While a significant minority of us on the radical left recognise the need for a political party to represent the objective interest of the working-class (psst, it’s communism), this has manifested in an ultimately counterproductive form for more than a few decades now. In Britain and elsewhere, Left ‘parties’ have been founded and disbanded throughout the whole twentieth century, first Trotskyism’s break with the official communist parties, and another great explosion of new grouplets throughout the new communist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. For the last twenty years or so, the incorrigible differences between organisations have generated both coalitionism and movementism, two phenomena which tacitly confess that the radical left struggles too much with developing a productive democracy within its ranks to even attempt to facilitate bringing democracy to society. Essentially, we have given up on dialectic; instead, we opt for a ‘quiet sectarianism’ where differences are glossed over and hushed up. Simply put, revolutionaries have attempted to dissolve their differences through repression, rather than go through the harder, more patient work of solving these through open disagreement, assuming acrimony from an interlocutor before assuming good faith.
I am by no means outside of this problem. I am a member of a small, nationally operating communist organisation (which possesses the good grace not to call itself a party), and I could tell you my problems with almost every British far-left group and why I joined rs21 rather than, say, the SWP, CPB, CPGB, or SPEW. Jokes about the communists’ constant squabbling and quibbling are told so often as to make them unfunny cliches in wider society, but I would like to point out there are both positive and negative aspects to this fact. The positives demonstrate that communists are, in the main, politically principled people. We don’t just opportunistically hop onto the most popular mass movement or talking point and stoke up whatever sentiment is already prevailing among the people. We accept our position is by its very nature counter-hegemonic, and see our task as winning people round to our way of thinking. To view the current organisational and ideological state of the working-class as sufficient for revolution is manifestly disproven by the fact that revolution has not and is not occurring. One may counter this by saying that objective conditions foreclose the possibility for revolution, via either mass movement or targeted insurrection, but to that I must ask: does the left not make up part of these ‘objective conditions’, and is it not – considering it is the only part of those conditions we can do anything about – in fact the most important part of these conditions when discussing our class’s preparedness to take power?
Our collective neglect of organisational questions has resulted in our marginalisation in the sphere of high politics and made those sympathetic to our cause hesitant to become organised (we probably all know potential comrades who won’t join whichever organisation we are part of simply because our fragmentation inspires so little confidence: a partially justified negative feedback loop in our political culture). This can, and must be rectified; independent organisations must work on critiquing the political climate so as to alter what lies beneath our feet and what path lies ahead of us. For too long, we have applied such criticism only to matters outside of our movement, shrinking away from criticism of ourselves for fear that our unity, like a prized glass menagerie sitting on the mantelpiece, will shatter upon the slightest impact. But our revolution is not some premade ornament we need only point out; it is the molten glass we mould each day with our praxis. Failing to realise this germinates from mistaking the nature of socialist political unity in the first place, which can only be founded on political principles forged in struggles, not temporary alliances predicated on ephemerally appearing and disappearing ‘communities of interest’. That may be enough for a firmly seated ruling class, but the crises facing our world and our means of solving them demand a new conception of how we can assemble and mediate our differences. An old saying goes ‘if all you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail’; we would do well to remember that our tasks are different from those of our rulers, which must be reflected in our tools.
Revolutionary action is guided by the world as it should be. It cannot bear to waste a moment within the present, which sweeps it forward before its feet are fully planted. One can claim to be a Marxist or a revolutionary as much as they please, but our revolutionary figures do not descend from the heavens to bestow medals upon us simply for claiming discipleship. What matters is practice, not semantics. Our class needs to be in power, and a unified, radically democratic communist party is our way to get there. Neglect of the party question is a neglect of the needs of our class, and a dereliction of our duty as its most conscious faction. Our unwillingness to build alongside one another despite ideological differences projects an image of division onto the class we seek to organise, leading to the rational conclusion that any society we would build in our image would lack the skills for overcoming our alienation and may even increase it.
