20.02.2025
Moshé and Nick
Question, question, question, that is Marxism. Carla Roberts reports on the latest session in the ‘Building a Communist Party’ series organised by Why Marx?, which addressed the question of sects and sectarianism
The left is riddled with confessional sects. Of course, most members do not believe that their particular group is actually a sect. They are told by their respective leaderships that they are, in fact, the revolutionary organisation - the kernel of the future party that will lead the working class to revolution. It just has to grow a bit for ‘when the day comes’ (within “five to ten years”, as the newly packaged Revolutionary Communist Party states).
But what is a sect? Why are there so many? And how do we build a genuinely democratic Communist Party instead? That was the topic of the February 13 session in the new Why Marx? Zoom series. (The next session will discuss the other side of the coin - the ‘broad left fronts’ set up by those sects).
Moshé Machover gave perhaps the best short definition in the meeting, which was attended by an encouraging 105 people (the video has already been watched thousands of times). He welcomed the current communist fusion process, “which I am very excited about. And it if is successful, which I really hope it will be, I will almost definitely join. Contrast that to a sect, which will refuse to even discuss fusing with others. All they will say is ‘Join us - everybody else is wrong’.”
Yes, they might engage with other groups and forces in this or that particular front, but they believe they are ‘it’ already and just have to grow a bit. “Size does not come into it,” the comrade quite rightly said. “You can have small sects and you can have big sects.” A good summary by comrade Machover on the key aspects of a sect, which was discussed in more detail throughout this illuminating session.
The meeting was opened by Nick Wrack of Talking About Socialism, who has got plenty of experience on the issue, having spent many years as a leading member in Militant, the forerunner of the Socialist Party in England and Wales. He outlined the key features that all sects have in common: “A lack of internal and external democracy. Members are expected to follow the leadership line. They have to agree with every dot and comma in the programme, while we would argue that members should accept it.”
He thought that there was “no fundamental difference” between, for example, the Socialist Workers Party, SPEW and the new Revolutionary Communist Party: “Their disagreements over whether the Soviet Union was state-capitalist or a deformed workers’ state really does not justify having 2,000 members in one organisation and 2,000 in the other,” he said (probably somewhat overestimating the actual membership numbers). “These are secondary issues, which we can have disagreements about, as long as we are united in the essential strategy - the overthrow of capitalism.”
Expanding on the issue of the need for democracy, he said: “It is not just permissible to have disagreements: it is obligatory. Why? Because society will not be changed by an individual or a small clique of people - but it has to be the conscious will of the working class.” Allowing and encouraging the expression of different viewpoints, including in factions and in front of the working class, therefore has to be part of what we are building, right from the start.
He agreed with comrade Machover’s suggestion that an organisation’s attitude towards fusion is a crucial part of the sect culture we desperately need to overcome: “In the present period, the nature of capitalism clearly demands the necessity of organising the working class in a democratic Communist Party. In the face of that clear necessity, the refusal to address that question and to use secondary differences as a justification to stay in separate organisations - that is sectarianism.”
Both rejected the much-quoted definition of a sect as “pursuing interests that are separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole”, which was mentioned in the generally very interesting discussion. As comrade Machover explained, “this is not useful as a definition, because no sect believes its interests are separate from that of the working class”. In fact, many sects use the quote from the Manifesto of the Communist Party (!) to claim – wrongly, obviously - that Marx and Engels were against forming a Communist Party and that socialists should instead stick to the Labour Party and/or subordinate themselves to the sub-reformist platitudes of the latest broad front, set up by this or that sect.
There was what looked like a disagreement between the two speakers over the role of ‘ideology’. Comrade Machover disagreed with comrade Wrack’s assertion that we would have to develop a ‘communist ideology’:
From what I understand from reading Marx and Engels, they never used the word ‘ideology’ in a positive way, but always in a dismissive and sarcastic way, in the sense of ‘doctrine’. Of course, I am in favour of a Communist Party developing a particular set of ideas, but that for me is different to ideology. There is a tendency in sects to cling onto old ideas and to never critically re-examine them. But you cannot be a non-critical Marxist, by definition. He, Marx, changed his mind on a number of things, just like everybody else on the planet.
Comrade Machover went on to illustrate the issue with the theory of value, “which Marx never really fully solved, and he admitted as much. He asked Engels to try and deal with the transformation problem after his death, but he did not manage it either. It is an interesting theory and it is worth reading it - but it has holes and it is not a model to explain capitalism today.”
Another example was Darwin’s book, On the origin of the species:
It is a tremendous work, but it clearly is not the model textbook to explain evolution. Science has marched on. The same goes for Marx. But some on the left cling to those ideas, no matter what. This turns into a form of hero worship. For example, I find it alarming that some people still believe the Transitional programme is applicable today. It was written in 1938 in a very particular historical period, looking particularly at Germany. Is it really true that capitalism has not been able to develop the forces of production? Trotsky was expecting imminent revolution. That was wrong in 1938, but excusable. There really is no excuse for clinging onto it today. We have hindsight.
The comrade also had harsh words for those who “hero-worship” Lenin:
Even early Comintern was clearly not a good model in terms of democracy, especially the ban on factions and the militarisation of the communist parties. Some people believe that before 1917 Lenin was much more democratic. He was, to a degree. But I find that his references to the need for democracy are often instrumental at best, because the proletariat needs democracy so that it can organise to overthrow capitalism. But there is very little in Lenin about democracy as being necessary in the transition to communism or communism itself. That democracy has to be the mechanism with which we come to decisions in a post-capitalist society.
In response, comrade Wrack clarified that he entirely agreed with comrade Machover’s criticism of the doctrinaire nature of much of the ‘ideology’ visible in today’s sects: “This really shows how important it is that we talk to each other in meetings like this. It all depends on how we define words like ideology, doesn’t it?”
The series continues. See: