The argument that small groups of socialists need to start by first building a socialist propaganda group if they are to have any hope of laying secure foundations for a mass revolutionary party is by no means widely accepted by socialists today.[i] Socialist Alternative's approach is condemned as narrow, rigid and sectarian or is dismissed as at best utopian. For some this is because they reject outright the need for a distinctively revolutionary party. A diminishing band of socialists still hold to the idea of trying to influence the reformist Labor parties. [ii] Some look to populist parties like the Greens. Others on the left put forward the idea of a "broad" socialist party which would include revolutionaries and reformists and all shades in between.

It is not simply the worst elements of the soft left and cynical former revolutionaries who promote the view that building a propaganda group with distinctive revolutionary politics is sectarian and counter-productive. Variants of these views are put forward by a number of organised socialist groups in Australia and internationally. One of the strongest advocates of the broad party model is Murray Smith, formerly of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and now a member of the French Revolutionary Communist League (LCR). Smith points to the examples of the SSP and Communist Refoundation in Italy - "the phenomenon of the appearance of new parties or alliances that do not fit into the classic reformist or revolutionary categories and that have a capacity to develop". "The mass revolutionary parties of the future... will be open, pluralist and non-hierarchical."[iii] He fudges the whole question of reformism versus revolutionary politics, arguing that in the current political circumstances it is not necessary to build clear-cut revolutionary parties because "the social democratic parties and to a very large extent the Communist parties are finished as vehicles for working class aspirations".[iv]

It is true that in many Western countries the working class base of the mainstream reformist parties has been seriously eroded over the last 20-30 years. Nonetheless Smith's virtual dismissal of the influence of organised reformism on the Western working class is seriously mistaken. Organised reformism is not simply based on parties like the ALP, but even more importantly on the trade union bureaucracy. And while in many countries the unions have been weakened, they still have an enormous impact on working class consciousness. In the Australian case this continuing influence was dramatically confirmed by the deep resonance for the union campaign against the Howard government's WorkChoices legislation.

In any case the roots of reformism in working class consciousness go well beyond its embodiment in reformist parties and union bureaucracies. The very nature of working class life - of having to go to work and be dominated by a boss - induces feelings of powerlessness and subservience. It opens the space for pro-capitalist ideas to have an influence. On the other hand the experience of exploitation and oppression also provokes resistance. Working class consciousness is marked by a constant tension between a resigned acceptance of the system and ideas that partially reject capitalism. Whether or not there is an organised reformist party, most workers, most of the time, will be influenced by reformist ideas. The task of revolutionaries is to build on the elements of rebellion in workers' consciousness and try to win the most class conscious workers to a socialist standpoint. But that involves an ongoing battle against reformist ideas. Building an organisation that fudges these questions, that does not take a clear stand against reformist ideas, will in no way aid the revolutionary cause. It will at best lead to disorientation, at worst it will help create an obstacle to revolutionary advance.

We have seen this movie before. The idea of building "broad" socialist parties which combine revolutionaries and reformists is simply a reversion to the approach of the Second Socialist International. It ended in disaster. Under the test of war the reformists abandoned any commitment to the defence of the most basic democratic rights and sent workers off to die in their millions in the trenches of World War I. When the revolutionaries objected, their reformist "comrades" combined with the extreme right to arrest or murder them.

But we don't have to go back to the history of the Second International to see the bankruptcy of the broad party model. There are numerous more recent examples. The most graphic case is that of Communist Refoundation in Italy which Smith upholds as a model:

Rifondazione ... has chosen an anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist road.

It is this party [Rifondazione], broad, heterogeneous and pluralist, which is behind most of the big mobilisations in Italy. It also works within broad united fronts. So the choice, either in Italy or in Scotland, is not between a narrow revolutionary organisation working through united fronts and a broad socialist party which doesn't.[v]

Originally formed as a left-wing split from the rightward moving Italian Communist Party, Refoundation also attracted the support of sections of the Italian far left. In the early 2000s Refoundation shifted leftwards and played an important role in leading mass anti-capitalist protests. However, the leftward jag was short-lived and Refoundation moved back towards accommodation with free market reformist forces. Refoundation is now part of the ruling centre-left coalition government which is determinedly implementing neo-liberal policies. The result has been betrayal after betrayal of working class interests, including voting to send Italian troops to Afghanistan and Lebanon.

