[The following is an edited version of a talk presented to the Resistance leadership training school, held in Melbourne, July 7-9, 1992.]

The reasons why we need a revolutionary party, and Lenin’s outstanding contributions on this question, was thoroughly covered by Reihana’s talk yesterday.

The aim of this talk is to look at the sort of party we’re building and some of the basic concepts and methods of our party-building approach.

Revolutionary leadership

Reihana pointed out that a mass revolutionary party is required to provide leadership to the working class and its allies in their struggle for socialism. The entire experience of the international working-class movement demonstrates that without the leadership of a mass revolutionary party the workers and their allies won’t be able to win a lasting victory over their capitalist oppressors.

That’s the essence of what we want to address today. How to lead. How to lead the working class, and all the oppressed, in the struggle for socialism.

All of us here have that responsibility thrust on us, as soon as we join Resistance or the DSP, as soon as we raise ourselves onto that higher level of consciousness that recognises the need for a revolutionary organisation. We are all leaders, and have to act that way.

And specifically in this discussion, I want to address how to lead the party and Resistance themselves. So this talk is about leadership, which is the essence of the party question.

In a speech to a conference in Havana in the 1980s, entitled “May Deep Feelings of Solidarity Shine Forth Here Once Again,” Jesus Montane Oropesa, a member of the Cuban Communist Party’s Central Committee, asked: Who will be leaders in the coming struggles? He answers:

… those who learn from others and think for themselves will lead the struggle. Those who do not lack determination and courage will deserve to be in the vanguard. Those who demonstrate the ability to judge situations, mobilize the people, win them over, advance along the path of unity, select the most effective methods of struggle for every stage and carry out a correct strategy by means of equally correct tactical measures will deserve to be leaders.

In the party and in Resistance today, we’ve put up front a key aspect of leadership: helping others to lead, training others.

We’ve stated that we’re an ambitious party. It’s also OK to be ambitious as an individual, but the best way to express that ambition in Resistance and the DSP is in a collective framework, with a team spirit, helping others to lead, training others to do their best, taking pleasure and pride in the successes and victories of other comrades and the organisation as a whole.

Isaac Deutscher in his great biography of Leon Trotsky commented on Trotsky’s attitude on this: “It was not that he deprecated all personal ambition – desire for distinction was often a stimulus to effort and achievement. But ‘the revolutionary begins where personal ambition is fully and wholly subordinated to the service of a great idea’.”

We’re a collective unit, and we adopt a team approach. And it’s comradeship, not friendship that binds us together.

We’re building a party of collectivists, not individualists. We are building a party of people who get satisfaction from the performance of the whole team, of the whole party. We’re building a party of leaders who want to help other people become leaders. We don’t want to shine at the expense of other people looking bad.

All comrades can play a leading role in some way in our movement. And by accepting that leading role, by aggressively taking up that leadership role, you develop yourselves.

We all have to lead by example. Leaders, at all levels, are expected to be exemplary in their unswerving loyalty to the party, and to set an example for others in their commitment to building the party.

Well, there are a few things that we can clearly see that leadership in our movement is not. It’s not posing as a leader, not being arrogant about being a leader. It’s not a question of apparatchiks entrenched in positions issuing orders from on high as the whim takes them. It’s not ego tripping. We discussed yesterday that it’s not a question of proclaiming yourself the vanguard, and it’s not a question of proclaiming yourself a leader.

In a speech he gave in 1967 Fidel Castro pointed out that: “Anyone can have ‘Eagle’ for a last name without having a single feather on his back. In the same way, there are people who call themselves communists without having a communist hair on their head.”

Leadership, both within the party and within the working class, is something that has to be earned.

Sources

Well, what are the sources of our organisational concepts and methods, and where can we get lessons from?

There aren’t many easy cookbooks, or manuals. There is experience, and lots of writings and books that we can study – writings by Lenin, Cannon, the Cubans, and, of course, our own experience now, which stretches over 25 years. And that’s very extensive, very thorough now. And it relates to our specific conditions. We do need it written down more completely, the experience of the party, and the experience of Resistance itself.

So what I’m going to outline in this talk are some of the general concepts involved in the question of leadership, and building a revolutionary party. Most of them apply equally to the tasks of building Resistance.

Well, we’ve got positive examples from history. But there are also lots of negative examples, and they’re also worth studying – the experiences of Stalinism, of Social Democracy, of the sects, of the anarchists.

And there’s no one document or article with all this experience drawn together. It’s mainly the historical experiences that contain the lessons, the norms, the principles. There’s not yet been a satisfactory attempt to put it all down in one spot.

