by Barry Conlon

Article originally published in Issue 4 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:”

There is a little genre of left wing literature, familiar mostly to the kind of people who buy socialist publications on demonstrations, made up of hundreds of articles explaining why we need a revolutionary party. So similar are these articles and the arguments they contain that a great deal of effort could be saved if the various socialist groups agreed to just republish the same one every few years.

Mass revolutionary party

They typically start with a brief, rather uncritical, history of Bolshevism. Then often proceed through the failures of other revolutions in the aftermath of World War One, Hungary, Germany, perhaps for the completists Finland. Then skip forward to the missed opportunity of France 1968, before dealing at some length with Chile, Allende and Pinochet. All of this accumulated historical evidence is gathered in a pile to demonstrate that a key distinction between a successful and an unsuccessful social revolution is the existence of a mass party capable of providing political leadership and organisation to the struggle at the appropriate moment of crisis. If you have read one such article, you really have read them all. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]

I’ve no desire to ever read that article again, but I don’t disagree with it. More precisely, I may think that the historical claims are a little less than convincingly proven at this remove from 1917. Or that most of the groups arguing for a “revolutionary party” have a rather crude and narrow vision of what such an organisation would be. But I agree with the central, theoretical, claim that a successful socialist transformation will have to involve a political organisation capable of leading one.

The real problem with these articles isn’t that they are wrong or are repetitive. It’s that an argument for the kind of mass political organisation that would be needed in the event of a rupture with capitalism is used as a stand in for an argument about how small groups of socialists should organise now. That is, once we accept that a mass revolutionary party is a desirable goal, it is assumed that organising as such a party in miniature is the appropriate immediate task. This does not in fact follow. In practice, when an activist group of dozens or hundreds organises itself as a miniature scale model of a mass party, what tends to result is a kind of parody.

It is disorienting to start thinking of your small organisation as a temporarily embarrassed mass party, or even as the embryo of a mass party. It leads to a tendency to place too much importance on the organisational advancement of your activist group. It is a classic sectarian mistake.

Broad workers’ party

There’s another distinct little genre of left-wing literature making a case for a broader socialist or working class party. RISE has added its own entries to it in previous issues of this magazine. We’ve gone beyond making this argument in writing and have joined People Before Profit (PBP), to be part of building a socialist party that can sink roots into communities and workplaces across Ireland, and begin to organise the most militant and radical sections of the working class. PBP is an unusual formation in that it is clearly more left-wing than most of what were once called the “new left parties” across Western Europe, like Die Linke in Germany or the Left Bloc in Portugal, but is not a little revolutionary sect with a Marxist programme. It is also not yet a mass force, but it represents the best opportunity available to build one in Ireland.

To bring these two, seemingly opposed, little genres together, it is my view that the most likely path to a real revolutionary party lies through the experience of a mass socialist party that will likely have a less clear, more heterogeneous political profile. That’s not the only possible path, and we should not be prescriptive about what is or is not possible, but it is the most likely one. This though leaves a fundamental question. What role is there for a narrower, Marxist grouping? Or to phrase it less generally, why, when it is part of a broader socialist party, and its members carry out their activism through that party, does RISE exist as a network?

What role for RISE?

To begin with a negative answer, we are not engaged in an “entryist” project. There is no perspective of building RISE as the “real” organisation within the PBP shell, or of taking over, or of exposing its leadership or any other such parasitical behaviour. There are numerous parties in the world with hardened reformist politics that revolutionary Marxists might reasonably work inside of as a force hostile to their leaderships. But taking that approach to working in a common party as radical as PBP, which contains numerous other Marxists, would be another type of sectarian mistake. We want to contribute loyally to strengthening PBP, organisationally and politically. That means involving ourselves in PBP’s activism, participating together in struggles and social movements. It also means engaging with the ideas of our fellow party members, seeking to persuade them of our views and to be persuaded by theirs.

““Clear revolutionary Marxist organisation can help act as a counterpressure, helping socialists to keep our longer-term objectives in mind, and place our day-to-day activism in a strategic framework.””

In positive terms, we think that there is an important role for a distinctive revolutionary current with our particular set of ideas and organisational principles.

There is a constant rightward pull on political organisations that are involved in parliamentary or electoral politics, a pressure to be reasonable within the terms set by an unreasonable system. In fact there’s a similar pull, less acute but constant, on activist groups and campaigns generally, even if they aren’t involved in electoral politics. Clear revolutionary Marxist organisation can help act as a counterpressure, helping socialists to keep our longer-term objectives in mind, and place our day-to-day activism in a strategic framework.

