09.01.2025

What sort of partyism?

Archie Woodrow is quite good on identifying the left’s problems, less good when it comes to giving answers. Mike Macnair continues his series of articles on the ‘party discussion’

In the December 5 issue I looked at the ideas of Socialist Alternative, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (more accurately called Atlanticists for Workers’ Loyalism) and Dave Kellaway for Anticapitalist Resistance. In the December 12 issue I explored the November 25 intervention of a group of RS21 members (Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st century); and the December 4 contribution on the Prometheus website of Joe Todd. In this third article I will address Archie Woodrow’s November 22 contribution.¹ I give this a full article because comrade Woodrow’s arguments have more substance to them.

The pattern in the contributions discussed in my December 5 and December 12 articles was largely that comrades saw the ‘party discussion’ as arising from the immediate political conjuncture - the 2024 general election result - and a ground to pursue their existing political ideas: SocAlt’s version of a new Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, just without the Socialist Party of England and Wales leadership; the AWL’s repeat version of the broad frontism broad enough to include Atlanticists, which they have been arguing since their Atlanticist turn in the 1980s; ACR’s latest iteration of broad-frontism, only this time with speech controls to prevent far left interventions; the RS21 comrades’ case for a version of Tony Cliff’s (episodic) anti-parliamentarism; and Joe Todd’s new version of Momentum.

In contrast, comrade Woodrow’s contribution is built on critique of the general situation of the far left. This is an important strength. The contribution is weaker on positive proposals that could overcome the problems he finds in the far left. The problem is that an incomplete break with ‘New Left’ conceptions leads to indeterminate proposals on what to do.

Types

Comrade Woodrow’s contribution to Prometheus on the party question is headlined ‘There are parties and then there are parties’. This headline reflects the first part of his article, which argues that there are three kinds of parties, the first being the most general or abstract sense of ‘party’ as any form of collective political action, the second an electoral party, and the third a party in the ‘Leninist’ conception. His second part argues for the organisation of ‘anti-capitalists’ as such, independent of, or separate from, the social-democrats. His third part addresses the disunity of the existing far left and its negative effects, and attributes it to commitment to the early Comintern’s party model. His fourth offers a series of fairly tentative proposals for overcoming the problem.

It will, I think, be most useful to start with the parts of the argument that I think are stronger before coming back to the parts I think are weaker. I will begin with the most concrete - the weaknesses of the current far left - before moving to the more abstract argument for the need for ‘anti-capitalist’ organisation independent of the social-democrats, then to the most abstract element, the different kinds of parties, before returning to comrade Woodrow’s proposals for action.

Comrade Woodrow begins by listing fourteen left groups (an incomplete list) and commenting that “This is obviously too many groups. Clearly this doesn’t work.” He proceeds to argue correctly that the groups do “punch well above their weight” because of membership commitment to activism and to raising resources; but also that fragmentation makes it harder to understand the world, and, in addition, makes it hard for the wider public to take the far left seriously. I agree (perhaps unsurprisingly, because comrade Woodrow cites me on these points). I would add two points.

First, the question of unity is more significant for organisations that seek to connect to the workers’ movement than - for example - religious groups. This is precisely because the working class as a class needs collective action, and hence needs unity in action in spite of diversity of opinions.² Hence the point that splits have to be not merely justifiable in principle, but also comprehensible to the broad workers’ vanguard - the large layer of activists of trade unions, coops, workers’ parties and so on.

Second, because the groups of the left seek to “face outwards” rather than “talking among ourselves”, they are unwilling to function as minorities in the outward-facing initiatives of other groups. Consequently they split broad fronts and set up counter-initiatives that intentionally undermine the other groups’ initiatives. This practice has been visible repeatedly in the politics of the British and French far left (I haven’t done the research to check other countries’ experience).³

Comrade Woodrow again cites me for the explanation of the problem: that is, that comrades cling to the conception of the party from the early Comintern. This is true but incomplete. The major argument in favour of the groups’ organisational form is their present-day relative success, which comrade Woodrow recognises - that the organised groups “punch above their weight”. It is only by posing questions about what would be needed for mass working class politics that broke with Labourism that we can see that the disunity of the existing groups is a problem.

But also, the phenomenon of bureaucratic-centralist sectarianism of the modern type actually precedes the Comintern’s party conception. It was already characteristic, before World War I, of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania led by Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches and others, and of the De Leonist (from Daniel De Leon) Socialist Labour Parties in the USA and Britain.⁴

This sort of sectarianism - that of the modern far left - is radically different from the sectarianism of the ‘utopian socialist’ groups of Marx’s time. It does not counterpose itself to the mass movement (trade unions and strikes, campaigns, and so on) as the old utopian sects did.

