Our aim is a democratic centralist party that unites all Marxists who are disloyal to the constitutional order behind a democratically agreed programme. This party should have a democratic-republican structure and culture, including freedom of speech, the right to form factions, and discipline over elected officials. It must form part of an international organisation capable of challenging the rule of capital. This will allow us to build a “state within a state” to allow us to challenge for power in the long run.

Barriers

With a clear understanding of our aim we can now approach what stands in our way.  The path to a communist party requires us to go through the existing left to some extent. Attempting to skirt around this simply results in creating another sect.

How we get through the existing left requires breaking apart the existing common sense. This common sense manifests itself in myriad ways:

• Seeking to appear “legitimate” to the bourgeois state; 
• Seeking unity with (in fact submission to) the “liberal/progressive/labour” section of the ruling class.
• A “not in front of the children” approach to disagreement.
• A refusal to accept or be in political minorities – defended on the grounds of not wanting to “waste time” on disagreements.
• Going to the class and refusing to think seriously about politics. Running around like blue-arsed flies.
• The “Network Left” orthodoxy – organising is something “we” do; horizontal-ism that results in unaccountable leaders; finding out necessary information by “knowing” people; dumbing down the wider movement.
• Constitutional loyalism
• Labourism – focus on stabilising capitalism; trade union bureaucracy dominance over the party; demands for the “here-and-now”; focusing politics on “old Labour” “the spirit of ‘45”.
• Sect-patriotism – allows bad practices in groups to persist; focus on being the “least bad”/“most democratic” sect.

There are many, many more.

Our aim should be breaking apart this common sense and constructing a democratic, republican, internationalist and revolutionary one in its place. This will be difficult. This common sense sustains the careers, social lives, and intellectual worlds of the vast majority of the organised and disorganised left. 

Strategies

We will fail if we limit ourselves to just condemning this common sense and its obvious shortcomings. We must engage with the Left as it exists and demonstrate that our common sense is better. That if our methods were common sense, we could finally break out of the routine we have been stuck in since the 80s of defensive struggles and demoralising defeats. 

Our politics, our view of organising, one that is democratic, that is republican, that is genuinely communist is effective and is capable of being genuinely popular and sustainable. Partyism can win over the existing left because it is better than the existing methods.

We must have the confidence of our convictions and organise openly as Partyists, as partisans of Marxist unity, wherever we are. In our unions, in our tenants associations, in climate action groups, in international solidarity work, and most crucially of all in the political organisations of the left, from Corbyn’s New Left Party to the smallest Trotskyist sect.

Usefully we are not starting from scratch. There is a model we can learn from. The Marxist Unity Group of the DSA, are objectively the most successful Partyist formation in the English speaking world in the last century. They have grown at a remarkable rate since the beginning of this decade and are now a significant force on the US left. 

We should take from them a clear commitment to politics and political education, while aiming to be the strongest fighters for the organisation as a whole. Similarly, our organisations should be, like the Marxist Unity Group, partyist in form, not simply in politics. This means things like term limits, recallability of leadership, encouraging the formation of factions and the open airing of disagreements, sharing of responsibilities, quality political education and much more. 

Partyism is effective because this democratic/republican method, that the Marxist Unity Group exemplifies, raises the level of politics and organisational skill amongst the membership. By contrast, the ideas that the left currently holds about organising/politics have the consequence of disorganising them and weakening their political understanding. This is a point that Mike Macnair has made before. Therefore, our ideas about organising should allow us to out-organise these comrades and prove them wrong. 

A principal barrier to the toppling of the common sense of the British left is the lack of a credible alternative. The Marxist Unity Group shows that partyism and Democratic Republicanism can be that credible alternative. It is up to us to prove this in Britain. It is insufficient to say that “our ideas are better” and then shrink as an organisation. That’s not going to work. Potential comrades will simply not take us seriously. If our ideas are logically sound, but the SWP are growing and we’re shrinking, these potential comrades will turn away from partyism, because the partyists are not offering a credible alternative.

The Marxist Unity Group organised themselves around seven key principles that took lines on the key fights within the Democratic Socialists of America. In Britain the fights are different. I would outline them as:

1. Organise for democracy – In our sects, parties, associations and unions we must fight for accountability of leadership, open discussion and debate, freedom of organisation, etc.
2. Unite behind a programme – The organised anti-constitutional left should seek to unite itself based on a democratically agreed programme.
3. Build a mass communist party – A mass membership, multi-tendency revolutionary party of the working class in Britain that is independent of capitalist influences is our immediate aim.
4. Demand a democratic republic – The working class must seize political power and build a democratic republic in order to establish socialism. We have to fight for democratic rights and freedoms as these are light and air to our movement.
5. Fight the main enemy at home – In the imperial core we must prioritise the fight against imperialism at home. We cannot become state loyalists.
6. No compromise with chauvinism – The working class is multifaceted, its experience is not uniform, we must challenge anyone that calls for the selling out of this or that section of the class in the name of “unity” or “power”.

