WeeklyWorker

18.06.2026
SWP: action, action, action

Centrality of democracy

Too many on the left consider lengthy debates, polemics, decision-making votes and minority rights a diversion from the ‘real struggle’. A fundamental error. Mike Macnair begins a series of articles

I attended the Connections event, ‘What next for the left’, in Sheffield on June 6. It struck me that apart from the very limited plenary discussions (vague platform speeches; the usual three-minute interventions from the floor), there was a lot of non-engagement between the participants. On the one hand, two sets of five parallel ‘workshops’ looked at a variety of topics. This is a practice which began in the 1960s-70s US anti-war movement ‘teach-ins’ and such-like. At its origins, it reflected the student-based character of the 1960s ‘new left’, and behind that the normal structure of academic conferences. Workshops provide an opportunity for more people to talk, but not actually to make decisions. It is assumed that the decision process will be somewhere else.

On the other hand, there was a series of parallel ‘self-organised spaces’, organised by Democratic Socialists, Republic Your Party, Campaign for a Mass Workers’ Party … Again, discussion; but in separated bubbles. We did have some debate in the Democratic Socialists’ ‘self-organised space’, but this was because the comrades there deliberately set out to organise some debate.

I do not mean to blame the organisers. It was not supposed to be a decision-making event and they were, anyhow, merely following normal leftwing practice. But with this event - aiming to discuss ‘what next for the left’ in the wake of the debacle of the anti-democratic Bonapartist manipulations of Your Party, self-identified as ‘democratic’ - it struck me forcibly how useless the normal leftwing practice is from the point of view of democratic decision-making.

And it also struck me that in the USA, Renato Flores has offered on Cosmonaut arguments for the Democratic Socialists of America’s use of Roberts’ rules of order (the US equivalent of the British Citrine on chairmanship) and ‘Rusty’s rules’ (a simplified version of Roberts, like Wal Hannington’s simplified version of Citrine, Mr chairman!).1 But there does not seem to be an obviously available defence of the principles of the procedural practices of the pre-1914 Social Democratic Party of Germany, carried into the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party and thus Bolshevism before the 1921 ban on factions was carried into practical effect in 1927-29; and at least to some limited extent partially preserved in the practices of the Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International, when I was a member of its British section in the 1970s-80s; and which relate to the practices we attempt to operate in the CPGB.

I do not mean that these practices are all correct (or that everything we in the CPGB have done procedurally in recent years has been correct). But I do think that trying to work up a defence of these procedural forms is worthwhile.

I have to say at the outset that this is not a party position, but simply my attempt at a case for and explanation of these procedural forms, as opposed to bureaucratic centralism, to bureaucratic Bonapartism masquerading as ‘democracy’, and to reliance on Citrine/Roberts’ rules and ‘traditional labour movement practice’. It is pretty much certain that I will miss some issues, and quite likely that some things I say will be controversial within the CPGB (it is not news that they will be controversial among the wider left, to the extent that anyone is willing to pay any attention to my arguments …).

This raises a good many issues and hence is unavoidably going to be a series of articles. To lay out at the outset what I plan to cover, I begin with arguments for the importance of the issue, and why questions of procedures of decision-making should not be regarded as a diversion from ‘real politics’. For this purpose I will unavoidably repeat both arguments I have made recently (and repeatedly) for the centrality of questions of political democracy,2 and arguments I made back in 20113 against Trotskyist arguments that these questions are secondary.

From this I will turn to issues of time. These are posed both by arguments that democratic decision procedures are time-wasting in general, and by claims that the urgency of the situation, or the need to seize the moment and the initiative, require undemocratic decision procedures. These arguments are not wholly without foundation, but they artificially generalise on the needs of military or emergency management (fire, flood, etc) decision-making.

The third general point is that we are concerned with principles and guidelines for practice, not with absolute fixed rules. This point will involve some unavoidable discussion on the nature of laws and rules in general and in particular of constitutional law. Some leftists are prone to designing elaborate ‘Heath Robinson’ (US: ‘Rube Goldberg’) constitutional machinery; these machineries will both inevitably fail, and point to support for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (rule of the capitalist class).

