Why does the working class need a revolutionary party?

New to Marxism: Session 6 of 6

Programme, organisation and the fight for a revolutionary International

The working class has the power to overthrow capitalism. But possessing that power is not the same as being organised and politically prepared to use it.

Strikes, protests and uprisings can transform people’s ideas with extraordinary speed. They can also remain divided, accept inadequate compromises or be defeated at decisive moments. The capitalist class possesses not only wealth and a state, but experienced political parties, professional strategists and institutions that preserve its rule from one crisis to the next.

Workers need their own political organisation: one that brings together the lessons of past struggles, develops a programme for power and unites revolutionaries in common action. That is the purpose of a revolutionary party.

What you will learn

• Why spontaneous struggle does not automatically produce a strategy for socialist victory.
• How a revolutionary party should relate to the working class and its mass organisations.
• Why revolutionary organisation requires a programme, democratic centralism and an International.

Struggle does not automatically produce strategy

Workers learn through struggle. A strike can reveal the common interests hidden by competition between individuals. A campaign can expose the bias of the press, the police or the courts. A mass uprising can create democratic organisations and make demands that previously seemed impossible.

But experience does not teach everyone the same lesson. One worker may conclude that collective action can change society; another that the same struggle failed because it went too far. Different sections of the class enter struggle with different traditions, organisation and confidence. Defeats can produce passivity as well as reflection, while victories can strengthen reformist leaders who claim the system has proved capable of change.

The ideas of the ruling class are also reproduced every day through education, the media, religion, the workplace and parliamentary politics. Capitalism presents wage labour, private property, national competition and the existing state as the natural limits of social life. Workers can resist particular effects of the system while continuing to accept these limits.

Economic struggle alone does not answer political questions: who should rule, what should replace the capitalist state, how can oppression inside the class be overcome, and how should workers respond to imperialist war? The answers have to be developed by combining living experience with the accumulated theory and history of the international workers’ movement.

Without an organisation able to do this, each generation is forced to begin again. The lessons of one strike remain in one workplace; the experience of one movement disappears as its activists disperse. A revolutionary party acts as the memory of the class, preserving what has been learnt and applying it to new conditions.

The need for leadership

Every struggle faces decisions. Should a strike escalate or accept an offer? Should a movement rely on parliament or organise direct action? Which demands can unite it, and which alliances will weaken its independence?

Someone will argue for each course and organise others around it. A movement may reject formal leaders, but that does not abolish leadership. It often leaves influence in the hands of informal networks, public figures or people with the most time, confidence and access to information. Leaders who cannot be elected or removed are less accountable, not more democratic.

The real question is which class interests and strategy a leadership represents, how it is selected and whether those it leads can control it. Reformist leaders seek gains through negotiation and the existing state. Their strategy repeatedly leads them to restrict struggles when these threaten their relationships with employers, officials or parliamentary parties.

Revolutionary leadership cannot be established by proclamation. A party wins authority by being the most consistent fighter for the interests of workers and the oppressed: participating in their organisations, proposing a course of action, warning honestly about dangers and proving its ideas in practice. It must say openly what it wants and be prepared to have its record judged.

The party does not substitute for class

The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself. No party, however disciplined or well informed, can seize power on behalf of millions of people and call the result socialism.

A revolutionary party is a voluntary political organisation based on agreement with a programme. Trade unions, strike committees and workers’ councils have a different function. They seek to organise broad masses of workers, including people who support different parties or no party at all. In a revolutionary crisis, councils of elected and recallable delegates can become the basis of a new state and exercise working-class power.

The party fights within these mass organisations to win support for its programme. It seeks a majority through argument and common experience, not administrative control. Its aim is workers’ power, not the substitution of party rule for workers’ democracy.

Stalinism reversed this relationship. A bureaucratic party-state suppressed workers’ councils, political debate and opposition while claiming to govern in the workers’ name. That was not the completion of Bolshevism but the destruction of the workers’ democracy on which the Russian Revolution had been based.

