Donald Parkinson takes a look at the history of the First, Second and Third Internationals, arguing for an approach to party-building and political strategy that is informed by the positives and negatives of these experiences. 

This piece aims to be an engagement in wider debates occurring in the left on the question of the party and revolutionary strategy, particularly in the US. Calling for a “workers party” is hardly a unique position in US leftism. What this actually means, however, is a whole other issue, with much of the far-left attached to a strategy of lobbying the Democrats as a sufficient alternative. My aim here will be not to convince those who have failed to comprehend the obvious – that a party and participation in mass politics independent from the Democrats is needed if we want to achieve any radical political goals. In recent leftist history, it was perhaps a controversial point to argue that a new revolutionary workers party should be the goal of the left, with ideas of “horizontalism” and “changing the world without taking power” having active currency. In the diffused activist left around the time of the Occupy protests, a sort of anarchist common sense that parties and state power were inherently oppressive reigned dominant. Now it is clear to more people that to change the world one must engage in mass politics, and that to do so we must organize around a vision of change, or a program. This necessitates forming a party, an organization of people who collectively share a commitment to a program. Yet what kind of party we are fighting for is a topic of intense debate, regarding both its form as well as general strategic orientation. To develop a genuine Communist Party, we will need a positive vision of what we are working for. My aim in this piece is to help develop such a positive vision. I will begin with a historical overview of the party question, then critique modern Leninism, articulate what an alternative vision of a party and strategy may look like, consider the question of whether revolution is necessary and what it entails, and speculate on what a future workers republic that puts the working class into power (and on the path to communism) may look like.

As well as the general assumption of the necessity of a party, my arguments will rest on another general assumption, which is that we need to form a Communist Party instead of a simple Labor Party. Some may immediately insist there is no difference, and that communists are never separate from any general party of the working class. However, a party can have a working-class base and only fight for the interests of the national working class within the state as a sort of corporate group with interests that can be balanced with the needs of the whole nation. A Labor Party that merely fights for legislation within the confines of the nation to benefit the immediate position of said nation’s working class is not a party that fights for the actual long-term interests of the working class, which is to globally unite. In fact, such parties, because they are national in character, must help maintain the competitiveness of that nation-state on a global capitalist market. This means the party can only go so far even in benefitting its working-class base. It also serves to divide the working class along national lines. Following these criteria, such Labor Parties can be categorized as ‘Bourgeois Labor Parties’. They fight for the interests of labor within the confines of the bourgeois order, even if they at times come in contradiction. In the end, it is the goal of the bureaucracies of ‘Bourgeois Labor Parties’ to win the loyalty of the rank and file and smooth over these contradictions, often through appeals to nationalism and imperial projects.

Some leftist groups will argue that we must first agitate for such a party, and then form factions within it so communists can do entryism in order to transform the party into a vehicle for revolution. This approach is to be rejected out of hand. Communists should organize the kind of party that we need, which is not a bourgeois Labor Party that fights for the immediate interests of one national section of the class, but for the long-term interests of the world proletariat. This means a party organized around a program for a worldwide workers republic and the long-term goal of communism. A Communist Party cannot merely be a Labor Party with a red flag, but must directly agitate for communism and internationalism, fight against all forms of oppression, and disdain to conceal its aims. It must not merely sit at the bargaining table as a good faith representative of the class, but act as a party of opposition not beholden to loyalty towards the bourgeois rule of law and constitution. Before going any further into describing the ideal Communist Party, we shall look at the history of the First, Second and Third Internationals which represented the global communist movement at its height.

From the Communist League to the Comintern

To begin, we shall start with Marx and Engels on the issue of the party and trace the development of Marxist thought through the Second and Third Internationals. Marx and Engels’ views on the state and politics changed and developed over time, as they did on issues such as colonialism and historiography. The topic of revolutionary organization was no exception.

Marx wasn’t the first Communist and became embedded in an already existing movement of revolutionaries that ranged from radical republican neo-Jacobins, utopian socialists, conspiratorial socialists aiming to follow the tradition of Babeuf, “True Socialists”, Chartists, and Proudhonian mutualists. The organization that became the Communist League, the League of the Just, was similar to the secretive societies in the tradition of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals and politically dominated by Weitlings “true socialism”. Marx and Engels would, of course, renovate the League, infusing it with their materialist conception of history and political strategy oriented around class struggle. Yet the Communist League still retained the shell of a Communist organization rooted in a tradition that existed before Marx and Engels developed a concrete view of the party.

After the experience of the Communist League, Marx focused on his own studies before joining into another party-building venture. Marx, in an 1860 letter to the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, described the Communist League as only a party in the “ephemeral sense” and compared it to the Blanquist Société de Saisons.¹ From this, it is clear that Marx had developed a critique of the original Communist League and believed its organizational apparatus was suited for an earlier, less mature period of class struggle. A small militant minority acting in a mass uprising, the 1848 revolution, had proven to be insufficient for the needs of the proletariat. This critique of his old organization can be seen as influential to his later political career.

Marx, inspired by his involvement in the First International, would develop his own understanding of the party as a sort of mass workers association united around a minimum program of working-class independence. By this Marx did not mean that only waged workers could join the party or that the program would only benefit waged workers, rather, all members were disciplined around a program which expressed the general interests of the working class as opposed to the interests of other classes. For Marx, this entailed the abolition of the wage-system, with which would bring the emancipation of all humanity. It was not a party of the “whole people” as the bourgeois parties would proclaim, but a party of opposition rooted in the combined strength of the organized working class.

The combination of workers across countries culminated into the First International and could be seen as a general united front of different tendencies in the workers’ movement. There were public factions that openly debated their views and aimed for political victories through majoritarian democracy. Marx recognized his own tendency was not dominant, facing opposition from followers of Lasalle, Proudhon, Bakunin, and many others. Yet overall, it was no single ‘ideology’ or school of thought that dominated the International, beyond basic republican virtues. Rather, the party was united around a founding program, and its centralism was based on the party program. This was something the First International worked up to as opposed to a program that was forced on membership. It would be through democratic deliberation that unity would be found, even if Marx had no doubt his views should be implemented by the party (as does any political partisan).

This form of the party would influence the Second International after the First International collapsed over debates between the followers of Marx and Bakunin. Like the First International, the Second International was a federation of national parties with their own programs, bound to rules set at the general congress. Yet the level of centralism was low on the international level. Politically, the Second International was based on a compromise between the Lasallean “state socialists” and orthodox Marxists. The Lasallean current believed in using bourgeois elections to win funding for workers cooperatives and state workshops, endorsing a form of socialism that unlike Marxism directly embraced the capitalist state. In 1881 Karl Kautsky, set to become the leading theorist of Marxist orthodoxy, would condemn the “state socialism” of Lasalleans as “… socialism by the state and for the state. It is socialism by the government and for the government. It is thus socialism by the ruling classes and for the ruling classes.”² For Marxism to consolidate itself in the Social-Democratic movement its adherents had to win the political struggle against other currents of socialism. This eventually became the case. 

In 1891 the largest party in the International, the German SPD, would draft the classic Erfurt Programme under the theoretical guidance of Kautsky which symbolized the achievement of Marxist domination over the party. This didn’t mean the entire International took up the ‘orthodox’ Marxist line, as dissident factions still existed. The classic instance is the example of Bernstein’s revisionists, who argued against revolution in favor of evolutionary reform to transform the capitalist state into socialism. Bernstein was also pro-colonialist, and while the Second International hardly extended beyond Eurocentrism in practice, in writing it was a majority anti-colonial party. Until 1914, Bernstein’s views represented a minority. While anarchists had been successfully removed from the party, the SPD accommodated these revisionist trends. While the Second International represented a continuity with the First International in its diversity of trends, it was relatively more consolidated politically while still retaining sharply divergent factions. The tension with the ‘revisionists’ in the Second International is illustrated by Rosa Luxemburg’s call for the expulsion of the revisionist wing in 1898. This move was unsuccessful, as Kautsky and Bebel defended their right as a minority tendency. The need for greater political unity around the program was seen as overriding these ideological differences, despite Kautsky’s intense scrutiny and critique of the revisionist wing.³

The general strategy of the Second International laid out by Kautsky in his classic Road to Power, can be summarized as a “strategy of attrition” or “revolutionary patience”. This strategy was somewhat based on arguments made to Wilhelm Liebknecht by Engels that the party should “not fritter away this daily increasing shock in vanguard skirmishes, but keep it intact until the decisive day.”⁴ In other words, one must build an army before going into battle. According to Kautsky, the party would grow increasingly large through success in electoral and trade union work, as well as through its “alternative culture”, which grew to include party schools, hiking clubs, cycling groups, a rowing club, socialist choirs, women’s associations, and mutual aid organizations along with a variety of party publications. Elections would show not only how much success the party had in winning over the general public but would mobilize the working class in political campaigns to develop their class awareness. The party also spearheaded the union movement, helping transform the union movement from guild-like organizations with sectoral interests into a unified trade unionist movement.⁵ Overall, as the crisis of capitalism developed, the ranks of the party would grow until the contradictions of capitalism would eventually lead to a moment of crisis where the party could take power and install a workers republic. The party must be careful not to rush into insurrection or provoke the class enemy into repression; the memory of Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws and how they held back class organization was not forgotten. This meant that the party should not simply fight for economic gains but also for democratic rights. These fights were seen to educate the working class in the art of politics and prepare the class to become the body able to govern society. While not all Second International parties maintained this principle, the German SPD refused to enter into electoral alliances in coalition governments with the bourgeois parties or send ministers into the executive government. The proletariat could only take power on its own terms when it had mass support and capitalism was in collapse.

