By Jeremy Dewar
The building of a mass Marxist party is the principal task of revolutionary communists today, as it has been for nearly 100 years. That fact alone makes clear how difficult the task is, and we thank Prometheus for hosting this useful, frank discussion on the question. We will set out below what we think are the fundamental principles that should guide us in working towards its solution, and what the first steps are that we need to take.
First, a preliminary point, while the goal is the building of a mass working class party capable of overthrowing and replacing the bourgeois state, all experience confirms that such a party will develop through a succession of stages: beginning with what we refer to as an ‘ideological current’ whose task is to establish the basic analysis of society, the key elements of the class struggle and the perspectives for the working class in that context; then a ‘propaganda group’ that begins the work of developing that analysis into a programme by engaging with workers’ struggles; building in time a ‘cadre party’ that has recruited to that programme a significant layer of workers with real roots in the class struggle; and, finally, the ‘mass revolutionary party’ that has the leadership of the workers’ organisations, which is only possible in conditions of social crisis.
While acknowledging the dangers of bureaucratic centralism and the reproduction of bourgeois forms of managerial and social oppression, we will advance some solutions to overcoming these problems. We will elaborate on our method of regroupment, which we also see as essential as opposed to the ‘We are the party, come and join us’ approach.
That having been said, we will try to establish the scope of the programme that the party we are trying to bring into existence needs, why it needs to be an international programme and therefore an International, in the tradition of the first four Internationals. Looking at the content of the programme, we will reiterate the lessons drawn by Marx, Engels and Lenin that this must culminate in the smashing of the bourgeois state machinery and its replacement by a semi-state, representing the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this context, we wish to pose the significance of the transitional programme over and above the minimum-maximum programme, which is not abolishedbut transcended.
Why the new International?
No mode of production is superseded until it is exhausted, nor can it be replaced unless a new mode of production can offer humanity a higher and more sustainable standard of living. Since capitalism, almost from its inception, is an international system, so must socialism be international. The imperialist epoch has, from the 1890s onwards, integrated the whole world into its market, making even the starting point in the fight for socialism an international question.
Marx and Engels recognised this in their work both in the Communist Leagues and in the First International (IWMA), and Engels in the launch of the Second (Socialist) International. Lenin and Trotsky continued this tradition into the imperialist epoch, adding to the work of their predecessors the struggle for unity around a revolutionary programme. Indeed, each International added a new element in the struggle for unity: the Communist Leagues, the declaration of proletarian internationalism and independence; the IWMA, international coordination and solidarity; the Second, the fight for mass parties and unions, utilising bourgeois democracy and the struggle against imperialist war; the Communist International, the codification of programme and the struggle for world revolution; the Fourth, the struggle against bureaucratic and imperialist degeneration (Stalinism and fascism) and shifting the focus of revolution from the imperialist heartlands to the whole world (permanent revolution). We sorely need a new International and simple maths dictates it will be the Fifth, though we make no fetish of this.
The negative proof of the need for an International is the enormous pressure to succumb to national-centredness, which is always present but accentuated in parties that effectively have no International, and therefore, in the inverse of Marx’s dictum, only their fatherland. This is the source of their ‘state loyalism’, as Andreas Chari puts it. An obvious example today would be the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL), which has never knowingly taken a position contrary to the interests of British imperialism.
But it has also sadly been a staple of the contributions in the debate in the pages of Prometheus. The starting place for the construction of a mass Marxist party has almost exclusively been posed as the British terrain. Workers Power stands in another tradition. From our founding 50 years ago, we have always prioritised the construction of an international tendency and propaganda and tactics towards the building of a new, Fifth International, not as an add-on to be thought about later, but built into our DNA at every stage of development.
Smashing the state
If the international context is the starting point for the development of the Marxist programme and the construction of the Marxist party, the revolutionary smashing of the bourgeois state is its culmination. Like Lenin, in his classic pamphlet State and Revolution, we believe this was a constant theme in Marx’s political writings all the way back to the 1848 revolutions.
