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Marxist vs. Anarchist Views on Political Parties
Revolutionary Marxists reject all spontaneist illusions according to which the proletariat is capable of solving the tactical and strategic problems posed by the need to overthrow capitalism and the bourgeois state and to conquer state power and build socialism by spontaneous mass actions without a conscious vanguard and an organized revolutionary vanguard party based upon a revolutionary program tested by history, with cadres educated on the basis of that program and tested through long experience in the living class struggle.
The argument of anarchist origin, also taken up by ultraleftist "councilist" currents, according to which political parties are by their very nature "liberal-bourgeois" formations alien to the proletariat and have no place in workers councils because they tend to usurp political power from the working class, is theoretically incorrect and politically harmful and dangerous. It is not true that political groupings, tendencies, and parties come into existence only with the rise of the modern bourgeoisie In the fundamental (not the formal) sense of the word, they are much older. They came into being with the emergence of farms of government in which relatively large numbers of people (as opposed to small village community or tribal assemblies) participated in the exercise of political power to some extent (e.g., under the democracies of Antiquity)
Political parties in that real (and not formal) sense of the word are a historical phenomenon the contents of which have obviously changed in different epochs, as occurred in the great bourgeois-democratic revolutions of the past (especially, but not only, in the great French revolution). The proletarian revolution will have a similar effect. It can be predicted confidently that under genuine workers democracy parties will receive a much richer and much broader content and will conduct mass ideological struggles of a much broader scope and with much greater mass participation than anything that has ocurred up to now under the most advanced forms of bourgeois democracy.
In fact, as soon as political decisions go beyond a small number of routine questions that can be taken up and solved by a restricted group of people, any form of democracy implies the need for structured and coherent options on a great number of related questions, in other words a choice between alternative political lines and programs. That's what parties represent.
The absence of such structured alternatives, far from giving large numbers of people greater freedom of expression and choice, makes government by assemblies and workers councils impossible. Ten thousand people cannot vote on 500 alternatives. If power is not to be transferred to demagogues or secret pressure groups and cliques, there is need for free confrontation among a limited number of structured and coherent options, i.e., political programs and parties, without monopolies or prohibitions. This is what will make workers democracy meaningful and operative.
Furthermore, the anarchist and "councilist" opposition to the formation of political parties under the dictatorship of the proletariat in the process of building socialism either. 1) represents wishful thinking (i.e., the desire that the mass of the toilers will abstain from forming or supporting groups, tendencies, and parties with different political lines and programs), in which case it is simply utopian, for that will not happen; or 2) it represents an attempt to prevent and suppress the attempts by all those toilers who wish to engage in political action on a pluralistic basis to do so, and in that case it can objectively favor only a process of bureaucratic monopolization of power, i.e., the very opposite of what the libertarians want.
In many centrist and ultraleftist groupings a similar argument is advanced, according to which the dispossession of the Soviet proletariat from the direct exercise of political power was rooted in the Leninist concept of democratic centralist organization itself. They hold that the Bolsheviks' efforts to build a party to lead the working class in a revolution inevitably led to a paternalistic, manipulative, bureaucratic relationship between the party and the toiling masses, which led in turn to a party monopoly on the exercise of power after the victorious socialist revolution.
This argument is unhistorical and based on an idealist concept of history. From a Marxist, i.e., historical-materialist point of view, the basic causes of the political expropriation of the Soviet proletariat were material and socioeconomic, not ideological or programmatic. The general poverty and backwardness of Russia and the relative numerical and cultural weakness of the proletariat made the long-term exercise of power by the proletariat impossible if the Russian revolution remained isolated; that was the consensus not only among the Bolsheviks in 19l7-18, but among all tendencies claiming to be Marxist. The catastrophic decline of the productive forces in Russia as a result of the first world war, the civil war, foreign imperialist military intervention, sabotage by probourgeois technicians, etc. led to conditions of scarcity that fostered a growth of special privileges. The same factors led to a qualitative weakening of the already small proletariat. In addition, large portions of the political vanguard of the class, those best qualified to exercise power, died in the civil war or left the factories to be incorporated massively into the Red Army and the state apparatus.
After the beginning of the New Economic Policy a certain economic upturn began, but massive unemployment and continuous disappointment caused by the retreats and defeats of the world revolution nurtured political passivity and a general decline of mass political activity, extending to the soviets. The working class was thus unable to stem the growth of a materially privileged layer, which, in order to maintain its rule, increasingly restricted democratic rights and destroyed the soviets and the Bolshevik Party itself (while using its name for its own purposes). These are the main causes of the usurpation by a bureaucracy of the exercise of direct power and for the gradual merger of the party apparatus, the state apparatus, and the apparatus of economic managers into a privileged bureaucratic caste.
Marxist historians can argue whether some of the concrete measures taken by the Bolsheviks even before Lenin's death may have objectively favored the process of Stalinization, or if Lenin and Trotsky were late in understanding the scope of the danger of bureaucratization and the degree to which the party apparatus had already been absorbed by the bureaucratization process. But these could be said to be contributing factors at most. The main causes of all these processes were objective, material, economic, and social. They must be sought in the social infrastructure of Soviet society, not in its political superstructure and certainly not in a particular concept of the party.
On the other hand, historical experience has confirmed that where a leading or even highly influential revolutionary party is absent, workers councils last shorter and not longer than they did in Russia: Germany in 1918 and Spain in 1936-37 are the most conspicuous examples. Furthermore, without such a party these councils do not succeed in conquering state power, i.e., in overthrowing the bourgeois state. Empirical evidence confirms Marxist theory, showing that it is the free and democratic selforganization of the toiling masses, dialectically combined with the political clarification made possible by a revolutionary vanguard party in the leadership, that represents the best chance for the conquest and continuous exercise of power by the working class itself.
From the Fourth Interntional's 1985 resolution "Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat".
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