By Ahmed K.
 
Part one of this two-part series, published in the last issue of La Voz, tackled the “institutional” side of Vivek Chibber’s “Our Road to Power.” In that part of his essay, in which he tries to answer the question of what a post-capitalist order would look like, he advocated a form of market socialism with a liberal political rights regime. While he claims that this “socialism” will be won by a combination of electoral and militant street and workplace organizing, in fact, Chibber’s strategy would inevitably mean putting electoralism at the center of socialist organizing. Pursuing this strategy would therefore demobilize the working class, playing into a parliamentary logic whose rules are set by the bourgeoisie. Further, in ruling out the possibility of revolutionary seizure of power by the working class, Chibber capitulates to a static view of the working class as inevitably averse to militant, independent self-organization and attracted to “peaceful,” i.e., parliamentary representation of its own interests.
These flaws are largely dissected, from a Marxist perspective, by both Charlie Post and Dan LaBotz, whose critiques of Chibber we summarized in part one of this piece. However, neither LaBotz nor Post addresses what Chibber calls the “organizational” side of his argument, the part in which he tries to answer the question of how to organize within capitalism. To his credit, Chibber takes the question seriously. He writes that a cadre-based mass party would be the most effective instrument of working class power, and that it should look to the parties of the Second International and the Bolsheviks before and during the 1917 revolution. These parties, according to him, were models of democratic centralism (though he doesn’t use this term). However, while Lenin’s party was democratic, he writes that the “Leninist” parties that emerged in the 1920s and later both in Russia and elsewhere were not.
 
A Broader, Living Legacy of Leninist Organizing
This last claim is questionable. Why he doesn’t distinguish here between Stalinist offshoots of Leninism and the myriad other non-Stalinist Leninist parties and organizations is unclear. For example, the Trotskyist Communist League of America of the 1930s organized with anti-Stalinist, Leninist methods and led one of the major mass strikes of the era, that of the Minneapolis Teamsters in 1934. ^[1]
In the postwar period, Nahuel Moreno and the Latin American and other sections of the Fourth International were able to build Leninist parties in the working class. Some of them, such as the MAS in Argentina, achieved mass influence. In the early to mid-1970s, Trotskyists in the Socialist Workers Party helped rebuild the revolutionary workers movement in the US, bringing forth the largest strike wave since World War II. Currently, the comrade revolutionaries at Left Voice and Cosmonaut are among the most articulate and principled advocates of anti-Stalinist communism, their websites a breath of fresh air in the larger US left milieu, consistently offering brilliant ripostes to the fashion for reformism in a large sector of the US left. Here in the Bay Area, the revolutionary groups Socialist Action and Revolutionary Workers Group, along with former ISO militants have, with us in La Voz, collaborated to bring a revolutionary socialist analysis as well as tireless on the ground organizing to the anti-war, anti-racist, and labor movements, while refusing to compromise with reformist pressures. Nationally, the Marxist Center also represents a hopeful development, rejecting both the reformism and sectarianism that has vexed the left in the US over the past decades.
Nevertheless, Chibber is correct to say that if socialists want to defeat the capitalist class and bring about a socialist transformation, there is no alternative to the centralized, cadre-based, internally coherent mass parties such as the one led by Lenin. No other organizational model, whether anarchist, “movement of movements,” or “big tent” organization, has proven as effective.
 
Leninism is Not Stalinism
It’s incontestable that the Leninist party should clearly reject Stalinist methods and it needs to ensure bottom-up rank and file control and accountability of leadership.^[2] Although bourgeois ideology and Stalinism itself conflate the two, Leninism and Stalinism are in fact opposed to each other. The first roots itself in the working class while the latter has historically been the preferred organizing method of self-appointed “leaders,” often labor officials and staff, as well as elite and middle class “spokesmen” for the working class movement (in this respect if not others, Stalinism is quite similar to Kautskyism. See part one of this series). As Trotsky put it in a famous line in History of the Russian Revolution: “Without a guiding organization, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam in a piston box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.” It is the working class acting independently that is the motive force of history. Moreover, Leninism, unlike Stalinism, is revolutionary and internationalist: Leninist methods, applied by Bolshevik (class conscious) workers themselves, seek to heighten the class consciousness and radicalism of the wider working and oppressed masses and to embolden the movement to make more ambitious socialist demands. While both Leninists and Stalinists claim the leadership style of “democratic centralism”, they have opposite understandings: for Leninists and their successors in the Trotskyist tradition, democratic centralism is the centralization of political action of the party, not the homogeneity of views and thoughts. Stalinist applications of democratic centralism insist that “everyone should agree with the leadership”; those who raise questions or have differences internally are considered “anti-leadership” and are subsequently marginalized. This has not been the method of Marxists (from Marx to Lenin), and is not the method we claim today in our International or in the Trotskyist movement at large. We argue that centralism in action within the party is based on the complete freedom of discussion and the actual cultivation of debates and internal polemics on program and theory. Only through democratic discussion and joint experiences will we be able to advance as a collective.
 