Instead, it endeavours to control the political initiative within the mass movement, with a view to leading this movement step by step towards the insurrectionary general strike. But the result of this endeavour to control the initiative is both bureaucratic centralism within the organisation, which is obliged by its strategy to micromanage tactics, and sectarianism not towards the mass movement as such, but towards other left groups. The sectarianism towards other groups produces, indirectly, not being taken seriously by the mass movement.

Calling the practice ‘Leninist’ is an ideology of it; and it does have a significant basis in the resolutions of the second and third congresses of Comintern. But we could strip out the ‘Cominternist’ ideology and still produce the same result, by way of the inherent imperatives of the mass strike strategy.

Anti-capitalist

Comrade Woodrow’s second part argues that ‘anti-capitalists’ need to organise as such, and as more than a loose network. Much of this argument is sound. (OK, “I would say that, wouldn’t I”, since comrade Woodrow again cites some of my own arguments with approval.) A loose network cannot effectively discipline bureaucrats; common action with social democrats won’t work because “A social-democratic organisation will prefer canvassing swing voters over organising the working class; it will not be interested in prioritising radical anti-capitalist propaganda and education; it will run scared of making important political arguments (eg, over solidarity with Palestine or with migrants and refugees) if it thinks those would generate negative headlines and lose votes.”

The central line of divide is not so much “reform or revolution” as loyalty or disloyalty towards the state. Here, as well as citing me, comrade Woodrow makes valuable use of Ed Rooksby’s arguments,⁵ though he does not use the arguments of several authors who have pointed to the importance of electoral work to the Bolsheviks, including during 1917.⁶ I stress this last point, that much of Bolshevik activity in 1917 consisted of election campaigning, since the common far left version of the history tends to marginalise it.

There are two weaknesses in the argument, one minor and one major. The minor weakness is that in discussing “reform and revolution” comrade Woodrow notes that “the Leninist tradition within Marxism usually emphasises the need for revolutionaries … to have separate organisations from reformists”, but observes: “Those anti-capitalists who understand the state as a principal enemy therefore need independent organisation which makes that hostility to the state a core part of [their] politics.” (emphasis added in both quotes).

“Separate” and “independent” are different concepts. To give a couple of examples, the British Socialist Party in 1916-18 was not separate from the Labour Party (it was affiliated to it) but was independent of it, with its own press and organisation. On the other hand, the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain is organisationally separate from the Labour Party, but politically dependent on it through their Britain’s road to socialism strategy and, more immediately, through dependence of the Morning Star on support from trade union officials and Labour ‘official lefts’. Similarly, SPEW, by committing itself to the project of creating a new Labour Party through Tusc, would make itself (if the project had any serious success) politically dependent on the ‘official’ (Labourite) lefts.

It was not, in fact, ‘Leninists’ in general who argued for organisational separation from reformists as a matter of principle. Lenin personally argued in 1920 for the new CPGB to affiliate to the Labour Party. It is, rather, a Cliffite doctrine from the late 1960s, when the International Socialists (today’s Socialist Workers’ Party) abandoned their earlier entry in the Labour Party. The doctrine of organisational separation is maintained by the SWP to this day.

The major problem is definitional: ‘anti-capitalist’. This form of self-identification incorporates all the vices of broad frontism and the ‘transitional method’.

Communists, of course, whether openly self-identified or calling themselves ‘socialists’ to avoid avowing the name ‘communist’, are indeed anti-capitalist. But so are rigorous Salafists, neo-Thomist Catholic integralists and Protestant ‘dominion theology’ advocates. The difference is that these latter are reactionary anti-capitalists. In reality, of course, if reactionary anti-capitalists actually obtain political power, they will wind up creating forms of state/crony capitalism, like the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is because the actual restoration of a pre-capitalist economy would require megadeaths; and the attempt in any country would, before it got far, destroy the military capability of the state, which is the basis of political independence (as in the Khmer Rouge’s attempt to abolish the cities in Cambodia in 1975-78). This, however, does not alter the fact that the reactionary anti-capitalists are anti-capitalists, and the left needs to be clear that their anti-capitalism is something different from ours.