But it is not just in Italy that the approach of building "broad" socialist parties has led to disaster. In Brazil the Workers Party, which carried the hopes of many socialists in the 1990s, has in government been just as committed to neo-liberal policies and an alliance with George Bush as its conservative rivals. In New Zealand the Alliance Party, which formed in 1991 following a left split from the Labour Party, collapsed in disarray after its most prominent leader Jim Anderton took a ministerial post in the Labour government. Murray Smith held great hopes for his own Scottish Socialist Party:

...the SSP is a party that corresponds to the challenges of the present period ... the SSP is the type of party that needs to be built today, rather than the old far left model...[vi]

It has fared little better. After first moving in the direction of tartan nationalism, it then became embroiled in a bitter, largely apolitical internal dispute which led to a serious split. In the last Scottish elections the vote of the rump SSP collapsed and it lost all its members of parliament. With its remaining forces in disarray, the SSP faces a bleak future. Closer to home the Australian Socialist Alliance, which some sections of the left such as the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) hoped would lay the basis for a broad socialist party here, has singularly failed to make headway. But for intensive backing from the DSP, the rump Socialist Alliance would have already disappeared from the political scene.

The clear conclusion must be that the argument that the road to a revolutionary party lies through first building a broad socialist party is at best a diversion, at worst a disaster. It is merely another opportunist short cut to break out of the isolation that socialists have faced since the last great upsurge of radicalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is a short-cut that determined revolutionaries have to turn their face hard against. This does not mean that, if left reformist or centrist parties with mass working class support emerge in the future, revolutionaries should turn their back on them. Such parties may well provide important opportunities for revolutionary intervention. But the goal of revolutionaries intervening in them should be to attempt to win the forces needed to create a genuinely revolutionary party, not seeing a broad socialist party as a substitute for a revolutionary party. That means that revolutionaries need to intervene in such parties as organised revolutionary tendencies, arguing a clear alternative road forward to that of the reformist or centrist leadership. The success of such an intervention could well depend on whether revolutionaries have previously built a propaganda group capable of such work. It is one thing for small groups of revolutionaries to intervene in genuine mass formations that emerge from the class struggle or as left splits from reformist parties; it is entirely another matter for small groups of socialists to try to create "broad" parties on their own initiative.

Hal Draper's alternative

There is another current of opinion that proclaims the need for a genuine revolutionary party and rejects the "broad" party fudge, but argues that it is impossible to build a revolutionary party via the route of a propaganda group. One articulate representative of this standpoint is Hal Draper, a long-time Marxist writer and activist with politics similar to the tradition on which Socialist Alternative is based. In his pamphlet Toward a new beginning - on another road the alternative to the micro-sect, Draper equates a propaganda group with a sect, arguing: "To Marx, any organisation was a sect if it set up any special set of view...as its organisational boundary; if it made this special set of views the determinant of its organisational form". Draper goes on to claim: "There is no revolutionary mass party, or even semi-revolutionary mass party, which ever became a mass party by the road of the sect".[vii]

In previous chapters I have outlined just a few of the numerous cases of mass socialist parties which were built from small propaganda groups. There are a host of others - virtually all of the early socialist parties in Eastern Europe, Communist parties all over Asia and the Middle East and the Trotskyists in Ceylon in the 1930s and 1940s. The example of Poland which I examined in chapter 5 is clear-cut and typical. But Draper simply denies reality, declaring: "her [Rosa Luxemburg's] Polish comrades established a sect, not a class party."[viii] All I can say is that if an organisation of 40,000 members with a mass base in the working class and which played a leading role in the 1905 revolution is a sect, then hasten the day that we have such a sect in Australia!

