23.07.2026

Break from failed nostrums

Decision-making must be removed from the hands of the full-time apparatus and take place at the appropriate level. This necessarily involves a narrowing of choices. Mike Macnair concludes his series on procedural principles by discussing the advantages of democratic centralism

This series started five weeks ago with the point that questions of procedures of collective decision-making are not, as much of the left thinks, a diversion from ‘real politics’.¹ On the contrary, they are at the core of the possibility of posing an alternative to capitalist decision-making.

The second article² argued against ideas that democratic decision procedures are time-wasting in general, and against claims that the urgency of the situation, or the need to seize the moment and the initiative, require undemocratic decision procedures. On the contrary, while some decision-making is urgent, and delay to the point of making no decision returns to the sovereignty of property-owners, for much decision-making we can and should take as much time as is necessary for full collective deliberation.

The third article³ argued against the bourgeois liberal ‘constitutionalism’ of Citrine on chairmanship or Robert’s rules of order; and drew out of those arguments the more fundamental points that rules need principles to serve their interpretation, and seeking to decide everything by rules inevitably results in the overproduction of such rules (as in Robert’s rules).

The fourth article, last week,⁴ moved to the paramount positive principle that people who are prepared to participate in the decision process should be able to take actual decisions. 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 deliberate, not just to exchange soundbites, and to take real decisions, not to have these pre-empted by officials or by unprincipled manoeuvres.

The members, or - as we will see this week, the elected delegates or representatives - 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 and pay attention to minority views (which after the event may turn out to be right). Within the framework of this principle, I addressed the conduct of discussion and of decision-making meetings, procedures for discussion and for voting.

This week we move to the problem of decision-making on a larger scale. The simplest example is national organisation, but the same issues would apply in a local or sectoral organisation that got big enough; and international organisation poses the problems even more sharply. 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 larger 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. But, in addition, it is vital to avoid seeing leading committees as ‘the government’, and conferences as ‘the legislature’.

I reiterate yet again the point that I made in the first article, that what follows is merely my views: I may miss some important points and not everyone will agree with my arguments. And I repeat the point made in the third article, that what is at issue is guidelines for procedure on the basis of the principle that participants get to decide, not fixed rules. And the fundamental principle remains that people who are prepared to participate in the decision process should be able to take real decisions.

Local

I begin with two points I made back in 2010, polemicising against Paul Cockshott’s critique of my book on strategy.⁵ Decision-making on any scale greater than the local requires both delegation to the local (or sectoral), and mechanisms for narrowing the number of options for final decision.

For the first of these points, it is only necessary to imagine the case under global communism of a decision to adopt, or not to adopt, a new bicycle design at a minor bicycle factory in a small town, whether this town is in northern England, southern India or any other location. It would be plainly irrational for this decision and the numberless similar decisions that arise every day to be taken by the six billion-odd people in the world above the age of 15. This is true, even if we assume universal literacy and net access and (trustworthy) instant electronic referenda. Global decisions will need to be of rough frameworks, which are then more closely specified by local decisions - ‘local’ here includes both a range of geographical instances from continent level down to village level, and a range of sectoral instances from the level of global shipping, through continental rails and power grids, down to workplace levels.

The point applies with equal force to political action under capitalist rule, to trade union and cooperative organisation, and so on. The endeavour to take all decisions centrally is visibly demobilising: both recently and very strikingly in Your Party, and over the longer term and on a smaller scale in the inability of the Socialist Workers Party to convert its 2,800 paying members and larger periphery into a party on the scale of the old pre-1991 official CPGB. Autonomy of local action is necessary for practical mobilisation of support. And this includes the ability to publish locally, local control of funds and local knowledge of who is and is not a member (an issue which arose in Your Party).

This is not a novelty. As I observed in the second article in this series, already by 1920 it was visible to the Russian Communist Party that the combination of the pressures of war work, plus the 1919 military-centralist turn that barred local publication and imposed a veto from the centre, was destroying the collective life of the local organisations.⁶ The reality was that, if Bolshevism had from 1903 been like the military-centralist organisational conception developed in 1919-21, it would never have won the mass working class support that allowed the Bolsheviks to take power in 1917.

In the UK in 1974 (following failed attempts in 1969 and 1971-73) the capitalist class succeeded in securing apparatus control of the trade unions under a judicialised regime, marginalising the shop stewards and other local activists. At the same period, control of local government by judicial review and by central government control of funds was radically increased, reducing the extent to which there could be democratic politics in local government.