The case for capitalism is essentially that, in spite of involving radical inequalities, it allows approximate coordination of human beings’ productive activities, and generates sufficient growth (in the output of goods and services) to lead to majority acquiescence to capitalism. From the 19th century to the mid-20th, this argument was heavily based on comparing capitalism with pre-capitalist societies. Since 1991 it has been mainly based on the failure of the Soviet model, defeated in the “seventy years’ war” 1918-1989.⁷

The consequence is that the left unavoidably needs to grasp the nettle of the word ‘communism’ - and for that matter the word ‘socialism’, which has also become a must-avoid for people committed to ‘transitional method’. Hence the empty name of the group ‘Anticapitalist Resistance’. We need to grasp the nettle of the failure of the Soviet bloc itself - not by trying to take moral distance from it, either by characterising it as ‘state capitalism’ or by setting up personality cults of Lenin and Trotsky to counter the personality cult of Stalin and imagining that pre-1923 decisions had no causal relation to the 1930s terror or to the final defeat.

We need to make concrete proposals about alternatives to market and private property forms of decision making. About political democracy - as an alternative both to the plutocratic-oligarchical ‘mixed constitution’ that gets misnamed ‘bourgeois democracy’ and to the bureaucratic managerialism of the labour movement in general, including the far left. And we need to defend planning in kind - planning of labour and material inputs for material outcomes (like housing, health and education services, and limits on carbon emissions and plastics and other pollution). But as soon as we take seriously planning in kind, it becomes apparent that this requires political power on a continental scale.

Three kinds

Back to comrade Woodrow’s first part, the three kinds of parties. The first kind is merely any sort of collective political actor, including, for example, a trade union.⁸ The second kind is an electoral party, and

… successful electoral parties will usually need to become extremely broad coalitions containing multiple different political projects, sometimes projects whose aims and methods violently contradict with one another.

Under the [first past the post] electoral system in Britain, anti-capitalists who think it’s useful to engage with electoral politics will likely need to be involved in electoral coalitions that involve a wide range of people with differing political outlooks. Any specifically anti-capitalist political organisation that engages effectively with electoral politics is likely to be some kind of ‘party-within-a-party’, rather than being a freestanding electoral party by itself.

Comrade Woodrow’s third kind of party also needs extensive quotation for clarity:

For Leninists, the answer to the question of how the left exercises agency collectively is not merely through a party, or through some parties, but through ‘the party’. The idea is that, for a revolution to succeed, there must be one singular organisation, uniting all revolutionary forces, and coordinating the revolutionary struggle across all aspects of society.

Participation in state elections might be one front of that struggle, but the Comintern’s line was that, “[Communism] denies the possibility of taking over parliament in the long run; it sets itself the aim of destroying parliamentarism. Therefore there can only be a question of utilising the bourgeois state institutions for the purpose of their destruction.”⁹

So, although such a party might sometimes contest elections as a tactic, this kind of party was supposed to be very different from an electoralist one. It would only engage in state elections in so far as that engagement could be used to support the wider revolutionary mass struggle. In this conception, struggles in parliament, in workplaces, in communities are all just different fronts of the same class war - and the party is the institution which coordinates the strategy that can tie these fronts together.

The distinction reappears towards the end of comrade Woodrow’s article:

After anti-capitalists have regrouped together in a unified political organisation, they might conclude that they need to intervene in electoral politics - either by running candidates of their own as a communist electoral party; or by engaging in entryism into existing electoral parties like Labour or the Greens; or by forming an electoral alliance with other groups. Anti-capitalist regroupment would, in that case, precede electoral regroupment.

On the other hand, the process of electoral regroupment for the wider left might be a precondition to anti-capitalist regroupment.

This analysis supposes that an electoral party has to be a ‘broad-front’ party. In effect, that such a party has to aim immediately to form a government. It thus denies the significance to mainstream politics of minority opposition parties - like the Labour Party and the continental parties of the Second International before 1914; or like (from a different angle) the Liberal Democrats, the Greens or the successive Brexiteer or British nationalist projects (Ukip, Brexit Party, Reform) in recent politics.

Consider also Corbynism: its initial appearance as an opposition down to and including the 2017 election called forth significant rhetorical and judicial concessions to the working class. But the Corbyn leadership’s efforts to preserve the Labour Party as an “extremely broad coalition containing multiple different political projects” by opposing efforts of the grassroots left against the rightwing, and to try to trigger a general election by parliamentary manoeuvres with the ‘Tory remainers’, set up the conditions for the radical defeat of the project in 2019.

I have emphasised here the immediate practical usefulness of a minority opposition party in extracting concessions without seeking to form a government - and how seeking to win a government leads to defeat. I have chosen this emphasis because comrade Woodrow’s distinction between meanings of ‘party’ actually contains within the definitions the argument that it is unavoidably necessary to choose between the politics of the coalitionist ‘revisionist’ right wing of the pre-1914 Socialdemocratic Party of Germany (SPD) on the one hand (the “electoral coalitions”), and those of the mass-strikist leftwing of that party (Luxemburg, Pannekoek, and so on) on the other (“the institution which coordinates the strategy”). The line of the SPD and Second International centre, which was also, in fact, that of Bolshevism before 1918, is, according to this view untenable.