This general strategy still has much merit within it, yet has largely been rejected in whole by revolutionary Marxists in favor of the Third International (or Comintern) model that dismisses the Second International model as entirely reformist. There is a good reason for this – the strategy ultimately failed as the Second International parties developed nationalist tendencies. When the moment of crisis arose in WWI, the majority of parties became partisans of their own nation rather than their class. Internationalism was easy to proclaim, but when the tough moments came it wasn’t easy to live by. This, of course, led to the departure of radicals from the Second International and after the Bolshevik Revolution the creation of a Third, Communist International. Social democracy had split into reformist Social-Democrats and proper revolutionary Communists, and the Communist International, or Comintern, aimed to consolidate all revolutionary Communists in a single world party. The Comintern was an attempt to replace the decrepit Second International with a properly revolutionary Marxist organization, initially composed of veterans of the old Second International parties and minorities of newly radicalized workers, often straight out of the trenches. It was formed on the observation that global capitalism had entered a period of ‘Wars and Revolution’ where capitalism itself was in decline and the revolutionary proletariat ascendent. In a way, the initial Comintern saw itself as a “general staff” of the world proletariat, with each national section acting as a battalion that would be sent into battle in a global civil war against capitalism. Many workers joined the early Comintern parties wanting to immediately deploy to the front of this battle.⁶

The Comintern was founded not only on the assumption that the period of ‘wars and revolution’ demanded a shift in political strategy, but also that a radical break was needed from all aspects of the Second International. This was based on the correct observation that the politics of the Second International materialized as a right-wing distortion that led to the disaster of 1914. The Third International introduced a more centralized structure and required its parties to purge themselves of reformist influences. The idea was to make it impossible for someone like an Ebert or Schneiderman (SPD leaders who would come into government and have a hand in crushing the Communist Spartakus Uprising) to win leadership over the party. This centralized structure resembled a military chain of command, reflecting the view that parties were soon going to be engaged in armed civil war. It also reflected changes in the Bolshevik Party itself, from a more democratic mass organization to a militarized war party. For many radicalized workers and intellectuals, October had signaled the dying days of capitalism. It was the job of the workers of the world to join in and finish what the Bolsheviks had started. Purging the party was seen as a tool used to strengthen its ranks and maintain purity from the influence of reformists. This policy had appeal due to the treachery of Social-Democracy, which had once again helped the bourgeoisie spill proletarian blood in their role of the suppression of the Spartakusbund as well as its support for Kerensky’s provisional government in Russia, which had continued an offensive war in Germany. By its second congress, the Comintern had set up a non-negotiable list of 21 political conditions that its parties had to adhere to. Like any program, these 21 conditions were a way of setting the boundaries of party membership. This created political divisions with the reformist socialists over a variety of issues. Of these, imperialism was key, a wedge that separated authentic communists from social-chauvinists.

The Comintern made a deliberate effort to overcome the Eurocentrism of previous Internationals by attempting to form parties throughout the entire world. Anti-colonialism became a priority, reflected by the Baku Conference where Zinoviev called for revolutionaries in the colonial world to join the world revolution. For these reasons alone, the Third International was an improvement of the Second. Marxists moved towards a truly internationalist universalism which saw the entire world as having agency in the revolutionary process and struggled politically against internal European chauvinism. To quote Zinoviev in his debate with Martov at the Halle Conference (in response to Martov mocking Bolshevik efforts to win over third world revolutionaries at the Baku Conference), “‘the Second International was restricted to people with white skin. The Third International does not classify people according to the colour of their skin”.⁷ Whether or not the Comintern took the correct programmatic approach to anti-colonialism is another important discussion. Though with an increased centralization and a serious attempt to exist at an international scale, the Comintern was more of a proper “world party”. This was a vital correction of the Second International’s nationalist deviations. While they planned for the proletariat to take power in one country at a time, the Comintern properly aimed to unite the proletariat in a world revolution. What was then unclear was how protracted the struggle for a world revolution would actually be.

While the Second International made rightist deviations, the early Comintern could be said to have made “ultra-left” distortions, in some ways regressing to the Communist League’s strategy of a militant minority acting in a semi-spontaneous mass uprising. If the Second International had a “strategy of patience”, the Third was plagued with a sort of revolutionary impatience, acting on the assumption of inevitable world revolution and increased faith in the power of a militant revolutionary minority. This was partly due to a desire to break from social democracy in favor of a more insurrectionary politics, a militant working class minority that wanted to fight the class enemy as soon as possible, and a misreading of the Bolshevik Revolution as a takeover by a small party. The break from the tactics of social-democracy had the benefit of allowing for the promotion of more militant tactics like mass strikes and accounted for the possibility of violent clashes with capitalist reaction before the seizure of power. However, this also would lead to a fetishization of direct action and spontaneity. For the most extremist members like Bela Kun, the party was conceived as a “militant minority” that would push the masses into revolutionary action as mass strikes erupted, inevitably throwing the proletariat into struggle against a decaying capitalism. While the Third International had become more willing to break the straightjacket of constitutional legalism, it overestimated both the capacity of the “militant minority” to spring the working class into action by intervening in waves of mass strikes, a process that could lead to the formation of Soviets that could command political authority and be lead by the Comintern parties to communism.

This tactic had a big problem: the majority of the working class was not aligned with the Comintern and still had loyalties to the SPD. The question of leadership of the labor movement had yet to be seriously dealt with, and the hegemony of Social-Democracy was underestimated. In its first four congresses, the Comintern would increasingly come to grips with this fact and tried to develop a strategy of winning the working class over from Social-Democracy. Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder can be seen as a polemic against tendencies in the Comintern that aimed rush into battle without winning leadership over the labor movement, and an implicit reminder that certain tactics of the Second International were still useful. Many of the “Lefts” Lenin was arguing against, like Herman Gorter and Anton Pannekoek, claimed that the historical situation had changed and that it was now necessary to abstain from elections and break with unions in favor of factory organizations. They saw such tactics as a remnant of an earlier phase of the workers’ movement which was made obsolete and even harmful by the tactics of mass strikes, with workers councils being the key forms of proletarian organization. Some “Lefts” were in favor of a minority “vanguard party” that would guide the spontaneous struggle of the workers’ councils, while others such as Otto Rühle were against party organization entirely. However, by making these bold statements about tactics and the historical periods they belonged to, the Lefts were incapable of adapting to changing situations. Strong theoretical chops and an ability to see past the opportunism of reformists were not enough without a keen sense of politics. Organizing for revolution requires tactical flexibility: the proletariat must use every tactic possible to win. For Lenin in his rebuttal to the “Lefts”, what was important was not tactics, but the animating principle behind them. Lenin argued winning elections and leadership of the unions were not tactics inherently corrupted by the legacy of Social Democracy, but rather tactics that needed to be utilized for revolutionary rather than reformist ends. If they failed to do so, they simply ceded ground to reformists. The left tendency in the Comintern was not simply reflected in the ideas of a few idealist intellectuals lost in abstractions and separate from the class struggle, but also within the rank-and-file itself. There was a strong distrust of Social-Democrats and the union bureaucracy among the rank-and-file and for good reason. This distrust would last through to the rise of Hitler, yet the rank-and-file of both parties also showed a willingness to unite from below. However, as long as long the as the SPD held hegemony over the German labor movement, the KPD would not be able to take power except via a putsch.