 
The Combat Party: Lenin versus Kautsky
Chibber writes that to build an effective mass party, it is essential for that party to base itself on deep, organic links in the working class, like the Bolsheviks once did. Only in this way can a socialist party remain aware of shifts in proletarian political consciousness and become able to generate the most effective mass slogans. All of this is correct. We would also add that only if that party organizes along democratic centralist lines can it both ensure internal democracy and an ability to respond to the shifts in the class struggle in an effective and timely way. And here lies the main difference between Kautsky and Lenin that Chibber disregards: the main goal of the socialist party is not to embrace the whole class as it is, to “represent” its views, but to be organically linked to it in order to set it in motion, to organize its struggles and fight. Lenin organized a combat party with mass influence, with solid and meaningful articulations among key sectors of the class. Kautsky sought to embrace the whole class in a mass organization with parliamentary goals, merging in the same organization workers with different kinds of consciousness and dispositions for action.
It is curious that Chibber sees the role of the party here as that of generating slogans, as if socialist consciousness develops through infusion of ideas from a larger milieu or from outside. Indeed, here he is being faithful to the Kautskyist legacy, for it was Kautsky himself who viewed the development of socialist consciousness in precisely this way, as the infusion, by way of socialist “leaders”, of scientific (i.e., socialist) ideas into the working class movement. As Leninists, however, we disagree. We see socialist consciousness as developing organically from the working class struggle for improved material conditions and for power. We see this for example in the teachers’ strikes of the past two years, in which more and more teachers and community members began to draw anti-capitalist and socialist conclusions, significantly more than they had done in the preceding period of lower levels of class struggle (see the La Voz interview with teachers’ strike participants and leaders in this issue).
Revolutionary and reformist socialism are not only different in their programs, but also in the kinds of parties they create. For reformist parties relate to the working class like bourgeois parties do: instead of developing workers’ own experiences and power, they instead continue to tell workers that they need to leave their fate in someone else’s hands (i.e., the leaders of the socialist party). Socialist consciousness, however, can only arise from a combination of experiences of struggle and education. A party that does not push the class to fight, to put into practice workers’ own attempts to “reform” capitalism and to fix their problems, is a party that will never enable workers to break free from capitalism, even at the ideological level.
 
The Reasons of the Collapse of Mass Socialist Organizations
 Chibber observes that, since the 1950s, socialist organizations, at least in the capitalist north, have become marginalized, which is true. More questionable, however, is his claim about why this has been so. For Chibber the reason is simple: socialists in recent decades have turned away from organizing in their workplaces. Therefore socialist groups have become middle-class milieus, “havens” for “lifestyle politics.” It’s odd that Chibber makes an essentially metaphysical criticism of contemporary socialist organizations, extracting them from the historical process by which socialism became marginal in the US after 1950. McCarthyism? The war the US state waged against revolutionaries in the 1960s and 1970s, such as COINTELPRO? The failures of attempts to realign the Democratic Party or the left’s near-exclusive fixation on elections to win reforms? The capitulations of social democracy to imperialism – for example, Harrington’s DSA? These warrant not a word by Chibber, even though they played a far more important role in marginalizing socialism than anything small cadre organizations have done, not to dismiss the fact that these organizations have behaved in ways deserving criticism.
In our opinion the demise of the revolutionary left in the US has resulted from a combination of two factors: political repression of the working class movements and left organizations and a crisis of political leadership, for in the US many socialist organizations abandoned class independence and clear anti-imperialist, anti-oppression politics. Neither of those choices were inevitable developments, from which we should conclude that the project of building cadre organizations in the working class geared towards interventions in struggle, i.e., Leninist parties, should be abandoned. What we do need is to learn from our mistakes. An exhaustive list of such mistakes, though beyond the scope of this article, must include, to be sure, things that Chibber mentions, such as a turning away from a working-class orientation. But it must also include the forms of organizing that Chibber is advocating, such as centering electoralism and marginalizing anti-oppression and anti-imperialist politics in favor of more “bread and butter” (economic) agitation.
 
