Road to Power: What constitutes a "Mass Party"?

During discussing Road to Power, Walrus and I came to the discussion point in chapter 6 of what actually constitutes a "mass" party. Walrus and I were not able to come to an agreement, so it seems it is worthwhile discussing it.

Walrus' point of view is, I think, somewhat arbitrary and equates the "mass" party with majority support of the working class. So, a party may only become a "mass" party under revolutionary times, but not in normal ones. Before that, the party may be "big" but not a "mass" party. It is an elite party.

I contest this view and think the pre-war SPD or, for that matter, the Bolsheviks were mass parties: The former had half a million members at the time of writing RtP (and much more in the unions, the cooperatives, the alternative culture institutions, etc, but these were not quantified in the book); the latter had a huge influence in the Russian working class, people who were very sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, but didn't join for fear of prosecution by the Tsarist police-state.

The background in my position stems from my Trotskyist background (and indeed much of the rest of the left) that have this wild idea that they will become a mass party when the revolution comes, if only they remain pure... So, I have a strong position in agitating against this and for "mass parties" where "mass" here means massive, with broad influence in our class, seeking to organise the whole class.

But I agree that it is impossible to get a majority of our class under normal times. This requires a revolutionary crisis which puts forward the question of authority and which the party-movement may then be able to fill. But this requires a mass party.

Cue Walrus

First of all Q distorts the question. We are not talking about "just" a mass-party, but about a revolutionary mass-party.
The proletariat is a revolutionary class, but not an actual revolutionary class but a potential revolutionary class. So we have a potentially revolutionary class and a revolutionary mass-party. If we accept that the consciousness of people is determined by society, then we cannot say that in a non-revolutionary situation the whole class can be actually revolutionary and unite into a revolutionary organization.

Of course, people are marxists right now. But these are as Kautsky noted an elite. Only in a revolutionary time will the entire class, or at least a great majority, be revolutionary. The people that are revolutionary right now are "raised above the masses of the population by some special occupational, local, or individual characteristics".

This does not mean we must aim for a sect and think our party will become a mass-party "when the revolution comes". Of course not! We must still actively work on developing a party theoretically and be active in the existing movements. To build a party, however we must not have the illusion that we can just build a revolutionary party out of thin air.

If the party is somewhat of a force, like the SPD was with half a million members, the more of a possibility there is for it to develop into a revolutionary mass-party in a revolutionary time.
I don't think the organization of the class as a class can be just that, the organization of the class as a force, without it being a great majority of the class. It can be a quite big party. But mass? No.

First of all Q distorts the question. We are not talking about "just" a mass-party, but about a revolutionary mass-party.

This is so much a given, it's not worthy of mention. After all, we're talking about a Marxist party, not Christian-Democracy or modern Social-Democracy.

The proletariat is a revolutionary class, but not an actual revolutionary class but a potential revolutionary class. So we have a potentially revolutionary class and a revolutionary mass-party. If we accept that the consciousness of people is determined by society, then we cannot say that in a non-revolutionary situation the whole class can be actually revolutionary and unite into a revolutionary organization.

Agreed. Only a relative minority of our class will unite into a Marxist organisation in normal times. But this can still be a massive part of the class. Indeed, it should be our aim to unite the whole class.

Of course, people are marxists right now. But these are as Kautsky noted an elite. Only in a revolutionary time will the entire class, or at least a great majority, be revolutionary. The people that are revolutionary right now are "raised above the masses of the population by some special occupational, local, or individual characteristics".

Yes, the SPD was a genuine vanguard party. As was the RSDWP (Bolshevik).

This does not mean we must aim for a sect and think our party will become a mass-party "when the revolution comes". Of course not! We must still actively work on developing a party theoretically and be active in the existing movements. To build a party, however we must not have the illusion that we can just build a revolutionary party out of thin air.

This is where we seem to differ. Forming our own party, independent from the rest of the workers movement, is currently a necessary step in order to avoid bureaucratic clampdowns that currently form our movement. However our aim should still be what Lih calls the "merger formula": Try to convince the existing workers movement of the aims of communist self-liberation and, thereby, transform the movement.

If the party is somewhat of a force, like the SPD was with half a million members, the more of a possibility there is for it to develop into a revolutionary mass-party in a revolutionary time.
I don't think the organization of the class as a class can be just that, the organization of the class as a force, without it being a great majority of the class. It can be a quite big party. But mass? No.

This more and more seems to become a matter of semantics to be honest: You equate "mass" with "majority", I do not.

The reason I keep clinging on "mass" as "massive, with broad influence in our class, seeking to organise the whole class", besides as an polemical point against the sect-communist groups and grouplets, is that it should seek to organise our whole class, be a class party, even while it takes a revolutionary situation to truly become one. It takes time to build the party-movement's institutions that fit proletarian rule when the existing state can finally be destroyed. "Mass" here then also translates as a political message: We seek to liberate all of humanity via the proletariat, which is the majority of our society.

The question remains, can a revolutionary party have massive influence if the class itself is not revolutionary?

As for the merger formula stuff, I am in agreement I just didn't word it properly.

