PARTISAN!

Broad parties are common across the global left, but their success has been limited. Why? Edith Fischer writes that we need a revolutionary mass party, not a broad party, to advance the Communist cause.

What sort of party do we need? In the socialist left, outside of those who tail Laborism or support entry into the Green movement, we largely hear two answers: the Broad Party and the Party of a New Type. While my comrades at the Partisan have engaged in a sustained critique of the Party of a New Type, I believe it is time to level the guns at the Broad Party and its advocates. This is not for no reason: it is the framework of the Broad Party that animates the largest socialist project in the country: the Socialist Party, with its various state-wide sections.

In Australia, the primary thinkers cited by advocates of the Broad Party are Murray Smith of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), and the radical-democratic populists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The former has more sway in the sectarian left – Smith is often discussed in the Socialist Alliance and has been republished in LINKS, Alliance’s somewhat moribund theoretical review. Laclau and Mouffe are arguably more influential, having made a substantial impact on figures in the left of the Greens, such as Max Chandler-Mather and Liam Flenady. 

Laclau and Mouffe have their own pedigree, being the founders of the post-structuralist Essex School of discourse analysis, and being extremely influential in their propagation of “post-Marxism” – a radical left populism that rejects the centrality of the proletariat. While they have left far more of a mark than Smith, their followers are not as prominent in the Socialist Party in Australia, and as such a more extensive treatment, and a general balance sheet of left populism as a political project, will be continued in a future article.

Smith has a somewhat different background. A lifelong Marxist and member of the Committee for a Workers International (a splinter of the Grantite Militant Tendency) and an activist in the broad left SSP, he became an advocate of the “broad party strategy” and entered into a series of polemics with John Rees, a prominent intellectual of the Cliffite Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In the Australian context, he also entered a debate with Mick Armstrong and John Percy, who were at the time members of Socialist Alternative (Percy has since passed away). This debate took place in the context of unity talks between Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative in 2013, talks which while producing some optimism in the rank and file, were quickly scuppered by the mutual sectarianism of the leaderships.

In his polemic with Armstrong and Percy, Smith provides us with a clear outline of the Broad Party concept. With the collapse of the social democratic workers movement into neoliberal capitalism, a position has opened up to the left of social democracy in which a new left movement could forge a space electorally. This party of the left would draw together disparate political forces into a mass movement against neoliberal capitalism and the political right. In short, Smith argues for a broad left party that organises all those who have not been captured by neoliberalism – regardless of their orientation towards classical questions of reform and revolution. Model examples can be found across Europe: the Scottish Socialist Party, the Socialist Alliance, Die Linke, Le Parti de Gauche, and SYRIZA.

Programmatic Problems

Smith’s model of the broad party is plagued with programmatic inadequacies. From the outset, it is clear that this party does not make a programmatic distinction between reformist and revolutionary socialism. That is, it should postulate a socialist platform without explicitly indicating a revolutionary orientation. A good example of such a platform can be found in the policy platform of the Socialist Party in Victoria. This document consists of a laundry list of economic and social demands which, taken together, would be simply intolerable for capital. However, at no point is the key question ever addressed: how will the working class take power? When pressed, most members of the Socialist Party will say that constitutional limits on nationalisation of industry (to give one example!) can be swept aside, or that they simply are not relevant at this stage. In practice, this amounts to a fudge – and an unwillingness to confront the question.

Mick Armstrong’s critique of Smith’s broad party formulation is telling. Armstrong puts forward a solid account of the sectarian “Party of a New Type” formulation that emerged from the Communist International and was enforced during Bolshevization. This framework argues for an ideologically coherent and relatively politically homogenous revolutionary cadre organisation that engages in a form of bureaucratic centralism – disagreement is kept strictly internally and factionalism is either explicitly banned or discouraged. In a rather sharp critique, Armstrong accuses Smith of muddling the difference between left reformism and revolutionary Marxism, and in turn accuses Smith of liquidating revolutionary politics into a broad front that is overwhelmingly oriented towards “peaceful revolution” and a new form of democracy, absent of revolutionary or proletarian content.

Armstrong’s critiques of Smith hit the mark pretty squarely. The Broad Party is essentially a left reformist formulation, which confuses the vital programmatic questions facing the working class. However, Armstrong’s counter-position is equally untenable. The sectarian Party of a New Type, Smith rightly points out, is self-isolating and cliquish, incapable of achieving mass support because it is allergic to political disagreement. In the years since his polemic was published, Armstrong seems to have come to agree with Smith. After placing their feet firmly in opposition to Broad Party formations, Socialist Alternative has since leaped into a liquidationist turn – becoming the primary political force in the broad Victorian Socialists, and fighting vehemently to maintain its broad character against those who would seek to impose some kind of programmatic framework onto the organisation. Marxist Left Review should probably print a retraction – or at least a sequel.

Armstrong is correct that drawing a line between reformism and revolutionary Marxism is vital even outside of the revolutionary period. But the question that he fails to answer is how. If you ask Socialist Alternative, it is about militating for revolution rhetorically, and training revolutionary cadres for the future battle. Of course, both of these points are important, but they obscure the real question. It is entirely possible to be revolutionary in word and reformist in practice. The practical line of demarcation between reformism and revolution that is fudged by both Smith and Armstrong is consistent oppositionalism and disloyalty to the state!