The paramount principle - which will reassert itself at all levels of concrete detail - is that people who are prepared to participate in the decision process should be able to take real decisions. The principle is two-sided. On the one hand, the ‘silent majority’ do not get to be ‘represented’. On the other, those who do participate - as party, union, cooperative, and so on members, as voters, as jurors, get to take real decisions, not to have these pre-empted by officials or by unprincipled manoeuvres. The members - for shorthand, because we are not in power, organising the decision-making of the whole society - have to have the right to make mistakes. But equally, they need to be aware that their decisions may be mistakes - and therefore to include minority views (which after the event may turn out to be right).

Within the framework of this principle, it is possible to approach the conduct of decision-making meetings: meetings need chairs (not ‘facilitators’, which is a managerialist concept); how should the chair work (to draw out and promote clarifying disagreements); how to handle proposals for amendments; what about proposals which are counterposed to each other; and so on.

Decision-making on a larger scale involves specific considerations. The easiest example is national organisation, but the same issues would apply in a local or sectoral organisation that got big enough. Sub-division into local groups - cells, branches, and so on - is indispensable; and a large part of discussion can and must take place in these, before any major conference. But even so, large numbers imply too many choices available, and it remains necessary to narrow the range of possible choices beyond the procedural forms discussed for meetings in general. Part of this role can be played by factional groups and caucussing at conferences; but arrangements such as commissions (as used in the early Comintern) and compositing negotiations (as used in the Labour Party before the recent past) are necessary.

The same issue - too many choices available - poses in a different way the question of leading committees. These are as much needed by large local organisations as by national ones. Here the choice between collective leading committees and the cults of individual leaders (and the direct election of individual officers) is a choice between democracy and Bonapartism.

Political

Both the Spartacists and Duncan Chapel of the Fourth International in Scotland argued that the left in Your Party over-emphasised questions of party democracy at the expense of offering an alternative political line. These are versions of a standard Trotskyist political story - that “a political line dominates over the regime”. Leon Trotsky argued that “A party regime has no independent, self-sufficient meaning. A party regime is a derivative magnitude in relation to party policy.” And again, “A political line predominates over the regime.”4 The second of these quotations has become dogma for the organised Trotskyist movement. It was originally written in 1937 in defence of the Cannon leadership of the Socialist Workers Party in America against its internal critics and has been used ever since in defence of bureaucratic centralism.

This approach is profoundly mistaken. In the first place, if we are to appeal to Trotsky, he also wrote in 1928 that “All questions of internal and international policy invariably lead us back to the question of the internal party regime”, and that “A change in the internal regime of the Comintern is becoming a life-and-death question for the international revolutionary movement”. Both these quotations are from the section, ‘The question of the internal party regime’, in The Third International after Lenin.5

If we are forced to choose between Trotskys, we should prefer the fighter against the degeneration of the Soviet state to the promoter of ‘Trotskyist’ bureaucratic centralism. The whole section could be profitably read by anyone who believes that “a political line predominates over the regime”.

Members and leaders of the SWP (Britain) would benefit particularly from reading it: de te fabula narratur (the story is told about you - Horace): see yourselves in the mirror. The story Trotsky tells of the ban on factions, the usurpation of power by the apparatus, false unanimity, the top-down promotion of the obedient, the political expropriation of the ranks and the loss of the party’s ability actually to mobilise its members for its political purposes could be reprinted with the names changed to those of the SWP and still tell a true story.

Secondly, the argument that “a political line predominates over the regime” is internally contradictory, and not in a dialectical sense. Trotsky was and Trotskyists are advocates of a ‘democratic centralist’ party, as opposed to a loose federation and of a republic of soviets (workers’ councils) as opposed to parliamentarism. But both choices are no more than choices about ‘party regime’ and ‘state regime’: ie, about procedures for collective decision-making. You cannot coherently, or even dialectically, but only in Orwellian doublespeak, say that the party question or the question of soviets versus parliamentarism is a first-order issue of political line, but opposition to bureaucratic centralism is merely subordinate to the political line.