The Bolsheviks, according to Draper, were never a sect and never a membership organisation. They were simply a political centre cohered around a paper within a broader party. What Lenin called for, according to Draper, "was an all-inclusive socialist party in which the revolutionary Marxist center would constitute one tendency, hopefully eventually dominant."[ix] Draper's position simply does not hold water. He conveniently avoids any mention of the role of the Emancipation of Labour Group - a classic propaganda group, if ever there was one - in laying the basis for the Bolshevik Party. But in any case, after the defeat of the 1905 revolution a period of extreme reaction set in. Tens of thousands of activists were arrested, exiled or abandoned politics. The Bolsheviks were reduced to a tiny rump that did indeed set a sharp organisational boundary based on a set of ideas. For example they expelled the ultraleft Bogdanov group - the hallmark of a clearly defined propaganda group. The ultralefts in turn formed their own organised faction to fight the Bolsheviks.

By 1910 the number of Bolsheviks had declined to just a few hundred from 40,000 in 1907. "Membership in the Moscow district organization, which was as high as 500 toward the end of 1908, dropped to 250 in the middle of the following year and half a year later to 150; in 1910 the organization ceased to exist."[x] According to Schapiro, in 1909 the Bolsheviks had only five or six local committees left in the whole of Russia.[xi] The remaining Bolsheviks had to fight to hold the line against the resurgence of strong right wing liquidationist currents on the one hand and on the other ultraleftist currents which refused to retreat in good order. The Mensheviks condemned the Bolsheviks as a pathetic "sect". "All of present-day development," wrote the Menshevik leader Martov, "renders the formation of any kind of durable party-sect a pathetic reactionary utopia."[xii] According to Geoffrey Swain, Lenin's support,

...was confined almost entirely to the Paris-based ‘circle for the support of the Workers' Newspaper'. In this group there were some twenty-five to thirty members, but only five of those thirty were true Leninists...Apart from these, he was forced to rely on a small group of devoted supporters...The majority of émigré Bolsheviks had deserted Lenin and become conciliators.[xiii]

While Trotsky states:

In 1910 in the whole country there were a few dozen people [in the Bolshevik party]. Some were in Siberia. But they were not organised. The people whom Lenin could reach by correspondence or by agent numbered about thirty or forty at most.[xiv]

Without getting into a pedantic and hair-splitting argument about what exactly is or is not a propaganda group, this sounds like a pretty close approximation to one. Most of the energy of the Bolshevik core around Lenin was spent on the vital task of political clarification and bitter polemics with Mensheviks, Bolshevik conciliators, ultraleft former Bolsheviks and all sorts of confused intermediary groups such as the conciliators grouped around Trotsky. At best Lenin and his supporters could win over individuals and train a cadre. In this context, even organising a tiny educational school for Bolshevik cadre abroad was an achievement. There was no party in any meaningful sense. When the level of struggle began to revive from about 1911 the Leninist propaganda core had to rebuild the Bolshevik faction in most parts of Russia from scratch.

Draper states that "there is no proposal for a sect form of organization in [Lenin's pamphlet] What Is To Be Done".[xv] Of course not, because the whole point that Lenin was making in What Is To Be Done, which was published at the start of 1902 just 18 months before the Congress which founded the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, was that the socialist movement had gone well beyond the stage of local circle organisation. A revolutionary party organised around a nation-wide newspaper was immediately on the agenda. Thus Lenin wrote: "Give us an organisation of revolutionaries, and we will overturn Russia." And later:

The organisation, which will form round this newspaper...will be ready for everything, from upholding the honour, the prestige, and the continuity of the Party in periods of acute revolutionary ‘depression' to preparing for, appointing the time for, and carrying out the nation-wide armed uprising.[xvi]

Draper argues that:

The membership organization to which Lenin looked was to be a mass party, not one consisting exclusively of those who agreed with his revolutionary Marxism, but rather a mass party broad enough to include all socialists, indeed all militant workers. It would have different tendencies within it, and the consistent marxists might be a minority at least for a while.

