By the fight and in the fight
The tasks facing revolutionary socialists today
By Jessy Ní Cheallaigh and Paul Murphy
Article originally published in Issue 1 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, which is sold out. You can purchase the digital version here:
"... the proletariat requires a high degree of political education, of class-consciousness and organisation. All these conditions cannot be fulfilled by pamphlets and leaflets, but only by the living political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the revolution."
Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike (1906)
We are faced with a major contradiction. Global capitalism is in a crisis-ridden state. It is entering the second major recession of the 21st century. Every day, it brings us closer and closer to climatic catastrophe. Across much of the world, its control of the political process is extremely tenuous. In Ireland, that is expressed by Fine Gael and Fianna Fail forced into coalition for the first time ever.
However, despite the crises of capitalism and the impressive mass movements of the last years, the revolutionary left globally has not only failed to grow, it has entered into crisis itself.
The existential problems facing revolutionary organisations are rooted in the failure to grapple with the complications and opportunities of a new period. It is one marked by explosive struggle, but where the imprint of the organised working class is often lacking, and class consciousness and organisation remains relatively low.
Rebuilding the workers’ movement from the defeats of the 1980s and 1990s has proved to be protracted and complicated. Right now, time is of the essence, given the developing crises of capitalism that we are facing - growing wealth inequality, the effects of systemic racism reaching boiling point and the impending, hugely detrimental effects of climate catastrophe.
The revolutionary left generally has struggled with relating to broader movements and consciousness. It has floundered between abstract propagandism from the sidelines on the one side, and opportunistic adaptation on the other.
How can revolutionaries avoid these mistakes? How can we best contribute to building the mass revolutionary parties which are needed to overthrow the capitalist system?
Conditions today
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)
In order to act to change the world effectively, understanding the conditions we face is essential. In the Transitional Programme, Trotsky summed up the situation then facing socialists as follows: “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.”
He was writing in 1938, at a time of mass ‘socialist’ and ‘Communist’ parties, with a large and powerful advanced section of the working class. That ‘vanguard’ was composed of workers who were not just occasionally active, but who had a high level of activity, consciousness and organisation, be that in social-democratic or ‘Communist’ parties, or in a relatively lively trade union movement.
Considering the Great Depression and the impasse capitalism had found itself in, it was clear that the primary obstacle standing between the working class and successful socialist revolution was the misleadership of the social democrats and Stalinists. The struggle to create an alternative revolutionary leadership was dominant in the struggle for socialist change.
Conditions are very different today and Trotsky’s observation needs to be adapted. Objectively, the working class is more powerful than ever. It has grown significantly worldwide, both as a proportion of the global population and in absolute numbers. The developments of literacy, mass education and technology has meant that the working class is also more educated now than ever. There has been a huge influx of women into the paid labour force, making up almost half of it internationally.
However, despite the enormous potential strength there, politically and industrially, it remains largely unorganised and therefore weak. This is partially the consequence of the continuing impact of the collapse of Stalinism and the associated throwback in consciousness and organisation as well as ideological confusion. Connected with that, is the absence of mass revolutionary forces and of significant forces of the left in general. All of this has acted to delay and distort the development of consciousness.
After decades of neoliberal attacks and significant trade union defeats, the working class was historically weakened and underprepared to face the 2007-2008 crisis. Now, more than a decade later, the working class, the left generally and ourselves in the revolutionary left still remain in an historically weak position struggling to measure up to the tasks in front of us.
Nonetheless, despite these complications, there are very significant developments taking place. Consciousness is moving forward, albeit not in a straight line. We have seen impressive mass movements on a worldwide scale. From 2011 to 2018 we saw the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados, general strikes in much of southern Europe, the development of the global women’s movement (with feminist strikes in a number of countries), and mass, global school student strikes. Then came 2019, the year of global revolts. Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Hong Kong, Catalonia, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Colombia and Chile amongst other countries saw movements of potentially revolutionary proportions. This was temporarily interrupted by the spread of the coronavirus, itself a probable byproduct of capitalist agriculture and environmentally destructive practices.
The revolt from below re-emerged explosively in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the horrific police murder of George Floyd. This is the broadest movement against racial oppression in the history of the US, supported by a majority of Americans for the first time ever.
What is generally absent from these movements is a broad and developed understanding that the problem is capitalism (although anti-capitalist awareness has clearly grown in recent years) and, in particular, that the alternative is socialist change. In that sense, consciousness is markedly different than in 1938. The Yellow Vests movement in France which arguably marked the start of the recent global wave encapsulated the confusion that is present within these movements, in terms of tactics, strategy and politics.