In 1977, at our 5th National Conference, the party did adopt a resolution on “The Organisational Principles of the SWP.” In the mid-1980s we felt that this resolution was inadequate in summing up our organisational concepts and norms. The National Executive of the party commissioned the drafting of a new resolution on this topic. However, we weren’t completely happy with it, so we did not submit it for adoption by the party. At the same time, we did not believe it would serve the party’s needs to retain the resolution adopted in 1977 as a statement of our organisational principles. So at the 11th National Conference in January 1986, the party formally rescinded the 1977 resolution, and we adopted a new party constitution that codified some of our organisational norms that we set out in the 1977 resolution, for example, on the rights and obligations of factions within the party.

The December 1982 issue of our magazine Socialist Worker, contains three reports on party building by Jim Percy, and that’s a mine of information and principles that help on this question. There are the experiences of the US SWP, and many of the writings of James P. Cannon of course – The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, The History of American Trotskyism, Letters from Prison and many others. But they apply often to specific US conditions, although there are a lot of very useful generalisations, and sometimes there are some things that don’t really apply, or might be a bit distorted. And, of course, there are the writings of Lenin and the whole rich experiences of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and although they occurred in quite different circumstances to our situation in Australia today, are still valid and the fundamental source of our organisational principles.

Comintern Theses

The Communist International, which was set up after the victory of the Russian Revolution, did adopt some theses on this question at its 3rd Congress in July 1921, titled The Organisational Structure of the Communist Parties, the Methods and Content of Their Work. It’s reprinted in the book, Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International.

This document was adopted in the context of firming up some of the new parties that had been won over to communism, some of the parties that had formerly been social-democratic parties or parties that had split from social-democratic parties, and so it was specifically directed at combating some of the old social-democratic methods of work and organisation.

There are things in it that are not applicable today, of course. But there are some useful points we can learn from.

It begins with a preamble of five general principles:

The organisation of the Party must correspond to the conditions and the purpose of its activity. At every stage of the revolutionary class struggle and in the subsequent period of transition to socialism – the first step in the development of a Communist society – the Communist Party must be the vanguard, the most advanced section of the proletariat.

There is no absolute form of organisation which is correct for all Communist Parties at all times. The conditions of the proletarian class struggle are constantly changing, and so the proletarian vanguard has always to be looking for effective forms of organisation. Equally, each Party must develop its own special forms of organisation to meet the particular historically-determined conditions within the country.

The document also points out that there are definite limits to national variations.

In the coming period the centrally important task for all Parties is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the seizure of power. Accordingly, all the organisational work of the Communist Parties in the capitalist countries must be directed towards establishing organisations which can guarantee the victory of the proletarian revolution over the ruling classes.

That was still in the period of revolutionary upsurge that followed World War I, and there were prospects for revolution still in countries such as Germany.

Leadership is a necessary condition of any political action and is a vital factor in the present most important struggle in world history…. The Party itself must have good leadership if it is to lead well. To lead the revolutionary class struggle, the Communist Party and its leading bodies must possess great fighting power and at the same time the ability to adapt to the changing conditions of struggle. Successful leadership presupposes, moreover, the closest contact with the proletarian masses. Unless such contact is established the leaders will not lead the masses but, at best, only follow them.

As an aside on this: often the opportunists and economists urge this contact with the masses; some of the trade union officials today urge this, but not for the purpose of leading them, but merely tailing behind them, following them, and that becomes an excuse for dropping any socialist or left principles.

Democratic centralism

The preamble concludes that “The Communist Party organisations are to achieve organic contact with the masses by practising democratic centralism.”

And Section II is on that. I’ll just pick out some relevant theses and points.

The theses point out that democratic centralism means a synthesis, a fusion, of centralism and democracy.

Centralisation in the Communist Party does not mean formal, mechanical centralisation, but the centralisation of Communist activity, i.e., the creation of a leadership that is strong and effective and at the same time flexible.

The document reminds us that it’s not centralisation of power in the hands of a bureaucracy, allowing it to dominate the other members of the party, or the revolutionary masses outside the party, but the centralisation of party activity. United action, which is the purpose of having a party in the first place, requires centralised direction, i.e., leadership. A strong and effective leadership, however, can only be developed through party democracy. Only a leadership that has the confidence of the membership can provide effective centralised direction.

A party of activists

Section III of the thesis stresses the communist obligation to carry out the political work decided on by the party. “8. The Communist Party must be a labour school of revolutionary Marxism“, it states, i.e., members must be activists.

It’s hammered again in the next thesis: “9. <193> all members should at all times participate in the day-to-day work of the Party.” Comrades will recall from yesterday this was at the heart of the Bolshevik/Menshevik split at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903.