It was the Mensheviks and right-wingers, not Lenin, who split rather than permit a left-wing majority. Nor, in the years of the Bolshevik party's formation, did Lenin make a virtue out of necessity: he did not adopt the view the Party had to be limited to Bolsheviks. On the contrary, he fought consistently for the conception of a broad Party, in which, however, the left wing had as much right to take over the leadership by a democratic vote as did the right wing.[xvii]

This had been Lenin's attitude at the time of the 1903 split and for some years afterwards. But Lenin's approach was to shift markedly away from this orthodox social democratic position, and he came to see the need for a party that consisted only of revolutionary Marxists. 1912 saw the formal foundation of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolshevik) as a completely separate party from the Mensheviks. This was "an advance on Lenin's own earlier position, in that the 1903 split had in large part been the work of the Mensheviks, and Lenin had frequently been willing to countenance reunification, whereas now he broke with the Mensheviks once and for all".[xviii] In 1912 the Bolsheviks ran candidates in opposition to the Mensheviks in the elections for the Tsarist Duma. In 1913, at Lenin's urging, the Bolshevik Duma deputies split from the Mensheviks to form an independent fraction. The Bolsheviks stood their own candidates in union elections. By June 1914 the Bolsheviks controlled 14 of the 18 unions in Petersburg and ten of the 13 in Moscow.[xix]

Draper further claims that:

Nor were these factions (Bolshevik as well as Menshevik) ‘membership organizations' in the sense of the sects we have been trying to build...the membership organizations in Russia were local and regional party groups which might be part Bolshevik and part Menshevik in sympathy...

Both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were, in organizational form, not membership sects, and not even ‘factions' in any organizational meaning relevant to today. What were they? Both were political centers based on a propaganda/publishing enterprise, plus a central organizational apparatus for forging links with sections of the workers' movement, through ‘agents', literary collaborators, etc.[xx]

This is nonsense. It is true that Lenin's faction was not the authoritarian monolith of Stalinist myth. For a long time it was relatively fluid, informal and messy. In many of the dispersed party groups in the regional centres of the Tsarist Empire, there was not a sharp separation between the supporters of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Nonetheless there were organised Bolshevik and Menshevik factions with formal memberships. They were not just some vague political centre. Trotsky described the situation at the 1907 London Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party:

Each of the factions and national organizations met separately during recesses between official sessions, worked out its own line of conduct and designated its own speakers...At the final session of the Bolshevik faction, after the closing of the Congress, a secret Bolshevik Center was elected...composed of fifteen members.[xxi]

The Bolsheviks held their own congresses - the first in Finland in December 1905 - and elected their own Central Committee. Three conferences of Bolshevik local committees were held as early as September-December 1904. By the time of the 1905 revolution the Bolsheviks had established their own Committees in Petersburg, Moscow and other centres such as Odessa, Baku, Batum and Tiflis. During the course of the 1905 revolution the Bolsheviks established their own factory cells independent of the Mensheviks - almost 100 in Petersburg and 40 in Moscow.

By the fourth Congress in April 1906, membership had grown, it is estimated, to 13,000 for the Bolsheviks and 18,000 for the Mensheviks. Another estimate (for October 1906) was 33,000 Bolsheviks, 43,000 Mensheviks...By 1907 the total membership had increased to 150,000: Bolsheviks - 46,143., Mensheviks - 38,174, Bund - 25,468, and the Polish and Latvian parts of the party 25,654 and 13,000 respectively.[xxii]

The war drew a sharp line

Draper omits any reference to the dramatic impact that World War I had on Lenin's whole political outlook, in particular Lenin's development of his theory of imperialism. The outbreak of war had blown out of the water any idea that you could have a broad party containing revolutionaries and reformists, even left-wing reformists. This was a vital issue that Lenin had to face up to in his analysis of the era of imperialism. Lenin's theory of imperialism entailed not just an economic analysis of this latest stage of capitalism, but, as Georg Lukacs puts it, also "a theory of the different currents within the working-class movement in the age of imperialism."[xxiii] As early as November 1914 the Bolshevik Central Committee had issued the slogan "Long live a proletarian International freed from opportunism".[xxiv] In his pamphlet Socialism and War written in 1915 Lenin declared:

