This is the first part in a series reflecting on what is meant by the term ‘party’ in the contemporary context.
Some leftists advocate for a working-class party to emerge in the U.S. But what do we really mean by ‘party?’
The Party Throughout Time and Place
Are all political parties the same? If not, how do they differ? The German Social Democratic Party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazis), the Communist Party of the United States, the Democratic Party, the Communist Party of China - what, if anything, do all these have in common? If we say we want a party, will any party suffice?
The oldest modern political party still in existence is the Democratic Party, founded in 1828 and still going strong. No matter their ideological or organizational differences, all other parties owe at least something to the Democrats. After all, it was Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson who pioneered the continuation of the bourgeois revolution through mass electoral politics. They knew that once the masses became proletarianized, they could not be kept out of politics forever. Better to invite them in on terms favorable to the status quo. And indeed, it has been quite a triumph of bourgeois electoral democracy that even those who claim to oppose it have found it necessary to adopt that form.
But somehow it strikes us as unsatisfying to compare the Democrats with the CPC. So what do we really want? One over the other? Both? Neither? It’s hard to find examples of parties that capture everyone’s imagination of the left’s purpose. Perhaps the point is that no one party is capable of embodying everything because the problem for which parties exist in the first place involves a contradiction in the relationship between one’s motive for being on the left and the reality one seeks to change. That is, capitalism is already the revolution, and no political party has yet seemed able to grab hold of the reins firmly enough for that fact to dawn on the whole working class.
But clearly the working class is involved in politics, even if it votes highly sporadically and often not at all. Indeed, bourgeois parties seem to have had the most success with the working class. We don’t even need to cite the all-time winners of the working-class vote, such as Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan, or Trump. Just the fact that even the boring elections for mundane government posts are only contested among bourgeois parties speaks volumes about the working class’ participation in the system at hand. To be fair, if you’re presented a menu at a restaurant, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction (or arrogance) to demand a dish not advertised therein. There are, though, working-class parties in some parts of the country that attempt to win votes in this or that election, sometimes for show and other times to seriously try to win.
So, don’t we already have a working-class party? If we don’t, then we return to the question of what we really mean by the question. Are the existing parties not good enough? If not, why? Should we try to build a new kind of party? Take from older parties? Will it take another Soviet Communist Party? If not, how about merely the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party? How about not even a party at all and something more akin to the International Workingmen's Association? Answers abound. The point is, though, that there is much more under the hood that can be lost by a chorus of otherwise disparate traditions all converging on the same word. And in my case, I wish I had known that before I joined my first leftist party.
By Invitation Only
I joined my first leftist party during one of the worst periods of my life. I had just graduated college but lost my job in Peru due to the Covid-19 pandemic and was shortly thereafter forced to return to a country I had no immediate plans to ever see again. I spent the rest of the year unemployed yet somehow was still expected to pay rent, utilities, and private student loans. This was 2020 and the summer of that year saw the largest sustained protests in American history. If something was going to change, it felt like it had to be then. So I joined my first leftist party. I mean, why not? It felt like the natural evolution of my leftism, which had outgrown the progressive world of college campus organizing.
But I was pretty shocked by what I found. My new comrades were people who ardently believed (and probably still do) that their every move contributed to the likelihood of revolution. The atmosphere was one of intense discipline. There was a months-long orientation process every new recruit had to go through during which time your party work was supervised and you had to attend regular classes on Marxism-Leninism. We held teach-ins around the city, plastered flyers and QR codes everywhere, and flooded the streets with our signature signs and t-shirts. We even ran our own presidential candidate. It was all pretty exciting, if wildly out of proportion with the reality of that year’s protest activity. Now that that apparently revolutionary moment has passed, I wonder what my old comrades are thinking.
I say ‘wonder’ because I’ll probably never know. I was booted out some four months into my experiment - I was never even a full member. Officially, I disobeyed the central committee and continued doing some organizing on the side that I valued at the time but which was deemed petty bourgeois and thus incompatible with the party (they were right about that, but I didn’t see it that way at the time). But unofficially, I dared to ask in multiple venues if what they were really doing was ‘Marxism.’ They at least had the decency to take me seriously, seriously enough to attempt a re-education and ultimately kick me out. I will be forever grateful.
I had joined this party seeking purpose and meaning in my life, and that mistake was on me because that was truly an unrealistic expectation. To my credit, I made a decision that young people in the U.S. hadn’t really made for two generations or so. The anti-neoliberal leftist youth never joined any political parties, and the Occupy Wall Street left was allergic to organization of any kind. I had no idea what to expect. But the important question, and the one I couldn’t articulate at the time, was as follows: What makes a political party worth joining for a leftist? How are we to determine what organizations are worth our time to transform into the ‘vanguard’ of today’s discontents with capitalism? Are there any such organizations, or do we need new ones?
I myself haven’t answered this last question because I joined another leftist party a few months after getting kicked out of the previous one. I’ve done a lot of work for this party and have seen it grow spectacularly. But I still can’t help but wonder what it’s all for. This party is the exact opposite of the previous one I experienced. There is no discipline whatsoever, despite healthy doses of passion and hope. There is a lot of diversity in terms of who members are and what life experiences they bring with them, as opposed to being a group of utopian college kids and some old-timey leftists. We don’t run any candidates any more, though. And there’s hardly any funding, which may explain why nothing really gets done. This party has over 100 years of activity in this country (just about half the Democrats’ pedigree!), well beyond the ten or so years of the other. Are both of these ‘parties’ in any meaningful sense of the word? Does it make sense to call them by the same name, to expect the same things by virtue of that nomenclature?
Horkheimer’s quote relating to this predicament comes to mind instantly: One can’t be a Marxist outside the party, yet one can’t be a Marxist inside the party either. Has the party structure itself revealed its inability to translate Marxist politics into a winning politics? Is Marxism fundamentally incompatible with party politics of any kind? Or over the course of its history has ‘Marxism’ itself changed in meaning, applicability, and scope? To gain some clarity, we might return to a context in which these debates literally meant life or death. At the very least, the crisis of the Second International can shed some light on how to frame the question. Ultimately it has to be answered by experimenting with different parties. But choosing the right method from the outset may save us the hardship of working through all the sacrifices our class ancestors experienced to afford us the luxury of historical reflection.