Prologue: The Question of Organisation
With the Labour Party in its Starmerite variety in government, the Left in Britain has started asking the old party question (again). This ongoing debate has shown the pressing need to articulate the tasks of communists in Britain. Communists are again looking for a way out of the current impasse between building another limited sect pretending to be a party, entryism into a left-of-labour formation, or abandoning communist politics in favour of some eclectic movementism. This piece starts by giving a cursory look at the current state of the far left in Britain and its dominant tendencies: state-loyalism, bureaucratic centralism, and movementist liquidationism. I argue that against those misdirections, our strategic focus should be on the principled unity of as many Marxists as possible within a mass communist party with an explicitly Marxist programme as a radical opposition to the current capitalist order.
Our road to power is through joint work within the existing left: the socialist movement with its fragmented communist groups and the worker movements with its mass campaigns; it is not an either-or. We cannot avoid the necessity of joint work and dialogue across the existing socialist movement nor engagement with the existing worker movement if we want to build a revolutionary opposition. Political dead-ends such as “going to the class” to go around the existing communist movement or liquidating into another left-labourite coalition hoping to become junior partners of a Labour government have historically proven fruitless. Our only path forward is towards the mass communist party.
The Left in Britain
In sterquiliniis invenitur – in filth, it will be found.
– Latin Proverb
The State Loyalists
Finding a place to start an assessment of the left in Britain isn’t hard given the perennial elephant in the room: the British Labour Party, a “thoroughly bourgeois party”, to quote Lenin. Since assuming leadership of the Labour Party in 2020, Sir Keir Starmer has completely marginalised its left wing. It is no longer a vehicle for false hope and has again embraced its role as a more efficient manager of British capitalism than the Conservative Party. Its continual imperialist investment of millions of pounds for war-mongering in Ukraine and the ongoing genocide in Gaza abroad will only be met by more and more austerity at home.
This is not to say that the pre-Starmer Labour Party was without its contradictions or that we should refrain from criticising Corbynism or British “democratic socialism”. Recently, Callum F’s thought-provoking analysis of “democratic socialism” challenged the standard critique of Corbynism as mere social-democratic reformism and articulated the limitations of their tactics on reforms, the state and elections. Hopefully, this sparks a more substantive analysis of the politics of the British left during the Corbyn Era.
In his critique of the Labour Left, Alfie Hancox argued against the idea that by critiquing it, we give ground to the Labour Right. This idea fumbles the political distinction of communists from a Labour Party that was always loyal to the British State. This obscures how the restructuring of the Labour Party post-1914 was done explicitly to prevent any Bolshevik-inspired revolution, taking advantage of its Clause IV socialism and its significant connections to the trade union movement. This tied the interests of some sections of the working class with the interests of the British State, leading this labour aristocracy to adopt thoroughly state-loyalist and reformist politics.
Refusing to distinguish itself from Labourism was an early fatal flaw of the original CPGB, as recently argued by Tony Collins’ recent book1. This would be a staple tendency for much of the history of the British far-left. This would almost always lead to seeking unprincipled unity with the right wing of the labour movement that would make communists guilty of, as Hancox rightfully argues:
Permanent class collaborationism, equivocations and lesser evil-ism, betrayal of proletarian internationalism, and the erasure of ‘left’ reformists’ longstanding occupation as unwitting agents of the ruling class.
When push comes to shove, the Labour Party always poses itself as a party of order and stability, leading to a consistent trend of Labour governments selling out the most militant sections of the labour movement to maintain Britain’s competitiveness on the world stage.
A similar argument can be raised against the Green Party. While its public image as an alternative to Labour and the Tories, at least at the national level, has currently drawn several disaffected left-wingers to the Greens, as shown by the recent founding of “Greens Organise”, democratising the party and pushing its agenda away from state loyalism will prove to be a challenge (I wish good luck to the comrades involved but we can’t put our eggs in one green basket to solve our current communist disunity). They will have to face a Green Party that continuously waters down its programme and moves to the right.