Thirdly, advocates of the view that procedural and ‘constitutional’ issues are second-rate questions claim to be Marxists and Leninists. But this view is flatly opposed to the actual political practice of both Marx and Lenin. Dip into Lenin’s Collected works for the period down to 1917, and you will see how much writing effort he put into constitutional and procedural questions. Reread (or read for the first time) Lenin’s State and revolution, or the arguments by Marx and Engels on which it is based - especially The civil war in France, but also the polemics with the Bakuninists and the Lassalleans, or Engels’ critique of the draft Erfurt programme. Most of this material is available free online at the Marxists Internet Archive. You will find that it is Bakunin, not Marx and Engels, who thought political, ‘constitutional’ and organisational forms were unimportant; and that it is the Trotsky and Luxemburg of 1904 (when they sided with the Mensheviks), not Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who also thought that.

Fourthly and fundamentally, the economic and social issues themselves are at the end of the day issues about who decides and how the decision is taken.

Every serious strike, and every withdrawal of capital should remind us that “no man is an island entire of itself” (Donne). Our everyday life constantly depends on the actions of other people - eg, those who work in farms, food transportation and so on, to give only the most obvious example.

In other words, our lives are already collective and socialised. Capitalism is a means by which we collectively delegate critical decisions in social affairs to capitalists, and a procedural form through which they take these decisions on the basis of a body of social rules which gets called ‘the market’, ‘economic rationality’ or - for Marxists - ‘the law of value’. We delegate these decisions to the capitalists by simply putting up with them running society and by not creating alternative procedures for collective decision-making.

The result, of course, is substantive decisions which are in the interests of capitalists generally or of particular groups of capitalists who happen to have paid out the largest bribes (sorry, ‘political donations’ or ‘fees to counsel’) recently, and which are opposed to everyone else’s interests. But in order to get rid of this problem, we need alternative ways to take collective decisions without the capitalists and ‘the market’. And alternative ways to take decisions are, at the end of the day, merely procedural forms. This is, in fact, not merely a first-order political question. It is the first-order political question - the question of questions.

Minority

The underlying situation of the left is that we are very radically a minority (as I argued some weeks ago, and as it remains necessary to repeat). Contrary to the Trotskyists, the ‘transitional method’ cannot solve this problem, because it arises not from lack of clarity about how to get to socialism, but from the hostility of the majority of the working class to the ‘socialist’ end-point, towards which ‘transitional method’ points: that is, ‘war communism’ in a single country and the bureaucratic regime.

The blunt fact is that socialism and communism are (fairly small) minority ideas because we still live in the shadow of Stalinism. The generation who were adult and active before 1989-91 are now getting elderly, and there is a certain revival among a small minority of the young of using the communist name and Soviet imagery to épater les bourgeois; but every school-child is taught the calamitous history of the USSR and its fall. The large majority view among all classes is that socialism is either undesirable, because tyrannical, like the Soviet and east European regimes; or infeasible, because economically radically inefficient, again like the Soviet and east European regimes.

It is nonetheless objectively necessary to promote socialism and communism. And it is true, first, that the working class needs socialism in order to defend its elementary interests. Second, the society needs socialism - and this needs to be what Marx called in 1871 “la domination politique du proletariat” - the political dominance of the working class over the other classes, and in particular over management and the state apparatus. And, third, this is only possible with radical democracy.

The working class needs a socialist project.6 The starting point for this is that the ‘working class’ means, as I have argued before, the whole social class - in and out of work, home-makers, elderly, adults and children - which lacks property in the means of production and in consequence is dependent on the wage share of total output: either directly through wage-work or indirectly through dependence on a wage-earner, or on the ‘social wage’ (state benefits and charities).

