Obsolete Leninism: the Left-Wing Alternative.

Obsolete Leninism: the Left-Wing Alternative.

“Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amendable to disgrace of punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor good-will.”

William Hazlitt. On Corporate Bodies.

The SWP Special Conference is over. An initial assessment states, it “was extremely disappointing, even for those of us who didn’t expect much by way of surprises. The opposition was weak and scant; the level of debate very low and the CC was hardly pressed at all on any single count.” “The problem is not the numbers, comrades, but the party’s deeply entrenched culture of obedience to a (less and less) “charismatic” leadership.” The Corporate body could do not wrong…..

Others are more dramatic,

And so it is that the rigged conference has taken place, the leadership has secured its victory (though it may well be a Pyrrhic victory) and the opposition has been crushed. Rage and despair will be the natural reactions; however, it’s a good time to pause a moment and take stock.

The leadership is morally bankrupt

Let’s be blunt. The most pressing issue facing the SWP is simply this – is it a safe place? On the face of things, no; on the face of things, the majority of delegates today don’t think that is at all important.

The Party’s underlying difficulties remain. The SWP, culture or not, is the largest left organisation to the left of the Labour Party, and is important within many protest campaigns, and, to a lesser degree, in some trade unions. But it has never come close to offering the ‘leadership’ of the working class and oppressed to which it aspires. In over three decades it has not grown beyond a few thousand members. In recent years it has shrunk.

Weeks of debate on the left have shown that the SWP’s politics and organisational culture are widely challenged. Its inability to deal appropriately with allegations of sexual abuse in its own ranks, its bullying, its ad hoc changes in line, its ‘bureaucratic centralist’ methods to deal with dissent, have been talked over in pages of Web and printed criticism. Many have raised fundamental issues, about the SWP’s Leninism (with, or without, inverted commas), feminism, and the role of political parties in the socialist movement.

Now we are at point where some conclusions can be offered about the causes of this crisis. They indicate, as some have argued, that the Leninist political model that the SWP follows, has serious flaws. The view that an injection of democracy – “true” democratic centralism – can help is, this short piece will argue, not an answer to much deeper difficulties. These come from the impasse of the ‘revolutionary party’ project inspired by Lenin and Trotsky in present day Europe.