This is not a problem only for the Green Party in the UK. It is a general right-wing direction shown in the German Greens by their tailing NATO and support for the genocide in Gaza. It is a general right-wing direction of all European Green Parties, shown recently in their kowtowing of the Democratic Party2. This is precisely what prevents the Greens and their politics from becoming anything other than a political dead-end.
No Shortcuts! For an Independent Opposition.
This problem of revolutionaries uniting with reformist forces can also be seen in the attempts of many groups, particularly Trotskyist tendencies, to leverage the Labour Party for revolutionary politics. This would be the natural outcome of the Comintern’s attempts to unite the worker movement after splitting with the 2nd International by jumping from the United Front to Class Against Class sectarianism to the Popular Front. This was combined with the over-theorization of the Bolshevik strategy, which the Trotskyists would inherit3.
In an article on Trotskyists and the Labour Party, Mike Macnair highlights the following trends: the Grantites/Militant Tendency are the only Trotskyists that subsisted throughout its entry operation primarily by leaching on the Labour Party Young Socialists. At the same time, other groups have faltered or failed to make significant gains. In addition, broad-front strategies within Labour are short-lived, leading to groups losing their communist politics or failing to have considerable influence.
The Labour Party has its ideology (legalistic state loyalism), which must spread to everyone within and around it for its reproduction as an organisation. Instead of transforming it, even the best-intending comrades quickly become interpellated into state-loyalist subjects. In addition, Labourism, as the political manifestation of legalistic state-loyalism, ties the party and its programme to the interest of British capitalists and Britain’s competitive advantage on the world stage; this implies a politics of social nationalism and class collaboration in the final instance.
Macnair points out that this leads the entire party to move to the right or left depending on whether it’s in government or opposition, which makes entryism, especially in times when it is in government, pointless. Broad-front approaches also fail due to the attachment of the Labour Party to the British state. For Macnair, the Labour Left, by organising only according to its left-labourist purposes, only serves to prepare the next generation of the Labour Right. Only by campaigning for our purposes, for our immediate minimal and maximal communist demands, can we avoid being sucked into left-Labourist politics.
This is not to say we should treat Left-Labourites in a “Class Against Class” sectarianism or refuse mass participation in any broader formation and relegate ourselves to pure sect reproduction. Any future engagement with the left wing of Labour should heed the lessons of the National Left Wing Movement (NLWM) of the 1920s, where the CPGB attempted to cohere a Left Wing within Labour as a bridge to communist politics. Any tactical engagement and partial unity with reformist elements of the labour movement must be based on us defending communist politics, not us pretending to be left-Labourites. This necessitates our party, our publications and our electoral interventions outside of Labour Party structures. Otherwise, we risk subordinating our politics within a fundamentally state-loyalist organisation, inevitably liquidating Marxist politics and programme.
Attempting a shortcut out of the current fragmentation and disorganisation of the Marxist Left via entryism will also never succeed because the rightwing leaders of any reformist party, whether Labour or Green, would prefer a managerial dictatorship over their party – with the blessings of the British state– and will resort to either splitting or expulsions when the left challenges them. In other words, permanent unity within these parties will only be available if and only if we are willing to accept the rightwing leadership in control and its state-loyalist politics and not challenge them or if we remain so small we fall below the leadership’s radar, which by necessity means the rejection of spreading our ideas to the majority of the working class. Relating to any non-communist party or organisation is a tactic applied in addition to a strategy of patient independence.
The Existing Far Left
The Bureaucratic Centralists
The recurring structural characteristics of the vast majority of Marxist organisations in Britain (and worldwide) are a combination of bureaucratic centralism, i.e. the domination of the party centre over its branches and its denial of any semblance of internal democracy and unity over some specific theoretical dogma –and some textbook understanding of Lenin and the Comintern– rather than unity on the acceptance a common political programme4. Both of these characteristics inevitably reproduce existing chauvinism and oppressive politics, intensifying a recurring nightmare of abuse against gendered and racial minorities. These characteristics inevitably lead to an endless cycle of splits and member burnout. This nightmare is not an objective dynamic of any Marxist or “Leninist” politics; non-Marxist organising deals with similar issues without much luck. They are a matter of mistaken political choices throughout the history of the worker movement.
