Part 3 of 3 in this series.
Toward a Party Once Again?
But this interpretation is increasingly harder to sustain. It hardly seems accurate to say that all of human history is waiting to be resolved by whoever wins the internal dispute among Marxists over the quality and purpose of proletarian party leadership. It appears that we cannot take this same starting point for granted as our own. There may be preliminary work to be done before we could reach such a culmination again. After all, the Bolsheviks were only able to split from a party that existed in the first place. In other words, a mass proletarian party seems a prerequisite for the heightening of the class struggle through the internal struggle of Marxism to overcome itself.
If this is the case, then our demand for a proletarian party may evidence our recrudescence back to the 1890s or even the 1830s. Perhaps we have to start over, armed with the fullest recognition that we cannot make sense of the vanguard debate of the late Second International by forming ‘Marxist-Leninist’ parties in the 21st century. We may have to build a decidedly unrevolutionary mass socialist party to even get anywhere anymore. We may have to admit our own liberalism in daring to demand that society be true to the version of itself that it promised way back in 1776!
However, it could still be the case that demanding a proletarian party now would be making an impossible demand of history: that of moving backward. For to first have a proletarian party there must be a proletariat. But in today’s age of widespread service sector employment, thorough deindustrialization and capital flight, and the looming threat of AI making more and more jobs obsolete, how is it possible to even speak of a proletariat at all anymore? The production process seems so remote and theoretically unassailable from the standpoint of the drudgery of contemporary work that a party seems like the last thing we need. And if everyone is as confused and depressed as I was when I went searching for a party to belong to, then we can’t hope they’d all be as crazy as me and actually join a party instead of finding the same fleeting sense of belonging from, say, TikTok.
But this may be precisely the place to start. Capitalism is far from over. The Trump phenomenon shows how fed up people are with the advanced barbarism of our now 100+ year distance from the Second International’s crisis. The burgeoning billionaire space race proves that capitalism will exist as long as human beings have planets to inhabit. The objective opportunity is, in other words, literally all around us. It very well may take a party to reignite the kind of intervention in this reality that was once deemed vital by so many around the world. Those of us who believe in the futures promised by such experiments as China, Cuba, etc. surely must know that without a counterpart in the West, the land where capital reproduces itself, those earlier revolutions are on borrowed time. It’s only a matter of time before another communist country implodes like the USSR did. That is, unless the left in the imperial core can get its act together. Can we make a future for all of humanity? Maybe. We have to think it’s still possible. A party may very well be the key to that future. But what kind? That is how we began the present discussion. And it seems a fitting place to end as well. As a comrade of mine says, “There ain’t no party like a Communist Party!” May we struggle to make this true!