Our sect culture partly reflects an intellectualism that, while undoubtedly problematic, is readily distinguishable from the convenient anti-intellectualism espoused to the proletariat by the bourgeois political culture. We at least feel comfortable with being partisan, with having an opinion, with thinking what we think matters, even if we have not quite yet maximised the potential of this initiative. While we lament the sectarian impasse we find ourselves in, we may take heart from its presence, showing us that we have not become so lazy as to reject the responsibility we have set ourselves.
None of us wants our differences to remain in perpetuity. Riven as we are with contradictions, many of which are birthmarks of the social order we seek to tear down, the democratic urge which animates our aspirations may simultaneously frighten us. Our movement puts itself in a box, makes itself easily ignorable, assuming our differences to be an evil bound to pollute the world should we lift its lid. Well, some pernicious forces may tumble from the box should we conduct ourselves a little more openly, but we can hardly stuff that box with new and infectious hopes and practices without doing so!
Democracy is not a zero/sum, win/lose game. It is our way of retrieving what has gone before and assessing it on the basis of its current utility. Having forgotten this, and reinforcing that forgetting with clever cultish distortions of Marxism, there is something of the Miss Havisham in our sects, waiting lonely to be collected for her big day, except no one is coming. I assure comrades: many brooms and dustpans make light work of clearing away cobwebs, and many voices will be needed to chart a new course. Not all of the best ideas will be from those within the particular organisation to which you have sworn fealty, forsaking all others, and we do better by creating venues for us to hear each other out in venues specifically organised for that purpose.
In spite of agreement on these fundamental points, we as a movement have failed to create appropriate forums for such debates to take place, particularly between rank-and-file members of different organisations. How prepared are we to call those who are not in our micro-party ‘comrade’? Do we write off whatever individual intervention they seek to make through silently ascribed labels like ‘Stalinist’, ‘Trotskyite’, and ‘revisionist’, before even hearing them speak? These questions are not posed to encourage an uncritical ‘left unity’ politics which merely dresses up the repression of quiet sectarianism in an equally outmoded garb. Our disagreements are good not in and of themselves, but because they are moments in a potentially positive process which can only unfold by facilitating their dissolution. How we do this is easily imaginable to any reader: by erecting new forums for democratic discussion. So long as we remain fractured and splintered, we dumb down our strategic intelligence and weaken our organisational power.
Acknowledging these points has resulted in talk of a ‘new left party’. For example, The Collective is attempting to organise the mostly spontaneous rise of leftist independent candidates from the last general election into a left social-democratic party to challenge the British working-class’s most debilitating chronic illness: The Labour Party. As the forces of left social-democracy gather speed, revolutionaries (i.e socialists who oppose the bourgeois state along with Capital itself) must ask themselves an important question: On what footing should a new party be placed? Or, put differently, do we feel like doing Corbynism v2?
The temptation towards the latter option is real. In lieu of the necessary forces to assert themselves as a viable option nationally, and potentially prevented from generating a mass base due to long-standing feuds with the other larger Marxist groups, the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) will likely join in support of a new social-democratic initiative, just as they joined in with Corbynism. (Their support for left social-democracy is essentially the basis of their strategy for socialist revolution, as laid out in their ‘Britain’s Road to Socialism’). I could see most Trotskyists joining also, as most of their organisations lack a programme and won’t think of anything better to do, though I’d happily be proven wrong on this prediction. And yet, despite there being no small number of revolutionary socialists, more than enough to construct a new revolutionary party to act as a counterweight on the bourgeois parties of the left and right, we are so tied to our tiny fiefdoms mistrust for one another that we take the easier option, refusing to find our way to a shared program, acquiescing to try and sate our hunger with the crumbs that fall from the table of bourgeois politics. This is justified by the various communist groups under the nominal pretext of radicalising these movements’ rank-and-file, like we’re some scuba squadron of secret agents. Ultimately, however, we are more like children who, exhausted by play-fighting and rendered docile by lullabies, fall into the arms of our parents to be carried wherever they choose. This slumber has remained for so long that we estimate it as our prime fighting strength. Our marginalisation, created by reluctance to unite around a common revolutionary programme capable of marrying our various stripes, becomes self-imposed, and our fear of isolation from the workers’ movement, by doing so, deepens.
