-capitalist parties.

Politicians and political parties are widely distrusted today, particularly by younger people, the poor and excluded, and by oppressed groups. These attitudes, which may have existed for a long time, have recently become more noticeable, often turning into outright hostility. At the beginning of the European Social Forum, held in Florence (2002), for example, a widespread hostility to parties, which is deeper in some European countries than in Britain, was in part reflected by the continuation of the ban on the participation of political parties. This had been imposed at the World Social Forum held at Porto Alegre, in order to reassure the social movements, networks and trade unions, that the forums would not be dominated by left parties, in particular big reformist parties. Although the ban only remained a formal position at the Florence and Paris Social Forums, the role of political parties was a major debate in the run up to and during these events. [1]

At the same time, the huge recent mobilisations against the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the big demonstrations against capitalist globalisation, neo-liberalism, the destruction of the environment, and the numerical size of the Social Forums themselves, do not suggest that a depoliticisation has taken place among these sectors. On the contrary, we see a heightened radicalisation.

Leaving aside the influence of small anarchist and libertarian groups and the autonomist and syndicalist currents, the underlying reason for this apparent contradiction is not hard to find. In Britain, as elsewhere, we have experienced not just reformism without reforms, but twenty-five years of institutional counter-reform by the major parties, that has led to increasing disillusion and cynicism about organised politics. All the establishment parties, including the Labour Party, now pursue a policy of counter-reform, and like Tweedledum and Tweedledee (as in the US with the Democrats and Republicans), both the Labour and Conservative parties develop the appropriate news-speak to obscure their more or less common capitalist objectives of deregulation, privatisation and marketisation. The untrammelled drive for profit and personal wealth for the few, at all costs, has increased the influence of narrow individualism within our society and has undermined social values and solidarity. The incidence of corruption within the system has therefore dramatically increased, especially within establishment or bourgeois politics.

Underpinning this process is the new wave of capitalist globalisation, and its corollary, the neo-liberal offensive, both led by US imperialism, with Tony Blair in tow as second lieutenant. This offensive has had the effect of widening the gulf between the rich imperialist powers and the poor dominated countries, resulting in debt dependency, poverty, starvation and war. Within the imperialist centres themselves the same global offensive has resulted in the rolling back of many of the reforms and social gains achieved by working people since the Second World War, dramatically widening the gulf between the rich and the poor. Globalising neo-liberal capitalism not only means that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, but it has also created a dangerous, unstable world in which we have seen wars launched in order to maintain US economic and political hegemony.

All this has contributed to the disillusionment with traditional politics and parties among wider and wider sectors. It should not surprise us therefore that politicians today are increasingly seen as liars, cheats and thieves, and their parties and the party system merely the mechanisms for self-advancement and corruption.

However, the character of bourgeois politics as a dishonest subterfuge was built into the system from the beginning, ever since the growth, in the mid-nineteenth century, of mass political participation, modern parliamentary democracy and political parties. In fact ever since working class men and later women achieved the vote, capitalist politicians have combined limited concessions with lies. However, the contemporary phenomenon is historically specific - an aspect of late globalised capitalism.

It is not just the failures of bourgeois society and politics that is widely questioned today, but after the collapse of the USSR, we have also seen a so-called ‘crisis of socialism’, albeit in reality Stalinism, a murderous counterrevolution against socialism. All the left is affected by this crisis. Consequently, two of the characteristics of the new radicalisation, particularly among the young, can be summed up as, militant anti-capitalism, with a ‘libertarian’ or spontaneist emphasis, and a lack of any socialist perspective or serious alternative except of the most utopian kind (for example, small capitalism against the monopolies). Both positions reinforce suspicion towards political parties.

Disillusionment does not always lead to understanding and radical action, but instead can lead to cynicism and passivity; however, this is not the main feature of the situation today. The new movements have created both the possibility and the need for a new political alternative. Specific mobilisations and single-issue campaigns are essential but limited in their objectives and results. This magazine therefore, while building support for all progressive, autonomous campaigns and movements, and the trade union struggles of the working class, has also argued for the need to build a political alternative to capitalism as a whole. This must be a key task of socialists today. The launching of the Socialist Alliance and now RESPECT are positive developments in this direction. They are discussed elsewhere in this journal. But to make such a broad project as RESPECT a success, it is not only necessary to adopt an anti-capitalist programme of action, but socialists must also respond to the political problems indicated above. In particular, we need to explain why political parties are necessary and useful and what kind of party the anti capitalist and workers movements need, today and tomorrow, in order to resolve the deepening world offensive and endemic crisis of capitalism.