Responding to relative isolation in the broader working class movement and faced with the dominance of Social-Democracy even after the war, Comintern theorists like Bela Kun devised the “theory of the offensive” where the communist “militant minority” would attempt to incite militant conflict with the state, aiming to shake reformist workers out of their Menshevik boots and spring them into militant action against the state itself alongside the communist vanguard. The aim was to as Mao put it, be the spark that lit the prairie fire, to push the working class into action thought the militant vanguard. This strategy manifested itself in the KPD’s March Action which failed miserably and simply divided the working class movement even further. The KPD’s effort to “go on the offensive” did not see the Social-Democratic workers join Communist workers against the wishes of their leaders, it instead saw KPD and SPD workers fighting each other in the streets and an unleashing of state repression when already under constant threat from right-wing militias. Based on this experience, the idea of a minority or vanguard acting decisively to push the masses into more radical action was shown to be an ineffective strategy. There was no shortcut to winning a revolutionary majority. The March Action would be an astounding failure – hundreds of Communists killed, around 6000 arrested, and 4000 convicted including key party leaders like Heinrich Brandler. Party membership was essentially halved, with hundreds of thousands of workers leaving, slimming the ranks of the party from approximately 400,000 to 180,000.⁸

The failure of the March Action, while not clear to all Communists, was a sign that the Comintern had to develop a united strategy to win mass working-class support. The solution that the Comintern arrived at was the United Front, which was first officially suggested by the party leadership in Paul Levi and Karl Radek’s Open Letter. The united front strategy called on the unity of the entire workers’ movement (including all the unions and the Social-Democrats) in campaigns for demands of higher pay, unemployment relief, price controls, emergency expropriations, the disarming of right-wing militias and the arming of the workers, and freedom for political prisoners. The letter also called for the involved organizations to not “conceal the disagreements that divide us” and simply “limit themselves to lipservice for proposed basis for action”.⁹  This meant unity in campaigns for these reforms, not meaning that parties surrender the right to critique each other and lose their political independence. This letter was published in the KPD party press approximately two months before the failed March Action, and with its disaster leading to the implosion of the party, the united front now seemed to clearly represent a superior strategic approach. By the 4th Congress of the Comintern, the need for winning a working-class majority through the united front tactic was recognized officially by the Comintern’s Executive Committee (whose authority was binding on all member parties).¹⁰

The United Front policy was a call for unity of the workers’ organizations for specific struggles, with each organization maintaining its independence and the right to critique each other. The united front policy was applied by various Communist parties differently, as it was received with great skepticism by those who were unwillingly forced to adopt it. Some communists, like the PCI’s chief theorist Amadeo Bordiga, argued the united front should only be applied ‘from below’, meaning without any official agreements made with the leaders of reformist parties. This was contrasted with a united front ‘from above’, which involved making agreements and alliances on the political level rather than merely uniting across party lines in economic struggles. This desire to draw a distinction in order to avoid making deals with the leadership of reformists reflected a real expression of hostility towards uniting with the Social-Democratic parties from the party rank-and-file. Yet this tendency in the rank-and-file was not universal, as workers had already begun to unite across party affiliation on their own before the united front policy was imposed formally. Ultimately, the distinction between united fronts from below or above was less than useful; even if leadership rejected cooperation, this would simply be more evidence that Communists had the interests of the workers at heart in the concrete class struggle. Simply making deals with reformist leaders for joint action was not the same as a political coalition with a capitalist party to make easy electoral gains while sacrificing one’s politics.

It also important to distinguish the United Front from the Popular Front policy, which is not a common alliance of workers organizations, but rather an alliance with the bourgeois state to restore the constitutional order. The Popular Front policy is an explicit call for national unity with the bourgeoisie for a cause that supposedly carries more importance than the class struggle. This policy means a sacrifice of class-independence, while the United Front policy aims to allow for common action while preserving class-independence. The United Front aimed to give communists an opportunity to push for class struggle against the acceptable bounds of reformists, whereas the Popular Front was a retreat into the bounds of reformism.

An example of the United Front policy being put to the test can be found in the great railway strike in Germany in February 1922. The strike was triggered by cuts and layoffs of workers who were on the state payroll, with no opposition from the SPD despite protest from the conservative railway workers’ union. When the strike launched, the SPD ministers in government banned the strike and threatened disciplinary action. In response, the KPD backed the strikers demands and called for the leaders of the Railway Workers Union, the Trade Union Confederation, the UPSD, and the SPD to all unite in defense of the workers’ economic needs and their right to strike. While the SPD leadership denied cooperation, locally, SPD workers and Communists were able to cooperate. While the main backer of the strike was the KPD, the strike eventually reached a level of 800,000 workers and became the largest transportation strike in German history. Through their attempts to unite all workers and support the strikers, the KPD was able to come out as a more powerful party with mass support. Zinoviev even praised the actions of the KPD in the German railway strike as a “textbook example of the proper application of the United Front tactic”.¹¹

Despite this success, the United Front policy was not flawless. One of its more questionable elements was the concept of the ‘workers government’ where the Communists would form a halfway-house to the dictatorship of the proletariat through a coalition government with the Social-Democrats. The formation of ‘workers government’ was meant to create a crisis that would eventually put power purely in the hands of the Communist Party. This was based on the assumption that the dictatorship of the proletariat could only function with single-party rule, something which grew to become Comintern orthodoxy. This concept was also another ‘shortcut’ to seizing power without winning mass support, and relied on Social-Democratic votes to boost the parties position of authority. In 1923, the attempt to put the workers government tactic into practice in Saxony ended in failure and led to an unsuccessful insurrection that would foreclose hope of revolution in Germany for the coming years. Ultimately, the hope of climbing the ladder to power with the help of a ‘workers government’ was a chimera; the party had no alternative but to win a relative working class majority and displace Social-Democratic hegemony over the labor movement. This hope for spontaneity to fill in the gaps left by a lack of actual leadership over the class movement was the source of the Comintern’s ‘ultra-left’ distortion, but could also express itself in inconsistent opportunism.

Regardless of the flawed ‘workers government’ policy, the united front was an overall effective tactic that, when utilized, saw the greatest levels of growth in the Comintern.¹²  One can see this as a sort of realization on the part of the Comintern that its initial hope to form parties of civil war against an imminent demise of capitalism was a flaw. Communists were not guaranteed the support of the masses due to historical necessity – they had to fight for political support from the working class. This realization stood in contradiction to the logic behind the “theory of offensive”, and would continue to clash with it throughout the history of the Comintern, with the dominance of either approach not always reducible to a certain periodization. For example, it was after the successful merger with the USPD’s left wing at the Halle Conference when the KPD went on the suicidal March Action. Inability to unite around a solid strategy meant an approach of consistency and patience wasn’t pursued.

The rest of the history of the Comintern is a sad story. In the ‘third period, from 1928-1933, the parties fully moved away from their tactics of the united front and took up ultra-sectarian positions. This manifested most infamously in Germany with the KPD’s unwillingness to form a united front with the SPD against Hitler, leading to one of history’s greatest disasters when Hitler came to power without a serious united struggle against him by the working class. This idiotic ‘ultra-leftism’ would then be matched by the equally bankrupt rightism of the Popular Front, where Comintern Parties decided to forgo the struggle for socialism in hopes that the colonial powers of the world would back them against fascism due to their “democratic” characteristics. The bourgeois powers only opposed fascism to the extent it threatened the stability of their own empires.

One could judge from this history that the Second and Third Internationals were just shitshows with little redeeming qualities, essentially evidence that the 20th Century was proof of the impossibility of communism. It would be foolish to expect the first attempts at a global Communist Party to succeed, and despite their ultimate failure, they were the organized expression of the revolutionary working class at its height, with all their flaws and heroism in full display. As communists, we have no choice but to learn from our history. Ignoring the 20th-century communist movement or simply semantically distancing ourselves from the realities don’t make them go away. While the Second International primarily made rightist political errors, the Third International primarily made ‘ultra-left’ political errors. From this observation, we can come to a sort of center, where the positives and negatives of both Internationals can be learned from. This overall position, of building a mass party around a program for revolution through patiently consolidating the organized forces of the proletariat, could be described as “Centrist Marxism” or “the Marxist Center”. While the term ‘centrism’ is often used by Trotskyists as a term of derision, we use it here in this sense of a strategy that would mean patiently building up the forces of the revolutionary proletariat into democratically organized institutions, rather than trying to build a small “vanguard” or “militant minority” that will either intervene in a spontaneous movement or spark a revolution through armed struggle. It also entails a strong commitment to both Internationalism and democracy, emphasizing Marxism as in continuity with democratic and republican principles that developed in the struggles against Aristocracy, Monarchism, and Clericalism. Flexibility in tactics must be matched with a strong commitment to principles. One could say that the center strategy is a sort of pragmatism for the means of revolution rather than reform.