Workers need trade unions - and cooperatives, and renters’ organisations, etc - for defensive struggles to maintain their elementary position. Karl Marx characterised the necessary strikes, etc as “guerrilla struggles”.7 Through these struggles it is possible for some sections, who for one reason or another have particular economic leverage, to win sectional gains from capital. In particular, under boom conditions more concessions may be made; though the competitive pressure to push the wage share down persists, and concessions generally need to be extorted. In the slump phase of the business cycle the pressure is intensified.

Sectional gains are always vulnerable to being taken back - precisely because they are sectional, and capital can manoeuvre around them (as, for example, replacing British-mined with imported coal and with gas-fired power stations). And/or capital can politically attack the sectional gains as unfair to other workers. This was how the 1978-79 ‘Winter of discontent’ was used to bring in Thatcher’s government; and similar ideological offensives about supposed unfairness to other workers are underway now in relation to disability and sickness benefits and public-sector pensions.

As long as the workers’ movement accepts that capitalism will always exist, it also inherently accepts that at the end of the day the wage share must fall. This is true if the point is to preserve the competitiveness of the firm. It is true if it is to preserve the competitiveness of the nation in international trade and in the battle to attract investment capital (the commoner argument of centre-left and centre-right politicians). And it is true if it is to pay for armaments: Adam Smith’s 1776 “defence, however, is of much more importance than opulence”, or Herman Goering in 1936 (following US policy debates in 1916-17) arguing for guns to take priority over butter - an argument currently revived.8

The working class’s alternative needs to involve democratically organised planning of production in kind. At one level this should be obvious from the fact that the Ten Hour Day Act, public education and so on are already interferences with the market allocation of resources to secure goods identified in kind (more free time; the actual education of children whose parents cannot afford to pay …) rather than money for free choices.

At another level, suppose a ‘market socialism’ of worker cooperatives linked by money and markets: each cooperative would be driven by market imperatives to self-exploit, to attempt to drive down the wage share. This was part of Karl Marx’s arguments against the ‘mutualism’ of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and it is empirically confirmed by the effects of marketisation in Yugoslavia in the 1960s-70s.9

Planning

It is not just the working class that needs socialism. At a superficial level of analysis, since the ‘neoliberal turn’ in the 1970s-80s we have been living in the ‘west’ through an experiment in testing whether (as the neoclassical economists claim) free markets can deliver superior outcomes through financial engineering to the partial planning in kind which had characterised earlier capitalism, and had intensified after the failure of free markets to deliver in war conditions in 1914-16.10 The neoliberal experiment has, in fact, resulted in systematically more expensive outcomes in health and other areas, and worse outcomes in public education, housing and transport infrastructure maintenance.

Equally, politico-legal free markets in public regulation now transparently support practical immunity of the rich from the operation of laws - illustrated in Britain in the inability of the state to hold the water companies to account, the Grenfell Tower story, and so on. Overcoming these dynamics requires at least partial de-marketisation of politics, media and law; and these in turn require explicit rationing in kind of access to decision processes, as opposed to price rationing. Again, these problems affect everyone except a very small minority (considerably smaller than the top 5%) who are not ‘priced out’ of justice and political access.

More fundamentally, avoiding catastrophic consequences from human-induced climate change is quite unavoidably going to involve extensive planning in kind. We need to reduce carbon emissions to avoid climate change accelerating to the point of human extinction. That is a choice in kind, even if it is to be achieved by ‘market’ mechanisms of ‘carbon markets’. We also need a mass of measures for mitigating consequences that are already unavoidable - which will again involve planning in kind to deal with population movements due to changes in sea level, in fresh water availability, in land fertility, and so on, which are all already visibly in progress.

The inability to get anywhere with international conventions to deal with climate change reflects another side of the problem. The money system entails the state and the regime of many states, geopolitics and the drive towards war.

