http://www.leftvoice.org/The-Party-We-Need-A-Revolutionary-Socialist-Party
The Party We Need: A Revolutionary Socialist Party
We are living in turbulent times. President Trump and the rise of the
alt-right are not the only news. Thousands of people have become
politically active in the past year, galvanized by the Bernie Sanders
campaign and now joining organizations on the left, such as the
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the International Socialist
Organization, or Socialist Alternative.
The Party We Need: A Revolutionary Socialist Party
Juan Cruz Ferre
@WorkerTF
May 14, 2017
1
Photo by Luigi Morris
Left Voice’s second issue, "Women on the Front Lines", is now available
for purchase. For every magazine sold, we are donating $1 to a worker
controlled factory in Argentina.
Ten years ago, both of these movements would have been thought to be out
of the realm of possibility. These developments signal the potential for
seismic shifts in the political scene and an opening for revolutionaries
after years of retreat.
It is in this context that the question of the party as a political tool
for advancing socialism inspires renewed interest. What is needed to
undertake the fight for socialism and stand a chance to win?
Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman recently put forth a “blueprint” for a
party that, although with some merits, misses the central questions that
socialists should be discussing today.[1]
We don’t need to start from zero
A party for the working class will have to draw from the experiences of
past political organizations. The rise and drift of European social
democratic parties and the degeneration of the Communist Parties (Spain,
France, Germany, etc.) provide valuable lessons for today. The same can
be said of the short yet rich experience of neo-reformist formations
like Syriza and Podemos.
Every party has a program, whether explicit or not, and every party
represents the interests of either the working class or the bourgeoisie.
Capitalist parties such as the Democratic and Republican parties have
slightly different programs, serving different but overlapping factions
of the bourgeoisie. Although Sanders had a much more radical program
than Hillary Clinton, his explicit goal was still to reform (rather than
dismantle) capitalism, in effect, saving capitalism from itself.
For working class parties, the program is the party’s principal tool. At
the same time, the program needs to be based on a strategy. While an
electoral campaign or a strike against layoffs are tactics to win
specific battles, the strategy is the sum of those battles toward the
final goal, the overthrow of capitalism.
European social democratic parties (and the short-lived experience of
the Socialist Party in the US) took the position that it was possible to
achieve socialism by enacting reforms through parliamentary means. This
meant running in elections and using seats in congress to present bills
that would benefit workers. However, social democratic parties in Europe
did not have a unified strategy for achieving socialism. Inevitably, the
push for achievable demands (what they considered minimum program) was
detached from the fight for socialism (ie., maximum program).
Workers of the world?
The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was the largest of these
parties that ever existed. It grew exponentially around the turn of the
twentieth century, received over four million votes in 1912, and by 1914
it had over one million active members.
On August 4, 1914, only a few days after pledging to resist the war and
unite with workers in other countries in the fight for socialism, the
SPD–as well as socialist parties in Austria-Hungary, France, Belgium and
Britain–caved to nationalist pressures and supported their government’s
war efforts in World War I. Shedding any pretense of internationalism,
social democratic parties became accomplice to the capitalist class in a
war waged by domestic workers against foreign workers for the benefit of
their national bourgeoisies. Thus, the Second International crumbled.
During the remainder of the 20th century, social democratic parties
fought for reforms within capitalism under the illusion that each reform
was one more step toward socialism. However, the moment for socialist
transformation never came. Late reformism eventually abandoned all
expectations of ending capitalism and focused on the minimum program.
Overreliance on electoral politics is central to why social democracies
have failed to bring us any closer to socialism.
By the end of the nineteenth century, a revisionist wing led by Eduard
Bernstein claimed to discover a “civilized” form of government within
parliamentary democracy that superseded the “despotism of class
dictatorships.” Karl Kautsky later joined him in this strategic turn and
crafted his “strategy of attrition,” which Rosa Luxemburg dubbed
“Nothing-but-Parliamentarianism.”
According to Kautsky, the German working class could lead a warfare of
attrition against the bourgeoisie, undermine its power, and gradually
take over the state. The faith in bourgeois democracy and acceptance of
parliamentarianism as the only means of advancing workers’ politics
proved disastrous to the proletariat in key historical moments.
When revolutionary situations arose, socialist parties unwilling and
unprepared to take power strove to constrain the working class to what
was possible under capitalism. This happened in Germany in 1919 and
1923, during the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1939, and in Chile in 1973
when Salvador Allende refused to arm the working class to resist the
counterrevolution. In all three examples, the final outcome was the
bloody massacre of militant workers and revolutionaries.