Beyond “Leninism”

What would it mean for a party to accept the positive and negative lessons of both the Second and Third Internationals? To begin with, it would mean disregarding either as models to copy that we can identify as carrying some invariant “red thread”. Both failed, the Second International becoming an ally of the capitalist order and the Third International leaping into the ultra-leftist madness of the Third Period, the opportunistic Popular Front and eventually its full dissolution by Stalin. Today, much of what calls itself the ‘revolutionary left’ wants to essentially revive Comintern style parties, though perhaps only on a national scale. This attempt at revival, typically referred to as Leninism or Bolshevism, was last attempted in the United States with the New Communist Movement, having little to do with the actual history of Bolshevism before the Comintern. These views and the leftovers of this wave of Leninist party forming have come to represent what is seen as mainstream Leninism in the United States. Their results give us the micro-sects we have today; World Workers Party, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Freedom Road Socialist Organization-Fight Back, as well as countless Trotskyist groups that are all of varying quality in politics. In this particular section, when I refer to Leninists I do not mean the “Leninism of Lenin” which I very much admire, but rather the “Leninist movement” of attempts to form vanguard parties in the mode of the Comintern. What differentiates this mode of Leninism from orthodox Marxism is its embrace of the single monolithic party-state as a model for the dictatorship of the proletariat, the belief in a “party of the new type” that transcends the mass party through selective elitism, centralization around a specific theoretical line, and a militaristic chain of command that is not actually ‘democratic’ or ‘centralist’ but rather bureaucratic and autocratic.

Leninists argue the key innovation of their “party of a new type” was democratic centralism. Democratic centralism, most simply defined, is the hardly disagreeable formula of democratic deliberation combined with unity in action. By this definition, democratic centralism was also practiced by the Second International. Any democratic decision making requires centralism because the will of the majority needs to be enforced against the minority. The SPD, for example, voted as a bloc in parliament and had centralism enforced in the party, it was not internally a federalist organization (like other parties in the Second International) despite the wishes of its right.¹³ What made the “Leninist party of a new type” different was not democratic centralism. Rather than simple centralism, Comintern parties had a form of ‘monolithism’ to use the phrase of Fernando Claudin.¹⁴  In other words, Comintern parties emphasized centralism over democracy or often just disregarded democratic norms entirely. While this wasn’t absent in the Second International, the Third was born as a sort of militarized civil war organization rather than a political party in the sense of a mass workers association as envisioned by Marx. While this may have been justified at a time when an actual global civil war against capitalism was on the table, this is not the case right now – we are not living in the same era of ‘Wars and Revolutions’ as the leaders of the Comintern were. When modern Leninists claim the secret of their parties’ road to success is ‘democratic centralism’, it tends to mean an overly bureaucratized group that puts heavy workloads on individual members to make them more ‘disciplined’, and a lack of actual democracy in favor of a more militarized party structure. Factions are forbidden, ideological centralism (rather than programmatic centralism) is imposed from above, and groups aim to build an ‘elite’ cadre that tails existing mass struggles, hoping to bank in on them to recruit members. The Comintern model is simply a recipe for failure in today’s conditions, just another guide to building yet another sect that will compete for the latest batch of recruits. How this actually works in practice is exemplified by the state of actually existing contemporary Leninism in the USA.

Take PSL, FRSO-FB and the ISO as case studies. Alongside schemes to take over union bureaucracy, these organizations essentially form front groups that hide affiliation to any kind of communist goals and aim to mobilize students around the latest liberal social justice issues and work in alliance with NGOs to throw rallies of mostly symbolic value. Through these activities, the cadre (or inner group) of the Leninist organization hopes to recruit parts of the liberal activist community in order to grow their base of support and garner more influence in these social movements. The organizations themselves proclaim democratic centralism, but in reality, there is no public debate about party positions allowed between congresses. At the congresses debate, takes place as little as possible and is usually led by an unelected central committee that composed of full-time staffer careerists. By using their “militant minority” tactics to act as the “spark that lights the prairie fire” in popular struggles, the modern Leninists (with some exceptions of course) tend to tail these struggles instead of fight for a class-conscious approach to issues of civil and democratic rights. One tactic often used is to hand out as many of their signs as possible to appear larger in number, when in reality this is often protesting street theater backed by NGOs connected to the Democrats who are simply using leftists as useful idiots for “direct actions” against the Republicans. Usually, the rationale for this activism is to raise consciousness among liberals. Theoretically, by ‘riding the wave’ of spontaneous activism, the militant minority group will build up enough influence to launch an insurrection. This is a delusional hope. It leads to chronic involvement in activism that takes up time and energy but doesn’t build working class institutions that can actually offer concrete gains for working people through collective action. One could describe this general strategy of tailing social movements as ‘movementism’.

The critique of movementism has developed in Leninist circles, specifically by Maoists around the theorist J. Moufawad-Paul. He has written that movementism is the “ideological articulation of the default form of opportunism in the capitalist centre” and a product of internalized anti-communism.¹⁵ Yet the Maoist critique of the logic of economism and defeat that fuels movementism has no real alternative to offer beyond a fantasy of “protracted people’s war” where a mass movement grows in the process of waging a violent guerrilla struggle against the state. The actually existing Maoist alternative to the politics of movementism in the US is no better, mostly consisting of politically substanceless militant posturing and sectarianism. While the Maoists may be correct in their critiques of other Leninists, their alternative seems to entail acting like insurrectionary anarchists with red flags. Nor do they move away from the model of the “militant minority”- they instead double down on it with calls to “put politics in command” and boast about their supposed “military policy”.

While modern Leninist groups obviously have no organic or meaningful connection to the Comintern, it is still the reference point to which these organizations orient. Amongst Leninist organizations, the idea of the party as a minority “vanguard” that doesn’t rely on majority support is based on a misunderstanding of the Russian Revolution. Like bourgeois scholars, this misunderstanding views the October Revolution as a coup but embrace it, believing it to be evidence that a minority party can slip its way into power by being in the right place at the right time. This perspective leaked into the Comintern, despite Lenin’s protestations in Left-Wing Communism. Instead of critical engagement with the politics elaborated in the text  Leninists choose to use it as a guidebook for justifying rank opportunism. The idea of the militant minority channeling the energy of spontaneous mass action is essentially what unites both the early Comintern and today’s ‘movementism’ as well as the Maoist critics of movementism.

It is necessary to go beyond actually existing Leninism. This doesn’t mean disputing Lenin or distancing ourselves from his legacy; he was one of the greatest Marxists and revolutionaries of all time and his works and life are marked with political brilliance. Yet today, “Leninism” almost completely distorts or disregards the early Bolshevik party and its relation to the Second International and simply focuses on repeating the Comintern experience. What we need is to move beyond an attempted systemization of the Comintern and Lenin in particular, but rather continue the systemization of Marxism as a whole based on the entire history of class struggle. This is what Lenin did. Lenin didn’t see himself as a “Leninist”, creating a new stage of Marxism, but as an orthodox Marxist applying a system of thought to his own conditions. This doesn’t mean we should reject the most vital contributions of Lenin, for example, his views on revolutionary defeatism and imperialism. What it does mean is that much of what made Lenin great was already in Marx, Engels and even Kautsky. It means, much in the same way that Marx critically learned from the failures of the Communist League in developing his theory of the party, that we must critically learn from the failures of all past Internationals, especially the Second and Third (which historically had the most impact on mass politics).

Negative lessons, as in what not to do, are the easiest to pick from our history: we know the end result and can pick out where actors had incorrect judgment. But positive lessons, as in what we should do, are harder. The common orthodoxy of “Leninism” is that there are only negative lessons to learn from the experience of the Second International, and to suggest otherwise is to commit to reformism. Yet a mass workers party with class independence run on democratic lines is still relevant, despite its basic roots in the First and Second International. The strategy of these types of parties, to patiently build up forces through union and electoral struggles, organizing proletarian communities and building a sort of alternative center of power run by the working class – eventually to seize power and become the governing class – seems to make more sense than whatever kind of hope in spontaneous insurrectionism or a general strike that the left has to offer as an alternative. We can accept this strategy while also rejecting the social-chauvinism of the German SPD. We can also accept the advances of the Third International, especially in its aim to build a truly international party resolutely opposed to imperialism and the bourgeois state, willing to use non-legal means if necessary, and closed to nationalist reformists like a Bernstein or Bernie Sanders. We also can reject the bureaucratic, semi-militarized chain of command model taken up by modern Comintern-inspired parties in favor of a robust intra-party democracy, tolerating factions without enforcing rigid ideological centralism. As the First International did, we should aim for programmatic rather than ideological unity. As the experience of the Second International showed, it was necessary to draw the line somewhere and not tolerate reactionary views having a platform in the party. The future Communist International must develop programmatic unity through collective activity as a whole, and will probably never wholly have ideological unity. However, there must be basic minimum political standards enforced. Ideally, it is in a strong, clear program that one can develop these standards of principled unity. Yet one cannot make a formal rule that will prevent falling to the monolithism of the Comintern or opportunism of the Second International – it is also a question of ideological, of political debate.

