How Do We Get To A Mass Revolutionary Party?

To get to a mass revolutionary party we need to focus our activity on the working class, we need to focus on union work, build broad campaigns, but also it is vital we stand in elections with openly and clearly defined politics. This is the basis for uniting revolutionaries in Ireland and turning them into a force that can tilt the balance of a future crisis in a direction that leads to working class power.

Let’s define what we mean by a revolutionary party and why we need one. Some would have you think a “vanguard party” is something numerically narrow akin to a marginalised cult but that’s not the case. Revolutionaries like the Russian Bolshevik Lenin saw the vanguard party as numerically broad while being politically narrow (committed to revolution and having a clear revolutionary programme).

Such a party needed to be at one with the advanced workers having merged with the best fighters in the working class, uniting them with one another and with Marxist politics. Without such a party no crisis, no matter how deep, can be resolved in the interests of the working class. A severe enough economic or political crisis would necessitate mass struggle and worker assemblies formed to coordinate such struggle would necessarily have many political tendencies within.

Some of these would fight to steer the movement back into capitalist hands. If reformist trends dominate then the movement fails. There needs to be a mass network of revolutionary workers, rooted in every workplace, formed before a revolutionary crisis so that they can steer the movement into confrontation with the old establishment state and replace it with the worker assemblies. When revolutionaries attempted to form such parties in the chaos of revolution, having neglected the years of prepretory work necessary to complete the merger, the movement failed as in Germany in 1918.

History shows that there has been no single standard path to the formation of such mass revolutionary parties. Some emerged from splits in large Social Democratic parties, others by amalgamation of pre-existing smaller parties and groups and in the case the revolutionary Russian Bolsheviks, they gradually became one with the most militant sections of the Russian working class over the course of twenty years of hard work.

Let’s look at the Bolsheviks first.

It started with Lenin and a group of co-thinkers organised around a newspaper called “Iskra” which they used to win over pre-existing socialist and workers’ circles which were already active across Russia. They argued strongly for a united workers’ party with a revolutionary programme. The problem was that many of these local circles didn’t want to participate in the collective democracy of a big party. At the conference where these issues were meant to be sorted out and a united party formed the Iskra group split into two factions, the reformist Mensheviks and the revolutionary Bolsheviks.

The Mensheviks used talk of “self-activity of the working class” to blind workers into thinking they were the more working class faction. But the argument that struggle alone would spontaneously produce worker leaders was actually a method by which the middle class Mensheviks attempted to control and dupe the workers into accepting middle class leaders. The Bolsheviks argued that workers who had already been won over to revolution had to fight to win over other workers - struggle fertilised the soil, but socialist seeds needed to be planted and continually nurtured to grow.

Both groups went into the 1905 revolution with distinct strategies and tactics and their own distinct newspapers, though formally united they were effectively acting as separate organisations. While the Mensheviks tailed the Russian liberal “Cadets” in election campaigns Lenin argued for a clear Bolshevik platform that linked immediate reforms to the need for revolutionary change. The Mensheviks even put Lenin on trial for putting out militant Bolshevik articles, attempting to expel him from the wider Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

The 1905 revolution caused a massive influx of workers into both groups and Lenin agreed to a unity conference with the Mensheviks because he understood the other faction had some of the advanced workers in their ranks and he wanted access to that audience. But the Bolsheviks immediately elected their own secret central committee and Lenin wrote that workers would now get to see the difference between the two groups.

It wasn’t just separate election campaigns that had the two main factions fighting but also the attempt by leading Mensheviks to liquidate the party altogether and just form a “legal” broad labour movement. Under the Tsarist dictatorship a focus on acceptable and legal means of organising would have destroyed the movement altogether, particularly in the counter revolutionary atmosphere after the defeat of the 1908 revolution.

Eventually, in 1912, the Bolsheviks declared they were the party and broke off all relations with the Mensheviks. A massive strike wave rose from 1910, only broken off by the First World War. The Bolsheviks became the political expression of this growing worker militancy and this prepared the ground for their further expansion in the revolutionary year of 1917. That’s one path - from winning over a few worker circles with clear politics, through splits and temporary unity with others, to completing the merger with the advanced workers. The Bolsheviks spent 20 years systematically building the working class movement while exposing middle class socialists as saboteurs.

The credibility won by the Bolsheviks in the 1917 revolution enabled them to pressure other socialists around the world to begin to form real Communist Parties.

In Britain the Communist Party was formed in 1920 through the amalgamation of Syvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation, the British Socialist Party, the semi-anarchist Communist League, the South Wales Socialist Society (made up of radical miners) and the revolutionary Glasgow rank and file workers around militant trade unionist Willie Gallagher. Some branches of the Independent Labour Party also affiliated to the new party.

Each of these groups had some contact with the workers, although this was very uneven. Willie Gallagher had the strongest movement as he led thousands of Glasgow workers. But Gallagher was mainly focused on union work without connecting it to his wider socialist politics. This weakened both. Union work becomes entangled in day to day issues without strategic orientation and detached socialism becomes a sunday school lecture, disconnected from daily life. The Sheffield shop steward’s leader, J.T. Murphy, was also among the party’s early leaders.

Negotiations were dominated by the question of participation in elections with many delegates taking an ultra-left stance. Lenin insisted they unite in a single party with a revolutionary programme and committed to using broad union work and standing in elections to promote the revolution. Standing for election meant knocking on every workers’ door, mapping workplaces in an area, leading campaigns. That work is revolutionary work. It would have rooted socialists in the estates. Without that work Communists would have no roots in the class. To do campaign work and then hand a seat to a reformist politician was criminal.

