Marx's conception of socialist parties

I'm no expert on this, but I think his views changed throughout his life. Circa the Communist Manifesto, there's an explicit aim to "win the battle of democracy", seeming to assume universal suffrage would bring a communist party to power. Other times, he seems to use 'party' more in the sense of 'party to a contract' rather than 'political party'.

Also not an expert on Marxology...but anyway...

Marx is a tactician. As Joesph said, his views changed over time in response to events. In Marx's use of the term "the party" seems most often to be deployed as a kind of horizon rather than as a structure. When Marx and Engels are writing the Manifesto and the Gotha critique (1875) the mass political party and (near universal) suffrage are new phenomena. Germany had only expanded the right of suffrage beyond the bourgeoisie in 1871 and so Marx was responding to a new situation in which, despite suffrage, the mass of people were still excluded from participation in political life.

The ambiguity in Marx's position of the party seem to come in large part from his use of the term to means both a political organisation of persons aimed towards political ends and the historical becoming of the revolutionary proletariat itself. So in one of his Letters Marx writes that

and

[both cited in Camatte's Origin and Function of the Party Form]

There seems to be a common interpretation of Marx as suggesting that the formal party is a particular instance of the organisation of the historical party at a given moment under given conditions. He talked about this in the Poverty of Philosophy where he provided the example of the Chartists, and would go on to discuss it in relation to the Gotha Programme.

Thus the Party is an pretty metaphysical principle that speaks of the historical mission of the proletariat to develop consciousness and put communism in motion against capital. It may not be that the Party is necessarily metaphysical- it may simply be a placeholder for the history of such conscious class struggle itself, a kind of historical short-hand for assembling a tradition within which to identify and gain strength. At any rate, from this it follows that wherever there is conscious (and therefore in some way organised) antagonism between workers and capitalists there is the Party; and this is regardless of whether or not the Party is organised via the party form.

I think that, yes, the party-form is intended as assisting in the unification of the proletariat at times where it is materially possible, appropriate and only insofar as it continues to be the expression of the lived historical Party.

This seems to be the interpretation that Jodi Dean has deployed in her Communist Horizon, but with a much greater emphasis on the way that the Party must become the party. To my mind it follows from the above that actually the questions you ask about parliamentary and extraparliamentary struggle are above all dependent on a strategic understanding of the problems the proletariat confronts and the conditions it finds itself in (as well as answering the prior question- never to be taken for granted- "in our situation here and now is there a proletariat of which to speak?"

For Marx then, as is almost always the (frustrating) answer where he is concerned, these questions can only be answered by theoretical reflection on praxis, rather than given philosophical or ideological answers for all time.

I agree that Marx's use of the term party is ambiguous - sometimes a tight organisation of communists (a bit like the Communist League was meant to be), sometimes a more general organisation of the class, open to all currents in the workers' movement and combining political and economic functions, like the First International, sometimes the movement of the whole class when it becomes aware of itself as a revolutionary subject ("the constitution of the proletarians into a class and thus a political party"). Common to all these ideas however was an affirmation of the necessity for proletarian politics, and not just economic struggles.
Marx and Engels also saw the social democratic parties as a step forward (despite stinging criticisms of their reformist illusions) because they were founded on a more explicitly political basis and were much more directly influenced by the 'marxist' world view.
And the tactical question was certainly a focus for Marx and Engels, but this was also connected to the analysis of the historic period the workers' movement was going through. For example: the national question. In 1848, in the Manifesto, it was still seen as being on the agenda in the European countries, so in his view it was still necessary to support the formation of certain bourgeois nation states. By 1871, after the Commune, Marx declared the national ideal to be dead, in 'old' Europe at any rate.The question was still very much under debate with relation to the 'colonial' and 'semi-feudal' regions.
Much more could be said, but I don't think that it was historically possible for Marx to provide any definitive answers on this problem, even though his writings give us an indispensable point of departure.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/09/politics-resolution.htm

It's a good quote, but does it get us any closer to clarifying what Marx meant by a political party? Does it mean the entire working class organised politically, or a minority - part - of the class, which has a specific role to play within a wider movement?