The forces of the proletariat are weak and divided, it will take a long-haul approach to develop a party that can be a vehicle of independent political action. This doesn’t rely on any kind of ‘get rich quick’ scheme, where the party uses a mass line or transitional demands to attract the working class without actually convincing and winning them over to revolutionary politics. It means actually having to develop the actual organizational strength to put the working class into command of society. One has to essentially build a ‘state within a state’ which stands in opposition to the bourgeois order and command the loyalty of proletarians in their majority against the capitalist state. We cannot hope that crisis simply accelerates the working class into such misery that it has no choice but to go on mass strikes to form workers councils and then try to insert our militant minority into the movement to guide it on its proper track. Building a real alternative to capitalist rule requires, as Lenin pointed out, a principled core that is able to stay politically consistent while utilizing every tactic possible. No space left open in civil society, where we can agitate and educate, should be left unutilized. A class-independent workers party which does not neglect this fight is a necessity.

What Kind of Party

What does it mean for a party to be a “class independent workers party”? Should the “class party” be a vanguard party or mass party? To answer these questions, we must first look at the more abstract principle of “class interests” to understand what is meant by class independence. A workers party means, in a more plainly-spoken language, a proletarian party. For Marx, the proletariat is generally all those in society “without reserves”, meaning they own no property from which to subsist, and are forced to rely on the general fund of wages paid out by the capitalist, property-owning, class. The proletariat is not simply factory workers, but the entire section of society that relies on the wage fund to survive, in many cases they are not even formally employed. The proletariat has no existing property relations of its own to maintain. It performs cooperative labor on a global scale but mediated through the anarchy of the market. The broad proletariat can only liberate itself by cooperating across all its social divisions and collectively ending their separation from the means of production. Yet the bourgeois, propertied class, has interests in the maintenance of property relations that allow them to exist as a class. By nature, these two classes ultimately struggle not only over the needs of workers or the drives of capitalists on a day to day basis, but contest modes of production themselves. Class interests, however, are not derived from the subjective consciousness of individual members of a class, but from an abstract analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Because of the impossibility of liberation through reversion to small commodity production, communism is the only option for the liberation of the proletariat (and besides, self-employment for the entire proletariat via a return to petty commodity production is not a desirable or possible historical outcome). It can be said that the proletariat as a class because it is the class compelled to fight for communism, carries with it the interests of humanity, as communism entails the liberation of humanity as a whole. Yet only those without any real stakes in the capitalist system will never collectively, as a class, fight to abolish it.

When discussing class interests, we mean not only short-term needs like better economic conditions and expanding democratic rights, but the long-term need to overthrow waged labor and establish communism. By class independence we mean that the class interests of the proletariat are independent and exclusive to the proletariat and are antagonistic with the objective interests of all other propertied classes as they exist in capitalism – hence standing opposed to all class rule itself. There is a contradiction that cannot be resolved through any scheme of ‘harmony’ between the propertied classes (the bourgeoisie, their bureaucratic elite, and landlords) and the dispossessed class (the proletariat, which grows as small proprietors are knocked out of business and specialized labor becomes de-skilled).  Class independence means organizing around a program of politics that expresses the exclusive interests of the proletariat that differ from other classes – the need to overthrow the capitalist system, which only the propertyless proletariat has no stake in. It also means not forming electoral blocs with bourgeois parties, or aiming to win support from the bourgeoisie by changing the class program to de-emphasize communism or the seizure of state power by the waged class. A class-independent party and communist party essentially mean the same thing, if we accept the greater Marxist theory about the politics of class interests. An independent class program is, therefore, one which expresses not the subjective needs of the workers at a given moment, but on the overall role of the proletariat in history according to a Marxist analysis. Of course, a program must be more than simply words, but also express the principles which animate the day to day activity of the party.

Does a party that makes concessions in its program to small property owners lose its class independence? This question raises why it’s important to differentiate between a minimum and maximum program. The minimum program should be a set of measures that if enacted, will bring the proletariat to power. This should include the creation of a commune state, the arming of the proletariat, dissolution of the police and military, nationalization of monopolies, leading to a decisive break with bourgeois state power. It is not the abolition of the bourgeoisie (and therefore all class distinctions), but of their political rule initially in a certain region (the larger the better). The proletariat and bourgeoisie are still reproduced as categories, but capitalism exists in a state of decay, the bourgeoisie primarily existing in small production and the intellectual property of bureaucrats. Because of their role in social reproduction (often as specialists or producers of vital goods), concessions will have to be made to these classes for the proletariat to hold onto power without social reproduction breaking down. Therefore, a minimum program that makes certain economic concessions to small producers such as small business owners is not necessarily incompatible with the interests of the proletariat. Such demands, however, are incompatible with the maximum program, which express the final goal of communism. The full development of a socialized sphere of social reproduction will eventually leave small property relations in the dustbin of history, but this requires the long-term transformation of both the forces and relations of production. The small property owners will not immediately be forcibly collectivized by the proletariat in the same way as the largest monopoly capitalists will be. Because small proprietors control small patchworks of the economy, such as parts of agriculture and technology, they will not be easy to collectivize immediately -cooperation with these sectors is necessary to keep society running. They should be urged to form cooperatives and integrate into the socialized sector, but eventually, they will fall out business in competition with the growing socialist sector. The proletariat can’t cede too much economic power to small proprietors without risking its own power and having to limit democratic governance. A difficult balance is needed.

The minimum program should not be a set of measures that “complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution” either, as some suggest. There is no “completion” of the bourgeois revolution where all oppressive leftovers of the pre-capitalist order are destroyed, short of the proletarian revolution that transcends the bourgeois revolution altogether, eliminating all forms of class exploitation and oppression, including those that preceded capitalism. It should be a set of measures that change the form of the state such that the proletariat, or the working-class, is now the governing class. Such a society was called a “dictatorship of the proletariat” by Marx, but perhaps a contemporary, more politically viable term could be the “workers’ republic”. In the minimum program, some aspects may be reforms achievable under capitalism, but if enacted in full it should transform the bourgeois state to a workers republic; a metamorphosis from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to a dictatorship of the proletariat.

A proper minimum program also avoids the pitfalls of economism, not simply focusing on economic demands of the immediate class struggle, but also demands that address the struggle for democratic rights of women and oppressed nationalities as well as the general tyrannical and anti-democratic nature of the state. This means taking up demands for sexual freedom, for freedom from censorship, for the right own firearms, and democracy in all sphere of life. To quote Lenin in 1890, “In waging only the economic struggle, the working class loses its political independence; it becomes the tail of other parties and betrays the great principle: ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working class themselves.’”¹⁶ The party must be a school of politics where the workers are trained not to follow orders, but to take politics into their own hands and constitute their class as one that fights for the liberation of all humanity. ‘Class independence’ should not be interpreted in a narrow economistic sense where the working class strictly fights for things that solely benefit workers. Rather, the working class should pose itself as the most militant and uncompromising force in these democratic struggles, leading them to give as much of a communist perspective as possible.

The workers’ party itself should be a prefiguration of the workers’ republic, in the sense of its internal governance. This means it should practice a form of democracy distinct from and beyond the democracy of liberalism. This means experimentation, investigating new forms of collective decision making and seeing what works. The party should be economically organized (as all parties are firms) on a cooperative basis with no salaries that allow for careerism. The Central Committee should be directly elected by the membership and recallable. Open debate and tolerance of factions, rather than the imposition of an ideological monolithism are key if the party wishes to demonstrate to the class that communism, not capitalism, is the truly free society.

The party is a workers party because it is organized in the working class districts, campaigns electorally primarily in these districts, and builds working class organizations of all kinds, such as tenants unions and mutual aid groups, in these communities. The party must present itself as a complete alternative to the existing bourgeois parties but just as serious. The majority of the proletariat does not even vote, as the blog Cold and Dark Stars pointed out, meaning that a working-class party would have to tap into the disappointments of the mass of the population with existing politics while offering a compelling alternative politics that speaks to their deeper sense of human solidarity to build a culture of class struggle. A form of “insurgent electoralism” is needed, one that aims not simply to gradually capture the pre-existing capitalist state machinery for the proletariat, but to use the election campaign as a ruthless propaganda tool against the bourgeois parties, to help delegitimize the bourgeois state, and legitimize communist politics. We won’t win simply by acting like professional politicians and pandering to the center, but by being the more dangerous vote in an election.

