21.11.2024
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What sort of party?
Setting up yet another loose network, a broad left alliance or a confessional sect would obviously be pointless. Mike Macnair responds to an invitation to discuss what is the main question before us today
On October 21, Prometheus, the online magazine, issued “a call for articles written by people active across the left in Britain on the question: What do you mean by the party? What are the purposes of such an organisation? What are the functions it needs to cover? And how might it come about?” They say that “By canvassing written contributions from already active collectives and other interested figures, we hope to begin a process where people across the left put forward their understandings and the general level of understanding can be raised.” The deadline for submissions was November 8.1
This deadline was too short for CPGB to be able to offer a collective submission, or even an agreed submission of its Provisional Central Committee. So this is merely an individual contribution.
Starting point
The starting point has to be what the point of a party is. After all, the Labour Party claims by its name and by its trade union affiliates to be the party of the working class as such, and by its rules to be a “democratic socialist party”. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, the Socialist Workers Party, the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, the Socialist Party in England and Wales and the Revolutionary Communist Party (cast in order of appearance) and various others, all claim to be parties. Though they play limited useful roles for the workers’ movement, setting up another competing organisation of the same type would be obviously pointless.
Then, we need to look to an important point made by Karl Marx about the need for working class political action:
The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organisation of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point.
On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc is a purely economic movement. On the other hand, the movement to force an eight-hour day, etc law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement: that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation.
Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power - ie, the political power of the ruling classes - it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes. Otherwise it will remain a plaything in their hands, as the September revolution in France showed, and as is also proved up to a certain point by the game Messrs Gladstone and co are bringing off in England even up to the present time.2
Subsequent history confirms Marx’s assessment here. The Labour Party has been captured by the capitalist state as an instrument of political control of the workers’ movement. As a result, it remains true to the present day that the working class remains, in politics, a plaything in the capitalists’ hands.
This is because, in the absence of a workers’ independent political voice, capital can manoeuvre between backing the ‘party of order’ (Louis Bonaparte in 19th century France; the Tory Brexiteers, or the Trump movement, today) as a demagogic opposition to ‘elite’ liberalism, and backing the ‘party of liberty’ (Marx refers to the ‘centrist’ republicanism of Adolphe Thiers in 1871 France, and to Gladstonian liberalism in 19th century England; today the US Democrats; the Labour Party) as an alternative to the petty tyrannies and obvious corruption of the governments of the ‘party of order’.
The party and its press also represents a means by which the workers’ movement can define an independent political line in international affairs. These are, as much as domestic matters, a field in which the capitalist parties make working class political support a plaything - and in some respects more so. The point was already made in the 1864 Inaugural Address of the First International:
If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfil that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people’s blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.3
The point of a party is, then, to engage in working class political action. And this does not mean merely arguing for the complete overthrow of the capitalist regime and for communism as an alternative (though this is part of our task). Nor does it mean the common far-left idea of the party as coordinating ‘struggles’, or the less common ideas of the party as the ‘memory’ of the class movement or as a vehicle for ‘theory’.
It means the struggle for an independent political voice for the working class, which can offer choices alternative to those offered by the ‘party of order’ to represent the working class against ‘woke elites’, and by the ‘party of liberty’ to represent the working class against ‘populism’ or ‘fascism’.
These choices are concerned with the constitutional order: that is, the political regime through which capital rules. Conversely, they are concerned with extreme political democracy as the regime through which the working class can rule - as an alternative to both the present constitutional-monarchist state order and the managerialist regime which capital has promoted in the workers’ movement.
Secondly, the choices are concerned with general legislation in the interests of the workers’ movement - like repealing anti-union laws and other regulatory schemes for state control of cooperatives, mutuals, political parties and so on; like maximum working hours; like workplace health and safety laws; like pollution rules; like minimum building standards - and so on.
They are not primarily concerned with the (illusory) idea that ‘tax the rich’ budgets can fundamentally alter the class order, or that Keynesian stimulus operations can solve the problems of the economy. The US ‘New Deal’ was a mere antechamber to World War II, and it was the war, not the stimulus package, which overcame the 1930s depression. A ‘green new deal’ on the basis of the existing state order would be similarly mere cover for nationalism and the drive towards war. This is, in fact, already apparent in Biden’s policy, marketed as green, but marching alongside protectionism and military aggression.
Thirdly, the choices are concerned with international affairs. A party which is to defend the independent interests of the working class needs to defend those interests as universal interests - but also to be as disloyal to the states we inhabit as the parliamentary oppositionists who negotiated with the Scots to keep the Scottish invasion in northern England in 1640, or who invited a full-scale Dutch invasion in 1688.