Race to the Center
When neoliberalism became the order of the day, social democracies
succumbed to its appeal. In the last quarter of the twentieth century,
the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the Workers’
Socialist Party of Spain (PSOE), among others, embraced the Third Way
and implemented austerity policies demanded by capital. They morphed
from alleged champions of workers’ interests into agents of finance
capital and neoliberalism.
A scan-through of the parties that today make up the Socialist
International feels like a flip-book horror story: François Hollande’s
French Socialist Party, Enrique Peña Nieto’s PRI in Mexico, the UCR in
Argentina—now in government, in coalition with President Mauricio
Macri’s PRO Party. The DSA in the United States continues to be a full
member of the Socialist International.
Social democracies were not the only parties that moved to the center.
In the late 70s, Communist Parties in Europe–particularly the Spanish,
Italian and French CPs–broke ties with the Soviet Union and officially
shed the “dictatorship of the proletariat” from their program, although
they had long given up any prospects of a socialist revolution. This
movement, dubbed Eurocommunism, embraced parliamentarianism as the path
to socialism in advanced countries. In practice, they abandoned both the
perspective and the fight for socialism.
The Problem with Shortcuts
A few years after the 2008 economic crisis, a wave of uprisings shook
the Arab world and mass protests sprang up in the US (Occupy Wall
Street) and Europe. In the context of the bankruptcy of classical
reformist parties, Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain arose on the
shoulders of strong anti-austerity movements.
Left parties and radical activism around the world turned their eyes
toward these new formations with high hopes. It seemed that the left had
once again returned to a position of leverage and influence after a long
retreat.
Syriza took power in January 2015 with the promise of fighting the
austerity imposed by the EU. For some, Syriza’s victory signaled the
possibility that socialism could be achieved through elections. However,
only a few months later, Tsipras’ government signed a draconian
agreement with the EU–going against a referendum that rejected the deal
with 60 percent of the vote, as well as privatizing the largest seaport
(Piraeus), cutting pensions, and repressing protesters and workers who
went on strike.
Podemos in Spain showed its true colors before even taking office at the
national level: first by stripping the most radical demands from their
program such as the call for a popular scrutiny of the foreign debt and
replacing it with proposals for a restructuring of the debt; and second,
by trying to form a coalition with the PSOE, which they had repeatedly
denounced as part of the political caste. Podemos has governed five
major cities (including Madrid and Barcelona) for almost two years and
has provided no solutions to foreclosures, unemployment, and the energy
crisis.
Both Syriza and Podemos emphasized the need for institutional mechanisms
to supersede the struggle “in the streets.” The prescription was to vote
and stay home. Podemos’ unremarkable performance in local governments
and its eagerness to reach the presidential seat at any cost has
revealed its political bankruptcy.
Without a mass implantation in the working class, these new reformist
parties have focused their efforts on conquering the state to counter
austerity. Socialism is not on the horizon. Furthermore, as the example
of Syriza shows, the enduring economic downturn seriously undermines the
ability of any government to grant concessions, and renders their social
democratic program an anachronistic utopia.
A Party of Workers
The main source of conflict in our times is, as it has always been, the
division of society in classes: one class is exploited while another
reaps the profits, with some shades in between. Nothing defines our
lives and interests as strongly as the social class we belong to. A
party that welcomes workers as well as capitalists will always be
controlled by capital. This is why workers need our own political tool
to advance our interests.
The party we need is composed of, led by, and funded by workers. If a
party relies on funds donated by liberal non-profits or big donors, it
cannot even pretend to have working-class independence.
Social movement activists and liberals have far too often chosen to work
with the Democratic Party–a full capitalist party–either by pushing for
a progressive wing to emerge, taking over the party or by plainly voting
Democrat as a lesser evil against Republicans. As other authors explain
in this issue, this path is a dead end.[2]
Following this pattern, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has
consistently supported progressive figureheads within the Democratic
Party. Bernie Sanders was not the only one; they have also endorsed
Keith Ellison for chair of the DNC, a lukewarm liberal whose program
didn’t differ much from that of Tom Perez.
Socialist Alternative has committed the same mistake by endorsing local
Democrats in Seattle, and more blatantly when they campaigned for Bernie
Sanders in the primaries and registered people to the Democratic Party.
As if this was not enough, members of Socialist Alternative attended the
2016 DNC in Philadelphia as delegates of the Democratic Party, only to
lead a “walk out” after the votes were cast and Hillary had won the
nomination. It is difficult to come back from such deep involvement with
a capitalist party.