With few exceptions, there is an absence of mass political organisations of the working class and oppressed in which the movement can democratically debate demands, slogans, tactics, and the way forward. While there have been important steps forward, over the last period the trade unions have become largely hollowed out and bureaucratised to an extreme degree.
However, it is important to recall that the word ‘communist’ not too long ago was widely considered a dirty word. It is therefore an undeniable sign of progress that today we are witnessing rising numbers of people self-identifying as socialists and, among a growing younger cohort, communists. Linked to this is the huge rise in interest in left-wing figures that we have seen with the surge of support for the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Pablo Iglesias, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
They have inspired huge numbers of young people and workers to join the likes of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Labour Party under Corbyn. The use of language like “for the many, not the few” and the “billionaire class” pointing towards a class understanding, has been popularised. There is, however, still a final jump to be made between this broad aspiration for a fairer world to the clear strategy of how to achieve it - through a revolution overthrowing capitalism with the working class being the agent to carry it out.
A triple crisis
“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.” Karl Marx, Letter to Bracke (1875)
Trotsky’s ‘crisis of leadership’ in 1938 is therefore replaced by a triple crisis characterizing the world political situation today. A crisis of revolutionary leadership yes, but also of consciousness and of mass organisation.
Revolutionaries acting in this context on the basis that the sole obstacle to socialist revolution is an absence of revolutionary leadership leads to the narrow interests of revolutionary groups being substituted for the interests of the working class as a whole. The worst sectarian acts and undemocratic internal culture can be justified on the grounds of the crucial necessity of ‘building the party’, which is the ‘leadership’ of the working class movement, at the expense of everything else.
Recognising that there is a triple crisis facing the working class - of leadership, consciousness and mass organisation - points to (but doesn’t guarantee in and of itself) a very different approach. It firstly means that just building a ‘leadership in waiting’ won’t work. Instead, we must seek to contribute to redeveloping that advanced layer of the working class in terms of both consciousness and organisation, at the same time as developing revolutionary programme and organisation.
If we focus solely on our own revolutionary organisations, on recruitment, on education of our members without also struggling to redevelop broader organisations of working class people such as trade unions, then we will be left with an isolated, irrelevant, small revolutionary sect.
It may preserve certain key ideas and play a role in the education of a small layer of cadre. Even there, however, the ideas preserved will be a sectarian caricature of the genuine ideas of Marxism. The education imparted will also bear the imprint of sectarian isolation. Most of all, it will have no wider lasting impact on the wider working class movement.
It is also important to note though, that if we throw ourselves into building the wider movement, without sufficiently assembling and educating the revolutionary Marxist forces, we will be failing to build instruments sharp enough to take on and defeat the capitalist class. Being determines consciousness. Even those who start out with the best of intentions would likely buckle to reformist pressures inherent in the daily-struggle if they don’t take care to recruit and organise revolutionaries in the here and now.
Our conclusion is that revolutionaries must do both. We must develop revolutionary groups which can contribute to building mass revolutionary parties. At the same time, we must genuinely contribute to the rebuilding of the workers’ movement and its mass organisations. There is an interdependent relationship between the two.
Done correctly, engaging with broader struggles, movements and organisations can strengthen revolutionary organisations to no end. Arguing for revolutionary ideas against reformist and centrist ideas as part of a living struggle is an invaluable opportunity to hone our ideas. Being connected to and challenged by broader sections of radicalising workers and young people is an opportunity to both teach and learn.
In practice
“We must always attempt to lift as we climb.” Angela Davis, ‘Women, Culture & Politics’ (1989)
Of course, striking the correct balance while implementing these two interrelated tasks often proves to be challenging. While they do complement each other, there is also a real tension between them. This expresses itself not only as broad strategic choices, but also a multitude of daily choices - do we proceed with the reading group we have planned, or do we attend a protest or broader campaign group meeting? How can we measure up to these two tasks?
Firstly, looking at the responsibility we have as revolutionaries to make every effort to rebuild broader organisations and raising consciousness in the process. Revolutionaries must be on the frontline of the re-organisation of the working class and the redevelopment of its consciousness - politically, in workplaces and in communities.
Politically, revolutionaries should seek to contribute to building mass parties of the left. In the US for example, at this time revolutionaries should be organised within the Democratic Socialists of America. That is not because they should be blind to the problems with the DSA, not least its connections to the Democratic Party, but because there are over 70,000 self-described socialists who are members, and we should seek to engage with them, learn from them, and work together to build the biggest possible socialist party and movement.