On the one hand, this bureaucratic centralism is the outcome of how the Comintern tried to theorise political parties after WW1 and formalise what became known as the “Leninist” party / ‘party of a new type’. This is something shared by various varieties of official communism, such as Stalinists & Maoists, alongside Trotskyists, which defined the party strictly in terms of the way the Bolshevik Party functioned during and after the Russian Civil War, disregarding how revolutionary Marxist parties such as the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and others, operated before that.
In addition, this theorisation and political practice of the bureaucratic centralist model of the “Leninist” party becomes hegemonic within Marxist groups because, as Macnair argues, capitalism pressures workers’ organisations to employ full-timers and “cadre” to reproduce themselves. This exacerbates this managerialism, with the full-timers finding the “Bolshevik” model convenient for their reproduction.
An important argument in Macnair’s Revolutionary Strategy is that due to the historical “lessons” Marxists draw from the Comintern, these bureaucratic centralist organisations they build are seen by both other leftists and the average person unfamiliar with the far left as massively divided. If they are familiar with these groups or were a member at some point –as the people burning out mentioned previously– they usually conclude that these far-left organisations are not democratic but, as Macnair stresses, “they are either no more democratic than the capitalist parliamentary constitutional regime … or that they are characterised by bureaucratic tyranny just like Stalinism”5.
The Liquidationists
The negation of the sect form in Britain usually involves an entire ecology of motley crews that a priori reject the bureaucratic centralist sect for some other amorphous formation, such as networks of “organisers” scattered in hundreds of Signal and WhatsApp groups. Most of the time, this means they are inherently tied to the wilderness of local activism, whether by choice or necessity and adopt a strategy of “movementism”: grasshopping from one single-issue campaign to the other when they notice some semblance of working-class activity.
The usual outcome is one of tailism, chasing around the “uncorrupted” masses during a strike or protest and being unable or refusing to provide any alternative political authority to the bourgeois state and its ideological domination, with most of their logic being constrained to “adding capacity” to the “movement” – the movement of who, to do what, and why, (i.e. the questions of agency, tactics and strategy) remains unanswered. Within this current, there is a trend to abandon the Marxist conception of ‘political action’ as the “conquest of political power for the working class” in favour of ‘anti-parliamentarism’ and a fetish of the insurrectionary mass strike.
This can lead to a weird organisational phenomenon recently referred to by Harry Holmes as “The Network Left”, whose organising depends on linking together a narrow selection of like-minded individuals as the agents of mobilisation and change. Holmes accurately observes that a significant aspect of their organising is “the absence of something like a base or membership, or even a number of people whom you are accountable to” and that “this is ironically how a deformed kind of ‘horizontalist’ organising ends up allying itself with the traditional bureaucracies, such as in the trade union movement”. This approach is simultaneously substitutionist regarding the worker movement, where only they and their immediate circle of “organisers” are involved in conscious organising and decision-making and liquidationist regarding the socialist movement, where class struggle becomes an empty signifier for merely doing stuff. As Macnair accurately pointed out:
On the one hand, this has precisely the consequence that the workers’ movement and the left remain a ‘plaything in the hands’ of the capitalist politicians, who can drag it from tail-ending them in fetishising one bit of media outrage, to fetishising another and opposite one.
Refusing to build any institutions that can act as a political body providing an alternative political authority to the capitalist state and creating an opposition to the politics of bourgeois parties, socialists end up merely devolving into a growing culture of “actionism”. Instead of the socialist movement achieving ideological and political hegemony over the proletariat by patiently winning it to its Marxist programme, we end up in a situation where questions of long-term strategic thinking are replaced by a short-term chasing of what tactic can lead to a mobilisation. Rather than doing what needs to be done, socialists end up doing whatever they can to keep themselves busy.