However, a workers party is more than just an electoral party, and if it is going to even succeed as an electoral party it needs a base to mobilize in the first place. It requires well-trained cadre and education programs for all members, and it needs to distribute these skills and knowledge amongst the membership as much as possible. By learning to run alternative unions, mutual aid societies, and election campaigns, we learn the skills needed to run society on new political grounds. The party becomes a smaller state within and without the state that grows through a course of the protracted struggle to become the hegemonic force in society and stands as an alternative center of authority to the existing bourgeois state when crisis emerges.

Becoming a “state within the state” would also mean forming what is often called an “alternative culture” by historians of the Second International-era SPD.¹⁷ This would include things ranging from party-run sports teams to free clinics to breakfast programs or hiking clubs. The point of such ‘alternative cultures’ is not just to draw in wider layers of the working class, but also to develop new forms of socialization contrary to capitalism and meet needs of workers that the capitalist state ignores. One thing that modern-day anarchists get correct is the need to create such an alternative culture within capitalism. However, largely due to self-imposed ideological limitations, anarchist subcultures do not have the working class orientation, level of centralization, institutionalization, and access to resources (as well as cultural barriers) to actually make an alternative culture that is appealing, and instead, create a mostly ‘DIY’ alternative to charities. A workers party would bring a level of professionalization and discipline to such activities, as well as incorporating them into a larger political project with democratic accountability to a mass movement, moving beyond the limits of current left ‘counterculture’.

We also should never forget the importance of the party school, which is one of the key aspects of the party. The party school should aim to not only educate its members in Marxism, but also in skills related to organization, finance, science, technology, and logistics. The party’s educational institutions work to not only raise the class’s own class-awareness in history but also their skills in fighting against capitalism and constructing an alternative order. Most importantly, party schools should not simply be transmission belts for a certain leader’s ideology, but also promote free thinking and debate. Marxism should be treated as an open system, a progressive research program in the Lakatosian sense that develops through critical inquiry. The party must, therefore, have an intellectual culture of open debate and collective deliberation, reflected in its own institutions. Though the educational institutions of the party, workers should develop a system superior at creating well-rounded individuals than bourgeois education, creating a model that demonstrates the potentials of the communist alternative.

As for the question of unions, a party should aim to win leadership of the overall union movement as much as possible. However, winning leadership is a means to an end and should strive to push the union movement towards industrial unions that break beyond the divisions of craft and skill. Forming one united union for all workers, both skilled and unskilled, should be the overall aim of the party. This is, of course, a lofty ideal to achieve, something hardly imaginable to happen until after the consolidation of a workers state. However, communists in the union movement should not simply call for more militant direct action from rank-and-file caucuses, but strive to win union elections and build relations with other unions. Rather than seeking to form a stratum within unions that is merely willing to push strike actions into more militant directions, the aim should be for the party to campaign for democratic reforms in the union and make them schools of socialism, eventually winning them to supporting socialism as a long-term goal. Simply forming caucuses for militant struggle is not enough; workers can engage in militant strikes but still hold reactionary views. Communists must take an active role in education by participating in union politics and holding strong positions against the union bureaucracy’s association with the Democratic Party, apoliticism, and general opportunism.

Some have argued that industrial unionism is impossible in the United States because of labor law. This relies on two assumptions – that labor law cannot be challenged by electoral action or simple mass transgression of the law. It is also possible that the existing unions in the United States, in large part, are too conservative to reform. However, the majority of US proletarians aren’t unionized, giving a large pool of potential recruits for a new union movement that escapes the straightjacket of the official unions. In a period where old institutions meet their limitations and new ones struggle to find footing in the terrain of modern capitalism, it is hard to say what exactly the general defensive organizations of the working class will look like. The need for such organizations is eternal in capitalism, and the constant dislocations caused in the working class by the brutality of market competition at some point make defensive class organization of some kind a necessity.

What the party does need to avoid in the unions is bureaucratic careerism. Union representatives of the workers’ party need to be subject to the party rather than their own career interests, which creates a phenomenon that moves the party’s politics to the right. This means the focus of work in the unions needs to be a form of base building as well as education amongst the rank-and-file rather than using opportunistic machinations to climb the ranks of the union.

From sects to parties to state power

How we can build such a party is no easy question. To begin to answer this seriously would require an analysis of the dynamics of the various sects of the left, and thinking of a way to transcend the dynamics of the sect system while moving toward greater programmatic unity. Many argue the best option right now is to work in the DSA; others in the Marxist Center network, and still others in the IWW. What is clear is that serious communists need to start working towards some kind of programmatic unity that could be the basis of a new party. Potentially, we could also derive lessons from the ‘united front’ tactic of the Comintern on how to unite and consolidate our forces despite the division of the left. Unity in common action can help communists overcome pointless divisions and find their broader programmatic unity.

The road to building such a party will not be simple and will require ideological and political struggles. It is important that these debates be had in good faith and publicly in the press of revolutionary organizations without either anti-intellectualism or obscurantism. Compromises on tactical questions will have to be made. Old historical struggles will have to be put to rest. Dogmatism, faith in holding the one true red thread of the communist tradition, or believing in the one correct interpretation of the “immortal science” (and thus the unlimited authority it grants), should be fought against with open debate and inquiry. Factions will have to be tolerated; people will have to tolerate losing votes without splitting in response. Clear lines of ideological demarcation will be drawn, and political tendencies will grow that reflect the diversity of the proletariat in all its forms. The general strategy of base-building can be seen as a sort of ‘bread-and-butter’ of party organizing. The general task of building institutions with a proletarian base outside the state and capable of exercising class power is key, and institutions that can exist both within and outside a political party must be created. Building power cannot be done within the bourgeois state. Rather, a workers party must build power by first building its own independent base, not merely “conquering” the base of another party. Electoral successes are not so much a source of power as much as they merely measure and consolidate existing power.

A workers party worthy of the communist name must be closely connected to the class struggle. It is not going to arise spontaneously out of the unions and other defensive organizations but will begin through the consolidation of communists who then take an active role in organizing such institutions. A communist party must not simply “intervene” in strikes after they pop off, but be an organizational expression of class power that helps increase the number of strikes and class conflict. It must aim to win leadership of the working class’ own defensive institutions democratically, not through bureaucratic machinations. The communists must demonstrate their party to be different, not only in name from the bourgeois parties but in practice, fighting as the vanguard in the class struggle, not only for economic aims but in the fight for democracy too. A historical example of what this would look like is the way CPUSA was in the vanguard of the struggle for black democratic rights. By demonstrating they are the vanguard in such fights against all forms of capitalist tyranny, the communists can win the support of the proletariat at large by giving expression to and clarifying their class interests. The communists bring to the rest of the proletariat the “good news” that collectively, they can transform the world to eliminate all exploitation and oppression. But to convince them a vision is needed, the purpose of a program is in part to help the public envision the kinds of changes the party is fighting for.

A communist party building mass support socializes humanity in a new way and prepares the class and human solidarity that will be the basis of communism. By representing a better potential world in its organizational form, it gives life to the hopes of a better world that is otherwise suppressed by capitalist society. The rise of such a party is only compatible with the capitalist order to a certain degree; eventually, capitalism will fall into crisis and the party will have enough power to launch a social revolution if it continues with a secular rate of growth (meaning long-term continuous growth over a period of time). This was assumed by SPD theoretician Karl Kautsky who saw the growth of the party’s success as inevitable due to the growth of the proletariat. But history proved to be more cunning than this at-first believable situation, as the development of the socialist movement was bifurcated into different competing currents while the labor movement itself never followed a simple secular trend of steady growth. The hopes of Kautsky and many of his early followers proved to be too ideal for the complexity of actual politics. As the party develops and consolidates its positions, it will at times lose or gain members and support while taking necessary principled stands on issues. What matters is that the party lives up to its class independence in deed and not just word and that it does not vacillate to accommodate the interests of the propertied classes in order to win support.

How could a such a party actually win state power? Could it do so peacefully through elections? Even if the party won a majority in an election and came to power on its own, if it began to actually implement a revolutionary program to throw out the old constitutional order, dissolve the military, and arm the people, in all likelihood the bourgeoisie would react to the transgression of their class power and property with a coup or armed revolt. In this case, the only option is to either defend the revolution through the armed working class or concede to the bourgeois military. It is because of this political reality that one cannot promise a “democratic road to socialism” without the eruption of violent civil conflict. The unlikelihood of radical social change happening peaceful and without civil strife, at least in the United States, is well articulated by the American revolutionary socialist Albert Parsons:

“I do not believe that capital will quietly or peaceably permit the economic emancipation of their wage-slaves. It is against all the teachings of history and human nature for men to voluntarily yield up usurped or arbitrary power. The capitalists of the world will for this reason force the workers into armed revolution. Socialists point out this fact and warn the workingmen to prepare for the inevitable.”¹⁸

In the end, we will have no choice but to “smash” the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state, meaning in practice the dissolution of the police and military, arming the proletariat, and putting power in the hands of the working class by building a new form of representation fit for workers rule. Whether or not the party has a mandate for forming a workers republic shouldn’t be decided based solely on having a proper majority in the legislature itself. What matters is building up enough mass support and legitimacy that, when a crisis of political legitimacy most strongly expresses itself, the Communist Party represents the alternative pole of power with legitimacy from the majority of politically mobilized proletarians.