We are firmly convinced that, in the present state of affairs, a split with the opportunists and chauvinists is the prime duty of revolutionaries...our Party will work indefatigably in the above-mentioned direction...and through its day-by-day activities will build up the Russian section of the Marxist International.[xxv]

The right wing of Social Democracy openly backed the imperialist war and commonly entered into governments that sent millions of workers to their deaths in defence of the profits of the capitalists. The so-called Social Democratic centre looked to pacifist solutions but refused to actually fight the war. So the centrists too ended up supporting the imperialist system. The fight with opportunism was not some "sectarian" squabble, not a mere difference of opinion among socialists which could be settled by comradely debate within a united party. It was not a dispute over the best strategies and tactics to achieve a shared goal of socialism. This meant for Lenin that there had to be a sharp split in the international working class movement between revolutionaries on the one side and reformists and centrists of all shades on the other. As Georg Lukacs put it:

...opportunism is the class enemy of the proletariat within its own camp. The removal of the opportunists from the labour movement is therefore the first, essential prerequisite of the successful start of the struggle against the bourgeoisie.[xxvi]

The new Third International which Lenin campaigned for "was to be precisely an instrument of war - international civil war against the imperialist bourgeoisie - and therefore could tolerate in its ranks neither a fifth column nor waverers".[xxvii]

Of course the fact that Lenin's Bolshevik party was built on the back of a propaganda group, Plekhanov's Emancipation of Labour Group, and that after the defeat of the 1905 revolution the Bolsheviks had to rebuild again from a small propaganda core does not prove that the only road to a revolutionary party is via a propaganda group. We have no crystal ball. If other opportunities arise, then Marxists need to grasp them. But we have to begin somewhere, and we have to optimise the use of the resources we actually possess. In the concrete circumstances facing Marxists in Australia and many other countries today, where there are at best a few hundred or a thousand or so active revolutionaries, we face no alternative but starting from the base of a socialist propaganda group. No better option is on offer. For tiny groups the idea of building a "broad" socialist party is wishful thinking - and dangerous wishful thinking at that. It points away from where revolutionaries need to go.

The alternative that Hal Draper puts forward is one of a political centre "based on a propaganda/publishing enterprise, plus a central organizational apparatus for forging links with sections of the workers' movement, through ‘agents', literary collaborators, etc."[xxviii] How this would radically differ from a propaganda group is not at all clear. The "agents" of the political centre seem remarkably similar to the cadres of a propaganda group. The advantages Draper claims for his model are extremely dubious to say the least. He argues that "a political center can undertake a relationship with its followers which is not bedevilled by the rigid requirements of organizational life, its life-and-death votes, faction fights, splits, internal disputes" which are the hallmarks of a propaganda group/sect. [xxix] But even a cursory examination of the history of the Bolsheviks, which Draper upholds as a model of his "political centre", shows that they were repeatedly wracked by all of these phenomena.

That, however, is not the main point. Draper's schema effectively downplays the importance of revolutionaries clarifying their ideas and drawing sharp lines of demarcation, i.e. organisational conclusions, from them. The "life-and-death votes, faction fights, splits, internal disputes" that Draper so decries are not some terrible "sectarian" excess of small socialist groups. They are an inevitable and necessary element in the building of a mass revolutionary party. This is not to glorify splits and faction fights. There have been plenty of unnecessary and badly handled faction fights, and small groups are prone to split over secondary issues. Nonetheless, no genuine working class party, whether it be the Russian Bolsheviks or the German Social Democrats, has ever developed without them. For in the real world of politics, whatever the organisational form, there will be disagreements in any vibrant organisation. If these disagreements are not clarified and debated out, then as axiomatically as night follows day, opportunist ideas will win out. Furthermore, no matter how loose a socialist organisation is, in less revolutionary periods more conservative and reformist forces will be likely to refuse to work with revolutionaries in the same organisation, if the revolutionaries seriously try to clarify the issues in dispute.