Once Bernie was out of the race, some of his supporters turned to the
Greens looking for a progressive candidate. Socialist Alternative then
switched gears to endorse Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
The ISO, too, has repeatedly thrown their support behind the Greens in
an attempt to break the two-party system. They even ran a joint
candidacy for the state of New York in 2014 (Howie Hawkins-Brian Jones).
In a 2013 editorial in the Socialist Worker, Paul D’Amato writes at
length about the need to build a workers’ party, drawing from Marx and
Engels’ writings.[3] In the same article, however, he justifies support
for Ralph Nader’s Green Party campaign in 2000–“an anti-corporate, if
not anti-capitalist agenda”–as a means to “begin the process of building
a broader left that is independent of the Democratic Party.” D’Amato
makes no mention of the class character of the Green Party. In his and
similar analyses, class delimitation is replaced by a “broader left”
that is so broad as to include environmentally-friendly (“green”)
entrepreneurs. (see below)
The height of contradiction comes when, after justifying the ISO’s
support of the Greens, D’Amato quotes Engels’ appraisal of the New York
Independent Labor Party candidacy of 1886: “In a country that has newly
entered the movement, the first really crucial step is the formation by
the workers of an independent political party, no matter how, so long as
it is distinguishable as a labor party” [emphasis added].
Paul D’Amato and the ISO decided to overlook the last few words.
Although there are some self-described socialists in their ranks, the
Green Party USA is nothing but a middle-class party with a middle-class
program: “Invest in green business (…) with an emphasis on small,
locally-based companies,” reads Jill Stein’s 2016 platform. Despite
passing an amendment (# 835, June 2016) rejecting the “capitalist
system,” the same statement also condemns state ownership of the means
of production, supports small enterprises, and puts forward communalism
and the vague idea of decentralization of power as key tenets for social
justice.
So if the Green Party is neither socialist nor a workers’ party, why is
it even worth supporting? Is it really a step toward the formation of a
revolutionary socialist party? Examples of past efforts show clearly
that it is not. The Green Party serves as a diversion from working-class
politics that will only bring confusion and disappointment among workers
and socialist activists.
In the past year and half, Socialist Alternative has been repeating ad
nauseam that we need a “Party of the 99%.” The slogan itself is
problematic, since it blurs the class divide and opens the door for
cross-class electoral coalitions. This generous 99% would leave out only
the most concentrated bourgeoisie (those who make over $350,000 a year
or who have accumulated over $8 million in wealth), but would include
the petty bourgeoisie in its full, including some small capitalists.
Even though this may sound like nit-picking, the story comes full circle
when we see that it’s Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein who they’ve called
to form this party of the 99%.
Kshama Sawant and Socialist Alternative have gained popularity since she
took office as Seattle Councilmember, running as a socialist. The
efforts to appeal to moderate voters and the eagerness to collaborate
with progressive Democrats such as Bernie Sanders is the fastest way to
squander the political capital that no other left organization has
enjoyed in the past few years.
As basic as it may sound, refraining from participating in or endorsing
any multi-class or plainly bourgeois electoral option would be a major
step forward for the DSA, Socialist Alternative, and the ISO.
A Party of Combat
All the terrain gained by working-class organizations until the 1970s
was reversed in the half century that came afterwards. We are in such a
dire state that even the idea of a mass working-class reformist
organization would be a progressive development. However, as the
experience of social democracy shows, this is not enough to take on
capitalism.
It is clear that capitalist democracy is deeply flawed. Multiple
mechanisms skew the results of elections, suppress undesired political
forces, and ultimately guarantee the rule of capital through its
politicos in the government.
If Seth Ackerman’s article in Jacobin has one virtue, it is that it
shows how undemocratic the US electoral system is.
“One lesson from this history is clear: We have to stop approaching our
task as if the problems we face were akin to those faced by the
organizers of, say, the British Labour Party in 1900 or Canada’s New
Democratic Party in 1961. Instead, we need to realize that our situation
is more like that facing opposition parties in soft-authoritarian
systems, like those of Russia or Singapore.”
However, the plan he puts forward is nothing but electoral politics.
Since he only conceives of politics in the narrow scope of an electoral
strategy, his proposal ends up being yet another way of working with one
foot in and one foot out of the Democratic Party.
Any collective effort in the fight for socialism needs to acknowledge
the need for a revolutionary strategy.
Reformism has failed time and again and only revolutions have severed
the chains of class exploitation. Despite its later bureaucratization
and repressive drift, the Russian Revolution broke the power of the Czar
and the bourgeoisie and provided immediate relief to millions of workers
and peasants, distributed the land, paved the way for women’s
emancipation and sexual freedom and established the most democratic
system that has ever existed.