The full-time officials of the trade unions, the Labour left and much of the far left since 1974 have gradually internalised this culture of apparatus centralism and juridification, imposed by the capitalist class to enforce subordination of the workers’ movement. As long as the left clings to this culture, it will never pose an alternative to capitalist rule.

The other side of the coin of local organising relates to the problem of time, discussed in the second article. A couple of commentators on ‘X’ have criticised (not in depth) my objection to three-minute time limits on interventions, basically on the assumption that more people get to speak on three-minute soundbites than if (for example) 10 minutes is the limit.⁷

Suppose, however, a party of 300,000 members (like the British Labour Party). Leave aside finding a venue in which 300,000 people could meet; for all to speak in a five-day meeting occupying 40 hours would require a time limit of 0.48 seconds for each intervention. Even an organisation like the SWP with 2,800 paying members, assuming a three-day meeting occupying 24 hours, the time limit would need to be 31 seconds. The reality is that the effect of the claim to restrict floor interventions to three minutes is to exclude deliberation in actual membership or delegate meetings, leaving the actual decision process to take place among the officials.

The solution is that most of the discussion takes place in parallel - in the branches, cells and other standing organisations of the party (some discussion may usefully be in specially convened district or regional aggregate meetings, both to facilitate national and/or faction speakers attending and to integrate experiences and ideas beyond the single branch). Comrade Andrew Northall in his letter of July 2 was right that most discussion has to be in branches; his (profound) error was to counterpose discussion in branches and their election of delegates to the right to organise platforms/factions.⁸

‘Workshops’ or ‘breakout sessions’ and such-like arrangements attempt to create a simulacrum of the parallelism of discussion that takes place in branches - but on an anti-partyist basis: that is, without the decision-making capabilities of branches and in particular their right to elect delegates. This absence entails, as other devices to have discussion without decision do, that the actual deliberation (involving more time spent than three-minute soundbites) and actual decision-making, will be taken elsewhere (by the full-time officials).

Too many

The second problem is that of narrowing the range of possible positions to the point at which a collective decision is practically possible. Comrade Cockshott and his co-author, Allin Cottrell, have demonstrated that von Mises’ objection to socialism, that planning is impossible because of the complexity of the calculations involved, is false in the light of modern computing power.⁹ However, the planning exercise they propose presupposes general choices of plan goals.

Put another way, the planning exercise could contribute to narrowing the range of choices by excluding impossible combinations (like capitalist politicians’ promises of both lower taxes and improved public services). But a range - very likely a large range - of different combinations of plan objects and means remain possible. As soon as we start looking at the versions of communism and socialism available on the web, it becomes apparent that very nearly quot homines, tot sententiae (‘there are as many opinions as there are individuals’). To reach decisions for action among a large range of options it is necessary to have means to narrow down the options.

The process of narrowing down options to get to the point where a decision is possible necessarily involves delegation arrangements. The problem is simply the natural limits of time and numbers. Consider our six billion people deciding among (at a very conservative estimate) 850 different options for a global set of annual plan priorities ...

Take, for another example, the old and somewhat more democratic form of Labour Party conferences, where 650 constituency parties, 20-odd affiliated trade unions and various other affiliated organisations each had the right to submit a single motion to party conference. To enable a week-long conference to take place some means was necessary to reduce the number of these that went to the vote. I do not recommend the particular bureaucratic solutions traditional in the labour movement, but the problem is a real one.

Comrade Cockshott argued:

If Macnair really wanted to follow the logic of the working class party being the most consistent advocate of democracy, what he should be demanding is:

• the replacement of all parliaments, councils, assemblies and quangos by juries drawn randomly from the population;
• the right of initiative and referendum, with taxes and the budget to be submitted to popular vote; declarations of war only by popular vote ...; ¹⁰
• abolition of the judiciary and magistracy; juries to be supreme in courts; no loss of liberty without jury trial.¹¹

Under full global communism, I think that the first and third of these slogans would in principle be entirely correct (though the particular forms of decision-making organisation will, of course, be decided by future generations). The reason they would be correct is that communism involves the supersession of the ‘social division of labour’: ie, it ceases to be the case that people specialise for life in particular tasks, and in particular that some people specialise in decision-making tasks and others in doing what they are told.¹² Doing decision-making tasks for a period of time then becomes a tedious chore that the individuals involved are obliged to do from time to time, like jury service.

