PARTISAN!

In the first in a multi-part series for State & Confusion, Ewan Tilley begins to outline the form of revolutionary organisation best suited for our current moment.

The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality. The method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. — Marx, Grundrisse, 1857

I. The Inheritance

The British left does not lack organisation. It has organisations in abundance: tendencies, platforms, parties, federations, campaigns, coalitions, each carrying its own theoretical lineage, its own account of what went wrong before it existed, its own programme for what is to be done. What it lacks is organisations adequate to the working class as it actually exists. The difference between these two things is the central problem of revolutionary politics in the present moment, and it is a problem the left has not yet seriously posed.

To pose it seriously requires beginning from what is actually the case. The working class has undergone a recomposition whose depth and extent the existing left has not absorbed. The organisational forms through which it historically constituted itself as a political subject have either declined, fragmented, or persisted as institutional shells whose relationship to the class they claim to represent has become increasingly formal: the mass trade union, the party built on the model of the labour movement’s classical period, the community organisation rooted in stable working-class geography. The terrains on which class power is organised and contested have multiplied and shifted. The balance of forces has moved consistently against the class for the better part of half a century. These are not contingent misfortunes that a correct tactical adjustment would reverse. They are the determinate features of the concrete historical situation within which any serious politics must operate.

The left’s response to this situation has been, in the main, to ignore it. Not consciously. No tendency announces that it has decided to proceed without analysing the class it claims to represent. The evasion is structural rather than deliberate. It takes the form of recovering the correct historical model and applying it: the party-building schema inherited from the Second or Third International, the programme negotiated among existing Marxist tendencies, the organisational form adequate to the mass worker of an earlier period of capitalist development. The assumption underlying all of these moves is that the fundamental questions of revolutionary organisation have already been answered: that what is required is not analysis but application, not derivation but recovery. This assumption is the source of the left’s theoretical stagnation, and its consequences are visible in every dimension of actually existing left practice.

The organisational conservatism this produces is not a secondary problem. It is the form in which defeat reproduces itself. The left’s existing formations were shaped by the conditions of their emergence, conditions that no longer obtain. Their persistence in forms adequate to those earlier conditions is not merely an organisational failure but a theoretical one: the implicit claim that the present moment is essentially continuous with the moment that produced the forms now being applied. That claim has not been argued. It has been assumed, because the alternative requires a kind of theoretical labour the existing left is structurally disinclined to perform. The tendency in question was built to apply its programme, not to examine whether the programme remains adequate to conditions its founders did not face.

The result is a left that mistakes the survival of its organisations for political relevance, the reproduction of its theoretical vocabulary for theoretical development, and the persistence of its disputes for serious engagement with the problems those disputes were originally about. What survives defeat is not the political capacity that produced the forms now being inherited. The forms themselves persist, detached from the organic connection to class struggle that gave them their original content. Inherited forms applied to conditions they were not built for do not become adequate through the sincerity of their application. They become obstacles, not because they are wrong in their original determinations but because they are treated as complete rather than as starting points requiring development adequate to a changed situation.

The problem is not that the left has the wrong answers. The problem is that it has stopped asking the right questions: the ones that would require it to subject its own forms of thought and organisation to the same historical materialist scrutiny it claims to apply to everything else.

II. The Epistemological Error

The left’s theoretical stagnation is not uniform in its expression. It takes at least three distinct forms, each with its own characteristic pathology, each generating its own characteristic political failures. Beneath their surface differences, all three are expressions of a single underlying epistemological error: the substitution of inherited or constructed theoretical forms for rigorous engagement with the concrete historical situation. To name this error precisely is the precondition of overcoming it.

The first expression is voluntarism. Voluntarism is not the belief that human will matters — that would be trivially true — but the systematic substitution of will for analysis: the treatment of political capacity as something that can be asserted into existence rather than derived from the actual conditions of the class’s existence and struggle. It appears most visibly in the activist left’s tendency to treat mobilisation as its own justification: the crowd as evidence of its own political significance, the demonstration as proof of its own force. But it runs deeper than activism. It is present wherever political possibilities are read off from what is desired rather than from what the concrete historical situation actually makes available, wherever the intensity of commitment substitutes for the rigour of analysis, wherever the assertion that the class can act in a given way replaces the prior question of whether the class as it actually exists is capable of acting in that way at all. Voluntarism is idealism in the precise philosophical sense: the priority of the ideal determination over the material one, dressed in the language of radicalism.

The second expression is programmatic idealism. Programmatic idealism treats the programme as a theoretical construction to be derived from first principles or negotiated among existing tendencies and then applied to the class as its correct political content. Its characteristic product is the minimum programme assembled by Marxists for Marxists: a document whose adequacy is measured by its consistency with theoretical commitments rather than by its crystallisation from the actual experience of class struggle. The error here is not the insistence on programme. Programme is necessary, and the left’s programmatic vagueness is itself a form of theoretical failure. The error is the account of where programme comes from. Programme adequate to the working class as it actually exists cannot be constructed in advance of a serious analysis of what the class actually is and what its actual struggles are generating as political content. It crystallises from struggle or it is not programme in any meaningful sense. Doctrine applied to conditions it was not derived from produces not political clarity but political irrelevance dressed as theoretical rigour.