Conclusion

Unfortunately there are no guarantees in politics. The task of building a revolutionary party is far from simple and straightforward. Plenty of small socialist groups have gone off the rails well before they have come anywhere near to establishing a revolutionary party. However, for socialists who are committed to fighting to change the world, there is no alternative but to organise the forces that do currently exist. And if there are only twenty of you, or two hundred, or even two thousand, that means recognising the fact that at this stage of your development you need to see yourself as a propaganda group. Facing up to what you are, not kidding yourself, not pretending you are something broader or more influential is the first step towards building on a sound basis. Being clear on what you are and on the tasks confronting a propaganda group opens up the possibility of genuine growth and at some point, when there are sharp shifts in the political climate, of a qualitative breakthrough which can lay the basis for a mass revolutionary party.

This is not some dream or utopian schema. The experience of history is that time and time again small groups of revolutionaries armed with a burning commitment to Marxist politics and a fierce determination to build have been able to break through and establish parties that could play a leading role in struggles for workers' rights and even lead a challenge for power. That is the lesson of Plekhanov's pioneering work, of Poland at the start of the twentieth century, of the Chinese revolutionaries in the 1920s and of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in the 1930s and 1940s. In the last great radical upsurge in the 1960s and 1970s a similar pattern began to occur in country after country as tiny groups of largely student revolutionaries attempted with some limited success to break the hold of the Stalinist Communist parties over the most advanced sections of the working class.

With the collapse of Stalinism, an obscene obstacle that blocked the path of genuine revolutionary Marxism for over fifty years has been removed. That provides both an opportunity and a challenge. We now have the responsibility of making Marxism relevant to a new generation of fighters and laying the basis for a movement that can fire the hopes and imagination of tens of millions of people appalled by the horrors of twenty-first century capitalism.

[i] I have not space here to deal with the arguments of anarchists and autonomists that oppose any form of party organisation. See John Molyneux, Marxism and the Party, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2003. Tony Cliff, Duncan Hallas, Chris Harman, Leon Trotsky, Party and Class, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2003.

[ii] For the argument against the fruitless endeavour of socialists trying to influence the ALP see Mick Armstrong and Tom Bramble, The Labor Party: A Marxist Analysis, Socialist Alternative, Melbourne, 2007.

[iii] Murray Smith, "Where is the SWP going?", International Socialism Journal, 97, London, Winter 2002, p44.

[iv] Murray Smith, "The broad party, the revolutionary party and the united front: a reply to John Rees", International Socialism Journal, 100, London, Autumn 2003, p69.

[v] ISJ 100, p77.

[vi] ISJ 97, p45.

[vii] Hal Draper, Toward a New Beginning - On Another Road: The Alternative to the Micro-Sect, p3, 12. www.marxists.org/archive/draper/works/1971/alt/alt.htm

[viii] Draper, Toward, p5.

[ix] Hal Draper, Anatomy of the Micro-Sect. www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1973/xx/mirosect.htm, p8.

[x] Leon Trotsky, Stalin, Stein and Day, New York, 1967, p95.

[xi] Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Vintage, New York, 1971, p103.

[xii] Trotsky, Stalin, p111

[xiii] Geoffrey Swain, Russian Social Democracy and the Legal Labour Movement 1906-14, Macmillan, London, 1983, p136.

[xiv] Leon Trotsky, Writings 1938-39, Pathfinder, New York, 1974, p257.

[xv] Draper, Toward, p9.

[xvi] V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done, Collected Works, Vol 5, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1961, pp467, 514-515.

[xvii] Draper, Toward, p10.

[xviii] Molyneux, p64.

[xix] Tony Cliff, Lenin Volume 1: Building the Party, Pluto Press, London, 1975, pp331-332.

[xx] Draper, Toward, p11.

[xxi] Trotsky, Stalin, p91.

[xxii] Lane, pp12-13.

[xxiii] Georg Lukacs, Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Thought, New Left Books, London, 1977, p53.

[xxiv] Collected Works, p34.

[xxv] V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 21, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964, pp 329-330.

[xxvi] Lukacs, Lenin, p58.

[xxvii] Molyneux, p71.

[xxviii] Draper, Toward, p11.

[xxix] Draper, Anatomy, p11.