Universal decision-making by referendum with an unrestricted right of initiative would, however, be wrong even under full communism. The reason is that, completely irrespective of access and trustworthiness issues, it ignores the delegation problems - both of local decision-making and of narrowing the agenda for decision. Imagine for a moment: you get up in the morning and log on, and find in your inbox 20 million referendum proposals to be read and voted on ...

Exactly the same problem affects a common far-left idea, that representatives or delegates should be subject to imperative mandates in all their voting. If fully implemented in practice, the effect would be that the meeting of the delegate body at which the delegates vote is a complete waste of time: what has actually happened is a referendum, with the voting taking place in the delegating bodies. Precisely because the effect is actually a referendum, there is only an illusion of delegation. (In reality, as usual, these seemingly ultra-democratic schemes produce hidden decision-making by the full-time staff or the initiator clique; in Jack Conrad’s useful expression they are “anarcho-bureaucratic”.¹³)

Narrowing

Though the process of discussing in the branches (and other organisations), and the branches electing delegates to a congress or conference (from now on I will just say ‘conference’),¹⁴ the members in the branches take real decisions to narrow the range of proposals to be considered at the conference: proposals supported only by individuals or by small minorities are effectively taken off the immediate agenda.

Off the immediate agenda. It is important to retain the awareness that small minorities - and oddball individuals - may turn out to be right and the large majority turn out to be wrong. This is an important part of the reason for rejecting speech controls (the main reason is that we cannot trust officials with imposing them).

“Priorities ballots” are not a substitute for using delegate conferences. In local discussion and delegate elections, the democracy that reduces the range of choices is deliberative, and it may turn out that unexpected support for an initially minority option appears in discussion. On the other hand, a priorities ballot is a referendum process and, like all referendum processes, places the actual decision process in the hands of the officials or other Bonapartist figures who construct the ballot.

Under a pure system of branch representation at conferences, a minority that is evenly geographically distributed may be un- or under-represented at conference, with the result that the majority at conference imagines that there is less disagreement than there actually is. The primary reasons for not banning factions are about class politics, and in particular holding the full-time officials in subordination to the membership. But the need for the conference to be able to make real choices also implies that branch representation should be to some extent supplemented in the direction of proportional representation of organised minorities.

We should not advocate perfect proportional representation (that is, without any lower limits on representation). In perfect proportional representation, ‘the map is as large as the territory’ and the process has failed to reduce the range of possible choices.

Further, branches should be entitled to vote ‘uncommitted’ and elect uncommitted delegates. This is again an aspect of maintaining the character of the conference as a real, deliberative decision-making body - not one which merely ratifies the result of a ‘general election’ conducted in the branches. (This point is an auto-critique of the practice of the International Marxist Group and its successor organisations, while I was a member in 1974-93. The effect of not allowing uncommitted votes and delegates was to incentivise the creation of groupings like the ‘Outer West London tendency [faction]’ of 1984-86 and to produce an overestimate of support for the individual organised groupings.)

Narrowing the choices also involves procedures for handling amendments, drafting issues, and multiple not-fully-counterposed proposals. To some extent I have already discussed these procedures in connection with meetings generally, in the last article. The problem becomes harder for a large conference. Factions again can assist in clarifying what is at stake.

The technique of compositing can be of some use. Bureaucratically controlled compulsory compositing, as has been used by the Labour Party, is yet another device to secure control by the apparatus. But voluntary compositing, which still allows space for counterposed motions and amendments to be voted on, can potentially assist the conference in arriving at real choices. Both factions and compositing require space to be made on agendas for meetings.

Comintern in the 1920s used drafting commissions to amend documents and clarify issues at stake. These may seem analogous to workshops/breakout sessions. The difference is that drafting commissions are working bodies which, like compositing meetings, deliver a product for decision by the conference as a whole. Workshops/breakout sessions, on the contrary, are managed opportunities to ‘let off steam’, while the real work of decision-making is done elsewhere.

Initiative

Someone has to take the initiative to propose agenda items for collective decision; and to produce initial draft proposals that can subsequently be replaced or amended in discussion and voting. In the absence of an existing party, this ‘someone’ will inevitably be self-appointed organisers or initiators. So far, no problem. We can take, for example, the 1880 programme of the French Parti Ouvrier, initially drafted by Karl Marx, Jules Guesde, Friedrich Engels and Paul Lafargue in Engels’ front room in London, and later adopted with amendments by the party in process of formation (though this led to a split with the ‘Possibilists’ (capital P) who opposed the centrality of political demands in the programme).