It’s repeated in thesis 10. Members should give all their time and energy to party work, i.e., effectively become professional revolutionaries. “But the most important condition of membership is that members participate on a day-to-day basis in the work of the Party.”

The next five theses generally relate to the reorganisation of the former Socialist parties – how to structure them, setting up cells etc, setting up fractions (it actually also uses the phrase “working groups”).

Thesis 17 is interesting. It’s a specific area we should be implementing more today.

One of the duties of the Communist organisation is to make reports. This applies to all organisations and organs of the Party and to its individual members. Regular general reports must be made at frequent intervals and special reports when specific Party tasks have been carried out. It is very important that reports are presented systematically and become a firmly established tradition of the Communist movement.

It points out that committees have to report to higher bodies. Members have to report on their work (weekly); they have to report at the first opportunity. It can be an oral report or a written report; it should be concise; it needs to pass on the necessary information; and the reports have to be discussed at meetings.

In our situation today I think we suffer a little from the tyranny of modern technology and communication methods, the tyranny of the phone system, which makes it so much easier in so many ways just to phone the National Office and give a report, and that’s very good, but there are drawbacks. I think we need many more written reports from the branches to the National Office. First of all, it’s cheaper. But also it provides a permanent record, reports of how things are going that are available to all national departments and that can, if we think it’s useful, reprint for all comrades’ information in The Activist.

There should be a mention made in this context of something else that we sometimes fall down on, the checking up on decisions that get made, in a branch, a fraction, in a committee that we’re involved in. We need to follow up on them. That’s a key aspect of good organisation, and it’s related to the question of reports, the other side of it.

Section IV of the theses is devoted to the question of propaganda and agitation. There are a lot of specifics, but I’ll draw out a few general points.

Communists must “take part in all the day-to-day struggles and all the movements of the working class… Only by leading the working masses in the day-to-day struggle against the attacks of capitalism can the Communist Party become the vanguard of the working class…” It’s the point I made before – we have to earn in struggle the right to be the vanguard, you can’t just proclaim it.

Organisation

Section V is “On the Organisation of Political Struggles”, with lots of nitty gritty stuff on how to use leaflets and posters, how to build campaigns.

Section VI is “On the Party Press”. It states that “No paper can be recognised as a Communist organ unless it is subject to Party control.” However, it does not specify any particular means by which such control should be exercised. In this regard, it’s useful to remember that up until 1917 when they became a mass party, with tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of members, none of the papers that the Bolsheviks used to present their ideas were official papers of the party. They were published by cooperative associations in which the Bolsheviks played a predominant, but by no means always, exclusive role.

The theses go on to point out that the communists should publish a quality paper, a skillfully written and presented paper. It has to be independent of the capitalists. It has to be “our best propagandist and agitator”.

The Comintern document points out that the paper “can only survive if Party members are prepared to make substantial and regular financial and material sacrifices”.

“The Communists”, it states, “must be more than just lively canvassers and agitators for the paper; they must be useful contributors.” It notes that subscriptions “must be collected very systematically”.

Section VII is on “The General Structure of the Party Organisation” – the organisation of branches, districts and so on, and the question of discipline, how to organise.

The directives and decisions of the leading Party bodies are binding on subordinate organisations and on all individual members.

In their public appearances members of the Party are obliged to act at all times as disciplined members of a militant organisation…. If the decision of the organisation or leading Party body is in the view of certain other members incorrect, these comrades must not forget, when they speak or act in public, that to weaken or break the unity of the common front is the worst breach of discipline and the worst mistake that can be made in the revolutionary struggle.

And finally, section VIII is on “The Combination of Legal and Illegal Work”.

Well, these theses were drafted about 70 years ago, but there are still many useful principles there. They are worth reading by comrades, perhaps more than once, since the more times you read, the more you can glean from it.

A dialectical concept

The Bolshevik experience gives us an important understanding of the interconnection of democracy and centralism, determined by the conditions of political work.

Before 1905, Lenin had to operate in very underground conditions, so centralism came to the fore. There were physical and political difficulties in implementing party democracy. For example, it was impossible to hold a party conference inside Russia. So party conferences had to be held abroad. The difficulties of doing this meant that they were rather infrequent events.

After 1905, conditions improved for democracy in the party, so that at the 5th congress in 1907 the stress was put on the election of party bodies and committees, and the concept of democratic centralism was formalised.

What is democratic centralism? James P. Cannon, wrote in Letters from Prison:

Democratic centralism… is not a dogma to be understood statically as a formula containing the unchanging quantities of 50 percent democracy and 50 percent centralism. Democratic centralism is a dialectical concept in which the emphasis is continually being shifted in consonance with the changing needs of the party in its process of development.