To be clear, I am not advocating renunciation of entryist tactics under certain conditions, but such work is only worth doing if the rank-and-file can be helpfully moved into something different and better than the movement we are trying to pull them away from! So long as we forestall such a project, we are inviting them into a dilapidated mansion, whose oppressive dust compels most who enter to quickly seek the exit, only then to puzzle as to why people don’t stay longer.
If we don’t become serious about forming a new party for revolutionary republican socialists, united around a programme reflective of this outlook, we will be subordinated and directed by state loyalists, who will continue to defang the workers’ movement by obscuring its ultimate goal. Activists will be pushed into electoral campaigning without any attention paid as to how to place class-struggle on the agenda (an expression of “parliamentary cretinism” to use Marx’s own vocabulary: a fetish whose deleterious fruits bloom so abundantly in the British political psyche). Without agitation along these lines, being a revolutionary signifies no more than wanting the very nicest reforms social democracy can offer, a sort of social-democrat+, rather than a distinct political method born from understanding Capital and the state’s fundamental interrelatedness and coextensive powers of domination.
British society has a problem with democracy, but so does the radical left. We cannot be so superior in our feelings that we rule out the possibility of the former contaminating the latter. Charting a new course begins, necessarily, with a process of merging as many of our forces as possible under the banner of a new communist party, united around a revolutionary programme and in possession of a constitution enshrining the democratic aspirations of the communists into its policies and functional structures. Our clearest historical example of this is the unification process that led to the original CPGB, but this project requires two distinguishing features if it has any hope of longevity and success:
- A thoroughgoing emphasis on social oppressions that communists have, not ubiquitously but nevertheless too often, failed to recognise as important areas of political struggle requiring not only rigorous analysis (significant portions of the Marxist left demonstrate this ability quite satisfactorily), but concrete policies for deconstructing the material and ideological bases for these oppressions’ reproduction. For those of us who bemoan the lack of diversity among Marxist forces, it may be worth considering to what degree a lack of politics is to blame for this (you can have the a very good analysis of the world, but that comes to nought if such analysis doesn’t translate into actual demands and an effective plan for their realisation).
- We need to develop our movement by working through and mending the ideological fissures created by the last century of socialist states. The fact that most Trotskyists and Marxist-Leninists will assume from this statement that some sort of line struggle has to take place where we all get together at some big ol’ congress and vote on whether the USSR, or China, or Cuba was socialist during a particular date range only shows how far we have to go. This communist merger must develop a future-oriented politics. It would be unrealistic to assume that our theoretical differences will not lead to meaningful divergences on matters of the day, but such divergences cannot be productively debated with lazy recourse to tired epithets from an era now behind us. One thing those of us organising across organisations tend to learn is that we often have more in common with members of other organisations on certain issues than we do with members of our own. We must learn from this that a priori dismissive attitudes towards one another based merely on organisational affiliations or ideological alliances preclude proper democracy’s flourishing in our movement, further stalling our development. At the moment, the maturity of our movement can be measured by our ability to develop a programme that can include various theoretical outlooks, one that does not, importantly, prescribe ‘iron-clad’ tactics by which our goals are to be pursued.