This argument is orthodox among the ‘New Left’-influenced far left. It was actively promoted by Cold War period historians of the workers’ movement who started out in the British and US intelligence apparats at the end of World War II - Peter Nettl, Carl Schorske, and so on. They promoted this approach because coalitionism is safe for capitalist rule (as has been shown consistently in the role of ‘Labour’ governments and socialist participation in coalition government since then); and mass strikism is also safe for capitalist rule because it automatically generates a politically ineffective left.¹⁰

As to why mass strikism automatically generates a politically ineffective left, I have already given the answer: it is the imperative of conceiving the party, not as a political voice for the working class in high politics, but as “the institution which coordinates the strategy that can tie these fronts together”, which drives both bureaucratic-centralism and, with it, the proliferation of competing groups, none of which can really be taken seriously.

Proposals

It should now be apparent that comrade Woodrow’s ideas - as discussed so far - represent a substantial step forward relative to the standard far left combination of ‘build our group’ plus ‘advocate for broad fronts’ using ‘popular front’ or ‘transitional method’ approaches (in either case pretending to be left Labourites, or the political equivalent of left Labourites in other countries). But his ideas do not represent a clear break with this method. As a result, his proposals for ‘What is to be done?’ have an indeterminate character.

He begins with the entirely correct point that we need more discussion. He argues for more of the London ‘Pelican House’ ‘Party time’ discussions, but notes that:

The terms of the discussion need to be set much more clearly - half the room will be talking about social-democratic electoral formations, while the other half are trying to discuss anti-capitalist regroupment, so people talk past one another and go round in circles.

He says, clearly correctly, that there needs to be more discussion in writing - Prometheus’s own call being a step forward.

He goes on to suggest regroupment “from above”, meaning formal discussions between the organised groups; and “from below”, meaning left unity initiatives and discussions in the localities; and “from above again”, meaning repurposing ‘The World Transformed’ - which was, of course, one of the standard top-table-dominated setups designed to be turned on and off at the convenience of the ‘official left’ leaders.

But he accepts that all these ideas may not work, because the organised groups have something to lose. Comrade Woodrow poses this as just the leaderships of the groups having something to lose; but his observation, earlier, that the groups do “punch well above their weight” because of membership commitment to activism and to raising resources, means that it is not just the leaders, but the cadre (the longer-serving local and sectoral activists) who have something to lose. Witness the consequences in demoralisation of the 2019 dissolution of the US International Socialist Organisation - and numerous other cases of demoralisation following group failures.

Comrade Woodrow then suggests that “It may be that we will need people to be swept up in events. Some upsurge in activity, some new mass popular campaign, some crisis for the government that calls the left into action together. Such a moment not only forces the left to work together, to talk to each other, to coordinate with one another, but it puts the prospects of tangible victories within sight.” This is a common belief of the far left. But, regrettably, the experience of the last sixty years - not just in the UK - proves its falsity. In general, a rising tide of class struggle “lifts all boats”, with the consequence that all the groups have increased confidence in their own specific projects and are less inclined to unify with others. Unifications are, in fact, more likely in the wake of defeats.

At this point he returns to the different kinds of party, and the point that I quoted above - his view that either an initial anti-capitalist regroupment would be forced to enter into a broad-front electoral tactic, or that a broad front electoral regroupment might be a precondition for an anti-capitalist regroupment. Been there, done that - in the Socialist Alliance, Respect, and Left Unity. Didn’t work.

He suggests that Momentum might have been an example of such a process, but failed because “its leadership shut down its internal democracy and watered down its politics”. He attributes this to fear of expulsion from Labour as a “party within a party”.

But, in reality, what was involved was the Corbyn leadership’s fear of a new split in the style of the 1981 Social Democratic Party leading to a Labour election defeat (some of Corbyn’s opponents did in fact attempt a split in 2019, without success, as ‘The Independent Group’, later renamed ‘Change UK’). The Corbyn leadership clung to unity with the right in the hope of getting into government - and the broad frontist part of the Labour far left (Briefing, and so on) clung to unity with the official lefts, and thus gave the Corbyn leadership veto over what the far left did.