A period of virtually unrestricted internal democracy, which is normally the rule during the discussion of disputed questions under legal conditions, can be replaced by a regime of military centralism for party action under conditions of external persecution and danger, and vice versa; and all conceivable gradations between these two extremes can be resorted to without doing violence to the principle of democratic centralism.

What is essential is that the right emphasis be placed at the right time. Bolshevism, far from any dogmatic rigidity ascribed to it by superficial critics, is distinguished by the great flexibility of its organisational forms and methods. This does not signify, however, that there are no definite rules, no basic principles. These principles, in fact, are unchanging in their essence no matter how flexibly the party may see fit to apply them in different situations.

In his particular situation he wanted to emphasise two of these basic principles and he set them down as follows:

The party is conceived as a combat organisation destined to lead a revolution. It is not a freethinkers’ discussion club, not a mere forum for self-expression and self-improvement, imposing no personal obligations on its members. The party is not an anarchist madhouse where everyone does as they please, but an army which faces the outside world as a unit.

Following from this, it is an unchanging party law that the party has the right to control and direct the political activity of each and every member; to be informed about and to regulate and supervise the relations, if any, of each and every member with political opponents of the party; and to demand of each and every member disciplined compliance with party decisions and instructions, and 100 percent – not 99 percent – loyalty to the party.

Professional revolutionaries

Lenin and the Bolsheviks developed the idea of an organisation of professional revolutionaries.

What does it mean? Not that all comrades are on full time, but that we all see our revolutionary activity as our life’s work. We take a serious attitude to the enormous task we’ve set ourselves. We don’t have a slipshod, half-hearted approach. We don’t give up when the going gets tough, or when individual advancement is possible.

A professional revolutionary is someone who sees the highest purpose of his or her life as advancing the socialist revolution, that is, building the revolutionary party, and who is willing to accept any assignment within his or her capacity that will contribute to this goal.

Cannon referred to the idea that we’re building a combat party. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’re preparing for armed struggle now. Rather he was pointing to the fact that the struggle for socialism is a struggle, that the capitalist class will resort to any measures to defend their privileges and profits, including the sending of agent-provocateurs into the organisations of the oppressed. If the party is going to combat attempts by the capitalist state to destroy it, if it’s going to be effective in organising and leading a political struggle against the rule of the capitalist class, it’s got to function in a disciplined manner, to be able to function as a well-drilled unit. Thus our military metaphors. We’re the most implacable opponents of capitalist militarism, but not pacifists. We’re the strongest opponents of bureaucratism, hierarchies, but we know we need organisation and unity in action to win.

Quoting from Montane again:

Whether something is revolutionary or not isn’t determined by whether it is armed or unarmed, violent or non-violent, illegal or legal, insurgent action or mass struggle; anything that can and must be done in order to advance toward our ultimate objective, anything that will lead us to determine events and not trail after them, is revolutionary.

A working-class party

And of course we’re a working-class party. It’s axiomatic that we have an understanding of the role of the working class in the process of social transformation of capitalist society.

Lenin stressed this in What Is To Be Done? – Only in connection with a “really revolutionary class which spontaneously rises in struggle” does the type of organisation which he proposed in this pamphlet make sense.

So a Leninist party has to have a mass line. We have to be with the masses, and relate to the oppressed, the working class, and learn from their struggles, but also lead.

The party also has to have a flexible approach to tactics. We have to be able to engage in unity with other forces when possible. We have to have an approach to party-building tactics that vary with the situation. Lenin was a master at this, knowing when to split, when to unite.

We have to have an attitude of tactical flexibility, not doctrinairism and sectarianism.

The party and its members need a long view of history. We’re in it for the long haul as we know, so we need to have a historical perspective.

In a report to our National Committee in September 1980, Jim Percy elaborated on some of the party-building lessons we had learned in the first 10 years of the DSP. He grouped some of these important lessons under four headings:

1. We had developed a broad leadership team, we were an inclusive party.
2. We were building an independent party.
3. We were a party built on Leninist organisational principles.
4. We were an ambitious party.

An inclusive party

On the first point, the question of an inclusive team, Jim outlined in that report some of our experiences, some of the splits that we’d gone through, some of the fusions that we’d attempted – some which were failures, some which succeeded – but they showed the general thrust of our attempt to unite with other forces. He went through our history and our efforts in the ‘70s. He pointed out how we recruited from different periods and different cities, and comrades from different countries, and how these comrades recruited from different situations made up the current leadership of the party.

He pointed out that these sincere attempts at unity – the attempts to unite with other forces – laid the ground for future successes.

He said it also “allowed us to build a team – not a closed team but a team that was a pole of attraction and a framework for new and developing leaders.”