The neo-Kautskyans tend to pluck one phrase out of the Communist Manifesto, where Marx says, ‘the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to win the battle of democracy’, as if to prove that Marxism sees the dictatorship of the proletariat as the result of a peaceful, democratic revolution. But this wilfully ignores the preceding passage, where Marx outlines the coming to power of the proletariat as ‘the point where that [civil] war breaks out into open revolution where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat’. This is no peaceful transfer of power from one party to another.
Summing up these experiences five years later in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx was more explicit: ‘All revolutions perfected this machine [of the parliamentary republic], instead of smashing it up’. But it was the experience of the Paris Commune that drove Marx and Engels to be even more concrete. They agitated in no uncertain words for the smashing of the ‘ready-made state machinery’, the ‘bureaucratic-military machine’, and for the replacement of the deceitful bourgeois parliament by the delegate based Commune, ‘a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time’, with universal suffrage and recallability of delegates, workers’ wages for all state representatives, a workers’ militia, the election of judges and so on and so forth. In other words, the very bodies that overthrew the rule of the bourgeoisie were to become the form of the new state, indeed a semi-state, because it would not rise above the contending classes, but be directly answerable to the new ruling class, the mobilised proletariat.
If this is fetishising the soviet or commune form, or envisaging a society where the working class is in a constant state of mobilisation, then we, like Marx, plead guilty. But that is to pose the question in an utterly abstract and incorrect way. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not represent a whole new epoch stretching decades and centuries into the future; it is the form society must take to complete the war against the bourgeoisie, to deprive it of its property, and to lay the basis for socialism and ultimately the withering away of social classes and therefore political power, so it can turn to the mutual cooperation of associated labour and the administration of things.
Transitional or minimum-maximum programme?
Only when the Marxist programme is conceived of in this way, the road to the seizure of power and the smashing of the old order, can the relevance of the transitional programme be grasped. The raising of the working class to the position of the ruling class cannot be achieved by winning the battle of democracy in the sense of an election, but by building its own democratic organs of struggle and learning how to wield them in the construction of the new order. This is the transition the early Comintern and Trotsky had in mind when they talked about the need for a transitional programme.
First, to clear up some misconceptions, as expressed by comrade van Vliet in “A Transition to Nowhere”. The transitional programme does not reduce the Marxist programme to a set of economic demands, nor does it reduce the concept of socialism to ‘workers’ control and expropriation’ although such developments would be important steps along the road. A few of comrade van Vliet’s other objections are in fact objections to Lenin rather than to the transitional programme as such. The ‘small vanguard party without any mass base in the working class’ is a contradiction in terms, the vanguard of a class, like an army, has to have its roots in those it leads. In February 1917, there were ‘only’ several thousand Bolsheviks, but they included the day-to-day leaders in factories and workshops; that is why they were able to close factories to support the International Women’s Day march in Petrograd. Likewise, the concept of ‘capitalism in decline’ is Lenin’s description of the imperialist epoch. Various degenerate Trotskyists – Grant, Healy, etc. – have indeed taken this to mean that revolution is always around the corner. This is clearly nonsense, designed to keep members of their sects in a state of hyperactivity and blind loyalty. A dialectical understanding of imperialism can explain how the forces of production can grow for limited periods, but only by sowing the seeds for a deeper crisis in the coming years and decades.
The transitional programme, however, does maintain as its premise that capitalism is ‘rotten-ripe’ for revolution in the sense that an economic or partial struggle could grow into a revolutionary struggle for power. The Arab Spring became a rising up against authoritarianism and corruption, but its springboard (forgive the pun) was mass discontent over food prices, especially cooking oil. György Lukács called this the ‘actuality of the revolution’, the fact that late capitalism carries the potential for a revolutionary struggle in the present moment.
So, what do we mean by transitional demands? First, they must correspond to some actual need of the working class, e.g. in response to inflation, factory closures or police violence. Second, they must involve mobilising and organising the working class independently of the bourgeoisie or its agents in the workers’ movement, like the union bureaucrats. So we fight for rank and file price watch committees, workplace occupations or self-defence organisations. Third, they should include an element of workers’ control, over wages, over the production process or over our communities, ‘our streets’.
Finally, transitional demands must not be viewed statically, in isolation, but rather as a system of demands. Workers’ control in one factory poses the need for workers’ control in a whole branch of industry, which in turn poses the question of control over the full economy and society as a whole. In the words of the Communist Manifesto they are measures, ‘which appear economically insufficient or untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order’.