The third expression is organisational conservatism. Organisational conservatism treats the forms of organisation adequate to an earlier moment of class composition and struggle as universally valid: the correct organisational answer to a question that has not changed, despite the class having done so. It is visible in the fetishisation of the Leninist party-form, in the trade union bureaucracy’s institutional self-reproduction at the expense of its organising function, in the community organisation that persists as a formal structure after the community it was built to organise has been dispersed by capital’s restructuring of space. Organisational conservatism is the most practically consequential of the three pathologies because it is the most invisible to those who embody it. The inherited form is not experienced as a choice but as the natural expression of what serious organisation looks like. Its critique therefore requires not merely pointing to its inadequacy but showing why the forms it treats as complete are in fact first moments of a development they have arrested.

What unites these three pathologies is their shared relationship to the concrete. Each substitutes an abstraction for the concrete historical situation as the ground of political thought and practice: voluntarism substitutes the abstract will, programmatic idealism substitutes the abstract programme, organisational conservatism substitutes the abstract form. In each case the abstraction is presented not as an abstraction but as the concrete itself: the will as the expression of genuine political capacity, the programme as the crystallisation of genuine class demands, the organisational form as the adequate expression of genuine class organisation. The epistemological error is therefore not simply the use of abstractions. Thought necessarily proceeds through abstraction. The error is the arrest of thought at the level of abstraction, the failure to drive the movement from abstract to concrete that alone produces knowledge adequate to its object.

Historical materialism demands of itself what it demands of everything else: that its categories be derived from rigorous engagement with the concrete rather than imposed upon it. The left’s three pathologies are the form in which that demand goes unmet.

III. Theory and Its Object

The claim that theory precedes organisation requires precise formulation. It does not mean that theoretical work is prior to political practice in any temporal sense, that revolutionaries must complete their analysis before they act. It means that the forms adequate to the working class as it currently exists cannot be decided in advance of a serious analysis of what the class actually is. Organisation without that analysis is not premature theory but absent theory: the application of inherited forms to conditions they were not derived from, producing not political capacity but its simulation.

This is a claim about the relationship between thought and its object. The object here is the concrete historical situation: the working class as it actually exists, in the specific conditions of its existence and struggle at a given moment. The concrete historical situation is not a collection of empirical facts to be gathered and arranged. It is the concentration of many determinations, the specific form in which the capital-labour relation, social reproduction, and the political organisation of class power are reproduced at a given conjuncture, shaped by the accumulated results of previous rounds of struggle, advance, and defeat. To think the concrete historical situation adequately is to think the unity of these determinations in their specific historical form, to rise from the abstract categories through which they first present themselves to the concrete as the thinking mind’s reproduction of what is actually the case.

This is the method of historical materialism as Marx developed it against both empiricism and idealism. Against empiricism: the concrete is not immediately given in observation but is the result of a process of thought that drives from the abstract to the concrete through the mediation of determinate categories. Against idealism: the concrete that thought produces is not a construction of thought but thought’s reproduction of a reality that exists independently of it and disciplines thought’s claims to adequacy. The method is neither the passive registration of facts nor the active construction of theoretical systems. It is the rigorous derivation of the concrete from its own determinations, held to account at every point by the actual movement of the object it claims to reproduce.

Historical materialism’s specific mode of engagement with its object is immanent critique. Immanent critique does not evaluate its object from an external standpoint: not from moral principles, not from the standpoint of an ideal society, not from the theoretical commitments of a particular tendency. It holds its object to the standards the object sets for itself, measures its conclusions against the claims it makes on its own behalf, identifies its contradictions as immanent features of its own logic rather than as failures measured against an external norm. Applied to the Marxist tradition, immanent critique means holding the tradition to the standards of historical materialism it claims as its foundation, measuring its organisational and theoretical forms against the rigorous engagement with the concrete it demands of everything else. The polemical edge this generates runs inward as often as outward: at the organisational conservatism of the existing left, at the voluntarism that substitutes will for analysis, at the theoretical stagnation that mistakes the survival of a tendency for its political relevance.

The object of this series is the question of revolutionary organisation in the present moment. That question has the following structure: what forms of organisation are adequate to the working class as it actually exists, given the concrete historical situation within which it exists? This is not a question that can be answered by recovering the correct historical model and applying it. It is not a question that can be answered by negotiating among existing tendencies and arriving at a theoretical settlement. It is a question that requires the kind of rigorous, immanent engagement with the concrete historical situation that historical materialism demands, the kind of engagement the existing left has systematically failed to perform.