This naturally leads again to the weird way movementist politics unite with the bureaucratic centralism of the sects. If the entire point of the “organisers” of the Left is merely to serve as facilitators of actions such as street mobilisations and strikes, then there is no space available to propose a political strategy. The consequence is the micro-management of any decision that may harm the turnout of the masses where everyone outside of the “network” has to play the role of auxiliary follower. This is a negation of politics within the socialist movement that gives the labour bureaucracy and the sect leadership the upper hand to centralise any decision and hegemonise their politics over the working class. This also plays into the hands of the British state, which consciously seeks to depoliticise any deliberation of politics outside of its apparatuses.
As Holmes eloquently puts it, “the real power of any radical institution is the collective power of those involved in it”. By liquidating into “horizontalist” structures such as affinity and friendship groups, we remain unable to build a national, let alone an international force that even has the chance to compete with the resources of the capitalist class. By imitating how the capitalist class rules through depoliticised managerialism and individualistic or bureaucratic roadblocks to collective decision-making, we remain blocked from building the institutions by which the working class become politicised, intervenes collectively and exerts its will.
No Compromise with Chauvinism
Both the approaches of the bureaucratic centralists and the liquidationists led to a socialist movement, both politically and institutionally, unable to fight against exploitation and oppression. Bureaucratic centralism and the organisations it creates are clear barriers to communist unity that further exacerbate existing oppression. Even with a surface knowledge of the history of most sects, we can see patterns of chauvinistic abuse. Neither the liquidationists nor their turn towards movementism offer any solutions. Their politics are often unable to challenge social oppression due to their lack of political institutions. Instead of any attempt to build revolutionary institutions with structures of accountability and political deliberation to empower any oppressed sections of the working class, the liquidationists capitulate to the dynamics of bureaucratic politics they attempt to organise against. Ultimately, this mystification of politics leads to the inability to build a political body capable of mass interventions as an alternative to bureaucratic centralism and the existing chauvinism within the worker movement.
The working class is highly fragmented by race, gender, economic sector, country, etc. Our world-historic task as Marxists is uniting them into a force capable of winning the battle for democracy. Principled unity as Marxists, let alone as an international proletariat, therefore will be impossible if we allow any section of the socialist movement to retain their chauvinistic politics, whether those are establishing “socialist” immigration controls, transphobia or the sidelining of struggles against any oppression as “identity politics” or “sectionalism”. A ruthless criticism of all that exists includes those whose chauvinism will obliterate from the get-go any “unity in diversity”, any communist programme. This requires us to be combative against these chauvinistic tendencies, something most of the socialist movement opts against, fudging their politics: either accepting some of the chauvinistic arguments under a left banner or isolating itself in a “safe space” now deemed pure of chauvinism. The former approach, that of ceding ground to reactionary arguments, becomes state loyalist and tails the witch-hunts of the bourgeois state. The latter mistreats the problem by using splits and separatism, hoping this will purify them and bring out a genuinely anti-chauvinist organisation without realising that chauvinism and opportunism are objective tendencies within the worker movement and cannot be fought by splitting or non-interference.
Our inability to provide a communist intervention against both class exploitation and social oppression will be a significant roadblock to any mass communist politics. No analysis of the conjuncture and strategy can effectively capture our tasks as communists create an arbitrary contradistinction between class politics and fighting against oppression. On the one hand, attempting to focus solely on oppression without seeing its determination in the final instance by class leads us to a sort of liberal “intersectionalist” politics that are by nature popular frontist and deny us any socialist struggle. On the other hand, focusing on “pure” class exploitation without understanding how it’s also mediated by social oppression leads us to “class abstractionist” politics, which not only have a reductionist understanding of capitalism but politically remain incapable of addressing any social chauvinism and ends up being state loyalist and economistic.
All of these approaches are political dead ends. Communists should be at the forefront of any struggle for oppression and social chauvinism, regardless of its manifestation as racism, sexism, or transphobia. Only if we arm ourselves with a class point of view can we win these sections of the proletariat to a programme that acknowledges their particular oppression and tries to win them over a politics of generalised human emancipation.