That’s been an ongoing process, especially in regard to young people. That’s something we can be very proud of in our party. We know that Resistance has been the backbone of the party, the reason for the success of our movement. It’s how we started off and it’s how we have renewed ourselves.

Also we’ve been especially successful in the development of women leaders in the party. Here we’re unique on the left in this country, and possibly around the world, also.

And our experiences in the 1980s continued that approach we had in the 1970s, of reaching out. A report by Jim to a National Committee meeting in 1990 went through our efforts in that decade – the Nuclear Disarmament Party; the Charter process with the Communist Party and the attempt to set up a New Left Party; our efforts with the Socialist Party of Australia; and more recently our efforts with various Green forces.

As well as building a leadership team of the party and Resistance that is inclusive, and as well as reaching out to try to build the party and include new forces into the leadership of the party, we also want to make the most out of individual comrades. We don’t want to waste cadre, take a cavalier attitude to comrades who might be going through a temporary slump, say. We have to make every effort to integrate all comrades into the party.

And we want to set high standards of activity, but not so high that people will feel unable to join, or maintain membership. This approach is especially relevant for Resistance. Cannon pointed out once that:

“We don’t want an excess of Bolshevisation [in the party, so that] every time we bring one person into the party we drive two others out by our impractical and unrealistic demands upon them… We’ve got to grow up to the level of political people who are able to make use of members who want to belong to the party. Lenin was a great master at utilising material that wasn’t 100 percent perfect and he even succeeded in making a revolution with this defective material. One of the best stories I have ever heard was the remark made by Serge Evrikoff, a leader of the left opposition and secretary of the party under Lenin, when he was in this country. He remarked to some American comrades, “You will never begin to understand the genius of Lenin or to appreciate him in his full stature. You know that he made a revolution, but you don’t know the material he made it out of.”

But while we seek to include in our ranks all genuine socialist revolutionaries, the DSP is not “all-inclusive” in the manner of the Labor Party or similar social-democratic fake-left parties in other countries. Such inclusiveness is suited only to parties not seriously intending to lead major social changes, it’s a formula for doing nothing, a guarantee of acceptance of the status quo.

As Reihana’s talk yesterday demonstrated, we need a party that selects its membership on the basis of their agreement with our Marxist program and their willingness to work for its implementation. We seek to be inclusive of everyone who will help to build a revolutionary Marxist party, to build our cadre team.

So we’re an inclusive party in the sense that we have a broad leadership team, we’re always trying to absorb new leaders and expand the base of that team.

Because of the criteria we set down for membership in the party, we’re also a politically homogeneous party, we agree on our basic revolutionary perspective. Without that level of agreement we couldn’t function as a coherent unit. Jim’s 1980 report put it like this:

[Our political homogeneity is] a relative thing, and we want it to be only a relative thing. But it’s based on the attitude of comrades towards the party, a responsible way in which they raise differences and the way comrades, especially the leading comrades, have decided to operate in the framework of the party. That’s one aspect of it. The other aspect is that we have had an ability to correct our mistakes. If we’ve made a mistake and we’re convinced of that, we’re very quick to rectify it.

He also pointed out that we’re a structured team: “We’ve been able to develop a division of labour in the [National Executive] and in the National Committee.”

Loyalty

The DSP is a voluntary organisation, composed of individuals who have freely chosen to devote themselves to the task of aiding society’s transition from capitalism to socialism.

As a voluntary union of revolutionaries, the party has both the right and the obligation to demand an unconditional loyalty to its program and organisation from all members and all who seek membership. Those who doubt the correctness of the Marxist program; those who deny the necessity of a revolutionary party; those who are opposed to building such a party – all such individuals are entitled to their views. But they are not entitled to membership in the Democratic Socialist Party. Loyalty to the DSP is the primary condition for membership.

Party loyalty is not an abstract idea, but a standard of political conduct. Loyal members always place the party’s interests first. They defend it against its enemies. They work selflessly to build it. They seek to the best of their ability to implement its decisions, to abide by its discipline, and to adhere to its norms. They are party patriots because the party is the organisational embodiment of the revolutionary program and thus indispensable to the future which they desire for humanity.

We develop and cherish a strong party spirit, that incorporates our strong feelings of party loyalty, the concern for the party, always putting the party first, and a real sense of revolutionary elan and enthusiasm.

Dedication and commitment

At the centre of this is the dedication and commitment of our members. We’ve said lots about this at the Resistance conference already, and it’s a concept comrades here understand well.

Without it, we won’t get to first base, let alone tackle the big political task we’ve set ourselves – building a party that can lead the workers and their allies in the struggle to overthrow this rotten system and the building of a new socialist society. In this task we’ll need determination and courage and persistence.