I tend to separate the mass party from the broad party. The mass party has strong and deep roots in the masses of the working class. The broad party organises large numbers from broad layers. The SPD was a broad mass party as it was deeply rooted in the working class and organised millions of members, not only from the working class but from other social class as well. The Bolsheviks up to 1917 were a mass party with a rather small membership compared to the revolutionary classes it wanted to lead. Neither the broad nor the mass character of a party is the direct cause of either 'revolutionism' or opportunism. Small mass parties can become equally bourgeois as many of the broad left parties.

In Lenin Resdiscovered the following passage is instructive: [Lenin] quotes a sarcastic Menshevik comment: 'If the party equals the underground, then how many members does it have?' Two or three hundred?' Lenin indignantly responds that, in fact, there were already thousands of workers in the party by 1903 and that tens of thousands of workers do underground work even today. But suppose the critics were right. What then? 'A Miracle!' First, a decision made by five or six members of the executive group of the Central Committee. Next, a leaflet prepared and distributed by two or three hundred workers in the party underground. The leaflets do not talk about this or that reform bu about the anti-tsarist revolution and how political reedom is the only way out of the situation. Next the entire population of Petersburg - we are up to two million now - see and hear these calls for revolution. And then the message goes forth to all of Russia, with millions and tens of millions hearing the message. The message is conveyed through a thousand connections between workers and the rest of the population (not to mention by means of the bourgeois newspapers forced to carry news of the strike). The peasants - and the peasant army - hear of the workers' fight for a republic and for confiscation of gentry and land. (Note that the author does not say Lenin was rights about the party having thousands of members in 1903. The figures in the book suggest that the party had 3,500 members in all the years prior to 1903. The critics were indeed partially right, I believe.)

But I agree that it is impossible to get a majority of our class under normal times. This requires a revolutionary crisis which puts forward the question of authority and which the party-movement may then be able to fill. But this requires a mass party.

IMO, this "impossibility" arises from two causes:
(a) The concept of majority support is tied to bourgeois institutions (i.e. parliament, community councils, media, ...). The political struggle of the socialists is mostly wages within the bounds of these institutions. However, the bourgeoisie limits their use (by laws f.e.) in order to saveguard its minority rule over the mass of the population.
(b) Competition separates individuals from one another, not only the bourgeois but still more the workers, in spite of the fact that it brings them together. Hence it is a long time before these individuals can unite, apart from the fact that for the purposes of this union — if it is not to be merely local — the necessary means [...] have first to be produced [...]. Hence every organised power [the bourgeois state] standing over against these isolated individuals, who live in relationships, daily reproducing this isolation, can only be overcome after long struggles. (The German Ideology)

The background in my position stems from my Trotskyist background (and indeed much of the rest of the left) that have this wild idea that they will become a mass party when the revolution comes, if only they remain pure... So, I have a strong position in agitating against this and for "mass parties" where "mass" here means massive, with broad influence in our class, seeking to organise the whole class.

But I agree that it is impossible to get a majority of our class under normal times. This requires a revolutionary crisis which puts forward the question of authority and which the party-movement may then be able to fill. But this requires a mass party.

Actually, here's where I disagree with both of you, perhaps only semantically. Define "normal times."

It can be quite possible to get some form of majority political support from the working class before a revolutionary period, at certainly at least a massive minority as comrade Q noted. Lots of sympathy helps. It's just that, in such period, the confidence within the state apparatus hasn't been broken yet.

Perhaps what comrade Walrus really meant between the two party forms is the regular class party-movement vs. the revolutionary-period class party-movement? I stress this because, while in both cases the party-movement must have a revolutionary program, we should avoid organizing a r-r-r-revolutionary "vanguard."

The more I internalize the term "class party"[-movement], the more I view the term "mass party" as irrelevant. However, I don't wish to unintentionally open up that can of worms again that is Continentalism vs. Labourism.

I reproduce a quote a used earlier on this forum. I thought it was very instructive.

As odd as this may seem in retrospect, the marxists at that time [late 1860's] represented a party of inclusion. They made considerable efforts to reach out to the many manifestations of independent oganizing on the part of working-class groups. Within their model of organization, the cooperatives became service organizations for the movement, the unions were viewed as auxiliaries to the socialist party, and development like the International and the Commune were seen as the ends to which all were striving.
This openness was not true, or not as true, for other orientations, which tended to draw sharper lines between apporved and disapproved activities. While not always obvious from the various ideologies that each of these groups adopted, the degree of openness defined their politics. The Lassalleans, for instance, were inconsistent on trade unions and women (besides their support for aristocratic rather than liberal politics and their adaptation of autocratic models of proletarian organization), the anarchists disavowed the political, while the liberals with some individual exceptions had little tolerance for anything except the educational associations and the cooperative movement (and even here, they tended to oppose producer cooperatives when these competed with their own business interests). The bitter polemics of these years, between and within groups, should not be allowed to obscure the generally inclusionary reputation of the early marxist movement. The marxists were more creative, even if at first less succesful (and numerically weaker) than their competitors within the labor movement.

Anne Lopes, Garry Roth, Men's Feminism: August Bebel and the German socialist movement, pp. 110-111.

Following from this, I think that more schematically the party should be rather narrow but based on the masses (so not programatically narrow), while the movement that surrounds it would remain broad.