Practical Issues and Revisiting the Party Question
In the previous chapter, the rhetorical question about specific organization – institutionalization and bureaucracy – in relation to preparation was asked: If the existing bureaucratic organs of state administration are a dead end, and inevitable spontaneist reliance upon specific coordinator individuals from smashed state bureaucracies another dead end, what is the realistic alternative other than to establish, on a very permanent basis, an in-house bureaucracy as a means of preparatory organization?
As Mike Macnair put it another way in an older article:
The consequence is that the workers’ movement needs to work out the institutional forms which will make a professional bureaucracy answerable to the lay members. It needs to work that out in the existing organisations of the working class. It needs to learn how to control power. It needs to develop institutions that go far beyond the thin, impoverished parties of today, which do not address different aspects of the cultural life of the class. Within this network or web of institutions under capitalism the proletariat needs to learn how to create its own power over its full-time apparatus.
In that sense it remains the case that State and Revolution has absolutely fundamental lessons for us. It is just that those lessons are not those imagined by the left and council communists and more recently the spontaneists and the ‘councillist’ Trotskyists who fetishise the soviet form. The lesson is not that soviet power is the magic wand which lets the proletariat take the power. It is that the proletariat needs to begin to develop power over its full-timers under conditions of bourgeois rule – in its own institutions, in its own organisations – if it is to be in a position to take the power from the bourgeoisie and create a state which is actually answerable to the working class, rather than one which becomes a state for itself, like the Stalinist regime.
In concluding this chapter, it is only natural to link the democracy question to partiinost regarding an official party-movement and a sociopolitical syndicate, and to do so in a very practical manner. Areas of concluding discussion and application are:
1) The kind of internal party institutions to be established;
2) The paradox of revolutionary careerism;
3) Aligning parliamentary activity and campaign diversification with programmatic centrality;
4) Publicized discussive unity in relation to political and demographic diversity; and
5) Demarchy in relation to the first and fourth points above.
For too long have political parties organized committees and commissions as their internal institutions. This is but a reflection of their increased focus on electoral campaigns, fundraising dinners, and protest activism. Only the main political party committee and lower-level equivalents are permanent. Much of the class-strugglist left from the time of Lenin to the present day had and have even twisted the word “bureau” in their anti-bureaucracy fetishes, transforming it into small leadership organs for political issues (hence Politburos) and in some instances for general organization (hence Orgburos). A shift is required in favour of permanent or quasi-permanent organizations, hence institutions. Precisely because of this requirement, there should be, instead of workers’ councils formed spontaneously, those formed as purely party organizations. This new form of workers’ councils, such as a Central Workers Council akin to the Communal Council of the Paris Commune in 1871, should replace the main political party committee and lower-level equivalents, such that “all power to the workers’ councils” would be yet another profoundly true and important acknowledgement that only real parties hold durable power. Likewise, there should be proper bureaus instead of bureaucratic commissions, so instead of something like a central auditing commission, there should be a Central Audit Bureau which assesses “the expeditious and proper handling of affairs by the [party], and audits the [party’s] treasury accounts and enterprises,” to quote the old Rules of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as adopted by the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in 1961 – and as examined later in this concluding discussion. This proper bureau, with its anti-spontaneist bureaucratic procedure, would exist alongside the proper bureaus responsible for the alternative culture, with their own anti-spontaneist bureaucratic procedures.
With this institutionalization and bureaucracy (as well as anti-councilism in relation to spontaneous workers’ councils seizing power) comes the paradox of revolutionary careerism. The main demand related to this is the one tying occupants’ standards of living being at or slightly lower than the median equivalent for professional and other skilled workers. There simply cannot be a worker-class movement where the grunts are paid poverty salaries (or at least not paid living-wage salaries) while the charismatic figures and the mainly academic gurus enjoy the same privileges as the middle and perhaps even higher-level tred-iunionisty – well beyond per diems, gas allowances and certain other kinds of trip expense allowances. One aspect of revolutionary careerism that is less related to employee compensation is the problem of scheduling. The work cultures of student politicians and tenured professors, limited to weekdays, are incompatible with working-class interaction, and there is a dire need to hold both political and cultural meetings with workers on both weekends and holidays. To offset any perceived overtime in weekend and holiday meetings, the normal workweek for all the revolutionary careerists could be reduced without loss of pay or benefits.
