In Chapter IV we already stated that dispersed, democratic-centralist organizations, with authoritative party press, central decisions to undertake nationwide campaigns, etc., are parties whether they so call themselves or not. We explained that such organizations should not form in the absence of (1) a program,[1] (2) tested leadership, and (3) basic unity on how democratic centralism should function. Here we simply add an explanation why these are the only preconditions for adopting democratic centralism in a national organization. We also go more deeply into why it must be understood that a nationwide democratic-centralist organization is a party, regardless of what it calls itself and regardless of whether or not it is the party of the working-class vanguard.
(We urge comrades to remember that we have introduced this separate question of when to call an organization a party. Some comrades, who do not for a moment doubt that a national democratic-centralist organization should be formed without waiting for a high level of fusion or for unification of most communists, think that they disagree with us when we say that a party can be formed without such conditions being met. They forget that when we say “party,” we mean a national democratic-centralist organization.)
Despite the importance of a body of theory, a qualitative leap in fusion, and the unification of most communists for building a party that truly leads the U.S. proletariat, none of these conditions is a prerequisite for formation of a party. When a looser organization of communists, in some minimal numbers and with broad geographic representation, has met the preconditions stated two paragraphs previously, it should form a party. Then we can continue our theoretical and practical work and the struggle for broader communist unity, using all the advantages that democratic centralism can give us. One set of factors determines when communists can organize ourselves in a certain manner; the other determines when the organization will be capable of playing the leading role that it must eventually play in the class struggle.
But this is not as simple as it sounds. Neither the program, nor the leadership, nor the unity on principles of party organization will come easily and quickly. Each will require substantial theoretical study, struggle, and experience in practice–no doubt several years’ worth. These will also produce more communists in our tendency, both from among other forces existing today and from among the workers themselves.
But it is important to keep in mind the distinction, first clarified for us by the P.U.L.’s book, between party-building in general, which continues long after formation of the party, and party-formation. Obviously the more communists we unite, the stronger will be our party. And obviously the deeper fusion is, the more–by definition–will the party be playing a true vanguard role. And, just as obviously, the more we develop our theory, the more we will be able to increase both fusion and communist unity. But formation of a party, and use of all the advantages of democratic centralism, does not per se require a particular level of any of these factors, except for the theory needed to adopt a program.
Confusion on this issue comes from the fact that most of today’s parties not only finally admitted that they are parties, but claimed to be the vanguard party, uniting most honest communists, and including the vanguard of the working class. Such outrageous claims have been unanimously rejected each time some small part of the movement made them, but somewhere in the process most of us assimilated an assumption that either the claim about communist unity, the claim about the group’s vanguard character, or both, should be true before a party can be formed.
We disagree. When a network of communist circles has enough line unity, good enough leaders, and carefully-acquired unity on how a party should function so that it can divide labor more thoroughly and let the leaders lead a democratic-centralist party which implements a single line in practice, we should do so. We will probably still put more resources into theoretical work than today’s parties, acknowledge far more work to be done in deepening fusion, and press much more seriously for communist unification, rather than suddenly springing forth as if we are totally armed to lead the masses. But we would be ready to take advantage of the unity of will and action and the division of labor that democratic centralism permits. What we should not do is make one more voluntarist, sectarian proclamation that we are the party, the vanguard of the working class, the organization of practically all real communists. Unfortunately, we will probably be neither for some years after we are able to consolidate our organization into a party. But that consolidation will enable us to better do our work of further studying the society, deepening fusion and providing what leadership we can in the class struggle, and struggling to win over other communists to our trend. Hence there is no reason to deprive ourselves of the Leninist instrument for doing this work until we can honestly claim to have united the communist movement or to be unquestioned leaders of the working class.
The most thorough critique which we have heard of party-building lines which fail to specify some meaningful level of fusion as a precondition for party-formation came not from “party-building-is-fusion” advocates, but in a discussion with a “pro-P.L.A.” circle in the Midwest. They raised three main points. First, the working class must emancipate itself. Regardless of its line, a party composed almost entirely of comrades from petty bourgeois strata cannot lead the working class to revolution. The advanced workers, in particular, determine the character of the workers’ movement, and any party which seeks to lead the movement must have them within its ranks. How, they ask, can a party hope to lead the mass movement if those who would form it have not even been able to help develop and win over the class vanguard?
Second, by working to form another party without requiring it to be, at least in some measure, a party with a true proletarian vanguard character, we would hold open the gate to the opportunist path that the existing parties have traveled. Those who fail to state some level of fusion as a precondition for party-formation free themselves to be the next group to voluntaristically declare themselves The Party after expanding a little, establishing their press, and recruiting a few workers.