The origins of working class political representation

As long as society has been divided into classes there has been class struggle and movements of social resistance against oppression and exploitation. However these economic struggles, at first elementary or spontaneous, soon took on a political character. In capitalist society the elemental class struggle revolved around the attempt by workers to redistribute the social product of their labour in favour of themselves, the wage-earners, and against the employers, or owners of the means of production – that is, the struggle by workers to raise wages. Organising strikes to raise wages and improve working conditions required collective action. This implied a degree of class organisation and elementary class consciousness.

Before long the working class movement needed more than economic organisation (trade unions), with the emergence of demands other than immediate economic ones, for example, concerning social and legal problems, foreign policy and war. It needed a political expression, which could collectivise or synthesise its demands and fight for them in society at large, in particular within the bourgeois political arena. For that, including the fight for a workers government, a working class political party was needed. Marxists have argued, and history has shown, that the working class and its allies, or for that matter any movement with political objectives, needs a party to organise and lead it.

However, there was no linear or automatic trajectory towards political parties that truly represented the interests of the working class and its potential allies. The first independent political action of the workers in Europe developed out of the extreme left of the French Revolution, or those who solidarised with it in other countries. Babeuf’s Conspiracy of the Equals sprang from the left Jacobins - the extreme left of petit bourgeois radicalism. In England, the clandestine London Corresponding Society was set up by workers and artisans in support of the French Revolution. It was soon crushed by police repression. Subsequently, during the nineteenth century, various utopian socialist movements developed in France and Britain, some inspired by the left wing of the French Revolution. They were at first separate or marginal to the emerging workers’ movement. Writers such as Charles Fourier, Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, engaged in polemics against social inequality, exploitation and campaigned in various ways for an egalitarian society based on collective ownership of production. But they mainly relied on appealing to the good will of the men of property and in the case of Owen by attempting to provide a living example of his egalitarian socialist theories. The critique of capitalist society by the utopian socialists, although often radical, was primarily a moral one, and was often combined with religious ideas of a future promised land. Christian socialism evolved to become an important component in modern reformist social democratic, or labour parties.

The writings of Marx and Engels, particularly the early German Ideology (1845), and the Communist Manifesto (1847), made a decisive step forward. They placed ideas such as class struggle and exploitation on a material, scientific basis. In particular their causes were located primarily within the capitalist economic and social structure - a result of the interaction between the social relations of production and the level of development of the productive forces.

Historically, modern working class political parties (so-called), in different ways in different countries, were born out of a fusion between the elementary class struggle and organisations of the working class and various socialist traditions, including Marxism, which was the highest expression of working class political consciousness. Marx and Engels and the revolutionary theory they developed played a leading role in building the First (1864) and Second Internationals (1889). In all subsequent Internationals and the parties affiliated to them, Marxists continued to play a leading role. A partial exception to this rule was the formation of the British Labour Party, which affiliated to the Second International, but was primarily (although not entirely) the creation of the trade union movement – more correctly, the trade union bureaucracy. It was a relatively late formation and unlike the majority of the parties of the Second International, did not adopt Marxism, rather it was a partial break from Liberalism. It practised reformist trade union politics, or ‘economism’, while Christian utopian socialism became its credo. Lenin was later to characterise the Labour Party as a bourgeois-workers’ party, a term that reflected its contradictory nature as a capitalist party, with a capitalist programme, but one that based itself on the working class. Despite the hijacking of the Labour Party by the neo-liberal Blair and his attempts to heal the rift with liberalism by transforming the Party into something like the American Democrats, it remains today a bourgeois workers’ party.

Between the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the First World War of 1914-18, Europe and America experienced a long period of growth of the productive forces, which obscured the more fundamental contradictions of the capitalist system. However, during this period trade unions in Europe were built into truly mass organisations, and the parties of the Second International developed mass memberships. On the negative side, this forty-year period of capitalist growth engendered and reinforced reformist politics, which by the time of the Great War meant that the majority only formally subscribed to Marxism and revolutionary socialism. In reality, most of the parties operated within a bourgeois democratic, reformist, non-revolutionary perspective, as the British Labour Party had always done. Even Karl Kautsky the main Marxist theoretician of the Second International, and a leader of the German SPD, ended up, like the Labour Party, by supporting his own national bourgeoisie in its war drive.