Where Stalinist and Social Democratic Formations Overlap
In the end, Chibber’s conflation of post-1920s Leninism with Stalinism serves to obscure a deeper problem with his theory of organization. This is, specifically, the way in which Kautskyism and Stalinism often overlap in terms of organizational bureaucracy and lack of party democracy, producing organizations disconnected from the working class. The fact is, both Kautsky’s party and his concept of the party, along with Stalin’s – for all their other important differences – were profoundly undemocratic and hostile to working class self-organization and militancy. In the Stalinist case, the history is well-known. A good case is the US Communist Party’s turn toward the tactic of the popular front in the latter half of the 1930s, in which it simultaneously moved away from a revolutionary proletarian orientation and democratic (as opposed to bureaucratic) centralism. In the process, the CP abandoned Marxist praxis and became a restraint on and sometimes repressor of the working class. As a result, the CP ended up strengthening the Democratic Party, paving the way for its own eventual destruction and for a decades-long night of demobilization and opportunism in the US workers’ movement.
But this lack of democracy and hostility to working class militancy seems to be forgotten in the case of Kautsky’s SPD. It is well to remember that the deeply misguided notion that bourgeois socialists represent an intellectual vanguard whose role it is to bring to the working class scientific (i.e., socialist) consciousness, often misattributed to Lenin, was in fact formulated by none other than Kautsky, and this attitude has tended to characterize social democracy since his time. A full account of the ways that social democracy has historically demobilized or repressed working class militancy, often in collusion with Stalinist parties, is beyond the limits of this short article. Here we consider a case that’s most relevant to the current moment: that of the so-called big tent form of organization, the DSA under Michael Harrington and his current epigones.
Chibber is right to criticize big tent socialism, though he implies that the only problem with this approach is its lack of effectiveness in class struggle. The history of the most important such organization in the United States, the DSA (especially under Harrington’s leadership) surely confirms this, but a closer look reveals that it wasn’t just the big tent approach itself that was the problem. Big tentism is often assumed to be synonymous with what Lenin critiqued as “spontaneity,” in which the political organization retreats from intervening in the working class struggle and restricts itself to following mass consciousness “where it is at.” Lenin, in What is To Be Done, helped to advance the socialist movement beyond this, because he saw that it would be disastrous for socialist strategy: it would relegate socialists to agitating for purely economic benefits for workers while avoiding the political struggle for power (what he referred to as “economism”), leading inevitably to opportunism within the socialist movement.
However, in practice, what big tentism has produced in the US context is a politics that was largely neo-Kautskyan, avant Chibber. For Harrington’s political orientation was above all that of the electoral path to socialism combined with deference to the union bureaucracy. It was not just big tentism that was the problem, but how big tentism reflected a deeper set of political commitments. In Harrington et al.’s case, it was anti-communism and profound distrust of the capacity for self-organization and political leadership by the rank and file working class. Another way of putting this is that Harrington was specifically opposed to Leninism. This translated in practice into consistent resistance to worker struggles and organization independent of the Democratic Party and the union bureaucracy, as well as a capitulation to imperialism.
Chibber doesn’t mention, however, another flaw of big tentism: how undemocratic it can be. This is because a politics that is so focused on electoralism logically leads to a managerial ethos vis-a-vis rank and file workers and in particular, anti-oppression fighters within the class. Winning 50 percent plus 1 of the votes in the arena of bourgeois parliamentarism means that advocating any kind of politics bolder than mass consciousness as it exists is dismissed as “sectarian,” “adventurist,” or “immature.” Major strategic questions under such a regime get decided with very little if any substantive input from rank and file members, let alone with enough deliberation to develop thorough political analysis. Not coincidentally, such decisions also tend to be taken in a secretive and rushed way. One also can’t escape the suspicion that much of the class reductionist dismissal of “identity politics” that is fashionable on the Kautskyist left is rooted in this ideological commitment as well. An organizational culture develops in which deference to bureaucratic leaders, whether in the political organization or in the unions, becomes the main feature. This kind of organization, in turn, becomes exclusionary. It rewards the most vocal and aggressive (usually the most white, male, middle- or upper-middle-class, and most formally educated) members with leadership positions. Such “leaders” then arrogate to themselves the role of “representatives” of the workers’ movement.
Ultimately, the biggest missed opportunity – or maybe the fatal flaw – in “Our Road to Power” is its failure to clearly discuss the dangers to the revolutionary potential of the workers’ movement posed by the Kautskyist model of the party. A danger represented above all by the form it often takes today, the big tent type organization which styles itself as “non-sectarian” but which in practice tends to center electoralism and spontaneism, tailing mass consciousness instead of developing the capacity to offer it socialist leadership. That Chibber and other prominent socialists are now reviving Kautsky should alarm, and call for vigorous rejection by, all who fight for the emancipation of the working class.
^[1] A full history of the anti-Stalinist, Leninist (aka Trotskyist) movement is beyond the scope of this article, but there are good resources for readers interested in digging more deeply into and learning the lessons from this often heroic and principled, though often flawed, movement. Library rooms can be filled with these volumes, all ignored by Chibber, some of the more prominent of which include (to name only very few) Hal Draper’s “The Myth of Lenin’s ‘Concept of the Party’” and his monumental Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, John Molyneux’s Marxism and the Party, Breitman, Le Blanc, and Wald’s Trotskyism in the United States and Gregor Benton’s Prophets Unarmed on Chinese Trotskyism.
^[2] Some more reading on the legacy of socialists from the Stalinist tradition:  https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1947/amstalandantistal.htm