The theoretical construction this series develops is not a programme. It is not a strategic proposal for immediate implementation. It is the attempt to derive the forms adequate to the problem: to rise from the abstract categories through which the question of revolutionary organisation first presents itself to the concrete theoretical construction adequate to the working class as it actually exists in the present moment. Whether that construction can become practically adequate, whether the forms it derives can become the actual organisational forms of a revived revolutionary left, depends on conditions the theoretical construction itself cannot supply. What theory can do is name what is necessary, hold open the question of its concrete content, and provide the framework within which the further work of analysis, programme development, and organisational construction can be pursued without the three pathologies through which the existing left has consistently reproduced its own inadequacy.

That is what this series is for.

IV. The Present Moment

The present moment has a specific character that any adequate theoretical construction must take as its starting point rather than its conclusion. That character is defeat: not as a description of mood or morale but as a precise theoretical category naming the specific historical condition within which revolutionary politics in Britain currently operates.

Defeat is not the absence of revolutionary success. It is a determinate condition that actively reproduces itself through the very organisations and theoretical forms that claim to contest it. The British working class has undergone half a century of sustained decomposition: the destruction of the industrial base around which its classical organisational forms were constructed, the casualisation and fragmentation of employment relations, the dissolution of the stable working-class geographies that sustained community organisation, the dismantling of the welfare settlement that represented the high-water mark of its political power. These are not merely economic developments. They are the recomposition of the class as a political subject, the production of a class that does not yet have adequate organisational forms because the forms adequate to it have not yet been derived from what it actually is.

The left that inhabits this situation was formed by a different one. Its theoretical categories were developed in relation to a class composition that capital’s restructuring has transformed. Its organisational forms were built for conditions that no longer obtain. Its strategic debates are conducted within a framework of assumptions inherited from the period of the class’s greatest organisational strength, applied to a period characterised by its systematic weakening. The result is a left whose theoretical production is largely the reproduction of earlier positions, whose organisational innovations are largely the recombination of inherited forms, and whose strategic debates are largely the continuation of disputes whose original stakes have been transformed beyond recognition by the conditions defeat has produced.

What survives periods of defeat is Marxism as ideology: a body of texts, positions, and theoretical commitments that can be reproduced in the absence of living class struggle. What cannot survive intact is Marxism as organic political practice, the capacity to connect theoretical analysis to the actual movement of the class, to develop programme from struggle rather than from doctrine, to test organisational forms against the real conditions of the class’s existence rather than against the inherited criteria of a previous moment. That capacity requires an organic connection to class struggle that the present moment does not yet make available in any robust form. The publication in which this series appears operates in the gap this creates: between the theoretical rigour that historical materialism demands and the organic connection to class struggle that would normally discipline and verify theory’s claims to adequacy. That gap is both the limitation of theoretical work in the present moment and its specific historical function.

Defeat is not simply a condition to be endured until better circumstances arrive. It is a dialectical condition, one whose negation is immanent to its own intensification. The recomposition of the class that capital’s restructuring has produced is not only the destruction of earlier organisational forms. It is simultaneously the production of new conditions of existence, new concentrations of social power, new forms of exploitation and resistance that were not available as objects of political organisation in the earlier moment whose forms the existing left continues to apply. The fragmentation that defeat has produced suppresses existing organisational forms while generating the conditions for new ones, forms adequate to the class as it actually exists rather than as it existed in the period that shaped the left’s current inheritance. Those forms are not yet visible in any developed sense. Identifying them requires precisely the kind of rigorous engagement with the concrete historical situation that the three pathologies of the existing left have prevented it from performing.

This is the present moment to which adequate theory must be adequate. Not the present moment as it is wished to be, as the approaching culmination of a long historical development toward revolutionary possibility, or as the temporary trough of a cycle that will return to its previous high-water mark. The present moment as it actually is: a period of sustained defeat whose negation is immanent to its own intensification, within which the theoretical and organisational forms adequate to the class as it currently exists have not yet been derived, and within which the left continues to reproduce its inadequacy through the very seriousness with which it applies inherited forms to conditions those forms were not built to address.

The series that follows begins from the concrete historical situation: from what the class actually is, within what conditions it exists, against what organisation of power it must constitute itself as a political subject. It rises from that starting point through the determinate categories adequate to its object toward the concrete theoretical construction the present moment requires. It does not arrive at a programme. It does not arrive at a strategic proposal for immediate implementation. It arrives at the form, the theoretical construction that names what adequate organisation requires, holds open the question of its concrete content, and provides the framework within which the further work of analysis, programme development, and organisational construction can be pursued without voluntarist substitution, programmatic idealism, or organisational conservatism.

That it is necessary, that without it the left continues to reproduce its own inadequacy through the very seriousness of its inherited commitments, is the claim this series is constructed to demonstrate.