This brings me to an important point about the transitional programme. Trotsky didn’t invent it, though he did codify it, which no one else had done before. Even before the Manifesto quoted above, Engels in 1847 talked about ‘measures to restrict competition and the accumulation of capital [being] possible as preparatory steps, temporary, transitional stages towards the abolition of private property’. The strategy and tactics that the Bolsheviks used to conquer power in 1917 (April Theses, Impending Catastrophe, etc.) amounted to a transitional programme. The revolutionary Comintern began the process of codifying the Bolsheviks’ strategy and tactics at its third and fourth congresses, but without completing the work – although they did formally reject Bukharin’s minimum-maximum programme. Thus, we reject the claim that Trotsky invented a new kind of programme to fit with a false catastrophic perspective. Rather, the 1938 programme seems to us to have a rich history in the revolutionary Marxist movement.
Democratic centralism vs bureaucratic centralism
Briefly, on the question of bureaucratic centralism, we fully agree with comrades who have criticised the bureaucratic centralism prevalent in many of the propaganda groups around today. Comrade Chari has correctly characterised this and linked it to the political nature of the groups concerned, their fetishising over certain political positions to the exclusion of other no less or even more important questions, and its laying the ground for chauvinism, abuse and sexual violence.
We also agree with comrade Chari’s criticism of groups that believe that they are a chemically pure distillation of the morality of a future society. Only a sect that cut itself off completely from bourgeois society (and therefore the working class) could prevent bourgeois ills from seeping into its ranks. However, we disagree with comrade Archie Woodrow’s assertion that we fit into this camp, and this is why.
While we agree that democratic centralism recognises the right of minorities to argue for and maintain their views before and after democratic decisions have been made, we do not see their existence as a necessary sign of a party’s health. The permanent factionalism of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) in France actually delayed and ultimately denied agreement on its programme and its possibility to intervene fully in the class struggle. Indeed, as soon as its majority faction around Besancenot looked like losing its hegemony… it split. Likewise, the international tendency of that grouping, the USFI, has been faction-ridden for decades and zigzagged from Stalinophilia to Third World guerrillaism to Broad Left parties and recently to movementism and ‘ecosocialism’. Hardly an inspiring advert for letting a hundred factions bloom.
We believe that factions are a ‘necessary evil’ and that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were wrong to ban them towards the end of the civil war. Our own tendency started out as the Left Faction in the International Socialists (IS, now SWP) in the 1970s. We were expelled for refusing to dissolve ourselves after a conference defeat. So we put no time limit on the lifespan of a faction, providing always that the majority position is maintained in public. However, it is the duty of the party to resolve their differences, either by one side winning over the comrades of the other or by achieving a synthesis.
This happened quite recently in the League for the Fifth International, when some comrades of Workers Power held a minority view that the right of Ukraine to self-determination against Russian imperialist invasion was not negated by NATO’s aggressive arming of Ukraine and expansion to Russia’s borders, i.e. the view held by the majority. After a year of comradely debate, many useful documents expanding the whole League’s understanding and several international congresses, we arrived at our current position. It was frustrating to spend so much time on an internal debate, but it has strengthened our democratic centralism, and we arrived at a correct position.
We have also taken other measures for many years to strengthen the rights of the members, as well as the untrammelled right to form factions: the right of women, of Black and ethnic minority members, and of LGBT+ members to caucus at every level of the organisation; specific measures to combat sexual predatory behaviour and violence, and discrimination against disabled and neurodiverse comrades; independent control commissions with a clear majority of rank and file members to investigate and bring forward recommendations in cases or accusations of misconduct; and the right of appeal against all disciplinary decisions at a full conference. These measures should be adopted at all levels of the party, branch, fraction (e.g. trade union fraction) and internationally and be updated and improved constantly.