All this was possible only through the coordinated action of the working
masses through bodies of self-organization: the soviets (or workers’
councils). These councils were crucial for asserting and channeling
workers’ power and, very importantly, planning the insurrection. The
Bolsheviks fought within the soviets and won the majority in them to a
revolutionary strategy.
Of course, revolutionaries cannot make a revolution nor, despite Che
Guevara’s theorizations, create the subjective conditions for it. Yet, a
minority of militant workers can play an important role in a larger
movement of workers and oppressed people by fostering the creation of
united front organizations and advancing revolutionary politics.
The Fight for the United Front Begins Today
The soviets were nothing but united front organizations. As Emilio
Albamonte and Matías Maiello convincingly argue, the same united front
organizations that wage a defensive fight against the attacks of capital
and the state will serve to organize the offensive when conditions are
favorable.[4]
A central task for a revolutionary party, then, is the development of
these bodies of workers’ self-organization. And this can only be done if
the party is part and parcel of the working class, if it manages to
“merge itself with the broadest masses of the toilers.”[5]
Furthermore, the ranks of the party must be filled with the workers who
are politically most advanced, those who are active in the fights
against bosses and the union bureaucracy, against racism and gender
oppression, and who see the need to overthrow capitalism.[6]
In this way, members of the party will have their character and politics
forged in the struggle. Marxist propaganda and theory are the
scaffolding, but the participation in class struggles is the necessary
catalyst for cadre formation. Every strike, picket line, roadblock,
every conflict serves as a school of war, and the party tempers its
character in the heat of these struggles: it becomes a party of combat.
Although forgotten by most of the left, the fight against the union
bureaucracy is of paramount importance today. The approach of most of
the US left has been to try to secure positions in unions, oftentimes
sharing a slate with the bureaucracy.
The union bureaucrats are agents of capital in the labor movement. They
reproduce racism and sexism and systematically tame workers’ outrage to
reach a compromise with the bosses. The union bureaucracy is the main
hurdle workers need to fight to enjoy democracy in their organizations
and advance their interests.[7]
Since there is barely any discussion on union bureaucracy within the
existing left, there is little understanding of what it is and how to
fight it. An analysis of the union bureaucracy is beyond the scope of
this article, but for now let’s say the leadership is bureaucratic if
decisions are not taken democratically through assemblies, delegates are
not recallable, and participation of the rank and file is weak; if the
leadership does not fight relentlessly against racism, sexism, and
national chauvinism; or if the union endorses Democrats (or any
bourgeois party). Any of the above is an unequivocal sign that the union
leadership is not advancing workers’ interests.
Left parties in the US should contest union leadership with oppositional
caucuses instead of putting differences aside and joining them in a
slate in order to secure a position.
Democratic Demands and Workers’ Hegemony
The members of a revolutionary party not only need to advance struggles
for economic justice or workers’ demands. Individual racism and bigotry
must be fought at the workplace and at every level. But most
importantly, we need to build up a fight against these oppressions from
a working-class perspective. The initiatives Strike Against Police
Terror and No Cops in Our Unions, both advanced by Left Voice
collaborators, are attempts to link workers’ power with the fight
against racism.[8]
The mobilization of women in the US and across the globe for
reproductive rights, gender equality and against all kinds of gender
violence has reopened the discussion about what kind of women’s movement
we need.
It is not on moral grounds that we argue for putting up these struggles
for democratic demands: they are a key element in a revolutionary
strategy. Workers will lead the socialist revolution. But to do so, they
need to show themselves as the class that will achieve emancipation for
the rest: the poor and disenfranchised, students, the middle class; and,
across all social strata, to the most oppressed. The fight for their
demands strengthens working-class hegemony, that is, its capacity to
wage struggles for the benefit of all.
At the same time, the party will only be truly revolutionary if it
includes radical militants honed by struggles against racism, sexism,
and other oppressions.
Dispute the Superstructure
This is not to say that electoral activity should be dismissed or
belittled. Elections are not merely “a gauge of the maturity of the
working class” as Marx and Engels famously put it, but are also an
opportunity for socialists to spread their ideas, show their politics,
and engage in conversations with those who are looking for answers to
the social and economic needs of the working people.
Seats in congress, legislatures, or local councils should serve as a
loudspeaker for workers’ demands and workers’ struggles, as a platform
to denounce the abuses of the state and the bosses and an opportunity to
indict capitalist democracy.
In 1920 the Second Congress of the Comintern stated bluntly what
communists should make of the positions in a bourgeois parliament:
“[The] activity in parliament, which consists mainly in revolutionary
agitation from the parliamentary platform, in unmasking opponents, in
the ideological unification of the masses who still, particularly in
backward areas, are captivated by democratic ideas, look towards the
parliamentary platform, etc., should be totally and completely
subordinated to the aims and tasks of the mass struggle outside parliament.”