Rejecting substitution does not mean treating the party as an observer. At decisive moments, different political organisations will fight to lead the same councils and movements in opposing directions. A revolutionary party must be ready to argue for a clear course, organise support for it and take responsibility for leadership when it wins the confidence of the majority.

What does ‘vanguard’ mean?

The word vanguard is sometimes taken to mean a self-appointed elite that believes it is always right. For Marxists it should mean something very different: the organised section of the working class and oppressed that has drawn the most advanced conclusions from struggle and is committed to winning others to them.

The vanguard is not a fixed social group. New people move to the front through strikes, movements and political crises; experienced activists can retreat, become conservative or make serious mistakes. A revolutionary party must continually recruit, educate and learn from emerging militants.

It brings people from different workplaces and movements into one organisation. This allows a health worker to learn from a tenants’ struggle, an anti-racist organiser to influence a trade-union dispute, and lessons from one city or country to shape action elsewhere. Local experience becomes collective strategy.

Theory is essential to this process. It enables revolutionaries to recognise deeper forces that are not immediately visible and compare the present with previous struggles. But theory is not a set of finished answers imposed on reality. It must be tested, corrected and developed through practice.

Why the party needs a programme

A revolutionary programme explains the character of the society we are fighting, the goal of the struggle and the means of reaching it. It connects immediate demands to the fight for workers’ power.

It is more than a statement of principles or a list of desirable reforms. It must answer concrete strategic questions. How can workers take control of their disputes? How can united action be combined with political independence? Which demands challenge capitalist ownership? What forms of organisation could become organs of workers’ power?

The programme brings the different struggles discussed throughout this course into a common perspective. Exploitation cannot be ended without workers taking power. Workers cannot take power while divided by oppression or tied to imperialist rulers. Climate breakdown cannot be overcome within competing national economies. None of these problems can be solved by reforming the capitalist state.

A common programme allows members to act as one organisation rather than a collection of individual campaigners. It provides a basis for deciding tactics, measuring results and correcting errors. It is neither an infallible text nor something reinvented whenever a new movement appears. It develops through the interaction of Marxist theory, historical experience and present struggle.

Democracy and unity in action

A revolutionary organisation needs the fullest internal democracy. Members must have the right to receive information, debate policy, criticise leaders, propose alternatives, organise around differences and elect or replace the leadership. Minorities do not have to abandon their views after losing a vote; they must be able to continue arguing for them through the organisation’s democratic procedures.

Once a decision has been reached, members act together to carry it out. Otherwise the organisation cannot intervene coherently or discover whether its policy works. Collective action makes responsibilities clear: successes and failures can be assessed, leaders held to account and decisions changed in the light of experience.

This is democratic centralism. Its democracy and centralism depend on each other. Centralism without members’ control produces an unaccountable bureaucracy. Discussion without common action leaves decisions untested and allows informal cliques or prominent individuals to escape responsibility.

Party discipline should therefore be conscious and voluntary, arising from political agreement and participation in decisions. It is not blind obedience to a permanent leadership. No member or leadership is infallible, and an organisation that cannot identify and correct its mistakes will eventually be broken by them.

Building before the crisis

Revolutionary situations can develop with remarkable speed. But the organisation needed to act in one cannot be improvised after it has begun. Trust between members, roots in the working class, political knowledge, tested leaders and a common tradition of action all take time to build.

This preparation happens in everyday struggles. Revolutionaries organise in their workplaces, unions and campaigns; produce propaganda and agitation; recruit and educate new members; and learn how to connect local activity to national and international politics. The Workers Power newspaper and website, together with the books published by Prinkipo, provide scaffolding for this work by spreading ideas, connecting experience and preserving the movement’s lessons. They cannot substitute for an organisation of active people.

Membership is an active commitment, but not a test of how much somebody already knows or a demand that everyone do everything immediately. People develop through education, mentoring and collective experience. Responsibilities will reflect their circumstances and capacity, while the shared direction is towards becoming organised activists able to explain the party’s politics, intervene in struggle, recruit others and take responsibility for its work.