Finally, we speak of the need to develop tested leadership, recognizing that part of the problem with the existing parties is their careerist leaders, combined with a rank and file that slavishly follows those leaders, despite their failure to prove themselves in the class struggle. Yet how do we expect to see leaders tested, if not through successful practice? And success can only be gauged by some real strides in deepening fusion.
There is a great deal of truth in each of these arguments, but the fact remains that there is no specified level of fusion that must be met before Marxist-Leninists in a loose network form of organization can move all their work forward by adopting the party form.
The comrades’ comments lead us to add three observations to what we have already said about preconditions for effective use of the party form. First, when we speak of tested leadership, part of the "testing" takes place in practice, in the class struggle. As the work of comrades in the network progresses, some will prove to be much better than others at analyzing concrete conditions and providing communist leadership to mass struggles, leadership that can be seen because it is being followed by people, and because it is leading to some success in winning the best of the workers over to a communist analysis.
However, at least for the purpose of evaluating leaders, it would be a mistake to state in advance the degree of influence within the working class that such comrades must help us develop (e.g., the PWOC’s and others’ descriptions of developing a visible, somewhat accepted “communist current” within the working-class movement). Objective conditions could conceivably be unfavorable for dramatic advances in fusion, regardless of the talent and dedication of the comrades doing or guiding mass work. But good communists can facilitate the progressive development of any situation in the class struggle. Thus one attribute of those who develop as leaders should be their ability to do the best communist work that it appears can be done under the circumstances. (It is, of course, necessary to struggle against subjectivism in evaluating such work.)
Naturally, practical leadership is not the only attribute we will be looking for. We must also judge people and groups on their theoretical contributions, the part they play in the ideological struggle, their role in tackling the organizational work of the network, etc. But it would be a real mistake to speak of tested leadership and not make it clear that the criterion of success in practice is one of the “tests.”
Second, if the level of fusion is still low at the time a party is formed, we must be particularly careful to recognize that its line has only been verified in practice to a very limited extent, and the testing of its leaders is similarly limited. Then we can be wary of what would be over-centralization in those circumstances, as well as of a sectarian attitude towards the masses, from whom we would still have very much to learn. And in our attitude towards other parties, too, it would be especially important under such conditions to keep in mind that we do not know everything ourselves.
Third, we want to reemphasize that the distinction between party-formation and the continuing process of party-building would be especially important for a party lacking much of a vanguard character. Adoption of the democratic-centralist form would be for the purpose of best organizing ourselves to become a true vanguard party. Reaching the point of party-formation would just be “the first step in a journey of 10,000 li” (Mao), not the occasion for trumpets heralding the birth of a fully-developed vanguard party of the U.S. proletariat.
It is the struggle to grasp our tasks in periods of party-formation and further party-building that will keep us from imitating the worst aspects of the existing self-declared “vanguards.” What was primarily wrong with each of them was not that when they evolved into party-type organizations the level of fusion was still too low. The problem was that the line which most have by now stated in their programs was neither comprehensive nor fully correct, that they had opportunist leaders, and that they did not understand how to use democratic centralism (especially with a largely untested line). Otherwise it would have been correct to divide their labor in a way that gave them a topical national newspaper, other political literature, the ability to rely on good theoretical workers to develop and propagate analyses of concrete conditions, and freedom for a large majority of the membership to devote their attention to practice (though not as “free” as they are when bureaucratic centralism overemphasizes the role of leadership in developing line). Such a division of labor would have led to a qualitative leap in their ability to do the theoretical and practical work that would help develop and recruit a working-class vanguard, a process which in turn would have helped them gradually draw other communists away from opportunist-dominated parties.
For those remaining outside of these parties, it is certainly true that the better the class composition of our forces, the better we will be able to develop and implement a correct line. But the fact remains that communists who have worked together in a network on our theoretical, practical, and organizational tasks, to the point where a substantial group of them have met the preconditions we have listed, should not hold on to the primitive network form solely on the ground that the party we would form would have yet to be that of the true class vanguard. To do so would unnecessarily retard our ability to continue to help that vanguard develop.
The Chinese party formed by delegates representing 57 members was not such a vanguard (though we should not forget that it also did not establish strong democratic centralism in the early days). In Albania, the numbers were, relative to the population, far larger, but the party history tells us that the newly-formed communist party “inherited very weak connections with the masses” from its predecessor groups.[2] If things were better in seething Russia, it was largely because conditions permitted them to be different, not because the communists had awaited a deeper level of fusion before adopting the highest level of organization that they were capable of using. (And we remind comrades that the famous quotations[3] about the period of winning over the vanguard in Russia refer to a period that lasted until the 1905 mass revolutionary upsurge, two years after the congress that created a democratic-centralist party.)
