PARTISAN!

Sectarianism is endemic to the left, to the degree that it is often caricaturised. Porco writes on the history of sectarianism, what it is and isn’t, and how communists can ‘abolish’ it.

Sectarianism

A religious sect is a minuscule group of dogmatic worshippers. They have broken away from a larger tradition, refining their own beliefs into far more rigid and isolated conceptions of God or enlightenment. For the socialist left, sectarian is a word often thrown around to insult and belittle other socialists and competing organisations in the broader movement. We use the term to mean groups who are difficult to work with, weird cliques, or dogmatic ideologues. But sectarianism is also a structural phenomenon. It indicates a weak class struggle. If sectarian organisations are the norm, they define the capacity and limitations of the socialist movement as a whole. A critique of sectarianism goes all the way back to the Manifesto of the Communist Party, where Marx wrote of utopian socialists:

“…although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour… to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms.”

It has been 178 years since the Manifesto of the Communist Party was written, and the Communist Party is in no better state than the utopian socialists were. The originators of Marxism were revolutionaries, but the disciples of Lenin and Trotsky formed mere reactionary sects. This problem of deforming into sectarianism was noticed by Trotsky in his 1935 piece, Sectarianism, Centrism and the Fourth International:

“Every working class party, every faction passes during its initial stages through a period of pure propaganda… The period of existence as a Marxist circle ingrafts invariably habits of an abstract approach to the problems of the workers’ movement. He who is unable to step in time over the confines of this circumscribed existence becomes transformed into a conservative sectarian”

This definition from Trotsky lays out the problem of sectarianism. Sectarianism manifests as a dead end in the development of any ‘working class party’. This tendency towards theoretical dogmatism also structures the kind of organisation that is sustained and reiterated in the socialist movement. The sectarian left reproduces the sect, and nothing more. Trotsky continues to describe the pitfalls of the ‘sectarian’ Marxist:

“Though he swears by Marxism in every sentence, the sectarian is the direct negation of dialectic materialism which takes experience as its point of departure, and always returns to it… A sectarian does not understand the dialectic action and reaction between a finished program and a living, that is to say, imperfect and unfinished mass struggle.”

Trotsky was critiquing sectarianism in a period of considerable class struggle throughout the world. But what is sectarianism when the class struggle is diffused and obscured by a flailing union movement and an immature left? It is the primary symptom of a disoriented political sub-culture that cannot identify a united way forward for the international working class. In this way, even organisations like the Labor Party are sects, as they do not represent the working class, but rather the sectoral interests of ‘Australian workers’.

A mass party is not a sect

In his 1909 essay, Sects or Class Parties, Karl Kautsky summarises the sectarian nature of French socialism in Marx’s time:

“In France he found … much Socialism, but only in the form of sectarian societies. There were many Socialist ‘schools,’ each swearing to the genuineness of its own patent pill for the cure of all the ills of society, and each trying to rally the workers round itself. The various schools were at war with one another, and were thus instrumental in splitting the working masses rather than uniting them.”

In our time, it is just as common to ignore the existence of other sects as it is to feud with them. The sectarian socialist movement consists of organisations who all claim to be the true ‘Marxists’, as if Marxism is some pure uncontested political doctrine. The tendency to simplify and filter out what Marxism is and is not then becomes the central work of a sectarian organisation. The sect determines what is ‘revisionist’ or ‘reformist’ in Marxism and refuses to acknowledge or validate those blasphemous aspects. This ideological sectarianism arises out of the structure of a fragmented socialist movement. The former cannot even be engaged, without the latter being addressed. This is why the urge to be ‘non-sectarian’ leads to an opportunistic reformist socialism, while the ‘purity’ of a ‘revolutionary’ sect leads to isolationism, dogma and bureaucratic centralism. Kautsky continues by addressing the complexity of building an independent socialist party:

