Marx, Trotsky and the Party

In No. 1 of RÅDSMAKT there was an article on Marx's and Trotsky's views on the Paris Commune. Trotsky, as a representative of the general Bolshevik and Leninist attitude to the Commune, but also to the revolution and socialist construction in general.

One of the aspects discussed was Marx's, Trotsky's and Talès's views on the role of the proletarian party in the days of the Commune. The article states, inter alia:

“For both Trotsky and Talès, the great mistake of the Commune was its lack of revolutionary leadership. 'The Commune shows us,' Trotsky emphasized, 'the inability of the masses to choose their own path, their indecision in leading the movement, their fatal tendency to stop after the first successes...' How is this to be remedied? Trotsky knows the answer: 'It is only with the help of the Party, the Party which is based on the lessons of history, which theoretically foresees the various paths of development, all its stages, and on this basis calculates the formulas for right action, that the proletariat can rid itself of a constant repetition of its history'. He sums up his views with the usual logic: 'One can study the whole history of the Commune, page by page, and we shall be able to draw a single conclusion: that the proletariat must have a strong party in the leadership'."1

The Workers' Party

It may be interesting to contrast the Trotskyist interpretation of the Paris Commune with some of its greatest chroniclers, namely Marx and Engels. In his “The Civil War in France”, Marx nowhere explains that the defeat was a consequence of the absence of “a strong party in the leadership”. He is very impressed by the results achieved by the Commune. He describes it as “essentially a working-class government, the result of the struggle of the ruling class against the servile, the finally discovered political form under which the emancipation of labor could be carried out.”2

The above, and the other points made in the article, are certainly sufficient to show the abysmal differences in Marx's and Trotsky's conceptions of the Paris Commune, but we can go further than that. Marx and Trotsky do not agree on what the “party of the working class”, the “communist party” is. This is not due to Trotsky's inability to grasp the significance of the Paris Commune, but because Trotsky, like so many others, has simply adopted the Lenin-derived revision of Marx's party theory.

The quote above says that Marx did not, like Trotsky and other Leninists, anywhere declare that the defeat of the Commune was due to the absence of a party. No, and the reason is simply that Marx found in the Paris Commune precisely the “Party of the Proletariat”! While Trotsky complains that there was no party, Marx finds in the Paris Commune precisely an example of the proletariat organized as a party! In criticizing the conspiracy theorists, those who want to manage the revolution for the proletariat, Marx writes:

“One understands that these conspirators are not content with organizing the revolutionary proletariat. Their occupation consists in anticipating the development of the revolutionary process, in deliberately driving it towards crisis, in making revolution on the spot, without the conditions for revolution being realized. They are the alchemists of the revolution, and the confusion of the old alchemists. Obsessed with their preconceptions, they have no other aim than the speedy overthrow of the existing government, and they are profoundly mistaken in the more theoretical activity of explaining to the workers their class interests. As the Paris proletariat rose directly to the first place as a party, these conspirators lost their influence."3

What is interesting about this is not that Trotsky, unlike Marx, speaks of the party of the proletariat in the context of the Paris Commune, but that Marx and Trotsky, who in turn draws on Lenin, mean different things by the concept of a communist party. Nor is it merely a question of 'definition'.

Where Marx spoke of the party, he meant the proletariat organized as a class-for-itself, i.e. the entire proletariat organized for, and conscious of, the fact that as a class it must overthrow the bourgeois state and establish its own society, socialism. This is in contrast to a consciousness and organization as a class-in-itself, i.e. the proletariat conscious and organized for the class struggle within the framework of capitalist society.

When the whole, or at least the majority, of the proletariat is organized as a class in its own right, as a party, i.e. organized in workers' councils, workers' militias and the other proletarian organs of power that exist in the revolution, then the class also expresses its objective will: to overthrow the bourgeois state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. This type of party can be said to express the will of the class because it embraces the class, it is the organized class as a whole.

The Leninist “party”, on the other hand, is something quite different. It is an avant-garde organization, consisting at best of “the most advanced workers”. It is certainly (at least it is supposed to be) an organization of those who have a consciousness that the proletariat must crush the bourgeois state and establish socialism. But it is not, nor does it aim to be, the organization of the whole class. On the contrary, it is claimed that this organization, once it has proclaimed itself a “party” (and even before that, see e.g. the KFMLr), expresses the objective aspirations of the whole class. Once this has been established, the minority, the vanguard, has given itself the right to act against the class, on the grounds that “the workers have not realized their own interests”. It gives itself the right, for example, to crush workers' attempts to set up workers' councils according to the principles of the Paris Commune, as Maoists did in China (Shanghai) during the Cultural Revolution.

The Revolutionary Organization

This does not mean, on the other hand, that there is no need for a vanguard organization, that the most conscious workers do not need to organize. It is absolutely necessary for them to organize themselves, “partly to train themselves in socialist theory and other things, and partly to contribute more effectively to the development of socialist consciousness in ever larger sections of their class. This organization of revolutionaries, a revolutionary (“political”) organization, will naturally also intervene in the daily struggle of the working class for better living conditions, partly to support this struggle, partly to use the struggle to develop a socialist consciousness."4

In revolution and socialist construction, the organization of the vanguard, the revolutionary organization, is needed, it “requires a political organization capable of defending and strengthening the tendency which represents the strongest break with all existing social structures - the independent action and organization of the proletariat, its will to take its destiny into its own hands.”5

What distinguishes this revolutionary organization from the Leninist “party” is thus that while the revolutionary organization does not claim to represent anything other than its own members, the Leninists claim that their organization represents something else, something more than the organization itself, it claims to represent the working class.

Nor can it be defended by Leninists that the party can represent the class because it bases its activities on an objective, scientific social theory, Marxism. There are, as we know, several views (or if you like - interpretations) of Marxism. This article is just one example of this, and all interpreters, i.e. “parties” or associations, naturally claim that they are the right Marxists. Unfortunately, it is not always so easy to decide who is right, at least not in the short term. In that case, the interpretation of the Socialists would be right in Sweden, the Maoists in China, etc. In the long run, however, practice will of course show who is right. Until then, we will have to be content with constantly reclaiming Marxism through political and theoretical struggle. To quote Rossanda Rossanda (active in the Italian organization “Il Manifesto”):

“The tension that hangs over the historical institutions of the class, parties and trade unions, is not only due to their subjective limitations. It is due to a growing dimension which is more and more closely linked to the social commodity, which increasingly demands class consciousness and which becomes more and more difficult to delegate. In other words, the distance between vanguard and class that was the premise of Lenin's party is shrinking before our eyes. Marx's hypothesis was revived during the May Day movement in France, in the passions which run through our societies and which tend to escape the smoothest and most careful framing, in a purely political formation. It is in this observation that the problem of organization can now take its starting point. From Marx we are once again on our way back to Marx.”

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N.C.

• 1RÅDSMAKT, No. 1, Page 20
• 2RÅDSMAKT, No. 1, Page 20
• 3"Aus dem litterarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle", ed. Mehring, Stuttgart 1902, vol. III, p. 426. Quoted from Rossanda Rossanda: “Från Marx till Marx”, Swedish translation in “Il Manifesto” (Tema Teori No. 9).
• 4Political Platform of the Förbundet Arbetarmakt, p. 14, first edition, p. 18, second edition.
• 5A.a. p. 20 First edition, p. 27. Second edition.