We have very little to say here. It would simply be irrational for those communists who are united enough to use the democratic-centralist party form to wait until they have achieved unification of the entire communist movement. Even assuming that something close to such unification will someday be possible, the struggle for it can be carried out far more effectively using the strengths which democratic centralism will give to the theory and practice which will form the bases for other comrades’ assessments of us, as well as to our capacity to wage ideological struggle with them.
Even if we have correctly identified the conditions that permit use of the democratic-centralist, party-type form of organization, is it correct to call such a group a communist party if it is basically non-proletarian in composition, or if it unites only one section of U.S. communists? Yes, it is. True, if members of such bodies call their groups pre-party organizations, they might remind themselves, and be open to others, about the magnitude of their tasks in deepening fusion and in uniting with other communists. Yet this “pre-party” terminology has become standard among U.S. communists, without helping the members of such groups resist gross subjectivism in evaluating fusion and whether they have united most honest communists. Its real impact is that it obscures one of the truly fundamental errors of the existing democratic-centralist organizations: that they skipped to the Leninist party form of organization without preparing the conditions in which that form can be used to advance the work.
Those “pre-parties” which were to declare themselves The Party often printed Stalin’s description of what a communist party must strive to be–the organized vanguard of the working class. But they ignored the dialectics of a party’s development into such an organization, as if every true party is a capable and functioning “general staff” of the working-class movement when its founding congress adjourns. By collapsing the distinctions between party-building before and after formation of the party, these groups thus presented us with a false syllogism:[4]
A communist party is the organized vanguard of the working class. We are a communist party.
Therefore we are the organized vanguard of the working class. We escape (and expose) the faulty logic only by correcting the first premise’s failure to distinguish between different periods of party-building, its implicit denial that new parties often must work to become the organized vanguard. Instead, most comrades, knowing that the conclusion is absurd, have turned the syllogism into its obverse, like this:
A communist party is the organized vanguard of the working class.
You are obviously not the organized vanguard of the working class.
Therefore you are not a communist party. The same mistake can be made by turning the fact that a communist party should unite a country’s communists into the assertion that it is not a party when it has not done so. These approaches to the problem deny the possibility that the form of organization might well be that of a small party, but one which has much arduous work ahead of it–and perhaps much rectification–before it can become the true proletarian vanguard party and the sole organization of communists.
The terminology we are struggling for is new in our movement, but it is not new for Marxist-Leninists historically. As mentioned above, the Chinese and Albanian comrades formed organizations which they called parties before they acquired their vanguard role. And when there is more than one party in other countries, it is not generally the practice, even here, to call only the one judged most correct and most proletarian a party, while the other is labeled something else. (Cf. Lenin’s discussion of the possible formation of two communist parties in Britain.[5]) Being a party does not necessarily mean being the party, if the terms are used correctly.
All that the term party names is a particular form of organization. A political grouping might be a democratic-centralist party, a social-democratic-type party, a national federation of circles, a regional federation of circles, a local circle, a study group, or just two comrades living together. The question of what a group’s form of organization is does not depend on the correctness of the comrades’ line, their political success, their class backgrounds, or the degree to which they have united Marxist-Leninists. If it is a party, such factors would help us identify its most urgent tasks, and they would tell us whether it is an effective party or an ineffective one, one just beginning its work or one that is well developed, a revolutionary one or a revisionist one. History has certainly produced all of these. But holding back the term party–as a coveted title to be bestowed only on the correct, effective, united vanguard party–has only the advantage of being one (not the only) method of reminding ourselves not to be satisfied with an organization that is not yet such a vanguard organization. The other, more precise use of the term party has the far greater advantage of helping clear away the confusion about what the existing parties have done (and what we must not do).
For, as we have said, what they did was leap into the party form of organization long before acquiring programmatic unity, a body of experience by which to judge the leadership provided by different comrades or circles, and agreement on the nature of the party. And this form which they adopted is the one adapted to the functions of a party, which they did try to carry out (in a bureaucratically distorted manner) practically from the beginning: most members concentrate on trying to lead the proletarian struggle, by making use of centralized ideological and practical guidance.
The transition from the respective “pre-parties” to their announced parties was so inconsequential not because they are still not parties, as many think, but because their ’ founding congresses’’ only formalized and ratified a state of affairs that had existed for a long time. For each one, premature party-formation took place several years before the point at which most people identify it. What the party congresses of each group usually added was the open claim that the party is The Party (i.e., that there are few communists outside its ranks) and the claim that it is in fact The Vanguard Party (minimizing its work of fusing communism with the workers’ movement and minimizing the weaknesses inherent in its true composition).
