The previous installment of this two-part series covered the emergence of independent working-class politics in the era of Marx and Engels. This article takes the history up to contemporary times to show how different conceptions of a working-class party reflect different conceptions of its ultimate aim.

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By the time we get to the early 1900s, we have established in a number of countries parties that meet on some level or another Engels proviso for the political independence of the working class. In this sense, the working class had its own party in a number of countries—most exemplified by the German Social Democrats (SPD), which organized an entire separate set of institutions to cater to workers—not just social insurance schemes and publications, but singing clubs and sports societies, as well.

However, at this time—in the first two decades of the 20^th century, before the socialist movement splits over the First World War—a series of disagreements emerged over the means and ends of these parties, the relationships of the trade unions to the political parties, and the degree of commitment that individual members should have to the parties. These are reflected in the main debates of the time: between Luxemburg and Bernstein in Germany, between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in Russia, and so on. The two poles of this debate were represented by the leading lights of the Second International, whose main spokesperson was Karl Kautsky, then known as the “Pope of Marxism,” and V.I. Lenin, the main leader of the Bolshevik party in Russia.

Kautsky’s views can stand for the ideas of Social Democracy. One wouldn’t think today of any of the European social democratic parties, such as the Labour Party in the UK, as being committed to the socialist transformation of society. But in Kautsky’s day, even the SPD was formally in favor of this. Yet they saw the development of their party as being the inevitable result of the development of capitalism. As capitalism created a bigger workforce, the socialist party would grow as more workers joined it. The logic went something like this. Capitalism develops. The working class becomes organized in unions, clubs, and a party. The party grows large enough to win a parliamentary majority. With a majority in parliament, the socialist party can initiate the transition to socialism.

To the social democrat, the party represents the whole of the working class, including both its most militant and its more conservative elements. Because the social democratic party’s main purpose is winning elections, its party machine seeks to keep in check militant activities that might undermine its support among its more conservative constituents. As a result, the social democratic party’s organization represents the domination of the most conservative elements in the workers’ movement—trade union and party officials—over the most militant members of the rank-and-file.

In contrast to this conception of the workers’ party is that of Lenin. Whereas Kautsky once said that the SPD was a revolutionary party—in that it sought socialism—but not a “revolution making party”, Lenin put forth a different concept about the relationship of the working class, its organizations, and its goal of winning socialism.

To Lenin, a genuine socialist workers’ party shouldn’t include all workers under its umbrella, as the social democratic party does. Instead, its membership is composed of the most class conscious, politically active fighters within the working class. By organizing the section of the working class most committed to the fight for socialism, the Leninist party organizes, to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, the future of the socialist and workers movement in the present.

In other words, whereas the Social Democratic Party wants to represent the working class as it exists today, the Leninist party represents the interests of the working class—the ultimate being the interest in abolishing capitalism and replacing it with socialism. Unlike a reformist party, the revolutionary party (at least before a revolutionary situation emerges) restricts its membership to those workers whose politics represent those interests. Its members are consistent internationalists, fighters against all forms of oppression, and leaders in working class struggles.

Many regard the short pamphlet Lenin wrote, What Is to Be Done? as the epitome of everything that’s wrong with Leninism—concluding that Lenin’s organizational concepts are elitist and narrow. But the reality is that Lenin’s views on the party were highly conditional to the specific circumstances under which socialists were operating in Russia. Thus, at the formative conference of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1898, something like two-thirds of the delegates were arrested by the police. In part, Lenin’s conceptions reflected this reality. It was impossible to organize an open, democratic party in the repressive conditions of Tsarist Russia, but the ability to do so improves in more open political circumstances. So the concrete conditions of any given society are what should determine how publicly the party can operate.

But there’s another sense in which the organizational conceptions being played out in these debates really reflect a deeper disagreement over what it means to build a working-class party that is truly independent of the bosses, with its own class policies. When the Bolsheviks split from the reformist Mensheviks in 1912, it wasn’t over some obscure question of doctrine. In fact, on a number of positions on paper, the groups agreed more than they disagreed. But the split followed almost a decade of disagreement and factional battles over questions of orientation and strategy.