Revolutionaries may have been done with parliament but the majority of workers were still going to vote and it was vital the revolutionaries used the elections to promote their views. Lenin argued hard with the British to drop their ultra-left stance. By 1922 the Russians were still describing the British party as a mere “propaganda” society without an orientation for really leading the masses. Membership fell to 2,000 despite massive post-war strikes.

One report into the state of the party said: “The (local) branch consists of about twenty members (this is the average for the country). Of these, half a dozen do the work and are probably accused by the remainder of being a “clique”. Another half a dozen occasionally put in an appearance and lend a hand. The remaining eight are seldom seen; and of them the secretary is not sure whether they are still members, as he only has their names from the previous secretary’s list.”

A special commission into building the party advised the adoption of the united front method (building broad campaigns that involved reformists in order to win over their working class supporters). Without taking a lead in these day to day battles of the working class the party would have had no credibility with workers. They shifted gear and things changed.

A new emphasis was put on building up factory groups and on broad campaigning in working class areas. In the November 1922 general election they urged supporters to vote Labour where there was no Communist candidate, as Lenin had argued a Labour government would hasten the exposure of Labour. Two Communists, Walton Newbold in Motherwell and Shapurji Saklatvala in Battersea, South London even managed to get elected. In February 1923 they changed the name of their paper to “Worker’s Weekly” saying it would be “a paper by the workers for the workers”.

In just eight weeks its circulation grew from 19,000 to 51,000 papers sold. By 1926 the British Communists had 6,000 members, 1,000 of them organised in factory branches and sales of ‘Workers Weekly’ reached 60,000. There was the beginning of a potential real mass revolutionary party, that could lead a future revolt, if they had stuck to Lenin’s path.

In Germany the Communist Party was formed through splits in the SPD, the Social Democrats. Reformist support for the war saw a split and the formation of the anti-war (yet still reformist) Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany led by the likes of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. The revolutionary Spartacus Group, formed by revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, joined as a propaganda group. When revolt broke out across Germany in 1918 the revolutionaries formed the Spartacus League and later founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

A premature minority uprising in January 1919 saw the inexperienced infant party decapitated and Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered by right wing Freikorps militias under the command of the Social Democratic government. The authority won by the Russian revolution allowed the Bolshevik Zinoviev to address the Independent Social Democratic Party’s conference arguing they should kick out the reformists and amalgamate with the Communists. He spoke for four hours and won most of the room over. 234 delegates voted for affiliation to the Communist International and for fusion with the KPD, there were 158 votes against.

The party began without key cadres like Luxemburg. When the Bolsheviks were faced with a premature uprising in July 1917 they were willing to tell workers the cold hard truth that it was irresponsible to rise without mass support. Luxemburg and Liebknecht failed to do this and paid with their lives. In 1921 the German Communists attempted another failed minority uprising and got their fingers burned. This made them overly cautious in 1923 when the time was ripe for a rising of the workers.

Mass revolutionary parties are not built by sacrificing principle, neither are they built by tactical immaturity. The merger is key - to aim to mash together the best workers with Marxist politics. Some maintain their Marxist politics at the cost of abstraction and ultra-leftism, living on the margins to keep the politics pure. Others dive into mass struggles but drop their politics or operate through fronts.

In Ireland today there are a number of tiny revolutionary groups, most on the margins of the working class. Uniting them is pointless unless that unity has as its aim the merger with the best workers who are active in all the unions and with those who are active in the working class estates. That means having a clear rank and file union strategy, taking elections seriously and employing the united front method to organise in social movements where we aim to break sections of reformist groupings away through common action, all while upholding clear revolutionary politics.

Many of the revolutionary groups in Ireland think united front work simply involves unity with other revolutionary groups, creating campaigns that are nothing but fronts for existing networks of activists, just another way to hide in a left bubble while isolating yourself from the difficulty of winning supporters of other larger reformist parties. The key to the united front is to limit it to struggle, not political alliances and to continue to criticise reformist parties from the position of authority gained from involvement in that broad movement work.

Most groups think the choice is isolation and purity versus broad work and compromise. That’s a false dilemma. It’s possible to do broad work and maintain your principles. In fact, if you only have principles in isolation you aren’t much of a revolutionary to begin with. The same applies to parliaments and councils. If you’re afraid you won’t be a revolutionary if you get into the Dáil your principles weren’t that strong to begin with. We need a party that can control its representatives and set programmatic limits on their behaviour.

On the other hand, groups like People Before Profit may have some well known candidates who do work in the key working class estates but they do this while hiding revolutionary politics. This work is not consistent across all their branches and there is no political unity as they lack any programme, instead listing a number of disconnected “policies” on their website. The combination of clear criticism of the reformists combined with united fronts for struggle is lost in their extension of united front work into political alliances which mean subordination to the broad left and vague calls for a left alliance to run local councils or for a left government to run the capitalist state.

We need to get back to the working class politics, strategies and tactics of the working class Bolsheviks. In Ireland right now that means:

• The key focus has to be on workers and workplaces, every strike is a priority.

• Recruitment has to be focused on workers, not just students and academics.

• Stop tailing every issue that comes along and develop a strategy.

• We have to expose the role of the middle class and oppose any idea that limits workers.

• We have to fight in united front movements that involve reformists in order to win over their working class supporters.

• We have to stand in elections with clear socialist politics, not abstain altogether or hide behind fronts or aliases.

• We have to use building a local electoral profile to give a lead on issues that matter in the working class estates. Rooting yourself in an area is revolutionary work.

• You have to have a clear, short programme that links immediate demands with our final goal.

• We have to have a tactical position of external support for any left government that allows us to say that while we welcome the defeat of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, those who’d replace them will run the same system.

• In all this broad work we clearly call for a revolution and the rule of the working class.

The Red Network may be small but we are the only group in Ireland determined to take this path. Talk to us. Join us.