I was having a discussion with David Semple in the comments box regrading this post. And I discovered this article via Marxsite and it kinda connects with the debate we were having over democratic centralism.
Davis refers to the American Left but the same general point can be applied to the UK.
Even if you say that the whole legacy of Leninism was a historical disaster, you’re still faced with exactly the same questions posed in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done. That is, the need to create some organization of organizers that provides a framework for young people willing to make extraordinary sacrifices and dedicate their lives solely to the fight of the poor and the working class. The need organize a cadre of people able to exchange and generalize and coordinate experiences across the struggle so that some kind of genuinely left agenda–which means a pro-working class agenda–becomes possible.
The Bolshevik Party may not be the only route to this. The anarchists in Barcelona did a pretty good job in a different way of bringing together and coordinating a relentless struggle for their principles and the principles of the working class.
But the question is inescapable. You have to talk about this question. You have to talk about the creation of organizations. I’m not arguing to revive the little red book or the thoughts of Leon Trotsky, but we need organizations that can allow such dedication to exist.
Such organizations always existed in some critical tension with the inherent possibilities of sectarianism, dogmatism, the lack of democracy. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Bay Area attracted an enormous number of people–at least by my reference point of San Diego–who dedicated themselves to the left. There was an enormous amount of hard work, and they had very bruising, and sometimes shattering, experiences.
I think that Davis is onto something here. We do need organisations that mean that political involvement is meaningful. At the moment individual action is like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon. Action through a traditional democratic centralist organisation is like emptying out the Atlantic with a bucket: it may seem more effective until you look at things in the perspective of the size of the task. There is the same question but with nine decades of data on democratic centralism since the first workers’ government there needs to be a different answer.
We do need organisations that mean that political involvement is meaningful’
I agree.
And though it’s not a popular argument, I contend that this organistional answer still lies with entryism inot and take over of what is still the most appropriate infrastructure for working class action, the Labour party. It may not be for ever, but there’s nothing that comes close to it at the moment for either real or latent (and legitimate) links to the trade unions, and for other strategic alliance links.
This was all done in the early 1980s, in many parts of the UK, but it was piecemeal and ideologically utterly confused by the knock on effect of a then (and still) trendy ‘philosophy’ of identity group politics which ended up taking away from what should have been a core struggle.
Such a takeover of the LP can and should happen again, but this time we can get it right. Unfortunately, it may all go wrong again, and the mistakes may be repeated. See, for example, Pat Devine and David Purdy’s Red Pepper article ‘Feelbad Britain and the Future of the Left’.
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