That someone has to take the political initiative is an important point. There is a common belief on the left that programme - the political platform of a party - should “emerge in struggle”. A slightly more plausible version is the idea that it can be developed on the basis of ‘workers’ inquiries’, promoted notably by ‘Notes from below’.¹⁵ This was part of the basis of the Programme of the Parti Ouvrier. But what ‘Notes from below’ forgets is that the workers’ inquiries conducted in the run-up to 1880 were on the basis of an existing newspaper with significant public circulation and an implicit existing political platform. Somebody is still taking the political initiative - on a non-transparent political basis.

There is a problem if the political basis of the initiative is unclear. In this case what is actually on offer is personal support for the initiators. The same is true if the initiators impose procedural mechanisms that can prevent the party-in-formation from making its own choices at its founding conference. In either case the appearance of creating a party is deceptive.

Once a party has been created, it will need to have some sort of central committee, national committee, executive committee, or whatever, meeting between congresses. (From now on I will say ‘central committee’ or ‘CC’, because ‘national committee’ seems inappropriate for a multinational state like the UK, while ‘executive committee’ suggests the liberal separation of powers). This is, firstly, because a party conference (or for that matter a trade union, cooperative, etc, conference) cannot sit in permanent session, unlike a parliament or analogous body; secondly, because a party will need organisation and finances, and hence full-time officials, and there needs to be a body meeting more often than annually, to whom these people are to be immediately answerable.

Why a CC and not directly elected officers? The answer is simple. Directly elected officers are a Bonapartist form. They give the individual elected officer, as I said of MPs in the third article in this series, a “term of years absolute” - a property right in their office. In an organisation large enough to attract bribe-paying by capitalists, the officer will have a strong tendency to become a bribe-taker. In a small organisation, it remains the case that the elected officer’s property right amounts to the political expropriation of the membership.

These points are in a sense obvious. It follows that it also seems obvious that, once there is a party (or a lesser party-like organisation), the CC should do the job of initially proposing an agenda and drafting proposals for discussion. This is not, strictly, logically necessary. The German SPD and the RSDLP had separate CCs and editorial boards - ‘unified command’ that subordinated the EB to the CC being a creation of 1919-21. It would be perfectly logically possible to have also a separately elected ‘conference preparation committee’. It is merely convenient for the CC to propose the agenda and draft texts.

This is, again, no problem in itself. Problems arise, firstly, if the CC places obstacles in the way of open discussion and voting; secondly, and underlying this, if the CC comes to think of itself as the government and the conference as parliament (or, as a general election) and plays the sort of games that governments play in order to foreclose deliberation and voting.

The IMG (and successors) of the later 1970s-80s provides a somewhat baroque example. The conference (of an organisation at its height of around 600 members) elected a CC of around 60. The election was conducted through a ‘nominations commission’ of conference that proposed a slate, giving a ‘working majority’ to the actual majority or largest minority at the conference, but after this point carefully ‘balanced’ on a range of criteria (particularly geography). The CC met quarterly. The CC elected a political committee (PC) of around 30, which met monthly. The PC elected a political bureau (PB) of around 10, composed of full-timers, which met weekly.

The PB was the actual political leadership - the CC was merely a parliament. The PC provided the PB with an equivalent in the CC of the ‘payroll vote’ of junior ministers in parliament, lined up in advance of CC discussions. The effect was that the normality of factions (called tendencies) was like the normality of parties in liberal constitutionalism: whoever you vote for, the government (meaning, the full-timers) will get in.

The essential point, I think, is to avoid fetishising leadership as such. We need committees to manage business between conferences. It is convenient that they should also prepare conferences. Their function is not - unlike delegates - to represent the membership (whether geographically, or by ‘oppressed sections’, or whatever). They are to be the servants of the conference and thereby of the membership, not its masters (Engels’ 1891 point). In this context, nominations commissions and election by slate create non-transparency of election. The Mandelites’ ‘norm’ that the largest minority should obtain a working majority of the CC is merely the doctrine that ‘the king’s government must be carried on’, transposed from English parliamentarism into left politics. It is in itself political expropriation of the membership.

Centralism

What I have written so far is mainly about parties, though I began with the problem of decision-making under communism. Some of it is specific to workers’ organisations under capitalist rule: there is no reason, other than traditions formed under capitalist rule, why a ‘supreme soviet’ (national assembly of workers’ councils) could not become under workers’ rule a standing body that meets daily for much of the year, like a parliament.