In my earlier work, I wrote a few things about parliamentary and municipal politics:
1) That no illusions be held about conducting class struggle within parliamentary or typical municipal organs;
2) That the executive branch has accumulated more power in both its legislatively accountable sectors and its legislatively non-accountable ones;
3) That minimum demands in both the more radical, pre-orthodox sense and the less radical, orthodox sense can be achieved by means of publicized civil disobedience, demanding from outside the aforementioned organs; and
4) That parliamentarism and municipal politics should be treated by workers with utter contempt through coordinated mass spoilage, as opposed to cynical but ever-ineffective abstention, which reinforces the bourgeois notion that abstainers are either stupid or content.
The last point is important, because political support is not the same as mere electoral support. The very point that real parties are real movements and vice versa indicates that more substantive political support can be found outside the ballot box. Besides, electoral support can entail strategic votes, questionable protest votes, votes for charismatic leaders who are more popular than their respective electoral machines, votes in accordance with family voting, crass tribalism such as that found in the British Labour Party, and other unreliable factors. When Engels stated in 1884 that universal suffrage was “the gauge of the maturity of the working class [and] cannot and never will be anything more in the modern state,” he should have stated that it was one gauge among better ones, such as spoiled balloting. As for revolutionary careerists and the intrigues of parliamentary or typical municipal organs, an immediate solution can be found somewhere between unprincipled opportunism and ever-crude abstentionism, in the mixture of discussing social labour and nothing else (a tactic inspired by the DeLeonist tradition), semi-abstentionism by means of complete dedication to political office work in one’s electoral district, and populist anti-establishment rhetoric (both anti-capitalist and anti-Government) by those same revolutionary careerists. This mixture and other means of emphasizing the extra-parliamentary or extra-municipal party line – to quote Lars Lih once more – “programme and an insistence on discipline” would help prevent the revolutionary careerists, no matter their charisma, from dishonouring the party’s program by, for example, entering into cross-class ruling coalitions – the “ministerialism” denounced back in the days of the Second International.
On the subject of party lines and achieving “unity in action, freedom of discussion and criticism,” contemporary circumstances require nothing less than accessibility, flexibility, and political transparency. This implies:
1) That audience access to intra-party discussions should include, as much as possible, the voting membership at large and even the working class within the general public, including by means of live mass-media and/or Internet coverage of intra-party discussions;
2) That intra-party decisions should be made, as much as possible, by the voting membership at large and also on the basis of preventing, not repressing, factionalism; and
3) That no restrictions should be made on publicizing, even outside limited party channels, those professional discussions on decisions that have already been made, hence publicized discussive unity.
Note, however, that the negative connotation of factionalism above is not the same as political diversity within a party, which can take on a number of more transparent forms, such as forums and networks, currents, platforms, and tendencies. Forums and 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 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 and pensioners (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 Mike 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).
The only organs that should be allowed to have one or two factional characteristics under pressing circumstances (overemphasizing representative voting and top-down appointments, plus limiting audience access to intra-party discussions especially during politically revolutionary periods) are the Central Workers Council and its lower-level equivalents within the party.
Returning to the subject of networks and platforms in relation to particular worker demographics, despite the obstructive legacy of official labour parties whose supreme bodies allot bloc votes to affiliated and usually “yellow” trade unions, the mechanism of bloc votes need not necessarily be dumped by either the official party-movement or the sociopolitical syndicate. Consider the working poor and pensioners, for instance. Because of the present difficulties in mobilizing these insecure elements of the modern proletariat (not to mention the “yellow” neglect of these specific worker demographics), symbolic mechanisms can go a long away towards attracting their political support. This means bloc votes for their networks and platforms, in addition to existing individual votes. The Japanese Communist Party has seen a recent tide of support from younger people in the working poor, even if it has yet to adopt bloc votes for the newer supporters. In any event, so long as any disproportionate representation arising from bloc votes does not reach gross levels like those of the British Labour party, with its opportunistic disproportionate representation for members of Parliament and problematic disproportionate representation for affiliated trade unions, the danger of sectoral chauvinism can be avoided.