“It is… a mistake to think that the principal thing is to organise an independent working-class party, and that once such a party is in existence, the logic of events will force it to adopt Socialism…

One is apt to forget that that Socialism, which is alone capable of keeping the proletariat permanently together, and which alone can lead them to victory – namely, the Socialism of the class struggle – is not a thing which lies on the surface”

A mass workers movement cannot just be a Trotskyist or Stalinist party. While sectarianism can be characterised by a fixation on ideological purity, isolationist political activity, and petty squabbling, its deeper root is a workers movement that is at odds with itself. The fragmentation of the international workers movement foreshadowed the fragmentation of socialist ideology into sectarian dogmatism. The communist movement has proven not to develop in a linear fashion, but through spirals that can disorientate and reconfigure the ‘left’ as we know it. This is why Kautsky regarded the role of socialist parties as ‘comprehending’ the class struggle and capitalism.

“… a good deal of theoretical knowledge is indispensable in order to attain a deeper comprehension of the capitalist mode of production…Without such a comprehension it is simply impossible to create a really independent permanent class party of the proletariat, independent not only in the sense that the workers are organised separately, but that their mode of thinking is distinct from that of the bourgeoisie.”

Kautsky’s formulation can also be reversed. Without a class party of the proletariat, comprehending the capitalist mode of production and the class struggle is impossible. This is why the ‘socialist’ project must be a partyist project.

The road forward

Sectarianism is not just an issue of bad ideas, or wrong action. It is a structural predicament that the socialist movement finds itself in when it has lost its connection to the workers movement, which in turn has been crushed. The class struggle continues but it cannot be transposed into a socialist politics because there is no such thing. There are many socialists, and many political organisations, but they are more in conflict with themselves than they are with the forces of capital. For Marx in the Manifesto, communists could not “mould” the proletarian movement with sectarian politics:

“The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.”

The RCO does not oppose sectarianism because we believe that all ideas are created equal, or that authoritarianism, opportunism and reformism are not threats to the development of communism. On the contrary, we believe these threats, and false consciousnesses, must be faced directly, in the context of a mass organisation that includes all revolutionary socialists working together to build a party that is united around a revolutionary program.

This program is also not a “finished program” in the words of Trotsky. It is a document of unity among the socialist movement. It must be debated and developed by the working class through the process of mass political involvement inside and outside of the socialist movement. It is a positive vision of socialism, in contrast to ‘anti-capitalist’ resistance to the system. It is a strategic document that must unite factions who may not agree on all things, but accept the necessity of international socialist unity.

Socialist unity is necessary because working class unity cannot be achieved without it. Splits are not to maintain the political purity of the movement, but rather to uphold the greater unity of the working class. A split on the question of war, like Lenin’s position against the SPD, was not because of an ideological rejection of ‘reformism’, but rather a recognition of the international nature of the working class. Inter-imperialist war, if supported by socialists, is actually a sectarian position that divides the working class. Splits may be necessary to defend the international nature of the working class as a whole. But confused sectarian splitting has become the tendency of a disoriented and aimless socialist movement.

Socialist politics, then, can only be refined through struggle and democracy. We cannot know what works without engaging our interlocutors and comrades in a project to unite. The party project is necessarily a process of adjudication. We would all have to make concessions to democratic procedure, and hold the unity of the socialist movement above our ideological squabbles. Communists who do not believe this are sectarians. They believe that history will prove them correct in time. It is a religious impulse, in a sense. It is superstitious and utopian. It is everything Marx and Lenin fought against.

Political efficacy cannot be measured by an organisation’s membership, social media reach, theoretical prowess, the argumentative abilities of its members, its international network or its connection to the ‘working class’. The political success of the socialist movement will be measured by its ability to unify into a political weapon of and for the working class. If communism is the movement to abolish the present state of things, it must necessarily abolish the present state of the sectarian socialist movement. A workers’ revolution aims to abolish the working class. A socialist party aims to abolish sectarianism.