Capitalist states are driven towards competition in a semi-stable hierarchy. The process throws up a hegemon state, whose currency is the global reserve currency: Britain in the 19th century, the USA since 1945. But the position of being the hegemon state leads to inward investments that push up housing costs and in consequence wages, undermining industrial competitiveness, leading to offshoring and the relative (not absolute) decline of the hegemon.11

The USA has managed this relative decline since the 1970s by exporting simple destruction: in Mozambique, Angola, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria … and also since around 2000 pursuing a policy of aggressive encirclement of China, which has driven the current wars in Ukraine and against Iran. This drive to war is not a false policy choice by individual US leaders: it results from the inherent dynamics of the USA’s position as a (relatively) declining world hegemon.

This, too, affects all of us. If we do not break with the money mechanism, the logic forces yet more destructive wars; and in the end the choice between human extinction through generalised nuclear exchange and the ‘Somalification’ of the whole world outside the USA (leading, in turn, to the collapse of the USA itself).

Overall, then, the point is that society needs to shift sharply into the planning in kind of major productive activities, because the continuation of capitalist rule and decision-making through money and markets threatens us not only with worsening immediate conditions, but also with human extinction - either through runaway climate change or through generalised nuclear exchange.

USSR

But - as I said above - socialism is unpopular, because we still live in the shadow of the disastrous Soviet experience.

We have to recognise that the Soviet regime began with an attempt to construct socialism and continued to ideologise itself as ‘socialist’. The USSR did aspire to planning of productive activities in kind. It failed.

This failure is partly the product of the siege warfare conducted by the capitalist powers against the Soviet regime between the Red victory in the civil war in 1921 and 1941, and between 1946 and 1991. The actual survival of the USSR under this siege warfare reflected partly the support of the USA and British empire in 1941-45 and the ability to take equipment from eastern Germany in 1945-50. It reflected partly the fact that this was never socialism in one country, but bureaucratic socialism in one of the great European empires, including both an industrial core and a large agricultural periphery. This made siege warfare (‘sanctions’) less immediately effective than they have been in other cases.

The second element, however, was the absolute dominance of lies in Soviet ‘planning’. This flowed from the career interests of managers, party bosses and other full-time officials, in pretending success in order to keep their jobs or obtain promotion. The result is ‘garbage in, garbage out’ in the planning process, and a dynamic towards the Soviet workers’ joke: ‘They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work’.

Incentives for managers and bureaucrats to lie, and pretend things are going better than they are, are not in the least unique to the USSR. They are perfectly visible in ordinary western business management and the state bureaucracy. They can be seen even in the small-scale bureaucratic hierarchy of the British SWP. The ideologues of capitalism tell us that markets provide the necessary consumer feedback to control managers’ lies. This is at most a partial truth: while small businesses collapse rapidly if their business models fail, established firms can go on losing money for decades before collapse. Checks on managerial lies and self-deception are nonetheless essential to any rational decision-making.

The effect of the regime of career managers and bureaucrats without anyone to whom they were effectively answerable was to make each manager owner of ‘his’ factory, or whatever, each regional party boss owner of ‘his’ region, and so on - subject only to the occasional arbitrary interventions of the Renaissance court-style cliques at the centre. Marx already identified the issue 1843-44 in his critique of Hegel’s idealisation of the Prussian state bureaucracy: state bureaucrats do not express the ‘general interest’, but their particular turf interests.12 Bureaucratic or managerial socialism thus turns into the opposite of socialism; and tends towards capitalism - either by way of collapse, as in 1989-91, or by way of the managed increase of capitalism, as in China.

To whom are the bureaucrats and managers to be answerable, if they are not to be Soviet-style informal owners or accountable to capital (as western bureaucrats and managers are)? They can for some purposes (in relation to local decisions) be made answerable to those immediately below; but this does not solve the problem of planning as coordination on a national and international scale, which we need to solve (at least to some extent) in order to get beyond market ordering. Local answerability alone winds up as (at best) market-linked co-ops or Yugoslav-style ‘self-management’ under marketisation; and, as noted above, this fails.

