The revolutionary party: moving forward and standing pat

As a long-time observer of the Democratic Socialist Perspective (it used to be Party rather than Perspective) in Australia, I was very pleased to see them departing from conventional “Leninist” thinking and announce what amounts to an entirely different approach to the Socialist Alliance, a formation they have been leading for a number of years. Their inspiration is the NPA in France, a broad anti-capitalist formation that was initiated by the LCR, the official section of the Fourth International that has dissolved itself into the NPA.

The DSP lays out its new relationship to the SA in a document approved by their National Committee on June 7^th. There is much to appreciate in this document, especially this:

Small socialist organisations operating in relative isolation in the working class movements, or sometimes substantially outside these movements because they are composed almost totally of small groups of “socialist intellectuals” are chronically plagued with what might be called “Marxist” identity politics. That is they are more concerned about “proving” to themselves that they are “real Marxists” than actually applying what Marx, Engels and Lenin taught which is to build real socialist leadership in the working class. In fact, the further away such groups are from that objective, the more loudly they assert their “Marxist” identity. What passes as politics in “the left” as we have it in this country can degenerate to little more than a ridiculous I’m-more-Marxist-than-you pissing competition. We’ve all seen this time and again with various little sects. And we’ve also seen this tendency in our own organisation.

Much of the document takes the side of the NPA in a polemical exchange between NPA leader Francois Sabado and IST/SWP leader Alex Callinicos who while not quite hostile to the NPA’s new approach to party-building is clearly uncomfortable with it. I have commented on the Sabado-Callinicos exchange here.

It should be stressed that the DSP has not yet decided to dissolve itself into the Socialist Alliance, as was the case with the LCR/NPA in France. Given the years of operating on precepts learned from American Trotskyism, it is understandable why they may be moving a bit slower than the LCR which never found James P. Cannon’s ideas that compelling. But the little distance they put between themselves and Cannon’s party building “orthodoxy” was enough to precipitate a faction fight with an “old guard” in the party that was uneasy with the new direction. The comrades in the old guard were able to capitalize on the failure of the Socialist Alliance to live up to its early promise, but I strongly suspect that this failure was attributable to perceptions that it was nothing but a maneuver on the part of the DSP to build its own ranks at the expense of the rest of the left. In other words, the approach was in keeping with the “French turn” mentality of 1930s Trotskyism that always viewed broader formations such as the SP’s as obstacles to revolution, even if they were momentarily part of them. My guess is that if the new approach to the SA incorporates transparency and guilelessness, it could become an important part of the Australian left.

The ambivalence of the British SWP toward the NPA continues. In the latest issue of International Socialism, their quarterly journal, there’s an article by a French co-thinker named Denis Godard that is filled with positive characterizations of the NPA that unfortunately are not matched by an understanding of exactly what the NPA is trying to do.  For Callinicos and Godard, the key distinction is between “revolution” and “reform” and they fret over whether the NPA is sacrificing the revolutionary purity of the LCR in favor—implicitly—of an opportunist desire to grow indiscriminately.  Godard writes:

To read Callinicos is without doubt to see that grasping the nature of reformism—that is, understanding the contradictions that run through class consciousness and understanding the dynamics of its evolution—is for him the most important factor in arming the political revival and defining appropriate strategies and tactics. I share his preoccupation.

I come at things from a different angle. I think that the biggest obstacle facing the left today, at least the revolutionary left, is sectarianism. Callinicos seems to worry that if the NPA is not careful, it will go the same route as the SP’s and the CP’s. Fundamentally, I consider this to be a rather idealistic approach to politics. Reformism is not a function of the ideas in peoples’ heads but rather material forces operating in history, including the privileges enjoyed by parliamentarians and trade union bureaucrats. In other words, the Second International degenerated not because of Bernstein’s ideas but because its leaders had become corrupted by their place in society, which made it natural for them to begin thinking like the class enemy. Material reality determines ideas and not the other way around.

Godard appears to be something of a Gramscian and his discussion of the NPA is couched in terms of a hegemonic struggle, but mixed with Callinicos’s wrongheaded ideas about “united front” electoral initiatives such as the disastrous Respect Party intervention. He is preoccupied with the “communist” struggle to win the workers away from the reformists in a battle for hegemony that must precede the even bigger battle with the capitalist class:

It is in the light of this that we must clarify our conception of the NPA. The issue now for class struggle in France is to rebuild the workers’ movement and enable it to pull behind it “all the oppressed sectors”—to build what some call a “counter-hegemony”. At a time when the developing process of struggle has already begun to see potential leaderships emerge on many battlefronts against the system, the NPA must aim to regroup, coordinate and provide them with a strategy for confronting the ruling class. If it does so, and relies on the dynamic of the struggle to take things forward, it will not only help these new leaderships to overcome the paralysis due to the current domination by the traditional leaderships and their politics, but will also be key to rebuilding the workers’ movement.

It is hard to argue with such a formulation since it is so abstract.

The most worrisome aspect of Godard’s article is its emphasis on the need for “revolutionaries” to keep the NPA honest like a rudder on a boat:

Here we return, as far as revolutionaries in the NPA are concerned, to the role Marx attributed to communists: they are the most resolute when it comes to elaborating and developing an anti-capitalist strategy for the NPA and the most class conscious when it comes to understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of this strategy…

The aim of Marxists revolutionaries must be to work out a strategy among themselves and debate and try to get their strategy accepted within the NPA. They must test it not only against other positions but also in relation to the experience accumulated within the framework of the NPA.

In other words, Godard and his comrades see themselves and anybody else as advanced in their thinking as they are as laying out the “line of march”. They are like the philosopher kings in Plato’s Republic who have seen true reality outside of the cave and assign to themselves the awesome responsibility of communicating that reality to the uninitiated. This, in a nutshell, is the entire basis for sectarianism in left politics, which Trotskyism in its various permutations has perfected into an art form.