There’s a need to develop that strategic framework and argue for it. That means thinking about and discussing how a socialist transformation of society might occur, how the working class might come to power in a developed parliamentary democracy in the 21st Century. It means thinking about how to engage with and win over popular opinion. It means drawing from the past experiences of the socialist movement and engaging with and fostering new ideas. There’s a need to educate ourselves in that history and those ideas, to teach what we know and learn what we can. All without becoming a discussion club, divorced from activist involvement.

The politics of RISE

So what is notable about RISE’s set of ideas and methods?

First, a disclaimer. We don’t claim unique and sole ownership over any individual aspect of what I’m about to describe below. There are other people, other groups, who share some or even many of our views. When left-wing groups overlap with others in their views, they have an unfortunate tendency to treat their nearest ideological neighbours as their most deadly rivals, an attitude closely bound up with the belief that one’s own organisation is the revolutionary party of the future in embryo (some of the more sophisticated sectarians officially disavow this belief, while still adhering to it in practice). That’s not how RISE wants to approach the rest of the socialist movement. We readily acknowledge that other groupings are Marxist, that other currents will work alongside us and share organisations, that we will fuse with others in the future, that a real mass revolutionary movement will contain multitudes. We want to discuss these ideas with others, not treat them as our property.

Getting to the point, RISE is a revolutionary Marxist organisation, seeking to use and develop a framework for understanding the world taken from Marx’s writings and those of a century and a half of movements and thinkers and parties following after him. We see Marxism not as a finished and closed system, but as a set of methodologies for engaging with a changing world. It is revolutionary, not in the sense that we regard insurrection as the only viable strategy for social change, nor in the sense that we are 1917 reenactors. But we understand that parliamentary gradualism will never reach a socialist goal, and a fundamental rupture will be necessary. Working out how such a rupture can occur, developing what Daniel Bensaid called a “strategic hypothesis”, is a key task for socialists today.

It is ecosocialist, meaning that it does not simply see the environmental crisis as one issue among a great number of important issues, but as a defining issue for the future of humanity. The mitigation of the already unfolding climate and biodiversity disasters most centrally, are a precondition for the resolution of each and every other issue that we address. There is no socialist future, or any future, on a dead planet.

We believe that the key revolutionary force in the world, with the power, in Marx’s words, to abolish the present state of things, is the multi-racial, multi-gender, global working class. But that power is latent. The working class is disorganised. It is not conscious of its own potential, and all of the vast ideological apparatus of the ruling class works to keep it that way. It is divided, with sections of it encouraged at every turn by capitalist society to identify with their own oppressors and exploiters against more oppressed sections of their own class.

““RISE does not simply see the environmental issue as one issue among a great number of important issues, but as a defining issue for the future of humanity.””

We believe that the working class can only be united to fight for its own collective interests, and through that the abolition of class divided society, on the basis of opposition to all other forms of oppression. The socialist movement must be anti-racist and feminist. It must be opposed to the oppression of LGBTQ people and to the disabled. It must oppose national oppression and imperialism. It’s not good enough to argue that the root causes of oppression will be dealt with in a socialist society. We have to fight against each and every form of oppression here and now.

We are an activist organisation. There is no point having even the most pristine set of political ideas if they aren’t part of an attempt to build radical movements, to rebuild the workers movement, to strengthen struggles against oppression. That doesn’t mean arriving into campaigns convinced that we automatically have a superior understanding of strategy or tactics for that movement. We have ideas and experiences to share, but so do the people we work alongside. A socialist group in Germany that we work with is called “Lernen im Kampf”, or learning in struggle. That name captures our intended approach.

RISE is anti-Stalinist. Not in the sense that our members are required to subscribe to a particular theory of the nature of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist regimes generally, but in the broader sense that if those grey bureaucratic dictatorships are your vision of a socialist future, you share little politically in common with us.

We draw on three concepts developed at the 3rd and 4th Congresses of the Communist International, before the rise of Stalinism, and then taken up by the Trotskyist movement: Transitional demands, the united front and the workers' government. These come from the period when expectations of successful revolutions across Western Europe, inspired by the Russian example, in the immediate term began to fade and revolutionaries began trying to work out how to win majority support among workers in relatively stable capitalist democracies. For in-depth explanations of our take on these concepts, see the two articles on the history and theory of the workers’ government in this issue of Rupture, “By the fight and in the fight” in issue 1 which deals with the united front and Diana O’Dwyer’s contribution to the debate on “Green Capital” in issue 3 which outlines our understanding of transitional demands.