The various revolutionary ‘parties’ attribute their lack of numbers to certain objective forces in the working-class, such as racism, reformism, and the capture of trade unions by bureaucrats. Doing this, they conflate cause and effect, for each of our movement’s problems have histories showing the opportunist suppression of democracy a key culprit; our lack of a plan creates a power vacuum within our class that reactionaries of various persuasions are more than happy to fill. These ideologies are not to be phased out after a worker’s revolution, because their eradication is a precondition for such a revolution to occur. Comrades sometimes take the Russian revolution as their example, but have taken some of its best lessons and distorted them. Most of them have immortalised the 1921 faction ban, enshrining it as a positive new development for ‘democratic-centralism’, rather than seeing it for what it was: a temporary concession made for the overall preservation of the revolution at the expense of democracy in the midst of a bitter civil war. They have taken Lenin’s ‘professional revolutionary’ concept to sanctify elections of central committees who barely have to answer to the rank-and-file of their own parties, let alone socialists outside of them. Again, Lenin’s point here is almost entirely decontextualised; ‘professional revolutionary’ is made a transhistorical role whose definition remains the same throughout all moments of the revolutionary movement, rather than a flexible one whose responsibilities will naturally ebb and shift according to the needs of the struggle at any given moment. From What is to be Done? they also take the need for a party newspaper, but portray its sale as a good in and of itself; the newspaper, or any media infrastructure developed for the communist movement, is good only insofar as it works as a “collective organiser” for the movement and the party’s members, who are brought into writing for and distributing it to the working-class, providing them with a common vocabulary and counter-hegemonic discourse. Our comrades in the party-sects forget even this, let alone that the All-Russian newspaper proposed by Lenin was a specific intervention made to aid the generalisation of the workers’ struggle nationally. Most of the party-sects pretend to be inheritors of Iskra and Pravda but don’t dare to conduct debates between their members nor with members of other organisations, preferring to reiterate what so many of us already know (capital is evil; the British government is staffed by imperialist ghouls; the far-right is gathering a troubling momentum), rather than risk going out on a limb and producing strategic proposals and publicising their reception and interpretation. Obviously, we must be well-informed about the daily shifts in the political landscape, but this is presently crowding out considerations on how we enhance our forces and take the political initiative.
It is unsurprising that many within the sects don’t see how silly they look. According to them, the most advanced workers are in their party and nowhere else. Maybe they’re not organised into any party yet, but never in a million years could they be in any other organisation, as membership over there can only mean that they are irretrievably confused on the most basic questions. And so these comrades carry on this way, denouncing the government but seldom interrogating their own practices, rarely calling for anything but a ‘left movement’ or ‘united front’, and certainly never addressing the most burning question occupying the minds of the most active and advanced workers: where is the new mass party, who is calling for it, and what should its character be? They repress this debate because it implicates them, opens them up to criticism, and asks why their band plays to the trade unionists of middling consciousness rather than to the communists.
It is in this vacuum that publications like Prometheus have intervened with their ‘What is the Party’ series. One may agree or disagree with the views expressed by the particular contributors to the series, but the attempt to create an open forum for debate among members of the socialist movement on the party question is vital for our movement, and all contributors should be applauded for their service to contemporary communist politics in Britain. It is only a shame that the series did not receive more contributions from both leaders and ordinary members of the larger sects, who were given an open platform to justify their current strategy.
The Problem To Which I am Speaking…
Is one facing specifically the revolutionary Marxist left. We must dispose of the false dichotomy between the discussion of a ‘left party’ and the construction of a new communist party. This distinction frames Dave Kellaway’s argument in his article ‘Towards a New Broad Party?’. For Kellaway, the primary error of socialists throughout recent decades has been our dogged insistence on differentiating ourselves from the bourgeois parties by demanding that the working-class build an independent organisation founded on Marxist principles. His strategic preference would be for a new party in the mould of the French Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) and other European initiatives, which could encompass the revolutionaries and the reformists, or, more accurately, fold revolutionary politics into the reformist mould. For Kellaway, a mass communist party aiming to clarify working-class politics to the point where the whole class can wage a revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie is a utopian (and undesirable) fantasy. Those of us wanting to convince people to take down the state and replace it with one favouring the international working-class, would do much better than collapsing into the electoral work of anti-austerity, ‘social-ish’ candidates, and, while we’re at it, “set aside” theoretical questions whose answers the vast majority of workers have little to no acquaintance with. The party should be democratic insofar as it allows people to express their opinions, without going so far as to allow factions devoted to alterations in programme and strategy.