These principles should guide our work. They should be the points that we wish to win the Left to and around which a new common sense can be built. 

Practicalities

I will now examine what this practically looks like in two different situations, the new New Left Party and the Sects.

The New Left Party has attracted hundreds of thousands of people in the first few weeks including many sects and independent communists. Partyists should aim to organise a faction, what we have termed a “Communist Caucus”, that works in and against the New Left Party to transform it into a revolutionary, internationalist, party of opposition i.e. a Communist Party. Building this Communist Caucus and transforming the New Left Party will likely take years. We must be in this fight for the long run. 

A key element of organising this Communist Caucus should be comprehensive and effective political education. We should follow the example of the Marxist Unity Group with their collection of programmatic essays titled, ‘Fight the Constitution: For a Democratic Republic’ that forms the backbone of their educational programme for members. Further, there is an excellent short piece by Medway Baker written shortly before the founding of the Marxist Unity Group that outlines what effective Marxist organising in New Left Parties looks like. This emerged from that comrade’s experience in the Canadian New Democratic Party, specifically the Socialist Caucus. They argue that comrades must have a comprehensive understanding of the formal rules of the organisation to be able to challenge the right, but they must also have clear politics, present an alternative within the organisation, and become effective communicators to win over the centre.

Once established, our Communist Caucus will likely lose battles before it wins them. We cannot use this as an excuse to disengage or retreat. We should analyse why we lost and what we must do to win next time. We will also need to pick our battles, prove our political intelligence, and win. There is little point getting bogged down in questions of the militia or socialist transition if the New Left Party doesn’t even have a programme and its leadership are unelected and unaccountable.

Therefore, our first focus should be on democratic structures (delegate conferences, recallability of elected officials) and programmatic unity (the principle that membership is based on agreement with a programme). We should focus on these points as winning here will make our other interventions more effective. We should not be looking to split off. If we are kicked out that’s a different story, but we should not be engaging in entryist membership raids.

When we are in the New Left Party we will encounter the other groups of the organised far left. We must have a plan for engaging with them. These comrades are part of the problem but also part of the solution. This is fundamentally true, attempting to go around them has failed time and again and just ends up building another sect or collapsing into ignominy. The sects organise hundreds if not thousands of comrades who would be needed in a new communist party. We cannot afford to ignore them.

The sects are quite varied in terms of structure and politics. Some, like rs21, are relatively democratic, politically all over the place, and have a youthful and inexperienced membership. Others are incredibly bureaucratic, politically rigid, and dominated by old timers. We will have a much easier time winning adherents to our politics in the first type of group, however even in the second type we can and should organise.

We must encourage those sympathetic to our ideas in the sects to stay and fight. They should try and build a faction (secret where necessary) and encourage those sympathetic to join. They should engage in a patient political struggle to democratise and open up their organisations fighting for better political education, public factions, and more democratic and accountable structures. An important area of focus will be political education. This is often weak or non-existent in many of these groups and gives you a platform to discuss different political ideas, sometimes with comrades from across the sect. Another reason for focusing on political education is that the comrades in the sects generally have an incredibly low level of political education and struggle to write/speak coherently about politics, tactics, and strategy. 

Partyism can win in the sects because, as I stated above, partyism provides comrades with a better political understanding and organisational method. 

In the long run, these factions can either convince their various sects to engage in regroupment or, if necessary, split off and form part of a new communist party (much like the original Communist Unity Group split from the Socialist Labour Party in 1920 to join the newly founded Communist Party of Great Britain).

To conclude, some practical tasks for those of us fighting for Marxist Unity. How do we take the project of a communist party forward? As I see it, there are four necessary actions:

1. Independent platforms and publications for debate 

We need our own partyist communications infrastructure independent of the New Left Party and the sects, so that we can discuss and debate our politics. It can also provide a fait accompli to sect leadership when they try to silence us, if there are existing publications with a wide readership which will publish our writings when they refuse. 

2. Fight for democracy and communist politics in the New Left Party 

We need to build a Communist Caucus in the New Left Party with the aim of winning it to our politics. We will have to pick our fights intelligently. Fight for democracy and a programme first and foremost. We cannot call them scabs and threaten to split the minute any section of our programme is ignored or overwritten. We are in it for the long haul

3. Organise factions within the sects

There are hundreds of potential communists in the sects. Many of them hold democratic, republican, and socialist ideas. Most understand that there is something deeply wrong with the way that the Left have been carrying on for the last half a century. We need to help them organise to transform their tedious and rigid sects into real organs of working-class politics and life.

4. Be in the movement 

The fundamental failure of the partyist movement in Britain over the last thirty years is that we have been so small and disorganised that it has been possible to completely ignore us. This is unacceptable. We have to be everywhere. We have to demonstrate that our methods are effective, and we need to win. Only through victory will we be able to begin breaking down the common sense on the left and building a new one based on democracy, republicanism, opposition to the bourgeois order and a clear commitment to communism.