understanding the slogan for a mass workers' party

  1. Lolshevik
    Lolshevik
    Comrades,

    I feel I don't fully understand the slogan raised by many CWI sections on the call for a new (or in some cases the first) mass party of labor, usually based on the trade unions. I can kind of get it when it comes to - the U.S. for instance which has never had such a party, but in countries like Britain where a former workers' party, Labour, was born out of mass struggle but eventually became bourgeoisified anyway, wouldn't it be more appropriate to call for an explicitly revolutionary party? What would stop the new party from becoming as bureaucratized and pro-capitalist as the old?
  2. feraliagenitalia
    feraliagenitalia
    Well, we dont just raise the question of a new workers party and then just let it be. We have several ways of keeping out the bureaucratisation (sorry for the spelling), like party representatives on average worker wages, the ability to instantly choose new representatives etc, as well as our ambition to school our members in marxism.
  3. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Lolshevik, you already know from your own experience that there are different stripes to the concept "revolutionary party." My reading of it is that its an ultra-left excuse to form a separate communist organization outside a proper proletarian (not necessarily communist) party that at least seeks to: organize workers (not just unionized workers) into a class for itself, replace all non-proletarian hegemony with a proletarian one, and enable workers to conquer ruling-class political power by affecting the relevant changes to the state structure.

    Precisely because this isn't necessarily a communist party, this proletarian party may be politically revolutionary (not in the ultra-left sense of "revolutionism" / "revolution at any price") but not socially revolutionary.

    Now, that being said, most "mass parties of labour" are NOT, unfortunately, PNNCs. The very idea of a PNNC is "ultra-left" to those attached to the idea of forming and supporting "mass parties of labour."
  4. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    It's transitional. Case closed!

    J/k, this demand is (just) propaganda. The CWI knows it's likely that if unions would start forming such a party under today's conditions it would likely turn out to be yet another bourgeois workers' or social-liberal party. Nationalization under workers control and management isn't very likely either, yet this demand goes further because it breaches capitalist property relations. But capitalism isn't falling apart, so if such measures would be taken under today's conditions workers in seperate factories would have to operate under capitalist competition. If there are nationalizations it would mostly turn out to be a capitalist measure either way (with or without workers control). So the demand is also partially propaganda used in search for new activists who could help us get rooted in local communities, etc.

    The call for a revolutionary party doesn't fit with the current level of "appreciation for socialist ideas" (I wont call it consciousness).
  5. Lolshevik
    Lolshevik
    Thanks everyone. I've been doing some back reading on the topic & I now think I understand it better.

    I really don't think the slogan for a labor party in America is just propaganda, though. I think it's a necessary step, almost certainly, in the development of a revolutionary Bolshevik party in the U.S. Just because of the circumstances alone that it would take to peel the labor movement of the Democratic Party's corpse, such a mass labor party would emerge probably as a centrist formation, not as a bourgeois workers' party.
  6. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    A workers party is needed in the US, and it could mean a huge step forward but the call for it nowadays is mostly propagandistic. The balance of forces is not in our advantage (i.e. a labor party under today's conditions would be one in the hands of the labor bureaucracy).