He concludes that an electoral regroupment “seems possible, urgent, and likely”. He says, rightly, that “The anti-capitalist left needs to have a bit more patience and to focus on getting its own house in order and getting reorganised so that we’re in position to have an impact as a relevant political actor.” Then, “our” concerns (those of Prometheus’s readership) should be:

about how it relates to the question of anti-capitalist regroupment. This means that questions of internal democracy, freedom of organisation and of propaganda, freedom to form internal factions are the key questions we need to be concerned with. Whether we’re thinking about joining the Greens, or affiliating to Tusc, or creating some new electoral organisation, or whatever the proposed alternatives may be, the question that really matters is will we have the freedom within that coalition to be organised as anti-capitalists and to be organised in anti-capitalist organisations.

This is an important partial truth.

It is an important truth because there can be no unity that is more than ephemeral without willingness to be in a minority, and willingness on the part of majorities to put up with the ‘timewasting’ ‘talking to each other’ of minorities.

It is a partial truth because the core of the problem is not the unwillingness of the ‘official’ lefts to accept factions and public dissent. Rather, the ‘official’ lefts design their operations to be sufficiently undemocratic that open dissent does not matter - and then if they lose votes, make coups and splits, as the Labour right does.¹¹ The problem is that unity of the far left, of the communists (or as comrade Woodrow puts it, ‘anti-capitalists’) depends on acceptance of open debate.

Yes, we need to pursue communist regroupment, not a broad front coalition with the ‘official’ lefts. Pursuing that goal needs a culture of open debate among communists.

1. prometheusjournal.org/2024/11/22/there-are-parties-and-then-there-are-parties.↩︎

2. Revolutionary strategy London 2008 pp35‑36, 108-109.↩︎

3. Some examples in ‘Fetishising revolutionary crisis’, Weekly Worker Sept 26 2024, weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1508/fetishising-revolutionary-crisis, subhead ‘Initiative’.↩︎

4. On the SDKPiL, references in ‘Her life and her legacy’ weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/927/her-life-and-her-legacy. On De Leonism, convenient short reference at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Leonism.↩︎

5. edrooksby.wordpress.com/2019/04/10/the-bolsheviks-did-not-smash-the-old-state; and edrooksby.wordpress.com/2018/08/15/the-myth-of-reformism.↩︎

6. D Jenness, Lenin as election campaign manager New York 1971; A Nimtz, Lenin’s electoral strategy from 1907 to the October revolution of 1917 London 2014; Lars T Lih, jacobin.com/2019/06/karl-kautsky-vladimir-lenin-russian-revolution. WG Rosenberg, ‘The Russian municipal Duma elections of 1917: a preliminary computation of returns’ Soviet Studies, vol 21, (1969), pp131-163, already indicated indirectly the level of Bolshevik involvement in local election campaigning in May-October 1917.↩︎

7. “Seventy years’ war” is the tag of far-right SF writer and commentator Jerry Pournelle (1933-2017), but one which is more accurate in describing British and US policy towards the Soviet regime than more ‘mainstream’ narratives. For the prompt beginning of the war after October 1917 see, eg, D Foglesong, America’s secret war against Bolshevism Chapel Hill NC 1995.↩︎

8. I think comrade Woodrow’s abstract ‘first kind’ of party is over-general. Medieval Europe displayed episodic political conflict between the church, the monarchy, and the lay aristocracy; but these were social institutions, not political parties. The same is true of trade unions as political actors. In contrast, Guelphs and Ghibellines in the late medieval Italian city-states were probably at least proto-parties, and Whigs and Tories from their origins around 1680 were parties in the same sense as the British Tories and the US Democrats and Republicans today. The emergence of political parties as such in capitalist political order is both an institutional structure of capitalist class rule, and one which entails a contradiction which the working class can and must exploit, separate from trade union organisation and even if trade union organisation is fully illegal and/or very weak. More in ‘Programme: lessons of Erfurt’ Weekly Worker September 5 2013, weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/976/programme-lessons-of-erfurt; and, at a more abstract level, ‘Negations of democratic centralism’ May 30 2019, weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1253/negations-of-democratic-centralism.↩︎

9. The internal quotation is from www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch08a.htm, from Bukharin’s ‘Theses on the Communist Parties and parliamentarism’, accepted by the Second Congress of Comintern (1920), thesis I.6. Lenin’s intervention in the discussion (same web reference) is, in fact, inconsistent with the main body of comrade Woodrow’s argument quoted.↩︎

10. The same point in ‘Containing our movement in “safe” forms’ Weekly Worker September 12 2019, weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1266/containing-our-movement-in-safe-forms.↩︎

11. Both visible in Momentum. See, eg, M Macnair, ‘Referendarii dolosi’ Weekly Worker December 22 2016 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1136/refendarii-dolosi); C Roberts, ‘Reduced to a corpse’ January 12 2017 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1137/reduced-to-a-corpse).↩︎