In Argentina, the Left and Workers’ Front holds four seats in the
national congress and dozens of seats in province legislatures and city
councils. Apart from using these positions to present a large number of
bills to advance workers’ interests—such as the emergency bill to ban
layoffs during the economic downturn or the project to expropriate
MadyGraf, a worker-controlled factory [9]—the representatives of the
Left Front have gained national attention for being in the front lines
of workers’ struggles, enduring repression by the police and voicing a
ruthless critique of bourgeois democracy and its parties. In a country
where corruption is rampant and the pockets of elected officials are
bloated (MPs make almost $10,000 USD per month) all Left Front MPs are
committed to earning a teachers’ salary (now around $650 monthly) and
donating the remainder to workers’ struggles, strike funds, and
solidarity campaigns.
The Weight of the Dead
Setbacks in class struggle bring about a retrocession in the theory and
politics of the working class and the left. Successive defeats under
neoliberalism have taken a toll on left parties’ politics. The
forty-plus years without revolutions all but erased the “hypothesis of
revolution,” that is, the perspective that a revolution will ever take
place. But revolutions have happened throughout history and will
continue to happen. The challenge is to lead them to a socialist outcome.
It is difficult to overstate the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism
in the twentieth century. The purges inside the Soviet Union swiftly
crushed all left opposition to Stalinist rule. By 1934, 70 percent of
the members of the 1921 Central Committee had been either shot or
arrested. The doctrine of “socialism in one country” devastated the
communist left outside the USSR, dealt a death blow to the Spanish
revolution, and foreclosed prospects for socialist revolutions elsewhere
in the world.
Condemned to exile after leading the Russian Revolution, Trotsky wrote
the most accurate and compelling critique of the bureaucratization of
the USSR. Trotskyism remains today a necessary tool, in the words of
Daniel Bensaïd, “to undo the blend between Stalinism and communism, free
the living from the weight of the dead.”[10]
Immediate Tasks
In the age of Trump, attacks on workers and oppressed minorities are
multiplying. Unity in the struggle against racism, sexism, and
xenophobia is critical and can consolidate a working class resistance.
The tactic of united front is as relevant as ever. The national response
against the travel ban on Muslims and wide mobilization in support of
immigrant workers are promising developments.
With the appalling rise of national chauvinism in the US and Europe, the
left has to embrace the most radical anti-imperialist program, oppose
military interventions abroad, denounce and oppose the looting of
natural resources and oppression in Mexico and the rest of the world,
and fight for the freedom of movement and migration for all people.
The revitalized women’s movement has reopened the debate among different
currents of feminism. Revolutionaries must intervene in this movement
and try to forge a left wing that fights for gender equality and for
socialism. The Black movement against police brutality poses a similar
challenge and opportunity for the left.
The fight against the union bureaucracy is essential to reclaiming
working-class organizations for workers and their interests.
In the electoral arena, organizations that fight for socialism must
start by advancing working-class politics, drawing sharp delimitations
with the Democratic Party or any other organizations that are not
exclusively based in the working class.
One hundred years after the Russian Revolution, it is worth rescuing its
legacy from the ashes of Stalinism, opportunism and oblivion, and
rebuild a revolutionary party for socialism.
References
1. Ackerman S., “A Blueprint for a New Party,” Jacobin N23, Fall 2016.
2. See articles by Kwon & Goldman and by Rusk and Eagleburger in Left
Voice Magazine #2.
3. D’Amato P., “Independent of the Political Status Quo”, Socialist
Worker, Nov 1, 2013
4. Albamonte E, Maiello M, Gramsci and Trotsky. Strategy for the
revolution in the West, Left Voice, 2016.
5. Lenin, Left wing communism, an infantile disorder. International
Publishers, New York (p. 10)
6. This is the meaning of vanguard, as traditionally used by
communists. The term, however, has been extensively misused,
particularly by small groups that claim to be “the revolutionary party”
but had no real impact on reality, and don’t bother to test their claims
in any real struggle.
7. Ferre JC, “United Front and the fight against the union
bureaucracy”, Left Voice, September 6, 2016.
8. Visit leftvoice.org for more information.
9. See the back of this issue for more information.
10. Bensaïd D., Les Trotskysmes, Ed. Presses Universitaires de France,
2002.
This article was originally published in Left Voice print edition #2,
Spring 2017
Related
united front / revolutionary strategy / Democratic Party
/ Green Party / United States / Ideas & Debates /
United States
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