In and Against the Sects
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.
Oh no!
We’ve got to go through it!
– Michael Rosen, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (1989)
Macnair makes two increasingly valid points in “Bringing about a Marxist Party”. Firstly, despite the questionable politics of most communist groups, many of their members consider themselves Marxists and have some, albeit deformed, commitment to Marxist politics. Secondly, the main reason for the splintering of the far left into numerous sects is that communists are unwilling to be in a minority position. This inevitably leads to a belief that engaging with other communists with whom they disagree is a waste of time and that they should instead reach out to the uncorrupted masses rather than ‘the sects’. The result has been every time to produce another sect.
The Splintering of the Left or Building an Opposition
To successfully build a radical opposition to the existing order, we need to decide whether our approach is one where we engage with other far-left groups that might have some wrong politics, directly challenge their viewpoints, and perhaps slowly win them over, or we should ignore them and pursue an “independent” path to win the working class to our views while distancing ourselves from the rest of the existing left.
Most of the left in Britain usually opt for the second path, going to the “disorganised masses”, building their party and pretending the rest of the left doesn’t exist, hoping this will, in some revolutionary situation, appoint them as the leadership of the proletariat. As I argued in the first part of the article, pursuing this path is complicated when the working class—whether it has any experience with the far-left in Britain or not—sees us (entirely justifiable in most cases) as petty sectarians.
In a different Prometheus piece, I stressed that we need a party because we need a vehicle within the worker movement to serve as an educator and coordinator that uses its programme to elevate the everyday struggles of the working class to high politics. This would allow the proletariat to raise its awareness and see an alternative to the existing order while coordinating its class struggle through a communist programme, which clarifies its tasks and unifies it in a battle for hegemony.
Similarly, Macnair argues that the objective reason that a party is needed is “to link together the spontaneous tendency of the working class to create organisations for its immediate self-defence (trade unions, tenants’ associations, cooperatives and so on) and the body of ideas (a Marxist programme) which projects this tendency forward as a global alternative to capitalist rule.” Whether we are a smaller group of a few hundred people, such as rs21, or close to a thousand, like the CPB, these tasks, our objective mission as communists, will not change. It just means that these groups will attempt to accomplish these tasks by competing with each other.
The problem is, within these now competing groups, there are several communists who claim, in one form or another, to be followers of Marx, and these groups will spend a significant amount of their time expressing very similar ideas to each other. This leads to duplication of effort, less effective practical work, and the inability to organise effective political action as a class. In addition, this also leads to the diminished influence of Marxist politics among workers when they see the existing left as fragmented sectarians, and we have to compete with the countless other groups of the existing left and the propaganda efforts of our respective capitalist class and state.
Winning the Existing Left
We’ve seen the existing left’s failures in building democratic and accountable institutions of radical opposition and its splintering into countless varieties of sect reproduction or sectoral niches. If we want to do away with the endless splintering and away with the dynamic of capitalist politics, that of competing brands offering a product and instead as communists doing communist politics, the first tactic against this is realising that being in an organisation, be it a union or a communist group will always entail some people losing some decisions. It will always involve a pluralism of political opinions and the possibility of being a minority.
This should not be seen as defeat –with the usual solution being splitting or expelling the dissenters until you build a group in your image– but the conscious understanding that this is the necessary bedrock for any mass communist politics: being organised around unity in action and accepting that sometimes you might lose a decision. In practice, this means communists of all stripes must be willing to fight in their organisations as organised factions regardless of their internal structures and politics. Winning the existing left towards any revolutionary communist politics must first start with being willing to fight for your politics as a public minority.
This goes beyond just a formalist commitment to party and programme. It also means that our organisations must develop their culture and institutions to prepare the proletariat to win the battle for democracy and become a ruling class. It means building an organisational culture where debating in good faith is the bedrock of the organisation, not a culture of actionism or of “frank” polemics (I am not against polemics on principle, but the form of the polemic cannot be reified to the level of using it as the communication method).