Programme
Political voice implies three elements. The first is a political programme which can be the basis of a party. The programme poses the idea that the working class could take over and get beyond capitalism, and that it could in the meantime win legislative reforms in its own interests (like the Ten Hour Day Act, to which Marx referred, or the legalisation of trade unions).
The second element is publishing an alternative to the capitalists’ advertising-funded media, and especially the national press, which drowns out oppositional speech by the amplification of the proprietor’s and his editor’s voices and thereby helps enforce the choice between the ‘party of order’ and the ‘party of liberty’. This point is important.
It is quite widely believed that various forms of pure online publication can do the job of a party press. But in reality, this sort of publication, because it is not fully regular, cannot be agenda-setting in the way that the Murdoch and Harmsworth press are agenda-setting on the right. On the left, the Morning Star, in spite of the numerical weakness of the CPB, continues to be agenda-setting (as is very visible in the history of Corbynism, but also in the character of the SWP’s ‘united front’ operations).
The absence of advertising subsidy requires party backing; the Morning Star partly substitutes backing from China, etc in the form of public library subscriptions; the weeklies (Socialist Worker, The Socialist, Communist, Solidarity, Weekly Worker …) can only operate with considerable efforts to raise party funds.
The third element is as far as possible using the opportunity of electoral campaigning - and if possible actually winning seats in parliament, local government, and so on - to promote these policies.
Suppose we achieved a party, rather than a long list of small competing groups. A party is not a substitute for trade unions, mutuals, tenants’ organising, and so on. It promotes such activities and organisations. It defends them against attacks from legislation, the judiciary, the police, far-right organisations, the advertising-funded media, and so on. But it is not the job of the party to give tactical direction to trade unions or to individual strikes, etc.
The CPGB works on the basis of a Draft programme. The text is proposed as a draft for any unified party - ‘draft’ means that it could be changed, including radically, in a unification process. But acceptance of the Draft programme as the basis for common action is also the basis of CPGB membership, and shapes the political line expressed in the Weekly Worker.
We think that it is necessary for a party programme to have a maximum-minimum character. The maximum element expresses the long-term goal of communism, and thereby why there are grounds for hope in a better future, and the possibility of the working class, by taking over, opening the way to this future. We need to say more about it than socialists needed to say before the disastrous experience of the USSR and its satellites and imitators.
The minimum element is about the overthrow of the capitalist state order, the constitution, and creation of the immediate alternative - the radically democratic republic - and also includes a series of demands, consistent with the continued existence of money and markets, which would strengthen the position of the working class both under capitalism, and in the mixed economy under workers’ rule. We can fight for individual demands of the minimum programme under capitalist rule, but it is only its implementation as a whole - especially, the democratic-republican demands - that would amount to the overthrow of the state regime.
The converse of this is that we insist that (if we had MPs) we would remain in opposition until it is possible to form a government committed to the implementation of the minimum programme as a whole. That is why it is a minimum programme. It is this commitment that can help the left avoid the trap to which Rifondazione Comunista in Italy and Syriza in Greece succumbed in different ways.
Not having a programme at all inevitably means that the basis of membership is loyalty to some individual (alive or, like big Lenin or little Tony Cliff, dead). Serious differences cannot be contained. Of course, an organisation based on a programme may fail to contain differences. But it is possible to do so.
Centralism
The party we need to create needs to be democratic-centralist in its organisational methods. Lars T Lih, Ben Lewis and I have explored in print the origins of ‘democratic centralism’, which actually are strongly connected to the organisational institutions and practice of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) between 1890, when it escaped illegality, and 1914. It is not about the “party of professional revolutionaries”, nor about Russian specificities.4 Indeed, when the Russian Communist Party turned to radical militarist centralism in 1919, the opposition to this turn called themselves … Democratic Centralists.5
Democratic-centralism is not this militarist centralism created in 1919-21 by the imperatives of civil war and reconstruction in a peasant-majority country. It is not something only needed for the policy of an ‘insurrectionary general strike’ or extra-parliamentary mass action to overthrow the state. It is, on the contrary, a set of general decision-making principles.
The principles involved are, in the first place, that the party should be an organisation which individuals can join and to which they pay dues (like a trade union). Invented by the German ‘Lassallean’ General Association of German Workers (ADAV), this principle was adopted by the parties of the Second International generally and continued in the Third. The people entitled to vote are those willing to pay dues and actively participate in the decision-making processes. The ‘silent majority’ get no vote.