The answer is that the bureaucrats need to be answerable to the working class as a class: as I already said, to the whole social class. That the proletariat is in charge and subordinates the middle classes (including management and state bureaucracy) to itself is what Marx meant in 1871 by “la domination politique du proletariat” - proletarian political rule, which is more commonly called among Marxists the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And again, as I already said, this class is driven to collective activity - trade unions, cooperatives, collectivist political parties - because its separation from the means of production means that such organised collective action is its only strength. It is this proletarian drive to collective activity that is the ground of the Marxist wager on the working class. It is not, contrary to the ideas of the revolutionary syndicalists (who imagine that they are Trotskyists), the employed workers’ strength at the point of production, which can always be dislocated by capitalist manoeuvres.

Proletarian political rule thus implies everyone gets one vote, one voice, freedom of access to information and communication, and freedom of association. It also requires democratic procedural methods of decision-making: ones that as far as possible return real decision-making to the ranks, so far as they are willing to participate in the process.

“As far as possible” because there are decisions which genuinely have to be taken too quickly for democratic decision processes to be used. But these are fewer than is commonly claimed. The next article in this series will begin with this issue of time: which turns out to involve not only the difference between emergency and non-emergency decisions, but also really quite detailed procedural questions about, for example, the early publication of proposals, the frequency of meetings, the length of agendas … 

  1. ‘The procedural is political’, August 7 2021: cosmonautmag.com/2021/08/the-procedural-is-political.↩︎

  2. Eg, ‘Effective collectivity is key’ March 2 2023 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1432/effective-collectivity-is-key); ‘Very essence of Marxism’, March 6 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1528/very-essence-of-marxism); ‘Socialism requires democracy’, May 7 2026 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1584/socialism-requires-democracy).↩︎

  3. ‘The procedural is political’ Weekly Worker November 15 2011 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/697/the-procedural-is-political).↩︎

  4. ‘The groupings in the communist opposition’ (1929): www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/03/commopp.htm; ‘On democratic centralism and the regime’ (1937): www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/xx/democent.htm.↩︎

  5. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1928/3rd/ti07.htm (#p2-11).↩︎

  6. Here and below I use ‘socialism’ as we do in the CPGB (and as Leon Trotsky did in Results and prospects) to mean what immediately follows the overthrow of capitalist rule: that is, a contradictory society under workers’ rule on the road to communism as a stateless, classless society.↩︎

  7. Value, price and profit (1865), chapter 14 (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm); ‘Trade unions: their past, their present, their future’ (Geneva Congress of the First International, 1866: www.themilitant.com/2012/7632/763249.html.↩︎

  8. Wealth of nations book IV, chapter 2: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book04/ch02.htm (defending the English Navigation Acts as a defence measure); Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_versus_butter_model summarises the history of ‘guns or butter’. Current: see, for example, www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/04/16/wes-streeting-welfare-fund-defence-spending-keir-starmer; ‘Badenoch and Starmer clash over welfare spending at PMQs’, BBC News, April 29 (www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ce35dwddevwt). For the current political dynamics of the issue in Europe see, for instance, S Sacchi, G Buzzelli and C de la Porte, ‘“Guns versus butter” in public opinion: the politicisation of the warfare-welfare trade-off’ Journal of European Public Policy Vol 33 (2026), pp1199-1225.↩︎

  9. , See, for example, C Samary Le marché contre l’autogestion: l’expérience yougoslave La Brèche 1988; Plan, market and democracy (wwwiire.org/node/663), lectures 2 and 3.↩︎

  10. Characterised earlier capitalism: eg, J Guldi Roads to power: Britain invents the infrastructure state Cambridge MA 2012 (18th century Britain); DF Noble Forces of production New York NY 1984 (19th century USA). On World War I, see JE Hutton Welfare and housing: a practical record of war-time management London 1918.↩︎

  11. More elaboration on these points and supporting references in M Macnair ‘Imperialism and the state’, a four-part series of Weekly Worker supplements: March 17 2022 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1387/supplement-imperialism-and-the-state-part-i); March 24 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1388/supplement-imperialism-and-the-state-part-ii); April 7 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1390/supplement-imperialism-and-the-state-part-iii); April 14 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1391/supplement-imperialism-and-the-state-part-iv).↩︎

  12. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ch03.htm.↩︎