Trotsky wrote that “Revolutionaries may be either educated or ignorant people, either intelligent or dull, but there can be no revolutionaries without the will that breaks obstacles, without devotion, without the spirit of sacrifice.”

Recall the earlier Montane quote, where he talked about “Those who do not lack determination and courage…”

Well, courage for us is not physical at the moment – we don’t have to risk our lives to be revolutionaries – but there are two other very important aspects of courage. Firstly, the courage to persist in what we’re doing. And secondly, the courage to take decisions, to lead, to act quickly in political situations when necessary.

This leadership role, this type of courage has to be based on education, on political experience, and the confidence that flows from that. It is based on the confidence from acting in the past, and being proved right, and having the confidence to act even more decisively in the future.

It’s not a question of taking decisions decisively by bluff, tossing a coin, but from understanding. Obviously the help that the party can give with this to individual comrades is absolutely vital. We need decisiveness, but sometimes that courage is also expressed in the need to know when to hold back, when not to act.

Cannon, in Letters from Prison, addressed this. He pointed out that program, as always, came first, and we don’t take it lightly.

But to stand firmly by the program, does not authorise us to repeat the same active political slogans all the time with the same degree of emphasis. That would reduce the art of politics to memory work and as the Old Man [i.e., Trotsky] once remarked, make every sectarian a master politician. The art of politics consists in knowing what to do next; that is, how to apply the program of Marxism to the specific situation of the day.

We’re an ambitious party, and that was one of the “four features” in Jim’s report I mentioned. We have big goals, goals that we strive to meet.

And ambition is important also in individuals – not the ego-tripping type of ambition, but the ambition that can be good, if it’s directed in the right way. We do set ourselves big goals, and the way to fulfill that ambition in the context of the party is to help others to lead!

A supportive atmosphere

We need a comradely tone in the party and Resistance, in all our relations with other comrades. We aim to assist other comrades, and we shouldn’t let our own big ego or our big mouth get in the way.

We have to improve the level and tone of communication between comrades. We have to talk more, especially politics. And we have to be constructive in our discussions. This period will require enormous mutual support between all comrades. We can’t afford any backbiting, sniping, cliquishness, or gossip. We have to move right away from general discussions that dump on individual comrades – unfortunately there’s been far too much of that in the revolutionary movement. The discussion has to be on how to go forward, how to solve political problems, how to help each other, how to build the party.

Trotsky wrote about the tone required by leaders:

A patient, friendly, to a certain point pedagogical attitude on the part of the central committee and its members towards the rank and file, including the objectors and the discontented…

Methods of psychological “terrorism”, including a haughty or sarcastic manner of answering or treating every criticism or doubt – it is namely this journalistic or “intellectualistic” manner which is insufferable to workers and condemns them to silence.”

Of course, critics are not always right, so there will be vigorous debate, but a political atmosphere and the correct, that is, comradely, tone will ensure the right outcomes of the debates.

A political atmosphere

We have to raise the level of political discussion in the party and Resistance, at branch meetings, at executives, in national bodies. We’ll need a political membership and a political atmosphere to sustain the party in this period and find our way forward. It will be politics that recruits, trains, and educates the new generation, but even more so it’s politics that retains the old generation, and if we can’t keep the cadre we’ve got, it’s going to be hard to bring on the new.

There’ll be an increased importance in the period ahead for the leaderships of both the party and Resistance to spend the time in political discussion, initiating the political leadership of our organisations.

We all have a duty to educate ourselves. The importance of self-development and reading can’t be stressed enough. Trotsky had a good little quote on a poster that I’ve got: “Young people, study politics!” We have to study politics, and develop ourselves theoretically, that is, we have to assimilate Marxist theory and, above all, the Marxist method of understanding and changing the world. Without such an understanding we won’t be able to chart a correct course forward for the party and the working class.

We have to have concern for other comrades. We know we can’t build a utopian model of the future socialist society within the party – the party is a tool to make the revolution. But there’s no need to make this shitty capitalist society any worse than it is. The party won’t be able to be a model of the future, but we should do our best. Wherever we can and our resources permit, we need to encourage structures, relations that make life a little easier for comrades in this lousy system.

We can’t level out all the inequalities we come into the party with, but some things can go in the right direction – our pledges and sustainer, for example, we encourage what comrades can afford. Members who gain skills, professions, good jobs should be motivated to place their skills at the disposal of the party, to see their assets and advantages as something that can help the party, not something for their individual advancement. Our members should be motivated to gain skills and qualifications not to bolster their own ego, or for the pursuit of money or luxuries, but in order to advance the struggle.