However, we do not agree with comrade Chari that democratic centralism stops at the branch’s door or that it excludes tactical questions. While branches should be encouraged to creatively innovate new methods of working or tactics, they need to fit in with and not contradict the party’s overall aims and perspectives. Otherwise they may end up countering the democratic decisions of the organisation as a whole. An obvious example would be two sections taking opposing sides in a war or uprising and literally ending up on opposite sides of the barricades. But also it might be over something like the need for all branches to prioritise the fight against an attack on reproductive rights. A branch that wanted to opt out of this work in preference to an economic issue, for example, should be confronted with arguments and if necessary overruled. Otherwise communist unity dissolves in practice, no matter what formal agreement exists at an abstract level over programme.
Party building
The building of a mass communist party intractably opposed to all that exists is no easy task. Today, this principal task remains elusive, perhaps as difficult as ever given the confusion and disunity that pervades the left in Britain and internationally. Many have tried and failed. Many have tried and succeeded in attracting several thousands to their ranks, only to fall on the field of battle. One such example was the 30,000-strong Spanish POUM which, while to the left of both the anarchists and Stalinists, succumbed to the temptation of joining the popular front in 1936 and paid the heaviest of prices in 1937.
It is therefore of the utmost importance that the party is built on solid foundations, so that it doesn’t crumble in the ultimate test, the test of the class struggle. So, we agree with a number of comrades who say that we need to put programme first. If we cannot agree on what we mean by a Marxist programme and what needs to be in it, then we cannot build a solid party.
But what needs to be in the programme, and what is superfluous? We believe the programme has to involve not just fundamental principles and strategic questions, but also major tactics, like how to build a general strike, in what circumstances, under whose control and to what end. A general strike called too late, or too often, or under the control of the reformist bureaucracy, or called off at the first small concession, is of no use in the struggle for revolution and could even throw it backwards.
It has to include a broad outline of the current development of capitalism and its major trends. Unity with communists who view China and Russia as socialist or at any rate ‘not imperialist’ would crumble as soon as the great powers, principally China and the USA, size up for a major battle, by proxy or face to face. Unity with communists who saw world capitalism expanding without major contradictions for many years to come, or with those who put an artificial and preset timetable for its inevitable development towards huge revolutionary clashes, such as Alan Woods and his Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), would also not be real unity.
Unity has to involve not just bookish learning and unity on paper, but real tests of unity in action. It is all very well agreeing in principle how to use the general strike tactic, but can we agree on how to use it in Argentina today? Similarly, agreement on the right of nations to self-determination might be easily won, but do we have a common message to the people of Ukraine or Palestine on how to defend themselves against aggression, what rights to give minorities in their national groups, and how and when to overthrow their bourgeois leaders? Working out common statements on key moments in today’s class struggle is an important stage towards unity.
Finally, it has to involve joint campaigns and united practical work. How in practice do comrades from different traditions see a party working together, in the trade unions, in anti-racist and anti-fascist mobilisations, in elections? In the end, parties are voluntary organisations. Leadership has to be won over a period of time, in a variety of circumstances. Without mutual trust there can be no lasting discipline.
This means that there are two things we must do in the here and now. First, we must have what comrade van Vliet urges, revolutionary patience. Only a few comrades engaged in today’s struggles will be able or prepared to take the time to study in depth why there is no communist unity today, to look beyond the Counterfires, the SWPs and the RCPs (IMT) in their own countries and engage in a struggle for revolutionary clarity. We must find those comrades in the unions and on university campuses, in the social movements and in the various far left groups; in our terms, this is the task of an “ideological current”, working towards agreement on the basis for a new party and International today.
Second, we must engage with those communist organisations which see the need for regroupment, which do not simply believe they have all the right answers and that the way for anyone to build the party is to join them. It makes sense here to start by engaging with those organisations that are closest politically to each other. The League for the Fifth International, of which Workers Power is the British section, is currently in programmatic discussions with the International Trotskyist Organisation (ITO) and the International Socialist League (ISL/LIS), some of whose sections are already sizeable propaganda groups in their own countries. In Britain, we would like to deepen our engagement with a number of far left organisations but see none that are especially close to us politically. That does not mean we abstain from discussion and joint work. On the contrary, we are attempting to do precisely that with Anti*Capitalist Resistance (ACR) and Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21).
These are early days and tentative first steps, but with proposals for joint work, frank but honest polemics, and revolutionary patience, we are confident we can get there.