As the quote goes, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” Similarly, if the only way to engage with each other is through, more often than not, miserable and snarky rhetoric, we risk degenerating any internal communist culture into pointless bickering. I’m not convinced that will win people over to a mass communist party compared to a shared political programme and a culture of internal democracy and comradeship.
I argued that the Labour Party and Greens are only blind alleys for Marxists and that we should not attempt to use them as a shortcut to political relevancy. This does not mean we should not engage with their members and win people over to communist politics, but that this should be a tactic towards political power, not a shortcut to solve our present disorganisation. I also argued that neither the sect-form, with its bureaucratic centralism and endless cycle of spits, nor the liquidationists, with the localism and inability to counteract bureaucratic centralism, are solutions. This is not an argument against engaging in local struggles or building political organisations, but both must be done democratically with a revolutionary strategy in mind, not just an eschatological commitment to “let’s do activism and then …. sometime in the future voila ! … Communism”.
What is needed is a struggle for democracy within the socialist and workers’ movements against bureaucratic centralism in all its forms—whether within trade unions or the so-called ‘Leninist’ sects and the depoliticised politics of the “network left”. This a significant roadblock that the far-left needs to solve, which cannot be fixed by refusing to engage with the sects and going directly to the “uncorrupted” masses. Until the membership of the existing groups develops democratic and revolutionary politics and until the liquidationists move beyond their mystified organising to achieve programmatic unity, any mass communist politics will remain a pipedream; we will continue to face a confusing plethora of competing sectlets and incoherent localist adventures, undermining any political intervention.
The current impasse of the left in Britain is our inability to build political institutions for patient and long-term strategising and our inability to be minorities within our existing organisations. This problem is solved by navigating through the existing left, warts and all, and winning them over the need to unite into a mass communist party. This will be accomplished by being involved in mass campaigns in the broader worker’s movement and “partyist” interventions within existing organisations of the socialist movement and, through that joint work, convincing comrades of the need for rapprochement, party and programme.
We are already working together. We saw this joint political work between socialists, trade unions, and social movements during the strike wave, along with initiatives such as STRIKE! MCR, Strike Map, Organise Now! And Troublemakers At Work, amongst many others. It was shown in the recent electoral initiatives like Communist Future, and it was shown in the joint work against the genocide in Gaza with Workers for a Free Palestine and the Free Palestine Coalition. Through these initiatives, we’ve seen the potential of socialists merging with other layers to accomplish their goals and the necessity of democratising and institutionalising this joint work into the world-historic merger of the socialist and workers’ movements into one mass communist organisation.
These interventions again suggest the need to create a mass communist party to act as the great generalist of the worker movement. These initiatives make the case for a higher, explicitly communist unity. Through that work, we can intervene and politically convince comrades of the necessity of a mass communist party and a minimum-maximum programme.
Epilogue: Let’s Get This Party Started
And so, to work, comrades! Let us not lose precious time! Russian Social-Democrats have much to do to meet the requirements of the awakening proletariat, to organise the working-class movement, to strengthen the revolutionary groups and their mutual ties, to supply the workers with propaganda and agitational literature, and to unite the workers’ circles and Social-Democratic groups scattered all over Russia into a single Social-Democratic Labour Party! [my emphasis]
– V. I. Lenin, The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats, 1897
The strength of the working class is through its organisations, especially its party organisation. It is the strength of our unity and of these organisations that allows the working class to pose the question of an alternative order during a revolutionary situation and to have an independent political voice. It is through formal organisations that the working class can become a class for itself—a proletariat—and build the political institutions needed to strategise, link together struggles against exploitation and oppression, and conquer political power. Only through them can we create a collective revolutionary subject capable of intervening in any struggle and advancing emancipatory politics.
Through organisations, we learn to rule democratically and become an alternative political authority, which allows us to counter the chauvinism and patriarchal organising tendencies of capitalist society. Only armed with a mass communist party as a worker’s dreadnought against capitalism can the proletariat heed its call of duty to “raise the red banner of socialism and lead the charge as the vanguard in the battle for democracy”.