The reformist character of the leadership of much of the DSA and other broad organisations of the left is not a reason to stand on the sidelines. It is a reason to build an alternative revolutionary pole as part of these organisations, to help push back against the disillusionment which inevitably follows when they fail and to help workers and young people draw the correct conclusions from their experiences.
Trade unions, although significantly weakened, remain the basic organisation for workers in the workplace. Because of the potential power of workers to shut down production, as well as the workplace as the site of rising class consciousness, the redevelopment of trade unions is vital. We should seek to build the unions, while simultaneously building broad left or activists’ networks within them, based on a consistent ‘class-struggle’ approach.
Of course, we have also seen the rise of social movements that are separate from trade union or left party struggles. In Ireland, these include the struggles for marriage equality, abortions rights and presently the ongoing fight for housing rights and for the abolition of Direct Provision and against racism. Socialists similarly need to participate enthusiastically and organically in these social movements, helping to build them, and not just our revolutionary groups.
Concretely, with the surge in activism and debate around climate catastrophe, RISE participated in and helped to build Extinction Rebellion (XR). That was not with our eyes closed to the various limitations present in the ideas behind XR, from the underlying ideological outlook of many of its leaders, its lack of democratic structures, or the limitations of its tactics.
We recognised that XR was attracting hundreds of young people and workers at this stage who want to take radical action to stop climate change. Their demands - Tell the Truth, Act Now, and Just Transition - as well as their strategy of winning 3.5% of the population (over 100,000 in Ireland) to sustained resistance all point in the right direction. Socialists should be present there to struggle alongside them, to learn from them, to debate the best possible approach, and to win new activists to a Marxist understanding of ecological degradation and climate disruption. The value of such involvement was seen in the fact that XR was the only environmental organisation to oppose the Programme for Government.
The point, in all of these broader struggles, is not simply to be active in them, but to be active as revolutionaries. That means consistently being advocates for what is necessary to advance the movement, step by step, basing ourselves on the logic of class struggle. It also means revolutionaries being organised within these movements and advocating for the need for fundamental socialist change.
To build an organisation and train revolutionaries capable of meeting the challenges that we will be presented with means consciously learning all of the lessons from our current struggles and engaging in the intellectual work of study and development of Marxist theory and history. The point is not simply to add names to a list of members of an organisation, but to develop them as active, questioning and independent thinking Marxist revolutionaries in their own right. When combined with a systematic approach to political education and theory, experience in the broader struggle is indispensable to creating such revolutionaries.
Teaching & Learning
“The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.” Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
We believe that the revolutionary party is necessary to serve as the historic memory of the working class, connecting struggles of the present to the need to overthrow capitalism. But it’s not all about teaching for the revolutionary left. By engaging in and with these movements, trends, and confused consciousnesses we learn too. Of course, this engagement will ideally lead to more and more people joining with us after seeing our ideas in action.
But where did the lessons of working class struggle get learnt in the first place? The great revolutionary socialist theorists and leaders of history didn’t just wake up from an insightful dream and suddenly know the best way forward. They engaged in the struggles of working class people throughout history and generalised from their experiences.
Therefore we need to not only bring forward the lessons we’ve learned from previous struggles but also actively learn from the current struggles that we fight today. Take the example of the Soviets. The Bolsheviks did not invent them - they were thrown up by the working class themselves, with many Bolsheviks on the ground in 1905 being suspicious about these organisations which were neither party nor trade union. They became, like the Paris Commune before them, the basis of an alternative democratic state of workers, and a crucial reference point for Marxists today.
The movement against the water charges offers a more contemporary, if modest, example. The revolutionary left played a crucial role, in bringing to bear the lessons of the centrality of non-payment and active mobilisation from previous struggles. However, we also learned. Street meetings and local facebook groups were not sucked out of the thumb of Marxists. They were improvised by working class communities engaging in politics for the first time, using the means available and most suitable to them. They became crucial in developing the scale of resistance nationwide to defeat the charges.
Applying the method of the united front today
“The tactic of the united front is nothing other than the proposal made by the Communists to all workers, whether they are members of other parties or groups or of none, to fight alongside them, to defend the elementary and vital interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie. Every action for even the smallest demand is a source of revolutionary education, because the experience of combat will convince the working people of the necessity of the revolution, and will demonstrate the meaning of Communism to them.”