It is high time for us to remember that the left/right distinction is an inadequate framing of political matters, and the distinction between revolution and reform is qualitative in the purest sense. Lumping ourselves into left or right both unhelpfully ontologically fixes political feelings which are contingent, conjunctural, and mutable, as well as obscures an absolute contradiction in politics between state loyalists and revolutionary republicans. That revolutionaries critical of the reformist line are insurrectionaries who will settle for nothing less than armed uprising is a caricature spread by the working-class’s enemies, one that shrouds our call for a mass communist party opposing the state and whose tactics are directed towards its capture in the interest of democracy. Contrary to the rhetoric of the ‘left unity at all costs’ crowd, we accept that we do not currently ‘all want the same things’; some of us wish to ease the burden of working-class life by raising wages and introducing rent controls and wait for the capitalists to take these reforms away, while others want to reorganise political life so that society becomes a product of the oppressed’s own making, which can only come about once Capital’s foothold on the polity is permanently and decisively loosened. That is why, for my money, the most useful descriptor for revolutionary communists in Britain would be ‘Communist-Republican’. This word’s very use immediately and automatically demarcates between those wanting to cede political control to the capitalists, monarchy, and aristocracy and those who wish to establish a new state founded on an entirely new political psychology, using forms novel to our history.
Some weeks ago, I was chatting with a colleague of mine, an unorganised cleaner. We were talking about the state of Britain and the way our class is treated, and right out of nowhere, she says: “The thing I don’t understand about Britain is why we accept it. If this were going on in other places, they would kick off and just have a revolution, but people here just take it lying down…” . We can even look as near as France and Ireland to see the difference that republicanism can make among a populace in its struggle (though our republic would need to be of a different sort). British culture and values, the type the far-right and Tories are always harping on about, is one of boot-licking, complacent acceptance of injustice, along with divided loyalties between class and nation (Nietzsche would blush). We must accept how workers racialised as white are particularly susceptible and afflicted with this ideological rot, as their political identity is raised on a diet of chimaeras extolling a stoic monarchy who cares for the British public and a tendency to project their suffering under Capital onto marginalised groups. The socialist movement has never really done enough to divorce itself from this ideology, maybe because it seems too difficult, maybe because the development of capitalism in Britain did lead to the lion’s share of political power being in the hands of the accumulators of capital and not the landed aristocracy. Either way, it has led to a narrow conception of socialism as a purely economic system, one that can exist alongside the feudal vestiges that continually ratify and legitimise our backwards political system. We revolutionaries speak of a clean break with the bourgeois state not because we relish conflict, but because we know our arrival at democracy depends upon a battle which is intrinsically republican in nature. This new psychology contains the seeds of solidarity with the peoples of all nations, importantly, in the British context, with the Irish, who struggled under the yoke of the British ruling class, both aristocratic and bourgeois, for many hundreds of years, and on whose allyship we will be compelled to depend in the event of a revolutionary overthrow.
This is not to suggest that revolutionaries should not work at all with left-reformists in order to attain certain reforms, but the prevailing state loyalism and complacency around our undemocratic society upon which reformism rests can and must be eroded through the concerted efforts of the communists. Kellaway himself spends the first half of his article explaining how the voting system in Britain is entirely broken and cannot allow for new parties to emerge to represent working-class interests. Very good, but how he leaps from this point to imploring communists to let go of their most essential differences with the state loyalists and form an electoral coalition in a system he has only just admitted is undemocratic is entirely beyond me. Do we think the opportunist Green, Labour, and Independent candidates who rode into power without arguing against the state will suddenly be compelled to espouse republicanism once they’ve acquired their expense accounts? Would it not be better for any party whose efforts the revolutionaries devote their energies to allow revolutionaries to alter that party’s ideology via democratic means? I point comrades to the seventh point of his article’s ‘Key Considerations’ section:
Once the basic principles are agreed, debate going beyond that – the sort of discussions a revolutionary Marxist party would have needs to be set aside. Otherwise you have a continual debate like we had in Left Unity around programme and workers militias. This is one of the most difficult things to manage. If you have an open democratic party it is difficult to stop revolutionary currents joining but how do you stop their ‘raids’ and endless propagandizing?