This means we must break with the bureaucratic centralism of the sects and the actionism of the liquidationists and unite in a genuinely democratic centralist organisation if we want to have any chance of fighting against exploitation and oppression. By “democratic centralism,” I mean a mass communist party based on individual membership rather than a loose coalition or network. On the one hand, this mass communist party should have a central organising committee that represents the party as a whole and is mandated and accountable to its members. On the other hand, local branches should have relative autonomy, except in extreme cases where the central committee needs to step in. This mass communist party should be organised around the acceptance of a Marxist political programme. Such an organisation must go beyond imitating another broad left formation or attempting to build Labour Party 2.0 or another sect; it must be a mass-vanguard of the proletariat. But to take this first step, we Marxists must overcome our barriers to unity and put Marxist politics and programme in command.
The question remains: how to proceed? I won’t attempt to draw out a clear plan here, firstly because this piece is already too long, and secondly, that plan probably deserves its own article. The first step is drilling into the head of every communist that the current situation is untenable and that we cannot afford any factional patriotism (to use Lawrence Parker’s parlance) over our petty little sects. Their existence as sects hinders revolutionary politics. Therefore, any attachment to their existence means subordinating our politics to their reproduction. We must win over their members to understand that any oppositional communist politics necessitates a break with bureaucratic centralism and the sects it creates. We also need to engage with members of the existing left in trade unions and other campaign work. The number of campaigns mentioned in the previous section proves that we already talk to each other. What’s missing is talking to each other as communists and not marketing managers for everyone’s respective sect or as just individual activists but as communists moving forward a communist horizon.
Forging a mass communist party will, by necessity, involve explicitly building communist interventions in both the socialist and worker movements that unite all communists. This will also include engaging and organising public interventions on communist strategy where the spirit of principled Marxist unity is materialised in groups working together, as Archie Woodrow has detailed in his recent article. These political interventions should not be just amongst other “partyist” forces talking to each other but also engaging the broader socialist movement. A key limitation of previous “partyist” attempts from forces such as the CPGB was its inability to create a communist intervention that won over comrades outside its ranks. This intervention within the socialist and worker movements will also require a rapprochement of the forces currently struggling for a mass communist party and allow them to coordinate their tasks. This might be similar to the approach previously articulated by Jack Conrad, but we should not miss the forest for the trees. Only when this process has amassed a significant periphery within the socialist movement and an organisation that can engage within it productively can we claim the name of the Communist Party without any illusions. At every stage of this journey towards a mass communist party, we should emphasize the necessity of political struggle and programmatic clarity against liquidationism, sectarianism, opportunism, and chauvinism in defence of a revolutionary Marxist opposition.
In the absence of a mass communist party, our primary objective as communists is fidelity to the mission of building one. Sect-form loyalism, Labourist opportunism, and movementist liquidationism represent backwards steps in this task. We will not accomplish this by avoiding the existing socialist movement, building another sect, or liquidating into isolated localism. Instead, we can only make one through the patient struggle for democracy, party, and programme within the socialist and worker movements. Only by winning Marxists to unite under a mass communist party and a programme will we bring the twilight of capitalism and herald the coming of communism.
References
- 1 Tony Collins (2024), ‘Raising the Red Flag: Marxism, Labourism, and the Roots of British Communism, 1884–1921’
↩︎ - Not that other non-European Greens offer anything of substance see here for the Australian department: https://partisanmagazine.org/2024/12/01/once-more-concerning-the-greens/ ↩︎
- Mike Macnair (2008), ‘Revolutionary Strategy’ ↩︎
- See Lars T. Lih (2008) ‘Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What is to be Done?’ in Context’ and Neil Harding (2009) ‘Lenin’s Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Democratic and Socialist Revolutions’ ↩︎
- Mike Macnair (2008), ‘Revolutionary Strategy’, Introduction ↩︎