• Since the 1980s the conditions in which European left politics operate have been fundamentally changing. The State, the instrument of reform, or something to be ‘overthrown’, has been transformed. The EU fulfils an important regulatory role, and the ‘markets’ shape fiscal demands. In every country the pattern of ‘market states’, in which governments do not just privatise utilities, but hive off a large part of their main functions to private companies, has spread. Political institutions continue to express the electorate’s views by representatives, but a large part of public policy is shaped elsewhere, by financial pressure, and by the organised lobbies of the new state funded bourgeoisie. In these conditions those who promote more markets, more funds for these companies, and more privileges for those with money promote their plans as modernising reforms. Against them left-wing genuine reformers and the revolutionaries who once wished to ‘smash’ the state are often united around the defence of the social democratic institutions of equal public services and welfare provision.
• It is often sweepingly asserted that ‘market societies’, and what was once called ‘post-modernist’ culture, mean that the populations of the West have become politically fragmented, ‘atomised’, and resistant to the ‘grand narratives’ of the left. People turn in on their private lives, their families and friends, and lack the ‘ancient republican’ virtue of dedication to public things. Similar claims go back to the 1920s, if not back to the birth of bourgeoisie society. This may be partly rhetoric. But what has clearly altered nevertheless is the decline in mass participation in political and civil society organisations.
• The disengagement from social and community involvement is harder to explain than a few words about individualism or the spin off from ‘commodification’. In the US one of the longest periods of civic engagement began with the pre-Great War Progressive Age, and even peaked during the 1950s Boom years. (Bowling Alone Robert D. Putnam. 2000) By the 1990s this had weakened, people no longer volunteered, and smaller and smaller numbers of people came along to take up positions in ageing organisations. He looked to change though a new generation of “social capitalists”. We could consider David Cameron’s – failed – experiment in the Big Society to be inspired by this call. Parts of Labour’s One Nation strategy, underpinned by initiatives such as Food Banks for the worthy needy backed by Policy Review chief, Jon Cruddas, are also part of this approach.
• Putnam partly charged television with helping to draw people away from civic responsibility. ‘Social capital’ is now being accumulated in radically different ways, some of which may help re-engage people in more radical directions. Technology has been recast through the Web, (which I am using at this very movement) offering ways of connecting. This can give the impression that “it’s all kicking off” via the Net. This can sometimes be proved through real events (the Arab Spring); sometimes it bolsters less substantial movements, like Occupy! Every single day political initiatives are mobilised, meetings held, demonstrations planned, through this means, and people’s views are broadcast and challenged directly across wide geographical areas.
• How do political parties connect to these developments? It would appear that there are reasons to think they may be obstacles. In Political Parties (1911) Robert Michels claimed that there was an “iron law of oligarchy’. Left parties were groups of a mixture of classes (despite their claims to represent the workers) with “special interests” that tended to form “stable and irremovable” leaders, the “domination of the elected over the electors” He based his judgement on the view that as organisations that aimed to capture state power they would adopt the structures of the public administration, of this.
• More recently John Holloway has claimed that Leninist parties reproduce an oligarchy of knowledge, between the “knowers” in the party and the masses. The Party is equipped with Marxist science and the skills to lead. The rest, even if initially ‘self-organised’ are bidden to follow. This “monological political practice” goes against “non-fetishised, self-determining social relations.” (Change the World Without Taking Power. 2^nd Edition. 2005)
• There is nothing inevitable about political organisations operating in this way. The modern dominant paradigm for parties is not state administrative bureaucracy nor an all-seeing Knower but the company ‘flexible’ organigramme. The Parliamentary parties themselves are not US style Caucuses, or, miniature Republics of Barons on the model of the French 4^th Republic. They are Leadership-run, subject to rare rebellion. The arms-length (proto-hived off) Civil Service Departments limit the Leader’s power, if only in framing the realm of the “possible”. There are some external democratic constraints. There are figures who would like to base their mass membership operations on a small policy team, alert to political marketing, and a loose, affiliated membership that would operate as their sales-teams and, partly, as collectors of public opinion. In the Labour Party a union and constituency influence persists which defies this trend. It has yet to show much success.
• The SWP has not been able to offer an alternative. The Party’s Central Committee acts both as a semi-permanent oligarchy, and the Knower, determined to tell people what to do. In reality its ambitions over the years have become more modest. Public use of the Marxist phrase the ‘united front’ (now for party inner consumption only) gave way to the American expression ‘coalition’ (an alliance of pressure groups) for its campaigns. Its bizarre hostility to the Internet – evident in the Coherence where dissident Blogs were their major problem – is another indication of an inability to think boldly on the present day political terrain.
• An alternative to the SWP, and other Leninist models on the left, would begin from democratic organisation in the era of the Internet. It would not be a Leadership run body, but a democratic socialist project that drew in the left around a bottom-upward synthesis of people’s experiences and ideas about socialism. Lenin is said to have talked of “practical workers” as the key to a socialist party, but today we can all become practical-theoretical workers. The minimum programme needed to transform the Market States of the world into socialist societies should dominate our political framework. In the absence of a ‘party’ we have our practice.
• A project for a democratic ‘citizens’ revolution’, backed a variety of parties, and small groups. exists. In France. It is called the Front de gauche (left Front). It is not democratic centralist, but a bloc of independent bodies and individuals. We could begin by learning from this not from 1917.

Georges Sorel in La Décomposition du Marxism (1908) described the first ‘Crisis of Marxism’. Before the Great War he talked of the absence of a revolutionary proletariat and the growth of “constructive trade unionism”, that is mass reformism, and the support for “evolutionary socialism” this gave. Against this ‘reformist’ trend Sorel developed his theory of ‘myths’, heroic projections of the future that could not be falsified (L’illusion du poltiique. Shlomo Sand. 1984). Sorel fought against le politique, that is the routine administrative work of government, the compromises of state, for la politique a fundamental change in the world. How this was to come about, was left to action, not plans.

The most famous of Sorel’s myths, the General Strike, still has supporters on the United Kingdom left. Another is the Revolutionary Party. The SWP ISOP opposition declares, “The role of a revolutionary party is to fight for leadership in the class struggle. Democratic centralism is based primarily on conviction rather than discipline. The shared political perspectives required to underpin united political action are not something to be imposed, but are achieved through engagement in debate and argument and informed by experience.”

This is a fundamental flaw in a great deal in the debate about the SWP and Leninism. Lenin’s Party and is ‘Democratic centralism’, figures as a ‘myth’ not a historical reality. Or rather when it is talked about historically it is confined to one ‘good’ period – whose date wavers. Rather than discussing what happened when that party, apparently a model, took power, does not get discussed in the tale of the Good Bolshevik Party. It considered largely a separate issue.

Cut way the fist two sentences comrades. We need shared experience. We need united political action. We have had ample opportunity to verify the mobilising myth of Democratic Centralisation.

It has failed.

 

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This is also worth looking at: Is this the Turning Point for the British Far left?