The Mensheviks wanted to build an organization that embraced everyone who broadly thought of himself or herself as a socialist. It wanted to remain “loose,” allowing a high degree of local autonomy that would be subject to all sorts of individualist ideological influences. Lenin on the other hand, wanted to build a centralized party that overcame the tendency towards localism and fragmentation. He felt that only by requiring party members to actively build the party and carry out its duties would it truly serve to be a party of action and of committed activists.  He said, “The stronger our party organizations, consisting of real socialists, the less wavering and instability there is within the party, the broader, more varied, richer and more fruitful” will be the party’s influence on the mass of workers around it.

In many ways, this statement represents the exact opposite of “common sense” on the left, even more so today. Most people on the left argue that the key to mass influence is a “big tent” organization whose main priority is election campaigns. But as the experience of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has shown, this is not the way to create an activist organization that collectively participates in, and influences the course of, social movements. Long-time socialist Mel Bienenfeld gave an example of this problem in DSA after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. As he described, “at the height of the antiracist revolt, as the primary season continued, elections remained DSA’s top priority. For example, on June 16, during the upsurge following George Floyd’s murder, an email from the NYC Chapter Steering Committee, entitled ‘Paint NYC Red: Get Out the Vote,’ read, ‘If you do one thing this week, it should be this.'”

In contrast, Lenin argued that socialists should not only make building social movements its priority, but also that they should do so as an organized force—a group of committed fighters and organizers who can act, and attract around them, more people who can become committed to socialism. The Leninist organization is, above all else, focused on the struggles outside of parliament—not on maneuvers inside legislative bodies.

Much of the history of the period between 1903 and 1912, when the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions split to become independent parties, is a history of the struggle to define what kind of party the RDSLP would be. When the Russo-Japanese war broke out in 1904, wealthy liberal businessmen and nobles started a campaign of dinner speeches against the war. The Mensheviks called on workers to ally with the liberals and not to do anything that would unnecessarily frighten them. The Bolsheviks rejected this and called on workers to pressure the liberals and to raise their own demands.

This debates on the relations of the socialists to the middle-class liberals widened over the next decade. Should socialists organize themselves to be the reformist tail of a capitalist government or should they organize workers to take power themselves? In other words, the crystallizing differences between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks not only encapsulated the differences between reform and revolution, but also about genuine class independence of workers’ political organizations. Lenin’s fight in building the Bolshevik Party was about preserving an independent working-class politics against pressures to accommodate to various bourgeois, or liberal, influences.

The critical event that divided out the socialist movement and has bearing on the question of organization is, of course, the First World War. On August 4, 1914, the main pillar of social democracy, the German SPD, voted for war credits—thereby reversing its prior anti-war stance and throwing its support behind Germany’s ruling class against Russia. The SPD by that time had over one million members and was supported by a third of German voters. The SPD’s political authority was such that the vast majority of the rest of the socialist movement in other countries followed suit.

Lenin refused to believe that the SPD had betrayed its own stated principles against imperialist war. Up until then, Lenin had called the German SPD the “model of revolutionary social democracy.” But he was forced to conclude, “The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism.” Lenin drew the conclusion that there is a built-in contradiction between building a political organization that combats capitalism and one that from the outset represents the entire working class.

He concluded that you have to begin by grouping together militants and activists—because we’re not talking here about commentators and writers, but people who are involved in the actual struggle against capitalism—into a party that can lead politically other sections of the working-class movement through the ebbs and flow of the working-class struggle. He used the term “vanguard” for this, to mean people who are in advance in consciousness: that is, who are enemies of capitalism, rather than half opposed and half accepting. This isn’t an insult. It’s the reality for most people, that they hate the system, but don’t know what else you can put in its place. The point was how to put together a political organization that in reality represented the best fighters of the working-class movement.

That idea became enshrined into the history of the revolutionary movement for one reason: it wasn’t Lenin’s writings so much as Lenin’s doing. The Russian Revolution was the first successful revolution. In terrible conditions, it brought a weak working-class movement to power, and it laid open the question of working-class power internationally. And from that experience, the main principles of working-class organization were codified, and an attempt was made to generalize these internationally.

The U.S. stands out from other advanced capitalist countries as one whose working-class movement has not achieved the even limited of class political independence represented in the development of a labor or social democratic party. This wasn’t always the case. On the contrary, socialist parties have won significant numbers of votes from the best working-class militants in the past. The reasons for the failure of these socialist parties to take a long-term foothold in the American working class has little to do with “exceptional” American conditions. It has everything to do with the politics of the left and its historical relationship with the Democratic Party.