We can help our unemployed members find jobs. We can find support for comrades with special difficulties. Sometimes we’ll need to support high-school comrades who are forced out of home by hostile parents, find ways to support them, help them finish their studies if they want to. Members often live in party households out of economic necessity, let’s make virtues of that necessity, make them mutually supporting, special places to live. We can organise assistance for comrades with political study, with reading, with lending books. We can help comrades develop new skills. We are concerned about our members’ health, their happiness. We need to give them social support and help them fit in.

The party’s a special type of organisation already, founded on human solidarity, made up of people linked by political conviction, of all ages, all backgrounds. We’re linked through fighting a common struggle.

What to avoid

OK, that’s a fair list of some of the features of our revolutionary party, the things we need in the party and in our members. Now I’ll just very briefly list some of the errors and dangers in our organisational work.

We can be formalistic. It’s not automatic that once you set up a committee that it will carry out its work, that it will take the right decision. That’s something we have to be conscious of all the time.

We can be routinistic. We can stop thinking, we can just go plodding along the same old path, not being flexible, just sticking with routine methods.

We can be sloppy. A lackadaisical, slip-shod attitude towards party tasks is the mark of a petty-bourgeois dilettante rather than a proletarian revolutionary. “Slovenliness and slackness are Menshevik traits,” Cannon correctly observed in The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. Things like punctuality, tidy offices, being meticulous about carrying out assignments – all those things are important.

Another danger that we have to be aware of is apathy. We can tend to let our morale slip, lose our drive. We can’t afford to rest on our laurels, even if we’ve made big sacrifices in the last year, or last month, or last week, achieved great things in the past. The future’s ahead of us. We have to be conscious of the future.

And finally, too often we hear comrades indulging in a bout of whinging. Expressions of whinging and pessimism can project onto others your own personal disgruntlement, and disorient new members, other comrades.

Well, I’m sure comrades could list many more of these type of faults, this is just a little listing.

Factions

Reihana described very thoroughly the synthesis of democracy and centralism that our organisation requires, and some of the structures, responsibilities and rights, including factions. Within that framework I just want to briefly mention some harmful types of structures or tendencies that can develop, such as factionalism.

We defend the right to form factions, but are also aware of the potential dangers. The formation of a faction is a serious step, one that ought not to be undertaken lightmindedly. A faction should be formed only upon a clear platform, which is accepted by all its members.

The formation of unprincipled factions, in which political differences are glossed over in order to attain a larger number of votes on the basis of a fictitious unity, is a violation of principled socialist politics. Unprincipled factions are a direct importation into the party of alien class influences, namely the confusionist numbers game of bourgeois parliamentarism.

But contrary to the mythology peddled by the Stalinists in the past, the existence of factions is totally within the tradition of the Leninist organisational principles. Trotsky, in 1939, wrote of the Bolshevik Party’s attitude to factions:

The entire history of Bolshevism was one of the free struggle of tendencies and factions. In different periods, Bolshevism passed through the struggle of pro- and anti-boycottists, “Otzovists”, ultimatists, conciliationists, partisans of “proletarian culture”, partisans and opponents of the armed insurrection in October, partisans and opponents of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, left-communists, partisans and opponents of the official military policy, etc, etc.

A revolutionary party can no more get along without the occasional appearance of factions than it can get along without free and open discussion among its members, for the possibility of differences developing to the point where factions are formed is implicit in every discussion of the party’s political line. It is, of course, preferable if differences can be settled short of the point of factional struggle, and this has very much been the case with us in recent years, where we’ve had a high degree of consensus and political homogeneity, but when disagreements are too deep for this to occur, then factions become a necessary part of the process by which the party determines its political line.

A faction which is publicly declared to the party as a whole, which attempts to persuade the party rather than to manipulate it behind the backs of the membership, which conducts its efforts within the framework prescribed by the National Conference and authorised party bodies, and which gives the party the degree of loyalty that is expected of every party member, is thoroughly in keeping with the norms of a democratic-centralist organisation.

What is not in the Leninist tradition is the formation of secret factions, with secret membership, secret leaders, secret documents, and secret discussion. Secret factions block the normal democratic centralist functioning of the party and heighten the danger that political differences will lead to a split in the party. Secret factions set forces in motion that cannot be controlled by their instigators.

When the questions around which a faction was formed have been resolved or superseded, it is normal for the faction to dissolve. Otherwise a danger of permanent factionalism is created. A permanent faction is a grouping which stays together regardless of significant political changes. It assumes that on any and every new question there will be differences along the old lines. It first discusses every new question within the permanent faction before taking it into party bodies. It works out its whole position first, submerging any disagreements that may divide it internally. It thus breeds unprincipled combinationism.

