Ponderings on factionalism

[citizen of industry]

Speaking of socialist parties, I guess the common concensus is that heterogenous organizations might be able to garner a larger membership and votes during an electoral campaign, and hence have the potential to appeal to a larger audience, but that the hodge-podge mixture of different tendencies will only lead to factions and splits down the road, not to mention a tendency towards reformism.

So, to prevent that we have the vanguard party, where democratic-centralism is practiced, and the program is recognized as vital and capable of keeping the party on track despite inevitable mistakes and personality problems. Everyone adheres to the program, so theoretically the amount of factionalism is reduced. We also say some factionalism is inevitable and even healthy, that in a revolutionary period the party with the correct program will be revealed in struggle and assimilate the others and draw to it a large membership.

But one problem I see is that homogeneous vanguard parties are no less vulnerable to splits than the large, loose organizations. Parties with only a handful of members, split, and split again. We are in the middle of a global depression, and I'm willing to bet all of our parties have seen some increase in membership, but not on the scale you'd imagine. I don't see any assimilation going on or any mass parties in the making. But maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.

I'm wary of the "Why can't we all just be friends?" argument. But from time to time I wonder if efforts at assimilation are even being seriously attempted, or if instead the united front is proposed as the be-all-end-all solution. I see one advantage in our favor, the amount of theory and practice is always on the increase, so we have more to draw from and are more aware of pitfalls and mistakes in past movements and parties than previous generations.

On the other hand, a large amount of small parties with independent publications aren't that appealing to a great number of people. We always demand the unions to break from the democrats, but have we created an effective socialist alternative? And speaking of publications - a hundred years ago newspapers were a big thing and people had fewer forms of media. I wonder if party subs are not being drowned in the sheer amount of information on the internet, television, etc. and make less of a splash than they did in the past. And these are the major agitational tools for our parties.

Yeah, that's my rant. I go back and forth on this one, like other issues. Thoughts? I guess I'm just in a cynical mood and have to consider that the socialist movement took a big hit with the USSR and China, but that class war doesn't end and Marxism is seeing a re-emergence, and it will take some time for small parties to find their way and build a mass movement on our own terms, starting small like all mass movements.

[citizen of industry]

Also there isn't an international to affiliate with, unless you consider the 4th international not to be degenerate.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I wrote here and elsewhere that, while forums and horizontal networks, currents, platforms, and tendencies are all great and good, factions and factionalism are a no-no. It wasn't just Lenin's ban on factions. It was Marx's own argument against Bakunin's "hidden faction":

http://www.revleft.com/vb/practical-issues-and-t150582/index.html


Forums and horizontal networks can be organized by one or more current, platform, or tendency, as well as by the party as a whole, to promote particular issues, viewpoints, and debates, plus in the case of horizontal networks to focus on specific tactics like “No Platform” and other anti-fascist confrontations. Currents tend to be about particular systems, advocating things like so-called “Economic Democracy” and other forms of market socialism, participatory economics, and the more political Participatory Socialism (participatory economists advantageously raising socialist consciousness inside the working class but outside the class movement, while expressing their political rejection of the dead-end “democratic socialism” that puts parliamentarism above socialist aims, and also of the hyper-activist minority aims masked as “revolutionary socialism”). Platforms correspond to particular systems, particular worker demographics such as the working poor amongst the workforce and pensioners outside it (more on these two groups later), or lesser themes such as pro-labour reform, ecology, and civil rights – but are nevertheless bound, according to Nestor Makhno’s works on anarchist platformism, at least by tactical unity, collective responsibility, and some form of federalism in between decentralization and centrality. Last but not least, tendencies are a step up from forums, currents, and platforms, with separate media in striving for an intra-party majority both politically and organizationally.

So what is factionalism, then, within an atmosphere of forums, currents, platforms, and tendencies? Factionalism is characterized by its very contrast to publicized discussive unity. As opposed to tendencies, factions and their culture of secrecy limit audience access to intra-party discussions, overemphasize representative voting and top-down appointments, exhibit unprofessional behaviour in striving to be a political and organizational majority (such as bullying or threatening to split unless their views are adopted across the board, or attempting to replace party media with their own), refuse to act in accordance with agreed-upon action, and abstain from presenting majority viewpoints in addition to their own. It is no wonder why the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and his immediate conspirators, despite their baseless and hypocritical charge of authoritarianism on the part of Marx, were expelled from the International Workingmen’s Association for maintaining the International Alliance for Socialist Democracy as a secret faction inside and outside the former, with its “rules or administrative regulations contrary to the General Rules and Administrative Regulations of the International Association.” Therefore, the best approach to factions vs. tendencies would be similar to the left-reformist “Eurocommunist” approach, as described by Macnair:

The clearest cases are the French and Italian Communist Parties. Such parties officially prohibit factions [and factionalism], but have them [and tendencies] de facto, and are officially Bonapartist-centralist, but in practice allow a lot of leeway to the branches and fractions. They can actually be useful for the workers’ movement and the development of class consciousness even if they have coalitionist politics which they cannot carry into practice (all of them between the 1950s and the 1970s) and even if they are small (like the old CPGB).

[citizen of industry]

But it's a "sin of the past" for the most part, if you look at the splintered state of the left in the US. Most of the factional splits happened decades ago. The communist party split off of the socialist party, the communist party split into three. The SWP had a good run but then split into FSP, SA, etc. Maybe those splits were necessary in their time, but for someone coming into the socialist movement now, it's not a question of factions and splits, but of being an activist in one of dozens of small organizations. Hence calls by some groups for unity, which runs up against a wall, that of Leninist theory in regards program.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Lenin was a mixed bag. Lenin the Revolutionary Social-Democrat was good. Without a revolutionary program there can be no revolutionary movement.

Lenin the Cominternist was less so. There's a difference between revolutionary program and revolutionary "theory."