The implication of a supreme soviet as a standing body would be that the functions of a government formed by this standing body can and should be reduced, to be mainly functions of initiative in proposing agendas and draft motions to the standing body. If we think of the English constitution after 1688, but before the expansion of the suffrage in the 19th century led to the reduction of the democratic elements of the constitution,¹⁶ a good deal of decision-making was actually in parliament - or in local government - rather than in central government.

The question of ‘democratic centralism’, as it was understood before 1919, would, however, still be posed. Here is Lenin in his 1913 Critical remarks on the national question:

But, while, and insofar as, different nations constitute a single state, Marxists will never, under any circumstances, advocate either the federal principle or decentralisation. The great centralised state is a tremendous historical step forward from medieval disunity to the future socialist unity of the whole world, and only via such a state (inseparably connected with capitalism) can there be any road to socialism.

It would, however, be inexcusable to forget that in advocating centralism we advocate exclusively democratic centralism. On this point all the philistines in general, and the nationalist philistines in particular … have so confused the issue that we are obliged again and again to spend time clarifying it.

Far from precluding local self-government, with autonomy for regions having special economic and social conditions, a distinct national composition of the population, and so forth, democratic centralism necessarily demands both.¹⁷

This is not about a party; still less about a ‘revolutionary party’: it is about the relations of central and local government in a state. Democratic centralism is fundamentally about the relations between central decision-making (in the first place, by the conference; only secondarily by CC or similar bodies) and local (and sectoral) decision-making.

This takes us back to my starting point: the failure of Your Party, and the uselessness of common broad left decision procedures. Both are connected to the attempt to put in place national organising without local organising (and without effective recognition of factions); whether to maintain bureaucratic control (the Corbynistas) or to try to ‘organise’ on a non-party basis, without membership and branches, in the hope of broad unity (the left opposition to the Corbynistas).

Democratic centralism is by no means restricted to parties: it is a potential approach to democratic self-government in general. But it is illusory under capitalist rule to attempt to create democratic centralism without attempting to create a political party - or attempt to create a political party without attempting democratic centralism. Without this approach, we remain within the endless repetition, worsening, of the failed nostrums of the left.

1. ‘Centrality of democracy’ Weekly Worker June 18: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1590/centrality-of-democracy.↩︎

2. ‘Time is on our side’ Weekly Worker June 25: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1591/time-is-on-our-side.↩︎

3. ‘Legalism and labyrinthine rules’ Weekly Worker July 2: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1592/legalism-and-labyrinthine-rules.↩︎

4. ‘Principles and guidelines Weekly Worker July 16: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1594/principles-and-guidelines.↩︎

5. ‘Representation, not referendums’ Weekly Worker June 30 2010: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/824/representation-not-referendums.↩︎

6. The resolutions, including expressions of concern about loss of the mobilising capacity of the local organisations, are in R Gregor (ed) Resolutions and decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Vol 2: The early Soviet period 1917-1929 Toronto 1974, pp83-89, 90-98, 107-14, 119-24.↩︎

7. ‘OT Biscuit’ aka @gaoblai, and MUG activist Jean Allen.↩︎

8. Letters Weekly Worker July 2. I responded in the previous article.↩︎

9. ‘Computers and economic democracy’: www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/quito.pdf; also ‘Mises, Kantorovich and economic computation’: mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/6063/1/MPRA_paper_6063.pdf.↩︎

10. I have omitted the third point in the list - “full political rights, including the right to elect officers in the armed forces” - because I agree with it without reservation (it is already in the CPGB Draft programme).↩︎

11. I have argued against the idea of the abolition of the judiciary in ‘On reducing undue trust in judges’ King’s Law Journal Vol 31 (2020), pp41-58.↩︎

12. More exactly the social specialisation of function. The division of labour, properly so called, will undoubtedly continue: we will not all be doing identical tasks at any one time. But ‘social division of labour’ is, though not fully scientifically accurate, the conventional expression for the lifelong specialisation I have described in the text.↩︎

13. Eg, ‘Coventry by numbers’ Weekly Worker October 4 2000: www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/354/coventry-by-numbers.↩︎

14. There is a distinction in the history of Bolshevism and hence in the ‘official communist’ tradition between congresses (which were sovereign) and conferences (which were special-purpose meetings). This distinction is in my opinion unnecessary and not particularly desirable.↩︎

15. notesfrombelow.org.↩︎

16. For references for this point, see note 7 above (pp48-50).↩︎

17. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/crnq/6.htm. I do not mean to promote the substance of Lenin’s argument in this chapter, which supposes that nationally homogenous territories (even as local government divisions) are attainable. In my view that is false.↩︎