Though Cowards Flinch

Democratic centralism, as an organisational form, cannot be entirely separated from the programmatic content of a socialist party. If we accept that the processes of capitalism are central to creating our world, including the means for changing it, then we descend from some abstract and universal model of political organisation to the concrete one of how best we go from point A, where we are now, to point B, where we’d like to be.

This is what democratic centralism aims to address, through its myriad features.

Whether reformist socialist or revolutionary socialist, point A and B are the same – from the current capitalist system to a socialist system of ownership, exchange and democracy. The question is not abstract, it is concrete – it is about how we go from point A to point B. And I think that democratic centralism is the answer to organising a movement that will achieve the transition.

Like Louis Proyect, I see some utility in the model of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Members oblige themselves to take part in the political work of the party and in return are accorded a free say in the aims and tactics of the party. Those organs (e.g. newspapers) created out of party funds give room to different factions to argue their perspective according to their support, and collectively the party chooses which perspective is the one to follow in practice.

Having taken that decision, party members are obliged to abide by it, even if they disagree with it – but at no time should their disagreement constrain their rights as party members. Disagreements should be public, and civil, and on each question which produces factions, the party membership should be encouraged to make up its own mind via resolutions discussed and passed at branch level, ultimately to be submitted to a national conference of members.

Branches elect people to administer the branch and delegates to a central congress; the central congress chooses people to administer organs of the party – such as the newspaper, journal etc – and the central committee and its sister committees for important subjects such as racism, women’s rights and so on. The central committee then attempts to implement policies determined by the branches and congress.

As far as I have ever been concerned, these are the bones of democratic centralism. In theory, it secures the structure of the party from the ground up – and so long as individual members of the party are unwilling to simply accept everything the elected leadership says at face value, and instead query everything, then the means exist for that membership to hold their leadership to account.

This is important, because the bottom level of the socialist party is essentially synonymous with the advanced layers of the working class – those workers who are awake to the need for political struggle on their own behalf. That every member takes part in political work, and that this membership is bolstered by efforts to recruit whole layers of the class, via trades union branches, district trades councils and so on, secure this organic connection between party and class, and form a material context within which the debates of the party will be held.

Such synonymity gives the party the sinews necessary to quickly and efficiently respond to pressure from the ground up, and gives the confidence necessary to organise actions by the working class as a whole.

Again, this element does not develop independently from programmatic demands. A party wishing to concentrate solely upon parliamentary means has no need of sinews amongst the working class; indeed exclusively parliamentary means imply a rejection of any degree of class analysis. A political movement wishing to win the battle with the capitalists outright needs a means of carrying people from words to deeds.

It is my view that no better model exists by which to do this, and by this overthrow capitalism, than a democratic-centralist mass party consisting of shop floor workers and stewards, organised across factories, stores, offices and localities all around the country.

With regard to the above, what exactly to call this particular system of organisation has always been a problem. It has been de rigeur, almost, for some left groups to denounce every other group as ‘bureaucratic’ or using some other slur for their mistakes – but if we accept that the above is essentially the way both Lenin and Trotsky expected organisations to act, I think it’s fair to call it democratic centralism.

Standard criticisms of democratic centralism are manifold; the enforced ‘discipline’ needlessly creates splits, it is open to abuse by a ‘bad’ leadership, it unecessarily silences the opinions of minorities or even majorities within the party and so on. Dave Osler, who professes to oppose democratic centralism, has a recent summary of a lot of the criticisms and an example of some of the problems in play.

One way to answer such criticisms is to ask, were these problems caused by the applications of ‘democratic centralism’ (as I understand the term – and my travails in tracing the lineage and usage of the term are far from comprehensive), or by its misapplication?

I could add a few things to Dave O’s criticisms: in my argument with Louise, I pointed out how few of the current examples of socialist parties allowed space for factions to argue their point, and I suspect most party members don’t realise this should be their right. If one looks at the history of the Militant Tendency, for example, it becomes clear than Alan Woods and Ted Grant were simply batshit crazy ideologues who had way too much power and over whose written works someone else’s editorial judgment was not exercised half enough.

Were leaders forced to give over their pontification space to members, I think a much healthier internal regime would develop.

Where disagreements do occur, some groups seem especially quick to use the tool of expulsion in order to silence dissent. Splinty has some excellent stuff on this type of thing; here he discusses the CPGB (the old one). The culture of any given party is also important – though culture is influenced by the party organisation: if people are appointed by the leadership, and deference to leadership is rewarded then that’s a recipe for disaster – as members of the SWP, like Chris Harman, have recently noted.

Additionally, the presence of party full-timers or the practice of the outgoing executive committee selecting the incoming one, to be rubber stamped by national conference – as opposed to a free vote – are also practices I disagree with in the context of bourgeois democracy.

Yet I don’t believe any of this is unique to democratic centralism; in fact questions such as this apply to every form of political organisation. There is no magical formula, to borrow Trotsky’s words, which will guarantee an internal regime free of strife.

If we compare these criticisms of democratic centralist organisations with, say, the Labour Party, we meet many of them in different form. The raising of some members of the Labour Party above others, via parliamentary salaries, creates the sort of cast which the CPSU created post-Russian Revolution – to the point where members of the PLP now simply court one another and arrange their platforms without reference to the party members to whom they owe their position. There is a cursus honorum which members can travel by virtue of top-down patronage.

Party full-timers speak with pride about how they infringe the rights of party members to select their own candidates, or party activists – with the appropriate democratic sanction – to speak their mind without fear of having their CLP taken over. There’s a good exchange between Hopi Sen and Alex Hilton at Hopi’s place which, in the comments, outlines some of the critiques people – who aren’t even particularly Left-wing – have of the lack of democracy in Labour (and Hopi makes the rebuttal for the Right).

