Our party must be as open and democratic as the society we fight for, argues Dan Macintyre

On the left you will hear much about the need for a ‘revolutionary party’ or a ‘vanguard party’ to organise and strengthen the working class struggle for a socialist society. Indeed, there are many groups on today’s left who claim to be the revolutionary party. In reality, however, most of these ‘parties’ are not parties at all, but confessional sects in which members are expected to toe the ‘line’ in public or face expulsion or sidelining.

Moving beyond such a torrid state requires a revolution in the way in which the far left currently organises – democratic accountability and openness are crucial in this. After all, the means determine the ends, and if we are to usher in a society of openness, freedom and democracy, then we need a pristine approach to these questions.

In order to grasp what lies at the heart of the modern left’s method – usually passed off as Leninist ‘democratic centralism’ – it is important to look at what the left bases its practice on and what can be learnt from our history.

The Bolsheviks and 1917

Purportedly, the far left’s practice is one akin to that of the Bolshevik Party, which led the Russian Revolution in 1917. This has rightly gone down as a defining event in the history of socialism.

For the first time the world witnessed the working class take power in not just one isolated city or region, but within the belly of one of the powers seeking a share of the spoils of World War I.

The entire thrust of this revolution was directed not at constructing a forlorn utopia within Russian borders, but igniting the spark that would set Europe ablaze and bring the proletarian revolution into the heartlands of capitalism.

We failed in this endeavour. With the defeat of the varying European revolutions, the soviets, as councils of action for the organised workers and peasantry (‘soviet’ literally means ‘council’) were depleted through battlefield casualties, economic collapse and famine.

Without the democratic base that made revolution possible, the state apparatus began to increasingly malfunction, with the monster known as Stalinism coming to power against the revolution. Even before that, however, the retreat of the revolution forced the Bolsheviks to take measures which – although they could perhaps be justified at the time – should certainly not be theorised as the basis for the left’s political approach today. When Lenin banned party factions in 1920, this was not conceived as some sort of addition to his understanding of the way the party should organise, but as a temporary retreat. Unfortunately, most of the left now views the outlawing of factions as a matter of routine practice. The same also goes for the conversion of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (rule of the majority) into the rule of the party.

Abusing Lenin’s What is to be done?

Partly the way in which the far left – Stalinists in particular- have justified their lack of internal democracy has been to peddle a very crude understanding of Lenin’s 1903 pamphlet which addressed the key tasks of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and how Marxists should organise under the crushingly repressive conditions of tsarist illegality.

A crude analysis of this pamphlet – peddled by an unholy alliance of the Stalinists, former Socialist Workers Party leader Tony Cliff and bourgeois commentators – claims to establish a line of continuity connecting Lenin to Stalin. What is to be done?, it is said, shows that Lenin sought to unite a secretive group of activists, the “professional revolutionaries” around an authoritarian programme. These steeled cadre would be in all the committees and leadership bodies, whilst the thicko workers would merely obey their orders.

The critics of Lenin thus claim that the original goal of Bolshevism was to usurp the wider working class movement and dominate it through a top-heavy bureaucratic structure.

To back up this elitist schema, they draw on Lenin’s own admission that “The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness”; and that “By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of social democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.”ⁱ

These quotes have been massively taken out of context. Despite the fact that this assertion never appeared again in all of Lenin’s many writings, there is a sometimes official, sometimes informal, attitude that sees revolutionaries as somehow above the class that they will allegedly represent in the struggle against capitalism.

Lenin was a follower of German social democracy in the form of Karl Kautsky, who had been dubbed at various times as the “pope” of Marxism. At this time the revolutionary pope was engaged in a furious battle with those, led by Eduard Bernstein, who sought to water down revolutionary politics to the degree that – in the words of Bernstien – the “movement was everything, the goal nothing.”

Lenin, of course, paid great attention to events in Europe, and had taken note of Kautsky’s attempt to counter Bernstein and stress above all the need for a revolutionary party. In an article appearing in one of the german Social Democratic Party’s many papers, Die Neue Zeit, Kautsky himself had said that “the vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia” and that “socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously”.

What is meant is that socialist consciousness and revolutionary programme does not automatically result from the battle between employer and employee. It is, however, one-sided to assert that Marxist science comes from without – the British working class movement of the Chartists is as intrinsic to Marxism as German philosophy, English political economy and French utopian socialism – all different forms of the ideas of the ‘intelligentsia’.

Years later, the American Marxist Hal Draper put this argument into context by linking it to the struggle against Bernstein. In The myth of Lenin’s concept of the party Draper charts the line of development of Lenin’s thought, discovering the left’s mistake in holding the concept of the ‘professional revolutionary’ as the be-all-and-end-all of party organisation.

Noting that “It is a curious fact that no-one has ever found this alleged theory anywhere else in Lenin’s voluminous writings”, Draper argued instead that Lenin’s actual views on party organisation were based on “putting forward a view of party and movement that was the same as that of the best parties of the International, particularly the German party under the leadership of August Bebel – only allowing for the big difference that the Russian movement faced the special problems of illegality under an autocracy.”ⁱⁱ More recently, Lars Lih has argued that Lenin’s pamphlet has been widely misinterpreted as a result of crucial mistranslations – to such an extent that the reader often comes to the opposite conclusion of what Lenin means. For example, the Russian word crucially konspiratsiia is translated as ‘conspiracy': ie, a group of scheming intellectuals steeled in Hegel and Marx planning the poor workers’ fate. Actually, the term is meant to indicate that a serious political organisation must be able to survive in conditions of extreme polititcal repression and adversity – crucial for the Marxist movement in Russia, where the tsarist police regularly arrested revolutionaries.

Means and ends

Unfortunately, the many problems facing the left are not all down to theoretical error and disagreement. Perhaps the nub of the matter is that both these things are considered taboo, in the sense that disgreements, when they do occur inside a revolutionary party, are quashed or ignored in the name of ‘Leninism’ and ‘Lenin’s concept of the party’. The SWP is quite explicit: “The test of a cadre is … the lengths they are prepared to go to intimidate anyone who criticises the perspectives handed down to them” (International Socialists Group Democracy and the SWP 1994, p3). Some justify this semi-religious approach to politics by arguing that they are a mere ‘propaganda group’ and that if a genuine workers’ party did exist then they would, of course, argue for it to be open, democratic and perhaps even allow factions.

Yet the means determine the ends. As the history of Bolshevism shows, the party we need must be fought for in the here and now in order to get out of the impasse the left currently finds itself in. What this also means is not raising Lenin, Trotsky or anyone else to the level of infallibility, but looking at their works in the context in which they were written. Needless to say, we as Marxists must fight for an open, multi-tendency and openly revolutionary party of the working class as a whole in the here and now. Bureaucratic silencing of minority opinions and sect-like control cannot build mass parties of the working class like the Bolsheviks or German Social Democracy – to lead the fight for socialism as a conscious act of the majority of the population, not as the act of some enlightened, ‘professional’ minority.

References

i. What is to be done? Essential works of Lenin, New York, 1966, p74.

ii. Hal Draper The myth of Lenin’s concept of the party: http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1990/myth/myth.htm#n3.

Video:

Mike Macnair on Revolutionary Strategy: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8682919597603842499&hl=en

Further reading:

Lars T Lih: Lenin rediscovered

Jack Conrad: ‘Party, non-ideology and faction': http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/75/non-ideology_faction.html