If the choice of words indicates the underlying concepts at play, then I would say Marx probably had in mind something in between the two. Something called a worker's 'syndicate' is a lot different than a party and unlike Marx anarchosyndicalists outright reject any validity in the political forms and processes of capitalism, such as anything that might "conquer state power" rather than supplant it through the union of syndicalist organs. This I wouldn't call a party. That term is too misleading.

Thinking about when that quote comes from might give us a better clue. The Resolution was written in September 1871, coming in closely behind the Paris Commune of March-May 1871. This might lead us to think that Marx could be linking the party to the experience of the Commune. Marx considered the Commune to be 'the self-government of the producers' (something anarchosyndicalists could agree with) but it seems unlikely that this is what he means by "party" in 1871. Might it be more that the idea of the party he holds at that time is more connected with the defeat of the Paris Commune?

Also in September of 1871, Marx says that 'The working-class party functions as a political party in most countries by now, and it is not for us to ruin it by preaching abstention', So there seems to be a sense in which the party is meant in the concrete historical form that workers parties were beginning to take. It is Marx's contention that he didn't want to "ruin" these parties, indicating that such a novelty in the history of the working class wasn't to be rejected. This isn't a ringing endorsement, its just a caution that we shouldn't derail a new moment in the struggle.

Edit to add: link to short text I'm quoting from.

Marx justifies this by claiming that 'To preach abstention to them [the workers] is to throw them into the embrace of bourgeois politics'. At the historical moment Marx seems to be suggesting that the choice was to get on board with the working class's embrace of parliamentary politics or to "abandon" the class to integration and assimilation into the concerns of the bourgeoisie. We could argue about whether Marx was right about this dichotomy, but the essence seems to be that the party had emerged as a new form and that the workers themselves were organising on its basis. Marx seems to be celebrating self-organisation, albeit toward a form that would go on to cripple self-organisation, and to be saying that the party is a new tool to be weaponised by communists or by the bourgeoisie. This is Marx the tactician.

This seems to be confirmed when he says that 'The political freedoms, the right of assembly and association, and the freedom of the press — those are our weapons'. He seems to be suggesting that not utilising the party is to lay down arms, a kind of auto-castration of the revolutionary movement.

In the same short text Marx refers to abstentionists. I have to admit to not having a clue who he's talking about but it seems reasonable to suggest it was probably the anarchists.

So in the quote cresspot posted it seems likely Marx meant party in the strictly political sense. Marx's reasons seem historically situated (maybe analogous to all those people who saw the internet as an inherently anarchist new form) and therefore are already amenable to correction based on what would come of the party form. In other words, we can already see the seeds of his taking leave from the concept of the party as the parliamentary form.

Arran, you are quite right to put the quote into its historical context, which was the phase of the breaking up of the International and the divergence between the marxists and the anarchists, who do more or less correspond to the 'abstentionists'. It's also the beginning of the formation of the social democratic parties, which also means you are right to consider that the 'party in the strictly political sense' is being implied here. However, the social democratic parties still did not escape the confusion between party and class because even the best elements within them tended to see the taking of power by the proletariat and the taking of power by a mass proletarian party as one and the same thing. This notion persisted into the post world war one revolutionary wave, in the conceptions of both Lenin and the Bolsheviks and Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacists. However, the changing historical conditions of the class struggle made it possible to advance towards a clearer conception, elements of which could be found in different parts of the marxist movement: in Lenin's view of the party as an organisation of revolutionaries; in Luxemburg's notion of the mass strike and the mass organisation as a product of the struggle; in Trotsky's insights into the significance of the soviets as organs of insurrection and proletarian power; in the KAPD's insights into the party as a minority organisation of communists whose task was not to take political power. These advances were possible because history and working class practice had moved on from 1872. In my view, the syndicalist conception, although a healthy class reaction to the growing reformism of the social democratic parties, evaded the question of the party by developing a different version of the same confusion between the mass organisation and the organisation of the revolutionary minority. ,

Thanks for your reply. I'm largely aware of those occurrences and strands, I was just trying to stick with OPs question as it specifically related to Marx. But of course, Marx and his afterlife in the various interpretations and historical uses of his work are inseparable when we come to look at his work.