In the first two decades of the last century, the Socialist Party and its presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs gained millions of votes and had thousands of elected officials. But by 1920, it was finished as a serious competitor for the loyalties of the most class-conscious workers. The origin of the SP’s trouble was the fact that it was neither revolutionary nor a wholly working-class party. The SP tolerated within its midst Christian socialists, revolutionaries, and open racists, earning its description by revolutionary socialist James P. Cannon as a “socialist variety store.”

The left stood for industrial unionism, for class struggle and for a revolutionary transformation of society. The party’s conservative and middle-of-the-road elements, on the other hand, stood for gradual reform and an orientation to the American Federation of Labor craft unions, most of which excluded immigrants, women, Blacks and the unskilled.

As a greater number of SP officials won local office, the conservative wing of the party, led by U.S. Rep. Victor Berger and lawyer Morris Hillquit, consolidated its hold. They turned the SP into a primarily electoral machine for the ambitions of Socialist politicians. The Socialist mayors became known as “gas and water” or “sewer” socialists, for they distinguished themselves from Democrats and Republicans only by promising to deliver city services more efficiently.

In 1913, the party’s increasingly conservative leadership declared its desire to keep the party within the bounds of the law, renouncing many of the tactics of class struggle that the bosses considered “illegal.” It announced its intention to expel any member who violated the law and arbitrarily stripped radical Big Bill Haywood’s position on the party executive committee—a position to which the party membership had elected him.

By limiting its political action to electoral campaigns, the party lost any power to win large numbers of workers to socialism. In response to the SPs transformation into a party of middle-class reform, many of its best working-class militants simply quit—or, under the influence of the Russian Revolution, split to form the Communist Party.

The Communist Party (CP), formed in 1919 in the wake of the Russian Revolution, was committed to building its ranks from its participation in the class struggle. The CP succeeded in winning a reputation as a party of committed fighters and socialists, recruiting many radicals in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Unfortunately, the CPs, internationally and in the U.S., were transformed by the late 1920s from parties which fought for workers’ power to parties which were no more than mouthpieces for Stalin’s new regime. In the U.S. the CP squandered its initial successes when, in the 1930s, it adopted a policy of “Popular Front” alliances with “progressive” Democrats. By the Second World War, the CP supported positions nearly indistinguishable from those of the New Deal Democrats. The shift of the U.S.’s leading radical organization into the Democratic Party camp explains much of the left’s uncritical present‑day attitude to the Democrats.

These sorts of maneuvers cost the CP an historic opportunity to win thousands of workers to socialism. The late 1930s were a period of great radicalization in the working class, as the militant factory occupations that built the CIO attested. It is estimated that by mid‑1937, the CP controlled or held substantial influence in 40 percent of the CIO internationals. Rather than attempting to weld these workers into a socialist or even labor party, the CP acceded to Roosevelt’s and the union leaders’ capture of the CIO for the Democratic Party.

This history, when combined with the later Cold War witch hunts that drove socialists out of the main working-class organizations, the unions, largely explains why we encounter a system of two major capitalist parties, with the unions mainly allied with the Democratic Party, and with politics of lesser evilism dominating. For socialists, who believe in the political independence of the working class, this is a challenging environment that we cannot simply address with pat formulas.

More often than not, socialists have found themselves placed in the role of arguing what is essentially a negative position: socialists should reject the two capitalist parties. This has often meant, out of sheer necessity, an argument that those who are looking for real change aren’t going to find it on the ballot. We have to be clear, though, that in making this case, this is an argument about how we and our class can best fight for change. We realize that many people who are our closest comrades in struggle—in the unions, in the immigrant rights movement—will vote for the Democrats in the hope that things will change for the better, or that they won’t get worse. In many cases, it’s not because they believe in the Democrats, it’s that they don’t see any alternative.

Socialists can certainly participate in elections. But if they are not using the electoral arena to build an alternative to the capitalist parties, they are not advancing the cause that has been a fundamental hallmark of socialist politics since Marx and Engels.

Readers who are interested in learning more about these debates on political organization should consult August Nimtz’s The Ballot, the Streets or Both? and Tony Cliff, et al. Party and Class.