Workers Power does not pretend that it is already the mass revolutionary party the working class needs. We are building an organisation that can contribute to creating it: through political education, disciplined activity, participation in the class struggle and principled regroupment with other revolutionaries.

Why we need a revolutionary International

Capitalism is a world system. Production crosses borders, imperialist powers organise internationally and a crisis in one country rapidly affects others. Workers are divided into national states, but their fundamental interests are shared.

A workers’ revolution may begin in one country, but it cannot complete the transition to socialism in isolation. It will face the world market, economic pressure and counter-revolution from abroad. Its survival depends on workers extending the revolution and replacing rivalry between states with international socialist planning.

Internationalism therefore requires more than solidarity statements or occasional coordination between national organisations. Revolutionaries need a common international programme, democratic institutions, shared strategic debate and coordinated action. Different conditions require different tactics, but national sections should learn from one another and be accountable to a common world organisation.

The history of the First four Internationals contains immense achievements as well as defeats, degeneration and collapse. No organisation today can simply proclaim itself the finished revolutionary International or treat one national tradition as infallible.

Workers Power is part of the International Socialist League. Through common organisation and action, political clarification and principled debate, we seek to build revolutionary parties in every country and the world party of socialist revolution the working class needs.

Key terms

• Class consciousness: workers’ understanding of their shared interests as a class, their relationship to capitalist society and their capacity to transform it.
• Vanguard: the organised section of workers and the oppressed that has drawn advanced conclusions from struggle and seeks to win the majority to them.
• Revolutionary programme: a connected strategy of aims, demands and methods that links present struggles to workers’ power and socialism.
• Democratic centralism: full democratic debate and members’ control combined with unity in carrying out collectively agreed decisions.
• Revolutionary cadre: a member developed through theory and practical experience to analyse events, organise others and take political responsibility.
• Revolutionary International: a democratic world party uniting national revolutionary organisations around a common programme and action.

Read and discuss

For a group session, everyone should read this guide and at least one of the two short introductory readings.

Start here

• Workers Power, Why we need a revolutionary party — how uneven consciousness, programme and leadership made the party decisive in the Russian Revolution.
• Workers Power, Where we stand: sections 11 and 12 — our principles on the revolutionary party, democratic centralism and the International.

Go deeper

• Workers Power, B is for Bolshevism — a short account of Bolshevik organisation, party democracy and the struggle against Stalinism.
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party: ‘Proletarians and Communists’ — especially the opening paragraphs on the relationship between communists and the working class as a whole.
• V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, chapter IV — Lenin’s argument for an organisation capable of uniting scattered local struggles into a political challenge to the whole system.

Questions for discussion

1. Why does working-class struggle not automatically produce revolutionary consciousness or strategy?
2. Why does rejecting formal leadership often leave informal leadership unaccountable?
3. What is the difference between a revolutionary party and a workers’ council or trade union?
4. How does a programme help a party connect different struggles and test its actions?
5. Why do democracy and centralism require each other?
6. Why is a federation of separate national parties insufficient for socialist revolution?

Activity: find the system behind the crisis

Choose a recent strike, campaign or mass movement. Identify the main organisations and political leaderships within it, the decisions that determined its direction and the lessons participants were able to draw.

Then discuss what a revolutionary party would need to do before, during and after the struggle. What programme or demands should it advance? What forms of democratic organisation should it help build? How should its members decide and coordinate their intervention? What connections should it make with other struggles and with workers internationally?

Where next?

This course has introduced the basic case for Marxism and revolutionary organisation. The next step is to study the politics more systematically, test them against current struggles and decide what part you can play.

Read Where we stand for Workers Power’s principles and continue into the more detailed study guides. If you broadly agree and want to turn those ideas into collective activity, organise with Workers Power.

You do not need to know everything before getting involved. You need the willingness to learn, discuss honestly and act alongside others.