But there were many other factions within the parties of the Second International who remained committed to internationalism, the emancipation of the working class and to socialist revolution, and opposed their own ruling classes entering the First World War. For example, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in the German SPD, Lenin and the Bolshevik faction in the Russian RSDLP, James Connolly in Ireland and John Maclean in Scotland, all militantly opposed the imperialist war.

Lenin’s Theory of Party Organisation

It was in the context of the struggle against opportunism and reformism within the Second International and especially within the Russian party, that Lenin developed his ideas on the revolutionary party, which he described as democratic centralism explained in his book, One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward (1904).

Lenin had realised that without a truly revolutionary party at its head the working class could not seize power and hold on to it: that such a party must be a mass party, with influence and respect among the mass of workers, and capable of decisive action during a revolutionary crisis. He also realised that such a party could not be built spontaneously, overnight as it were, but would take years of conscious preparation and construction. However, by the turn of the Twentieth century, the experience of the parties of the Second International had shown that building a broad based mass party during a period of relative stability, during a non-revolutionary period, inevitably led to political accommodation to bourgeois politics and reformist degeneration.

Lenin’s theory of the party, particularly in 1904, laid stress on not just programme and democracy, but centralism - in other words, the party’s capacity for unity in action at important moments in politics. Democratic centralism also emphasises the working class character of the party, but the model party member, as Trotsky was later to explain, was not so much a trade union branch secretary, but a ‘tribune of the people’. Such a ‘tribune’ was a politically educated and experienced and self-active militant capable of politically addressing many class issues and leading many actions. The party should be a ‘cadre’ organisation, in other words an organisation of trained Marxist leaders, politically stable and capable of rapid expansion, without succumbing to reformism, during periods of external pressure and political crisis.

A revolutionary party built in non-revolutionary periods, was of necessity a small party, and would be comprised of the most dedicated and politicised militants. This was a far cry from the loose, open door model of the parties of the Second International, and it was very controversial.

Lenin’s radical view of the party was rejected by many on the left of the International, such as Rosa Luxemburg in her polemic; ‘Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’ (1904). Lenin’s theory of the party was also at first rejected by Leon Trotsky, who only belatedly realised its importance as late as 1917. He then saw that Lenin’s Bolshevik Party was the crucial and indispensable instrument of revolution. Without the Bolsheviks there would have been no enduring conquest of power by the Russian working class in 1917 - no Russian Revolution, and from then on Trotsky became a consistent advocate of democratic centralist parties.

However, Trotsky was the first to understand how and why the Bolshevik Party underwent a transformation and degeneration after the revolution. But he never believed, as the anarchists and others were to argue, that the cause of this degeneration lay mainly with the kind of party organisation that Lenin had developed. Rather, he explained that the deformation of the new Soviet State had quite different material causes. Its degeneration was due partly to the terrible and debilitating impact of the civil wars and the imperialist wars of intervention, which resulted in putting Russia on a war footing and subjecting everything to military requirements (War Communism, 1918-21). The deaths of large numbers of workers, including Bolsheviks, further undermined Soviet democracy. Decisive factors in the medium to long term, however, were the backwardness of Russia and the continued isolation of the revolution, and added to this the premature death of Lenin and the rise to prominence of Joseph Stalin as the political representative of the emerging state bureaucracy.

Despite the struggle against Stalin and the bureaucracy, led by Trotsky and the Left Opposition, the bureaucratic take-over of the Soviet State and the Bolshevik Party itself was victorious. Trotsky wrote that, ‘The degeneration of the party became both cause and consequence of the bureaucratization of the state. . .’

In the same passage, he also presented a clear picture of the democracy and centralism within the Bolshevik party before its degeneration,

The inner regime of the Bolshevik party was characterized by the method of democratic centralism. The combination of these two concepts, democracy and centralism, is not in the least contradictory. The party took watchful care not only that its boundaries should always be strictly defined, but also that all those who entered these boundaries should enjoy the actual right to define the direction of the party policy. Freedom of criticism and intellectual struggle was an irrevocable content of the party democracy. The present doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of the epoch of decline.