But we aren’t only interested in excavating the early history of the socialist movement. We try to engage with more recent and contemporary Marxian theory (see for examples articles on the Metabolic Rift and Social Reproduction Theory in Rupture issues 1, 2, and 3 and Transgender Marxism in this issue) and to learn from social movements. It sometimes seems as if some left-wing groups believe that the Bolsheviks or the Comintern had worked out all the answers, applicable across time and space, more than a century ago. If that was the case, it would be difficult to explain the failures of the socialist movement since. “Defending the ideas” is a religious approach.

‘Working out our ideas together’

RISE is committed to a thoroughly democratic set of organisational principles. Major decisions are taken at monthly general membership meetings. All members are entitled to listen in to the meetings of regularly elected leadership bodies. Information, minutes, ideas are shared throughout the group. Political minorities have the right to organise as tendencies. There are no cod-Bolshevik rules about committee secrecy or public unanimity.

Just as important as a formally democratic structure is a democratic culture, where disagreements are openly expressed and discussed out. A culture in which dissent is not treated as an error to be corrected, and discussions do not start with the assumption that there is an already known correct answer. We are not trying to educate our members in our line, we want to educate ourselves collectively by working out our ideas together.

Let me give two examples of how this works in practice.

We spent six months thinking through our initial view of the “national question”, imperialism in Ireland and a Border Poll. This involved circulating a range of documents on the issue from across the socialist movement to all members, the positions of other groups and the ideas of thinkers like Michael Lowy. There were three general meetings devoted to the issue, at which a substantial majority of our members spoke. In between those meetings there was another meeting for our members which we invited People Before Profit activists to speak at about PBP’s views. There was further discussion at branch meetings. Our members produced written documents and circulated them. And finally, we came to a collective view, outlined by Paul Murphy in “Uniting a Divided Working Class” in Rupture issue 2. Even this doesn’t mean that the issue is settled for all time. We have a framework, but much remains to be said. We continue to carry debate and discussion on the subject in our magazine (see “The Frog at the Bottom of the Well” in Rupture issue 3 and “Ending Partition and the Question of a Border Poll in this issue).

““We are not trying to educate our members in our line, we want to educate ourselves collectively by working out our ideas together.””

We are currently trying to develop an analysis of the capitalist state. We opened this process with a general meeting devoted to the classical “Leninist” view of the state, as set out in Lenin’s pamphlet “The State and Revolution”. This was followed by branch meetings specifically about the repressive apparatus of the state. Our next general meeting will move the discussion on to post-Lenin Marxist analyses and arguments: The question of how exactly the capitalist class rules, the role of the state in social reproduction, Gramsci’s concept of the integral state, and so on.

This kind of process of collective engagement and discovery is, in our view, much more useful than learning already established and settled truths. We try to take our discussions seriously, with agendas, proposals and background reading circulated in advance. We think that everybody can participate in developing, learning and teaching political ideas. It’s not just for the most confident, the most experienced or the most bookish. But if every member is going to have the opportunity to fully participate, they need to be given time to think before meetings rather than just responding to other people’s ideas off the cuff. Disagreements need to be carefully teased out and discussed in a friendly way, so that holes in our logic or contradictions in our understanding are noticed and addressed as we attempt to develop a strategic framework. Real dialogue, real debate, helps produce better ideas and approaches.

The aim in all of this isn’t to create a congenial Marxist discussion club. It’s to work out a collective understanding of the world as part of the process of developing a programme to change it. This isn’t intended to be a substitute for activist engagements, it’s meant to inform those engagements, and to help ensure that our activism is thought through and strategically useful.

If you are a socialist or a radical environmentalist you should get involved in People Before Profit. You should do that regardless of whether you agree with RISE on all of the above or not. PBP represents by far the best chance we have to develop a deeply rooted, ecosocialist party, and if you are serious about changing the world, you should help seize that opportunity. If you are reading this and you agree with RISE’s views as described here, you should also contact us and get involved in the RISE network within PBP. Add your experiences, your ideas, your activist energy to our collective project.

1 https://www.socialist.ca/node/3796

2. http://socialistreview.org.uk/364/do-we-need-revolutionary-party

3. https://www.leftvoice.org/The-Party-We-Need-A-Revolutionary-Socialist-Party/

4. http://www.marxism.org.uk/pack/party.html

5. https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/2000/millennium/chap02.htm

6.https://redflag.org.au/node/6982

7. http://socialismtoday.org/trotsky-and-the-role-of-a-revolutionary-party

8. https://www.liberationnews.org/keynote-01-why-we-need-party-html/

9. https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1967/party.htm

10. https://redflag.org.au/node/7378

11. http://links.org.au/node/1762

12. https://socialistrevolution.org/on-the-need-for-a-revolutionary-party/