So, in other words, freedom of criticism of reformist politics can be left at the door. We can leave to one side the cynical assumption that revolutionary groups seek only to “raid”, as it seems above Kellaway to assume in good faith that revolutionary groups can and do associate with mass movements in good faith as part of the organised class. “The sort of discussions a revolutionary Marxist party would have need to be set aside.” Are discussions around the programme and the workers’ militia beneath the British working-class all of a sudden? Comrade Kellaway’s position is clear: revolutionary politics are something to be “managed” by the broader (reformist) left, a necessary evil, a bad ex whose drunk texts the new broad party can ignore without blocking the number. I encourage readers to simply pause for a moment on the patent absurdity of the call for “a broad class struggle party and not a revolutionary Marxist one”. Considering Marxism is succinctly (though not comprehensively) definable as the systematic analysis and implementation of class-struggle, the idea of sacrificing Marxism at the altar of a theoretically obscure ‘class-struggle’ party seems to me more than a boggling confusion of terms. It is a recipe for a permanent puzzling of the will, and grunting and sweating under a weary life towards ends not of our choosing.
We should acknowledge the limitations and contradictions of the ‘Network Left’ that Harry Holmes critiques in his article, but repeat its organisational errors nonetheless. After all, is it not better to “bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of”. Holmes is a revolutionary Marxist and makes the argument for a democratic mass party not out of a conflation born from oversight but from an understanding of the principles upon which a sustainable and substantive unity might be reached. The party’s ambition should not be the effective organisation of the people by a few left functionaries, but to turn the people themselves into organisers. Holmes’ intention is made abundantly clear in the statement:
“Only by uniting Marxist forces from the existing far-left and those spread to the winds by Corbynism behind a socialist programme will we be able to whip such an organisation into shape – to make it provide the functions we mean when we say ‘the party’”.
And if this is still a little obtuse to the reader, this point is substantiated in Andreas Chari’s concise elucidation of the “functions” such a party should perform. It is clear that Kellaway is the biggest fan of democracy in this proposed broad left party, up until communists subvert the democracy by asking for freedom of speech, campaigning, and voting power for members to adjust the left party’s line from one of state-loyalist left reformism to one of socialist republicanism. Any organisation that calls the democratic process “endless propagandizing” has already given up on the working-class’s self-emancipation, and must resort to bureaucratic, conciliatory broad-frontism to hush up such a glaring apparency.
The effect of this broad-frontism ceding power to the reformists and state loyalists is felt in Kellaway’s thoroughly contradictory call for this new party to enshrine “a broad acceptance of eco-socialism” as one of its guiding principles. We must understand in no uncertain terms that any discussion of eco-socialism is entirely useless and politically impotent so long as it shies away from discussing the class character of the British state and its role as a general administrator for neocolonial imperialism alongside other powers across the Global North. How might this party go about bringing this knowledge to the British working class without declaring an open engagement with the Marxist tradition? I, for one, can barely imagine it. It is not that we lack socialism because we’ve failed to put the rightly enlightened group into office; the problem goes far deeper than that. Our legal system is undemocratic because it is grounded in ad hoc precedent. We cannot begin to imagine a new and sustainable economic future for Britain and the world until we declare this system to be our political enemy and argue for its replacement with a democratically determinable and modifiable constitution, ratified after extensive consultation with the British people. That is a democratic republic, and that is the only political form through which socialism can be reached.
I will conclude by saying that it seems the forces calling for a ‘Broad Left Party’ are not likely to abate at any point soon, but Kellaway, as a representative of this trend, only exemplifies why revolutionaries are correct in their suspicions towards the reformist crowd who cry ‘left unity’ and ‘broad church’. So, in the face of this reality, communists everywhere must commit themselves to a new orientation that emphasises our unity in contradistinction to this sort of opportunism, and express this by initiating and continuing the various processes towards a unification based on a political programme upon whose basis we can agitate, develop tactics, and recruit new members. So long as we lack such an institution, our affiliation with a broad ‘left’ party merely marks a symptom of our fragmentation. For revolutionaries, putting the cart before the horse on this vital organisational question guarantees our being ushered down a path to which we should bear no allegiance, carrying the potential of a revolutionary subject along with us.