In reality the history of Bolshevism is a history of the struggle of factions. And, indeed, how could a genuinely revolutionary organization, setting itself the task of overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and develop without intellectual conflicts, without groupings and temporary factional formations. . . . The Central Committee relied upon this seething democratic support. From this it derived the audacity to make decisions and give orders.

The regime of the Bolshevik party, especially before it came to power, stood thus in complete contradiction to the regime of the present sections of the Communist International, with their ‘leaders’ appointed from above, making complete changes of policy at a word of command, with their uncontrolled apparatus, haughty in its attitude to the rank and file, servile in its attitude to the Kremlin. [2]

How different was this Bolshevik party to so many would-be revolutionary organisations today, who reject such freedom of discussion and internal struggle, because it wastes party resources, undermines party functioning, and is said to reduce it to a talking shop.

Movements, Broad Parties and Revolutionary Parties Today

So what is the relationship between movements/campaigns, broad anti-capitalist parties and revolutionary parties in the present context? Clearly, autonomous, self-organised movements and struggles are an essential component of any genuine radicalisation. Parties who claim to base themselves on the struggle of the workers and the oppressed and who offer a programme of socialist change, must be able to work with each other and with the trade unions and social movements in a united front fashion. This means organising united action while maintaining political/organisational independence.

At the Florence Social Forum in 2002 many of the leading spokespersons recognised that reformism, and bureaucratic compromises with the capitalist state and its political system in the pursuit of governmental tenure, had led to betrayal of the working class and the social movements and single-issue campaigns. However, many also recognised the necessary role of political parties in fighting for governmental power, which social movements by their very nature cannot aspire to.

But what kind of party is needed? The new left wing parties like Rifondazione Communista (RC) in Italy or the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), are not social democratic parties, or communist parties, derived from the degenerated Third International, but nor are they revolutionary parties. It would be premature and unhelpful to tag them as ‘centrist parties’ – at their inception they represented a positive shift to the left. [3] They are pluralist anti-capitalist parties that could develop towards the left or the right.

Clearly the formation of broad parties, including the formation of RESPECT in England, first as an electoral coalition, which in the future has the potential to become a new left party, represents an important step forward. They correspond, at this juncture, to the developing consciousness of a politicising vanguard across Europe that sees the need for answers at the level of politics and the state. It is only through the experience of organised resistance and debate, and a struggle for governmental power, that active militants will come to understand the true nature of capitalism and its institutions nationally and internationally, and draw the conclusion that these broad parties must continue their development to the left. In order to correspond to the needs of the mass movements, they must be transformed over time and adopt the appropriate programme and form of organisation that can challenge the capitalist system as a whole and its repressive state apparatus. In other words they must become revolutionary parties. It is therefore necessary for revolutionary socialists to organise themselves within such a broad party for these ends, as loyal components, until they can be transformed into revolutionary parties.

But this does not resolve all the issues. First, it is necessary to prove to the doubtful, that the new left-wing, or anti capitalist parties are thoroughly democratic, multi-tendency, transparent, and will fight in a principled way for the immediate demands of the working class and the social movements.

Dave Packer is a longstanding member of the Trotskyist movement in Britain. Packer has held a number of leadership roles in the International Socialist Group and the Fourth International. Dave is a former editor of Socialist Outlook.

NOTES

[1] For a more detailed discussion of the Florence Social Forum and some implications, see Pete Cooper, ‘The difference between a party and a movement,’ in Socialist Resistance, Winter 2002.

[2] Trotsky ‘The Degeneration of the Bolshevik Party’ from The Revolution Betrayed, (1937). Translated by Max Eastman.

[3] Centrism is a term used by Leon Trotsky and other to describe political currents, either inside or outside the traditional mass parties, which vacillated in the centre of the road between reform and revolution. During the Spanish Civil War, Trotsky denounced the left wing anti-Stalinist POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) as ‘helpless centrists’ who ‘grumbled, groaned, wavered, manoeuvred, but in the end adapted themselves to the Stalinists.’ They also tail-ended the Anarchist CNT, and joined the Popular Front government in September, 1936. History suggests that left centrist parties can be a stage in the development of class consciousness and can be won over to revolutionary politics, while a rightward moving centrist current will act as a barrier to building a revolutionary party.

back to top