Since demarchy and centrality were discussed above in relation to workers’ own institutions, how can they be applied to the party itself, especially in a more mature stage with more party councils and bureaus? The key problem is statistical representation; according to the Central Limit Theorem in probability theory, as the size of a sample of independent observations approaches infinity, as long as those observations come from a distribution with finite variance, the sampling distribution of the sample mean approaches a normal distribution. Practically speaking, in order to be representative of a broader population and to minimize sampling error, a sample size should be at least 25 to 30 units, though the bigger the sample, the more the statistical representation and the less the sampling error. Therefore, the political and organizational answer to this can be provided by an examination and critique of a historical party structure such as the one outlined in the Rules of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as adopted by the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in 1961 (since parties like the SPD have a similar structure):
1) Primary Party Organizations were composed of three or more party members, and met at least once a month. Where there were less than 15 party members, a secretary and deputy secretary were elected by conventional means. Otherwise, a bureau was formed. Whether the modern equivalent of such bureau has 25 or more members determines the applicability of random selection, but smaller organs could still be elected on the basis of winning candidates being determined by the first vote(s) drawn randomly from the pool of votes (assuming the absence of secret ballots). Again, this would not be totally random, and general question of personalities is something which even somewhat-random balloting cannot avoid.
2) Next were the Area, City, and District Party organizations. These had conferences which formed committees (lower "central committees") and auditing commissions, and the committees elected secretaries and other bureau (lower "politburo") members. It is clear that the modern equivalents of said conferences and committees can be formed on the basis of random selection, while again the bureaus could be formed by random selection or by something like somewhat-random balloting.
3) Higher up were the Regional, Territorial, Republican, and All-Union Party organizations, but there were republican and all-union congresses instead of conferences. Random selection is so obvious for modern equivalents for these higher cases, but again organs equivalent to the Presidium or Political Bureau, if not large enough, might have to be formed on the basis of somewhat-random balloting.
What is interesting about single-candidate elections in the CPSU is that most positions in leading party bodies were determined by candidates already holding some other position. This is referred to alternatively as a job slot system. Relatedly, recall the possibility of random selections based upon candidates meeting certain technical criteria, which would in fact be an example of stratified sampling, one of various probability sampling methods (simple random sampling, systematic sampling, probability-proportional-to-size sampling, and cluster sampling) in contrast to quota sampling for gender and other non-probability sampling methods.
As much as possible, the party should adopt a mixture of probability and non-probability sampling methods as a replacement for elections to its councils and bureaus. Below are applications of various sampling methods to party organization:
1) Quota sampling could be used for gender or for cooperation between tendencies, platforms, and currents in an editorial organ. That organ might require some number of class-strugglist anarchists or rather pro-party anarcho-syndicalists, some number of participatory socialists, some number of market socialists, and of course some number of revolutionary-centrists. This would go a long way towards ensuring that key political positions are not censored from the party press.
2) Cluster sampling would be inherent in geographically lower party organizations. Nobody from the Middle East would be selected at random to lead a South American organization.
3) Probability-proportional-to-size sampling could be used to measure the relative strength of the tendencies, platforms, and currents in certain organs. This would solve the political problems associated historically with the slate system on the left, which according to one Pat Byrne is supposed to “recommend a list that consciously includes a good balance of talents and personalities [but] in practice […] has allowed leaders to secure their continuous re-election along with a body of like-minded and loyal followers.”
4) Once more, stratified sampling could be used to filter based on specialized knowledge, past or present experience in key occupations (job slots), but it could also be used to filter based on more basic criteria like mere duration of voting membership.
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