No matter how much support the Communist Party has, the transition to socialism can only happen if there is some rupture between the old ruling class and the newly-ruling proletariat which consolidates power against the collapsing regime- in other words, a revolution. In this case, revolution is simply defined as a change in which class governs the state. Such a change will require a radical rupture with previous forms of state and governance, passing political power into the hands of the masses. Since such a rupture would not likely be tolerated by the decadent classes, it is likely going to incite some form of armed struggle. It is exactly the change of power from one class to another that defines a social revolution. The hope for a rupture-less “democratic road to socialism” is merely a road to modernizing the welfare state. Unless there is a change in which class governs – in who shall rule whom – the bourgeoisie will never tolerate a transition to socialism by savvy politicians passing “evolutionary” or “non-reformist reforms” under their nose. A revolution may only be possible once the masses have been convinced that no other means are possible to solve the current crisis, and the only way towards a desirable change in society is through social revolution. The difficulty of this does nothing to negate the historical reality of bourgeois counter-revolution. The hope that a revolutionary rupture can be avoided in favor of ‘evolutionary socialism’, favorable among theorists influential in today’s DSA, is equally delusional as some immediate apocalyptic transition to communism.¹⁹

Let us look at a classic historical example. The abolition of slavery in the United States was attempted through gradual legislation when Lincoln’s Republican Party won elections on the platform of no longer expanding slave states. This prompted the slave states to form a confederacy and secede, leading to a war that began to reunite the nation but transformed into a revolutionary war to end slavery via military occupation of the south. Karl Marx was fascinated by the US Civil War for its political and strategic implications. It is likely this event influenced his views on how revolution would happen. Essentially, a revolutionary party would exhaust all means possible until either insurrection is the only way forward, or the bourgeoisie still simply launch a ‘slaveholders revolt’ and force a civil war that itself will call the existence of the bourgeois regime into question. One can look at the October Revolution similarly; the Bolsheviks and their coalition partners won a political victory in the Soviets and used it as a democratic mandate to overthrow the provisional government and form a Soviet Republic. The course of events, where the bourgeoisie went into revolt backed by imperialism via the White Army, forced the Bolsheviks to politically consolidate their regime through civil war. They did this through mobilizing the peasantry via the Red Army until 1922, finally leaving the harsh era of war communism toward the more stable New Economic Policy.

It is a fool’s errand to tell the masses that a peaceful road to a workers republic, essentially a change in class governance, is something that can be promised. Even if it was possible and the government was able to enforce a minimum program without prompting civil war, it would still require mass civic mobilizations to combat sabotage by the bourgeoisie that would accompany a shake-up of property relations. Those who hope for a “democratic road to socialism” don’t desire a new revolutionary state that is backed by the masses. They treat the liberal state as a neutral site of class conflict that the proletariat can transform to its own ends over time, slowly enough to avoid a period of social conflict where a rupture in the class nature of the state will occur. This idea assumes we can sneak a revolution pass the bourgeoisie and ignores problems like capital flight that crash attempts at social-democratic reforms. This can’t simply be combated by a hope in pressure from “mass action in the streets”. And it ignores that the capitalist class will happily resort to breaking with democratic norms in face of a government that seriously threatens the rule of property if need be, even if socialists have a democratic mandate. In Chile, an attempt was made at an electoral road to socialism through the Popular Unity government that aimed to avoid a rupture with the bourgeois state and the possibility of Civil War. Instead of arming the working class and dissolving the power of the state, Allende’s government kept the military in place and hoped for their support. This led to workers being defenseless in the face of Pinochet’s counter-revolution against the Popular Unity government that installed a military dictatorship which had devastating consequences.

It would be outside the confines of this article to speculate in detail exactly how a future communist revolution will occur, what chain of historical events will lead to it, how a civil war against reaction will play out, and how such a society will transition to communism. There will no doubt be continuities with previous revolutions, but the communist revolution will also look like no revolution that ever has occurred. It should not aim to merely win a single nation to communism, but an entire continent so as to establish a “beachhead” for the greater world revolution (Latin America would be one example). While making room for the creativity of the masses, one must have plans and institutions that are dedicated to turning questions of revolutionary governance from abstract fantasies to concrete issues to be dealt with. This is ultimately the aim of the party. It must organize the proletariat more effectively than the bourgeoisie, acting as an institution that not only can form plans counter to the rule of the bourgeoisie, but has the means of enacting these plans. Yet the question remains: what is the role of the party after the social revolution?

The aim of the party, organized around a minimum program with the goal of establishing a workers republic, must use some type of political mandate to mobilize the proletariat to smash the bourgeois state and form its own. The party will play a key role in leading the initial revolution, provide necessary coordination across all factions of the proletariat and act as an alternative sovereignty that replaces the capitalist state. As the party establishes this new sovereignty its aim should be to dissolve into different factions within the representative bodies of the workers’ republic freely voted on and recallable by the entire public. The legislative and executive bodies must be merged, the government becoming a ‘working body’ of delegates. This process marks the beginning of the withering away of the state, but it does not mean that a unitary, centralized, and repressive (of the capitalist class interests) state ceases to exist. A representative system should be composed of municipal councils and a central communal council that are accountable to each other. The aim should not be decentralization towards regional autonomy, with various municipalities having their own forms of government or law, but rather coordination and centralization of all bodies around a common plan. The purpose of the party is to take a role in leading the formation of such a government and providing the leadership to give it coherence. It should not aim to establish a Marxist-Leninist-style one-party state, instead of using forms of radical democracy that it has developed in the process of building a working-class movement. This is the only possible way forward to form a workers republic truly built on the foundation of proletarian mass power and put the world on the road to communism.

From the Workers Republic to Communism

How the workers’ republic will transition into communism is a whole other question, one which requires both a look into earlier attempts at socialism and a dangerous willingness to speculate. We can only say this: in an early workers republic, the immediate goal will not be the nationalization of all property, even its socialization or collectivization. The primary aim of the workers’ republic will be to collectivize political power, putting it into the hands of the working class. Central to this is the transfer of actual armed power into to the hands of workers’ militias through the destruction of the old military and police. A key element of any state, despite which class is at its helm is force, and this force is controlled by those who control the arms that back it up. Lenin excellently summarizes the changes necessary in order to make this happen:

‘The people need a republic in order to educate the masses in the methods of democracy. We need not only representation along democratic lines, but the building of the entire state administration from the bottom up by the masses themselves, their effective participation in all of life’s steps, their active role in the administration. Replacement of the old organs of oppression, the police, the bureaucracy, the standing army, by a universal arming of the people, by a really universal militia, is the only way to guarantee the country a maximum of security against the restoration of the monarchy and to enable it to go forward firmly, systematically and resolutely towards socialism, not by “introducing” it from above, but by raising the vast mass of proletarians and semi-proletarians to the art of state administration, to the use of the whole state power.”²⁰

Another goal of the new proletarian regime would be to end the existence of politics as a career. This demand is often echoed by the populist call to “get money out of politics”. However, removing money from politics doesn’t address the issue of bureaucrats creating fiefdoms of loyalty that shield their self-interests from public accountability. This phenomenon is not due to some flaw in human nature, where “power corrupts all”, but rather that bureaucrats use their specialist knowledge to hold a monopoly on decision-making and information in order to elevate themselves above others in status, thus developing interests similar to those of small proprietors. As long as bureaucrats exist due to the social division of labor, they will have these tendencies. What matters is that the workers’ republic uses democratic norms to make bureaucrats accountable (such as term limits, pay maximum, public supervision, recallability) as well as programs to simplify the political process and collectivize their skills for the masses to take hold of all aspects of political life.

The primary aim of the workers’ regime will be to essentially create and consolidate a new form of the state, rather than immediately destroy capitalism. Despotic inroads on private property will obviously be made, with the key commanding heights of the economy seized and the use of nationalization to fight economic sabotage. Workers will have to seize industries as the bourgeoisie flee, and the new workers’ state will make no constitutional sanctities for property rights. Initially, it will primarily be political transformations that occur, as economic transformations will take a longer period of time due to to the necessity of transforming forces and relations of production and to integrate the world economy. Such an approach may be called gradualist, whereas the seizure of power by the proletariat, on the other hand, makes immediate political changes. An immediate nationalization of all means of production and move to state rationing in place of markets will not actually abolish commodity production, but lead to the flourishing of black markets. Voluntaristic attempts to ban markets by fiat have a poor history, often simply being replaced by bureaucratic rationing prone to corruption. Under the initial economy of a workers republic, one can imagine a “market sector” primarily comprised of small producers, a “cooperative” sector of small producers self-socializing their property, and a “socialized” or planned sector. In fact, many of the initial steps made will not so much be direct negations of capitalism but the rationalization of state-monopolies towards greater efficiency. The existence of a market sector, no matter how small, is nonetheless a sign of the incomplete socialization of the economy; the question is not whether or not to abolish commodity production and have a planned economy, but how.