National conference has no power. Control of the state insulates the government against the party. Failure in union democracy compounds failure in party democracy by virtue of the union block vote. There are no party publications, collectively funded, in which people get to speak their minds according to the level of support their faction enjoys. Instead there are endless press releases, paid-for mailshots, emails and every other type of propaganda one can think of directed from the leadership at the members.

All of this and Labour is not a democratic centralist organisation. I don’t know what we might call Labour – but even in the days of ‘old’ Labour, some of these criticisms were still valid. In both cases, a leadership can entrench itself using every type of bureaucratic trick imaginable. The key is to analyse each concrete situation oneself, to determine the correct policy and tactic and then make use of party democracy to advocate that tactic both alone and by seeking support from other party members as part of a faction.

This is what I have always considered to be democratic centralism.

Organisational matters are ever complicated by the capitalist context in which we live. The Party cannot exist outside of capitalist hegemony; its members may use Marxist analysis to deconstruct that hegemony – of racism, homophobia, anti-immigrant bias, anti-chav snobbery and so on – but that’s not to say they are immune to all of its effects all of the time. The anchor of the Party is the working class – and the organic, democratic link with that class ensures, as well as self-conscious analysis, will ensure a correct course.

Which explains, perhaps, why so many of the existing groupuscles have quirky tendencies – their very isolation, rather than their organisational qualities, creates such problems.

There is also the question of bad policies and tactics having negative effects on the internal life of the Party. Diluting the class programme of the Party, it stands to reason, is liable to attract people who are interested by things other than the core focus upon organising the working class to oppose capitalism. Certain types of work are more liable to pick up idle hangers-on and the uncommitted than others.*

Once that begins to happen, once an organisation develops an exceptionally high turnover rate of members, who are not necessarily working class or orientated towards the working class, then its leadership will feel under siege and steps will be taken by that leadership to protect the ‘socialist’ thrust of the organisation, steps which reduce democracy in the Party.

The ‘special knowledge’ which the leadership is seen to claim in a situation such as this is actually its opposite – a result of bad policies or bad tactics and a lack of confidence in the grassroots.

Every political party can be wrong, every individual can be wrong. Tactical mistakes will be made. However, the existence of the Party depends upon the material processes of capitalism – the oppression and exploitation of the working class. So long as the party aims to defend that class, and is of and/or connected to that class, bad policies can eventually be corrected without splits and collapses.**

Whatever we call an organisational structure which aims at this consistently, it has in mind the same aim as democratic centralism had for Lenin and Trotsky – and the same open, forthright attitude to their public, the working class.***

Discussing all this from an individual perspective, what remains is whether or not any of the existing parties – from Labour to the most extreme ultra-lefts (the Sparts?) – has the promise of developing an internal life and structure in keeping with what we’d like to see. Labour certainly doesn’t, and as Louise and I mentioned in our arguments, linked to above, the bad experience of many with the Socialist Alliance casts a cloud over the other parties – though some, like the Socialist Party, are more hopeful than others.

Personally, I am completely disenchanted with the internal life of the Labour Party – and it is my view, succinctly expressed at Susan’s blog, that no change will now come to Labour from within. This is why I have been exploring options external to the Labour Party – including the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Socialist Party. If one reads the organisational ideas of which I am in favour, and the organisational ideas which I reject, Labour falls foul of virtually all of them and I have yet to see a competent exposition of how that will change.

Not to say the alternatives are perfect – but my lodestar is to an organisation that displays the democratic centralist qualities which I value: openness with party members and the class, accountability, the right to form factions, opposition to hero worship, the fostering of a critical mindset and finally unity in action.

* I don’t mean, by this, to dismiss the importance of the ‘cultural turn’ in academic studies of politics, or the value of ‘identity’ politics – but there are two methods for campaigning on such issues. One, beloved of the liberal intelligentsia, is basically to become the popular adjunct to think-tanks and NGOs and lobby parliament and the media establishment to create something of a furore. There are so many recent examples of this. The other is to directly organise workers to oppose homophobia, racism, sexism and all the rest of it themselves, and to encourage them to get still other workers onside. It involves having difficult conversation in the workplace, a renewed relevance to union branches and basically the recreation of struggle from the ground up – and avoids the charge of being overly economistic. Each of these things then link back into the wider politico-economic struggle.

** Some of the byzantine debates from parties, over the years, have resulted from tension between mortally opposed factions. The less significant the party, the more acrimonious the debate, it sometimes seems. I have the advantage of youth and (relative) inexperience of such situations and thus it is easy for me to place my confidence in the working class and in party democracy. Yet sometimes I feel we should realise that parties do tear themselves apart occasionally, the Eurocommunist-Stalinist split in the CPGB being the famous example, and there’s little we (as individual activists) can do except pick ourselves up, learn our lessons by tasking ourselves with understanding what happened and how to avoid it, and keep on trucking.

*** In all my references to Lenin and Trotsky, I am referring to their behaviour prior to the victory of the October Revolution and the civil war. Following the assumption of power, ‘democracy’ and the revolution wound up being opposed to each other, and they chose to save the revolution. I do not think this invalidates the concept of democratic centralism; it was an action taken of desperation and bar reversing the victory of October, I don’t see how it could have been avoided. I make this annotation simply to be honest with the reader. If the reader contends that the subsequent development of Bolshevik tyranny was a direct result of democratic centralism, they are free to argue as much – but I do not agree and will pursue the matter if it comes up in the comments.