The alternative - a loose federation of political clubs and groups - was the organisational form of political parties before the 1860s and remains that of the British Conservative and US Republican and Democrat parties. It is beautifully adapted to the needs of capitalist management of politics. ‘Networks’ and ‘horizontalism’ are merely rebrandings of the same capitalist principle.
Second, the party needs regular policy-making conferences/congresses and organisations both central (ie, central or national committee) and local (or sectoral, as in party trade union fractions, women’s or youth organisations, and so on).
Both the centre and the localities and sectors need to have the right to raise their own finance, to elect their own leadership (the central leadership being elected by the regular conference or congress) and to publish.
It is ‘centralist’ against claims to forms of federalism, and in particular against elected representatives having the right to put their supposed mandate from their constituents above the common policy of the party: in practice this ‘mandate’ usually means the defence of capitalist interests. The same is true of ‘intersectionalist’ forms of federalism, in which identity-caucuses are given veto rights.
Federalism in the state order is an instrument of the propertied classes: so cantonalism in Switzerland, so states’ rights in the USA, so the confederal structure of the European Union, etc. Federalism in workers’ party organisation copies the British Labour Party - and its subordination to the capitalist state.
It was ‘democratic’ against the ‘labour monarchism’ of the 1863‑75 Lasssallean General German Workers Association, which involved the ‘centralisation’ of the party in the ‘single will’ of its elected president, Ferdinand Lassalle, and his successor, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer. The modern far left has reinvented this ‘labour monarchist’ form through the personality cults of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, leading in turn to personality cults of a whole range of far-left leaders. But the same underlying capitalist (or Bonapartist) principle of one-man management is reflected in the direct election of party, union, and so on, individual officials.
It is ‘democratic’ also in operating open political debate. The point of the party is political voice: to make it possible for the working class as a class to make political choices, which are precluded by capitalist control of political representation and media. Hence, in the first place, if the party denies knowledge of its internal debates to the larger working class, it is precisely denying the class the right to choose between the options.
Open political debate also implies a commitment against the political method of constructing private diplomatic agreements. Just as much as secrecy of internal debates, these function to deny the broader workers’ movement the right to make real choices.
Secondly, capitalist control of political choices works through direct bribery of elected representatives, campaign funding, the advertising-funded media, and so on. Within the organised workers’ movement, managerialist controls on communication lead to capitalist control. This should be apparent in the use of ‘anti-racist’ speech controls in the anti-Semitism smear campaign.
The underlying question is: who defines what is ‘unacceptable’ speech? It is, inevitably, the full-time officials and elected representatives. These, because of the nature of their jobs, naturally come to share the managerial culture of the bureaucracies of the civil service, local government and big corporations. The result is back to what is acceptable to capital, through its political, legal and media representatives.
General
I have written here about the general nature of the party we need: not about substantive policies in detail. To write about substantive policies in detail would be to repeat what we in the CPGB have already written in our Draft programme: we collectively recommend this programme to comrades for discussion and, so far as may be necessary, criticism.6
To write about substantive policies in detail would also risk collapsing into the fundamental error of the ‘New Left’: that is, the idea of the party as an intersectional alliance of oppressed groups and ‘social movements’. The price of this method is before our eyes. The left marginalises the question of class, but by doing so hands the dissatisfaction of the working class to the right as an instrument: ‘Vote Clinton, get Trump’ eight years ago, ‘Vote Harris, get Trump’ this year.
We need to disassociate ourselves from this method. Without breaking from the far left’s present false conceptions of what a party is for and what it is, there is no chance of a unity which would be more than ephemeral.
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Marx to Friedrich Bolte in New York (November 23 1871) postscript: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_11_23.htm.↩︎
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Lars T Lih: johnriddell.com/2013/04/14/fortunes-of-a-formula-from-democratic-centralism-to-democratic-centralism (April 2013); ‘Democratic centralism: further fortunes of a formula’ Weekly Worker July 25 2013 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/972/democratic-centralism-further-fortunes-of-a-formul), Ben Lewis (translator): ‘Origins of democratic centralism’ Weekly Worker November 5 2015 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1081/origins-of-democratic-centralism); Ben Lewis (author) ‘Sources, streams and confidence’ Weekly Worker August 25 2016 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1119/sources-streams-and-confluence); Macnair: ‘Reclaiming democratic centralism’ Weekly Worker May 23 2019 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1252/reclaiming-democratic-centralism); ‘Negations of democratic centralism’ Weekly Worker May 30 2019 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1253/negations-of-democratic-centralism); and various other articles.↩︎
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_Democratic_Centralism; Michel Olivier: libcom.org/article/democratic-centralism-workers-opposition-clandestine-opposition-movements-crisis-party.↩︎