Call these groups terrible parties, poor excuses for the communist party, marginally effective petty bourgeois sects that do not even know that that is what they are, or whatever. But let us not call them democratic-centralist pre-party organizations masquerading as parties. That charge accepts and strengthens the concept that has in reality given powerful ideological assistance to the premature formation of parties which masqueraded as pre-parties.
We hope that our position on conditions for party-formation does not bring the reader to a crowning disappointment. “What?! One hundred fifty-one pages on a supposedly new party-building line, and they end up saying that presently unaffiliated forces should just form one more party?” If people think this, they are forgetting the content of those 151 pages. The idea that another party will be formed, perhaps while all the others still exist, comes from a sober assessment of the strength of the opportunism in those organizations and the hold their leaderships have on their members. Fragmentation of our movement, in the context of the rise of opportunism and confusion internationally, has consolidated itself in organizational forms and sectarian attitudes toward struggle that mean unification of this movement will be a difficult, slow process. It will probably require much harsher objective conditions, as well as a highly organized, more consistently Marxist-Leninist, more proletarian trend to struggle with the other forces. What is different in our party-building line from that which built the others is what we propose for creating that trend: (1) taking up, really taking up, crucial and long-neglected theoretical work; (2) doing concurrent practice, including broad mass agitation and organizing work, as well as propaganda to the most developed workers, but without delusions on the degree of fusion today; and (3) painstakingly building an organization that can carry out the theoretical work, share what we learn from practice, and carry out an open, uninhibited struggle against all the forms of confusion and opportunism that we will undoubtedly run into, instead of entrusting all this to slick careerist leaders, while the rest of us implement their line and brush off any contrary views as those of “anti-party” or opportunist forces.
Moreover, comrades with what, in this country, is a rare ability to assess problems of party-building objectively will be able to solve other problems better as well. Obviously the content of our line and tactics, not just our methods for arriving at them, will be different from what the existing parties have produced. It is not merely disagreements on party-building line that keep so many of us out of those parties, for the opportunism manifested in voluntarist party-building lines comes out in many other areas as well. But clarity on our theoretical and practical tasks, and organizing to create the best conditions for systematic line struggle, will permit us to develop the correct political lines and methods of mass work as well.
The theoretical, practical, and organizational work that we call on non-party communists to undertake will undoubtedly strengthen the link between those comrades and at least parts of the workers’ movement, before adoption of the party form. Successful work will also unite more communists than those who first began the enterprise. However, specified levels of neither fusion nor unification with other communists will be required before we can make the transition from the network form to the democratic-centralist party form that will permit us, under consistent Marxist-Leninist leadership, to do all our work better. Thus we do not dispute the point that what the working class needs is a true proletarian vanguard party, but reply that under the right conditions the communists seeking to build such a party can do so better and faster by moving to the party form of organization. Communists must try to seal off the voluntarist path which others have traveled not by specifying some level of fusion or unity as a precondition for forming a party, but rather those preconditions that are really required for a new young party to take up its work with an expectation of more success than a lower form of organization can achieve. Those preconditions are unity on program, tested leadership, and unity on a correct conception of what a communist party must be and how it should function.
As for how leadership is to be developed and tested, the practical arena of the class struggle is one place where such development and testing must take place. It is wrong, however, to accept the possibility of having to wait for class contradictions to grow sharper, to permit good leadership to be demonstrated by a significant degree of fusion of the communist and workers’ movements. Such leadership can be demonstrated by its ability to maximize whatever progress is possible under existing conditions, as well as by its leading role in helping us carry out our other tasks.
We call the preconditions which we have listed preconditions for party formation, not just preconditions for use of full democratic centralism, because an organization should be called a party when it adopts the party form. The international communist movement has not reserved the term for organizations that achieve a vanguard character or which are the sole significant communist groups in their countries. In the U.S., our calling parties “pre-parties” masked their adoption of the party form without meeting any of the preconditions for its effective use.
[1] We mean a program in the usual sense of a comprehensive statement of the party’s short- and long-term “aims and objects,” since a Leninist party will do agitation and propaganda around all of these and must have agreement on them. However, it would be wrong to be rigid about this. Some circumstances could demand unity around a much more basic program. For example, the outbreak of war between the superpowers could demand unification on a basic anti-war, anti-fascist program (cf. that of the new Albanian party after the Italian invasion of 1929), with differences on other questions left unresolved while the questions are studied. It would be a tremendous disadvantage to have the party press carrying a debate on the Black national question or trade-union work, and comrades in one party putting forward different lines among the people; but the need for organizational unification in those circumstances would probably outweigh the weaknesses.
[2] History of the P.L.A., p. 99.
[3] See Appendix A.
[4] A syllogism is an argument in which a conclusion logically follows from the assertion of two premises, as in the text above.
[5] Letter to Sylvia Pankhurst, LCW 29: 565.