Our Road to Power
" One hundred years removed from the Russian Revolution, we’re in a moment unlike any in decades. With both neoliberalism and social democracy’s traditional parties in disrepute, new opportunities are finally emerging for the radical left.
Every crisis finds a resolution of some kind, and this one will too. Where we end up depends in large measure on how the Left responds. If we play our cards right, the opening could be the occasion for starting a new cycle of organizing — revitalizing left parties where possible, and starting new ones if they prove to be immune to reform.
But rather than just looking forward, this is also an occasion to look back at the lessons of the past. The Russian Revolution remains the most ambitious experiment in socialist politics, and its successes and failures have to be part of any discussion of how to revitalize the Left. But it isn’t just the Russian experience. We have to place the Bolshevik experiment in the broader story of socialist politics in the twentieth century — alongside examples from Chile, Germany, and Sweden, among others.
There are two broad legacies of the Russian Revolution — an organizational one and an institutional one. By organizational, I mean issues pertaining to building vehicles for collective action in capitalism — unions, parties, and the like. By institutional, I mean the basic structures that will comprise a post-capitalist society — the political system, economic organization, the structure of rights. The organizational dimension pertains to how you build power inside capitalism, and the institutional refers to what you will build aftercapitalism.
Organizational
Structure
The Left is of two attitudes when it comes to Leninist party organization. One is to see the model as a disaster, or at least as something of a negative experience. The accusation is that Leninism has always and everywhere ended up in authoritarianism. Others have responded by saying, “Well that’s true, but you are confusing Stalinism with Leninism.” In other words, it is really with the advent of Stalin that you see the shutting down of debate.
The defenders of the Leninist party are right that in its early history it was remarkably open and dynamic. But at the same time, the fact is that its global experience since the 1930s veers much closer to its later, undemocratic form. So while Lenin’s party was very democratic, the Leninist party has not been. And we can’t lay the blame solely on Stalin, Zinoviev, or whoever your favorite villain is. A party model with strong and resilient democratic structures should have generated a more diverse set of experiences, not a uniform history of ossification.
That being the case, it’s easy to come to the conclusion, as most progressives do today, that the next left has to reject the Leninist party model. The problem with that view is that no other model has come anywhere as close to being politically effective. All the putative alternatives coming out of the Left since the 1960s — the multi-tendency organizations, the horizontalists, the anarchists and their affinity groups, the movement of movements, etc. — have been able to mobilize for a time, but they have had little success sustaining movements, much less achieving real material gains. Indeed, the cadre-based model has been so successful that every major mobilizational party of the twentieth century replicated it to some extent, even on the Right.
Given that history, it’s hard to imagine a way for the Left to organize itself as a real force withoutsome variant of the structure the early socialists hit upon — a mass cadre-based party with a centralized leadership and internal coherence. Now, maybe that will turn out to not be true. Maybe we will come up with organizational forms that are more open, more diffuse, yet which also manage to get things done. However, given our experience, we don’t really have a basis to reject our most accomplished model.
What we need to do is look back to the party’s early years — prior to 1918, when everybody agrees that it was pretty open and democratic — and study it closely. We need to have a sharp understanding of how they maintained the dynamism that made it the most successful organization of its time — where criticizing the leadership was taken as a right, a basic part of what it meant to be a party member. Were there institutional mechanisms that created the culture of debate and accountability, beyond the usual ones of elections and newsletters? Or was it simply dependent, in the end, on a leadership committed to those values?
If there were institutional mechanisms in place which ensured democracy then we could just copy them, put them in place. But if it was a question of a contingent internal culture, it means it means that democratic practices have to depend on a kind of moral commitment — which will be harder to replicate, because leaders tend to want to close down democracy, not uphold it. But that’s why it’s important to study the lesson and the actual practice to see where that democracy came from.
Base
The second organizational issue is that of the party’s relationship to its base. Here the Russian Revolution teaches us something. In Cold War historiography, the Bolsheviks are depicted as having taken power through something like a coup. The idea is that they really didn’t have a mass base, that they were a small group of fanatically committed ideologues who imposed a dictatorship. But what recent historians have shown, in dramatic detail, is that the main reason the Bolsheviks were able to take and hold onto power was that of all the parties in Russia, they had the deepest, strongest, and firmest links to the working class in the country’s major industrial centers. This is why it happened that, with every shift in working-class political mood — particularly in Petrograd but also in Moscow — in the months leading up to the capture of power, it was the Bolsheviks who were the most keenly aware of those shifts, able to understand the situation, and therefore able to generate slogans and programs that captured the popular consciousness. . ."
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