Why is a revolutionary party necessary?

Submitted by Anon on 5 March, 2006 - 11:20

The most crucial lesson from the experience of class struggle over the past two hundred years is the need for a revolutionary workers' party. Workers need a permanent organisation around our general political aims, not just ad hoc coalitions that organise episodic actions and campaigns.

And this revolutionary workers' party must be very different from the "revolutionary" parties the Stalinists and their kitsch-Trotskyist imitators built during the twentieth century.

In a workers' revolution, politics dominates

A workers' revolution is different from other revolutions. Take the capitalist victory over feudalism. The capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) grew in the womb of feudalism, as part of a division of labour inside that social order. The working class remains a slave class right up to the point of taking power. Although capitalism creates the preconditions for workers to assume power (for example, by making production more socially-integrated), socialist revolution cannot take place without the conscious intervention of the mass of workers fighting for their own interests.

And yet the working class in capitalist society is saturated with ideas pumped into it by the ruling class. Ideological chains consolidate the economic chains that hold workers down. That is why the established labour movement, most of the time, in most countries, is stodgy, passive, and unrevolutionary.

As Lenin put it, "Without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement". Without a persistent, long-term fight for Marxism, even the bravest would-be revolutionaries will end up adapting to the broad labour movement and (in the final analysis) to capitalism. And it has to be an organised fight, linked to political action - not just a matter of individual revolutionaries reading Marxist books or attending university courses.

The fight for Marxism is a fight to build a political party around a definite programme. To fuse the spontaneous movement of workers with the theory that represents its long term interests, we must first organise the most class conscious in a party that is clear about its ideas.

Most workers, most of the time, are bowed down by the daily pressures of life in capitalist society. They are not politically active. They do not get to read and discuss much. To one degree or another, they let the constant barrage of bourgeois ideas around them dominate their lives. Even if they envisage a better society, they see it as something for the distant future.

The mass of the working class can only approach revolutionary consciousness in sharp periods of crisis and struggle. And even then, not permanently. With defeats and disappointments, or even just loss of momentum (as in France in 1968), revolutionary self-confidence can ebb quickly.

The party is the long-term, year-in-year-out, bad-times-and-good activist force which keeps socialist ideas alive and fresh, acts as "the memory of the class", and tries to ensure that when workers do rise in mass struggle they will find socialist ideas on offer, and not just the leadership of demagogues like Khomeini in Iran.

Does the working class need leaders?

People have different levels of training, different experiences, different degrees of drive. A revolutionary party aspires to function as the leadership of the class.

Within the party (albeit on a higher level) we also see this unevenness. We see differences in consciousness, political understanding and commitment to preparing for the proletarian revolution: certain people embody the consciousness, the drive, the organisational propensities necessary to the party. And there is a "hierarchy" down to the level of local branches and committees.
Even in groups such as the anarchists where leadership is supposedly despised, particular individuals dominate, either generally or in special fields of work.

Socialists in the Bolshevik tradition recognise this. We know specialisation and concentration develop people. No matter how much anarchists protest, history shows the need for a revolutionary party organised in a disciplined, structured way. There is no "elitism" here. Socialist politics require study and experience, like any other serious work. The revolutionary party aspires to lead struggles, not because it claims any privileges, but because it organises its members and committees to work at gaining that study and experience.

We don't need leadership? Then you are saying that the working class ripens automatically. All we have to do is wait for it. This approach has one fatal flaw, if no other. If the Marxists build no structured ongoing organisations, and limit ourselves to ad hoc coalitions, the reformists, demagogues and Stalinists will not follow our example. All we will achieve is to leave the field to them.

Some look at the last hundred years and say that the fact workers have been defeated shows that conditions are still "immature" for socialism. That distorts history by confusing and reversing cause and effect. Workers have not failed to take power because capitalism contains within itself hidden seeds of future development protected by some guardian god even when capitalism was on its knees. During the great convulsions of capitalism, in the 1920s and 30s for example, workers in many countries rebelled, and could well have been victorious had it not been for the politics of their own leaders. Having survived, capitalism does not stand still. It develops. But its survival was not guaranteed in advance.

What is democratic centralism?

A combat party cannot have dead wood. Its function is to prepare, organise and fight the class struggle. It is an army on the march. It must respond to events with speed and decisiveness. That is what we mean by "democratic centralism".

The central leadership, democratically elected and controlled, must be in charge. As the highest active consciousness, its directives are binding. To be effective it must know exactly what resources it has - and where. If not it can't test its political line in practice.

At the same time, only an organisation with a fully active membership can be consistently democratic. Look at the average trade union branch. Some members are active while the majority do little. The leadership is in charge by default and often self-perpetuating. It can manipulate passive members.

After the revolution in Russia, Lenin proposed a shortening of the working day (regardless of its economic impact) because he saw long work hours as a big pressure on the self-activity of the masses. Only those who are serious about socialism, who organise their lives around the single purpose of fighting for and with the class, can be effective revolutionary socialists. It is a hard logic, but one imposed by an equally hard reality: We must rise above and overcome accommodation to capitalist pressures.

Members who are fighting actively know that every turn and twist and lapse of the leadership of their organisation has a direct bearing on themselves. They will be compelled, as they value their party and its work, to keep everything under review, to decide, to take a position on every issue, to change the leadership when it fails. In that active revolutionary vigilance lies the basic guarantee of democracy.

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