Executive Committee of the Communist International, Theses on the United Front (1921)
The discussions of the Communist International at its third and fourth Congresses in 1921 and 1922 have much relevance for today. This was a time when the revolutionary wave opened by the October revolution was receding. Lenin and Trotsky and others waged a battle to get the communists around the world to recognise that reality and the minority status of Marxists within the workers’ movement. The tactic of the united front, as well as the slogan of the workers’ government were innovations designed to “win over the masses as a precondition to winning power” as German revolutionary Clara Zetkin put it.
The united front has been applied in different ways. One classic example was the ‘Open Letter’ of the German Communist Party in 1921 to the reformist SPD, the USPD, which wavered between reform and revolution, and the ultra-left KAPD and four trade union federations in January 1921. Another was the urgent appeal from Trotsky for the Social-Democrats and Communist Party to come together to block the rise of fascism in the 1930s.
Many of these traditional applications presuppose something which is largely absent today - mass workers’ parties with reformist leaderships. It means that the classical united front which a smaller revolutionary group proposes to a bigger reformist party has less relevance.
However, as a method, it has enormous relevance for today. The essence of it is expressed in the quote from the ECCI Theses above. It remains the case that the number of revolutionaries is very small. However, large numbers are already fighting for or favour reforms that we agree with - from abortion rights to climate action, from opposition to water charges to increases in the minimum wage.
Significant numbers of working class people also look to organisations to our right to help win those reforms. In the case of Ireland, this is particularly the case for Sinn Féin. It is not a workers’ party, but in the South in particular, its support is based on a perceived opposition to austerity measures and the establishment. This method is a crucial tool in seeking to break working class people from Sinn Féin and to the socialist left. In a sense, the last general election was the first opportunity for RISE to test out its ideas on this score.
How to relate to Sinn Féin and the progressive sentiment of a majority of their voters to kick out the establishment and elect an anti-establishment and anti-austerity government was the key challenge facing the left.
We correctly anticipated that Sinn Féin support would grow, and took the sentiment to end the rule of FF/FG rule as a starting point and sought to point it forward. We put public demands on the leadership of Sinn Féin to rule out coalition with these right-wing parties, which they refused to do. We were able to cut ourselves out from Sinn Féin with billboards and leaflets proclaiming: “Kick out FG & FF - Vote for the only party that won’t prop them up.”
This was the method of the united front in action. Starting with the point of agreement we had with the potential electoral base of Sinn Féin, we used that to illustrate in practice that Sinn Féin was not going to deliver on those expectations.
The next five years, with Sinn Féin as the largest opposition party by far inside the Dáil, will require utilisation of this method. The socialist left should repeatedly say to Sinn Féin - you say you are opposed to the austerity measures of this government. In that case, join us in building a movement outside the Dáil to oppose and defeat them. If, under pressure, they agree, it enables bigger and more effective mobilisations, where the revolutionary left’s superiority in terms of strategy and tactics can be shown. If they disagree, it demonstrates that their opposition to austerity is only rhetorical.
A piston box for today
"Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston box. But nevertheless, what moves things is not the piston or the box but the steam". - Leon Trotsky, ‘The History of the Russian Revolution’ (1930)
One certainty in all of this is that a mass revolutionary party is necessary for a successful socialist revolution. The history of the working class movement and its successes and failures, from Russia in 1917 to Chile in 1973 and much beyond, testifies to that.
This truth about the necessity of mass revolutionary parties does not exhaust the question, however. The experience of the failed attempts at revolution in Germany in the early 1920s confirms that it is not enough to have a mass party which considers itself revolutionary, but that party must be capable of making the correct strategic and tactical decisions.
Mass revolutionary parties capable of measuring up to the historic challenges before them will not be built linearly from the small revolutionary groups today. They will consciously be built as part of the reconstruction and re-emergence of a ‘vanguard’, or advanced section of working class people generally.
This needs to happen on such a huge scale and in reality, given the situation around climate change and the continuously widening gap in wealth inequality, the time for waiting for opportunities to appear is fast running out. We as revolutionary socialists need to play an active role in contributing to it.
The building of a mass revolutionary party necessary for a successful socialist revolution will be an organic part of rebuilding the working class movement as a whole. These can not be achieved separately from each other.
Yes, these tasks seem daunting, especially when the revolutionary left is so fractured and marginal. However, attempting to answer the question ‘what is to be done’, and openly debating the way forward seems like the best place to start.