It is important to understand that nationalization is itself simply a means to socialization. Under a workers republic, a nationalized factory becomes the property of the state; it is still governed by a capitalist labor process, in many cases with technical division of labor that inherently creates a need for specialists and hierarchy in industry. While an industry can be nationalized, this does mean it has been transformed on a socialist basis or socialized. Key industries, especially those previously in the form of monopolies, can be nationalized and more quickly transformed into socialized industries that operate on a planned, worker-controlled basis, but even then this process requires a transformation of the entire division of labor that may take years (depending on the industry). Steps towards socialization, like workers self-management, should, of course, be actively pursued and implemented when possible.  As Lenin points out, nationalization is merely confiscation of property, socialization is a far more difficult task to carry out:

“Yesterday, the main task of the moment was, as determinedly as possible, to nationalise, confiscate, beat down and crush the bourgeoisie, and put down sabotage. Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The difference between socialisation and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by “determination” alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialisation cannot be brought about without this ability.”²¹

Simply put, the desire nationalize everything immediately after the revolution to wipe out all remnants of capitalism can only be a desire, the socialization of industry is not something that can be achieved by calling upon the inner willpower of the workers. This is because it runs against the limits of material conditions: the stability of the food supply, the provision of basic housing, reliance on skilled forms of specialized labor, and as Lenin points out, the ability to “calculate and distribute”. Many initial nationalizations may seize property to turn it into a munitions factory for the needs of civil war. Others may be to replace archaic and environmentally destructive forms of industry. It would be a mistake to nationalize all industries immediately and aim to set everything on an immediate course to socialization, especially since small proprietors will resist by turning to black markets and refuse integration into planned socialist production en masse. Small proprietors will either have to integrate into the planned sector of the economy, or eventually go out of business when faced with competition from the socialist sector.

The form of the state under a workers republic is the dictatorship of the proletariat, just as the form of the state in any bourgeois republic is, in the end, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ implies the existence of the proletariat, which itself implies the existence of capital. Hence, it would be wrong to say that the dictatorship of the proletariat moves beyond capitalism as a mode of production. Rather, the proletariat becomes the most powerful class within capitalism: capitalism is in decay. In the dictatorship of the proletariat, the proletariat has won the class struggle to become the leading class in society, having defeated the bourgeois state. Yet the class struggle continues on new grounds, now primarily against the petty-bourgeois and bureaucracy, which within them each carry class interests to restore various forms of class society. The proletariat must fight against these elements, not through violent campaigns of expulsion, but by transforming the economic base of society, transcending capitalism and class society itself. A key part of this is breaking down the mental/manual division of labor that at the core of bureaucracy and collectivizing skills held by specialists through mass campaigns combining education and labor. Because the proletariat holds state power it can use the power of centralized administration to take on such a task. The class struggle takes on a different form, becoming more directly about the transformation of social relations between humans.

One suggestion is that the transition will occur through the progressive reduction of labor time through the application of planning rather than primarily through nationalization of the entire economy and the enforcement of a rationing system. For some production, if there is not sufficient abundance, abolishing the commodity form in favor rationing may simply create black markets. Obviously, nationalization and the reduction of work hours aren’t mutually exclusive. It is important to note that in transitioning to communism, the focus should be on the process of transforming labor and other productive forces, reducing work hours, and collectivizing skills, rather than the percentage of the economy that has been confiscated by the state. Nationalization should be seen as a means towards achieving these goals, but not an end in itself. As we put the development of productive forces under new social relations via socialized scientific planning, new forces of production will be developed, which in turn develops our freedom beyond the limits of necessity and the ability to transform our environment. The two categories of social relations of production and forces of production can develop in a mutually reinforcing relationship. Developing communism is not a matter of privileging productive forces over relations of production or vice versa, but transforming both in a mutually reinforcing relationship.

In line with Marx, it makes sense to distinguish between a lower and higher phase of communism. The higher phase of communism implies a society where not only production is fully socialized, but distribution, meaning that has free access to goods without a form of money or rationing by the state mediating between humanity and the means of production. This is distinguished from the lower phase of communism, where socialized production is still on the basis of use but goods are distributed to the laborer according to their contribution of labor time (with some form of social insurance provided for those not able to work). The end of production based on exchange-value in favor of the direct production of use-values is a basic property of both the lower and higher phases of communism. Communism entails an end to buying and selling. This is what is meant by saying it is necessary to abolish the value-form. This is well summarized in the ABC’s of Communism by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky:

“The communist method of production presupposes in addition that production is not for the market, but for use. Under communism, it is no longer the individual manufacturer or the individual peasant who produces; the work of production is effected by the gigantic cooperative as a whole. In consequence of this change, we no longer have commodities, but only products. These products are not exchanged one for another; they are neither bought nor sold. They are simply stored in the communal warehouses, and are subsequently delivered to those who need them. In such conditions, money will no longer be required. ‘How can that be?’ some of you will ask. ‘In that case one person will get too much and another too little. What sense is there in such a method of distribution?’ The answer is as follows. At first, doubtless, and perhaps for twenty or thirty years, it will be necessary to have various regulations. Maybe certain products will only be supplied to those persons who have a special entry in their work-book or on their work-card. Subsequently, when communist society has been consolidated and fully developed, no such regulations will be needed. There will be an ample quantity of all products, our present wounds will long since have been healed, and everyone will be able to get just as much as he needs. ‘But will not people find it to their interest to take more than they need?’ Certainly not. Today, for example, no one thinks it worth while when he wants one seat in a tram, to take three tickets and keep two places empty. It will be just the same in the case of all products. A person will take from the communal storehouse precisely as much as he needs, no more. No one will have any interest in taking more than he wants in order to sell the surplus to others, since all these others can satisfy their needs whenever they please. Money will then have no value. Our meaning is that at the outset, in the first days of communist society, products will probably be distributed in accordance with the amount of work done by the applicant; at a later stage, however, they will simply be supplied according to the needs of the comrades.”

To achieve such a task society will need to greatly develop its productive capacities and rationalize its social organization. Abolition of the value-form does not occur through fiat, repressing it through a “communist dictatorship against value”. The aim is instead to change the relations and forces of production to put society on a developmental path toward such an end. It is necessary to not merely negate the value-form and suppress the existence of commodity production in favor of bureaucratic rationing but to transcend the value-form by producing new social relations that allow for a non-alienating and non-exploitative form of social reproduction.

It should also be clear that communism is not a possibility on the national scale, because it requires the full cooperation of the world division of labor. A dictatorship of the proletariat’s ability to transcend itself and wither away as a state is reliant on the success of world revolution; as long as the world is capitalist, revolutionaries will have to make economic compromises with capitalism. What matters initially is that politically, power is in the hands of the proletariat. From there, the proletariat begins to take steps to socialism in line with what is materially possible, initially creating an embryonic socialized sector by seizing key industries and planning them, as well as putting them under workers control, and gradually increasing the amount of social product that is freely available to all despite the time spent laboring on said product. As production becomes planned scientifically according to human need, distribution can increasingly be done on a free, communal basis, what exists of the remaining market sector of small producers will fade away. One can think of Preobrazhensky’s notion of the law of planning and the law of value, where the law of planning grows with the socialization of industry to displace regulations of goods by the law of value.²²The process should be done with care, at a pace that prevents major disruptions of social equilibrium. Merging labor with education to produce a surplus of skilled laborers is necessary so that specialists cannot use their knowledge as monopolies to benefit from. It will rather be collectively used to contribute to the general intellect of society.  

The new socialist society that develops out of the workers’ republic transitioning into communism will be a unique creation evolving from the shell provided by the old capitalist society, a creation of the proletariat taking production and science into its own hands. As more goods become socialized in distribution, the mental/manual division of labor eroded, and the necessary labor hours for all greatly reduced, people will have more free time, not only for leisure but to improve oneself and engage in the kind on non-alienated human flourishing that Marx claimed would become generalized. Such a society free of a repressive state will be a “free association of producers” where all of humanity forms a common, unified community.  Yet to get there, one must travail the class struggle, which is ultimately a political struggle: a struggle for power.