Medway Baker makes the case well in her article in Cosmonaut,

Their [the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs – EF] unifying point is, in short, constitutional disloyalty. The moderate socialists’ insistence on compromise with the bourgeoisie represents a commitment, on the other hand, to playing by the rules of the bourgeois constitutional order. It is not sufficient to declare oneself a partisan of the revolution (as did many of the moderate socialists); what is necessary, for the most basic kind of unity, is a refusal to abide by the constitution.

The struggle between reformists and revolutionaries is an expression of a programmatic struggle – a struggle between those who are loyal to the existing constitutional order, who side with their own ruling class, and who seek a common block with the bourgeoisie (coalitionists), and those who are wholly opposed to the current order, to any coalition with the bourgeoisie and their parties, and to their own ruling class – at home and abroad (oppositionalists).

There are plenty of revolutionary sophists who fail to make this hurdle. The Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL), who have consistently defended imperialist policy abroad and equivocated between imperialism and its victims, has planted its boots firmly on the side of state loyalism. So too do those in the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Communist Party of the United States of America, who speak of revolution out of one side of their mouth, while calling for a common front with the “progressive bourgeois” with the other. This kind of state loyalism is the actual line of division between reformists and revolutionaries, between coalitionists and oppositionalists.

Smith’s Broad Party formulation fails precisely because it fails to make this distinction. Die Linke, SYRIZA, Podemos – all the darlings of the Broad Left have one by one jumped into coalition governments with bourgeois and social imperialist parties. The results have been disastrous, and the recent history of left populist opportunism has been a trail of failures and political defeats that have stunted the development of the revolutionary working class movement in Europe. 

Not Broad, Mass

The building of an alternative leadership of the working class; i.e., of new revolutionary mass parties, remains the central task of our epoch. The problem is not that of repeating over and over again this elementary truth, but of explaining concretely how it is to be done. In fact, the building of revolutionary mass parties combines three concrete processes: the process of defending and constantly enriching the Marxist revolutionary program; of building, educating and hardening a revolutionary Marxist cadre; and of winning mass influence for this cadre. These three processes are dialectically intertwined. Divorced from the mass movement, a revolutionary cadre becomes a sect. Divorced from the program of revolutionary Marxism, cadres immersed in the mass movement eventually succumb to opportunism. And divorced from practical testing by cadres struggling as part and parcel of the masses, the revolutionary program itself becomes ossified and degenerates into a sterile incantation of dogmatic formulas. – from Dynamics of World Revolution Today, adopted by the Seventh World Congress of Fourth International (Emphasis mine – EF)

The alternative to the Broad Party formulation is a Mass Party. The Mass Party differs from the Broad Party in that it has a clear basis for unity – a political program that explicitly places it in opposition to the bourgeois political order. In turn, the mass party is oppositional – it seeks to place itself in opposition to the entire capitalist order, and opposes any coalition agreement with the capitalist parties. The Mass Party then seeks to win the working class to a coherent, revolutionary program, not by hiding its views behind temporarily popular slogans, but by consistent agitation, propaganda, and mass action tactics.

As Baker succinctly puts it:

Programmatic unity is not an appeal for unity around theoretical tenets, nor is it an appeal for a broad left party. Both of these extremes have proven to be dead ends and it is time that we leave them behind. Communist programmatic unity means unity around a shared strategy for taking power and initiating the socialist transition, which means a shared commitment to constitutional disloyalty and pursuing multiple tactics simultaneously, all directed towards the common aim. This requires both intellectual and political pluralism and democratic centralism, which means allowing multiple factions to coexist within a single party, but acting only on the democratic decisions of the majority. In a healthy mass workers’ party, it is improbable that any one faction could hold a majority on its own, and all factions would presumably be represented in permanent party organs in proportion to their support among the membership.

In short, against the Broad Party, the Mass Party is unified around a coherent program for revolutionary government and workers power. Against the Party of a New Type, it is open and democratic. These two elements are dialectically intertwined. An open and democratic political life allows the party to retain its mass character, while furthering fostering unity around a common program. In term, the coherent political program provides a solid basis for common political action – and binds political minorities to a common struggle.

The form of party that we advocate can be seen in the history of revolutionary social democracy. Forged in the wake of the defeat of the Paris Commune in the 1870s, the revolutionary mass parties of the early twentieth century, both social democratic and then communist, demonstrated that unity around a coherent program of democratic and social revolution was vital to winning mass support amongst the working class. This unity – programmatic unity – was reinforced by systematic opposition, which was enforced in the early years of the movement – such as when the congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany censured the party’s Bavarian section for giving confidence-and-supply to a bourgeois regional government.

It was indeed on the basis of effecting a split from state loyalism that the Second International was torn apart after the treason of the social democratic party leadership during the First World War. The division between state loyalism and oppositionalism has yawned before us ever since. No attempt at fudging the differences can obscure this, nor can it mend the effect this division has had on the international working class.

In Australia, we face an unprecedented period of reconsolidation and party building. It is vital that we articulate a clear common vision of a new, mass socialist party, on that does not fudge the necessary questions, and one that takes its political task seriously: not just to raise the flag of socialism, but to prepare the working class to take political power.