A permanent faction also serves as a breeding ground for cultism. Since it is not based on principled political agreement, an arbiter must emerge within the group to settle any differences – the leader exercising veto power to preserve the common front against the factional adversary.

Permanent factionalism leads to unprincipled manoeuvring and perpetual factional warfare. It turns the party into a factional jungle, organised vertically. It is the permanent factions, organised from the top down, which have the real discussions on all matters that count. The elected leadership bodies lose their general authority and are reduced to meeting grounds of the heads of the warring factions. The membership loses its control over the leadership and the party loses both its internal democracy and its centralism.

Cliques

In reality a permanent faction ceases to be a faction at all. It is no longer a grouping organised for a specific and therefore temporary purpose, but a gang of people who consider themselves “like-minded”, who are comfortable with one another, who are against someone else. In other words it is a clique. A clique is based upon matters essentially unrelated to real political questions: on friendship, wounded feelings, back-scratching, mutual likes and dislikes. It cannot attempt to win the whole party because it is exclusive rather than inclusive; its members do not think “we” and mean the party, they think of themselves as “we” and the rest of the party as “they”.

A clique is the very opposite of a principled faction. Whereas a principled faction announces its existence and basis to the party, a clique is by its very nature secretive and its “program” is unspeakable. Whereas a faction deals with the organisational question of leadership only to defend its political views, for a clique political questions are always subordinate to the “organisational question”, of whether the clique’s members had their feelings injured. A faction is a temporary grouping, to be dissolved into the party once the entire party has ruled on the issues in dispute, but a clique is a permanent mutual-assistance society. As James P Cannon put it in The Struggle for a Proletarian Party:

Cliques and cliquism and permanent factions are abhorrent to proletarian revolutionists who seek the realisation of their socialist aims through a workers’ mass movement led by a mass party. The only permanent formation that can claim our allegiance is the party.

Cliquism is a cancer in a revolutionary party. Because the clique rather than the party is the formation to which its members give their loyalty, a clique inevitably becomes a transmission belt by which hostile class pressures are exerted on the party.

Party democracy

No leadership of any party has ever been infallible. The best leaders are those who are most capable of learning from the experiences of the entire party and the current stage of the class struggle and the mood of the working class and using this knowledge to determine whatever changes may be necessary in the party’s program of activity. But there is no way in which the leadership can obtain reliable feedback from the ranks if all levels of the party do not feel free to express their criticisms when the line or the method of implementing it appears to conflict with the requirements of the class struggle.

Our party is a voluntary union of revolutionaries, which solves its problems and sets its course by pooling its experiences and ideas and arriving at a collective decision. We join the party because we realise that a union of revolutionaries is more effective than the sum total of the efforts of individuals would be. But a party lacking internal democracy sacrifices one of the most important benefits of such a union – the opportunity to chart its political course on the basis of the collective knowledge of the leadership available to it.

There are many instructive experiences of inner-party disputes and factional struggles from the past history of the Bolshevik party, of the US SWP and the Fourth International, and of our own party as well. It’s very useful for comrades to study these.

In recent years, there have been very few major differences in the party. There’s been no factions or factional behaviour since the early 1980s.

But we need to be familiar with some of the negative experiences. We’ve learned to handle them better than most parties.

We also need to be conscious about cliquish behaviour, some of the symptoms of cliques, even if there’s not a fully-formed clique in the sense I’ve outlined above – feelings of arrogance and individualism; exclusiveness in social functions; gossip networks, that bypass the party or Resistance structures and formal channels.

Resistance and the party

We’re all very much aware of the unique relationship that exists between the DSP and Resistance. This aspect of building the revolutionary movement is something that we’ve developed better and further than any other party we think – we could teach others a lot. For example, the experiences of the Bolsheviks was fairly limited on this.

The DSP is committed to building an independent revolutionary youth organisation. Such an organisation can attract young workers and students who are not yet prepared to commit themselves to the Bolshevik perspective of becoming lifetime revolutionaries, but who are ready and eager to participate in revolutionary political action around a broad range of social and political issues. An independent revolutionary youth organisation enables young rebels to develop as revolutionary cadre, by having the opportunity to learn through their own experiences. In such an organisation they can more easily acquire the political and organisational experience necessary for them to become members of the revolutionary socialist party. The youth organisation is thus a valuable reservoir of recruits for the revolutionary party.

The youth organisation and the party are not two revolutionary parties on different planes, but rather two organisations with different roles in building the revolutionary Marxist movement. This means that the party avoids the contradictions involved in trying to be simultaneously a party of professional revolutionaries and an organisation that can incorporate young people who are relatively new to revolutionary politics. The party is therefore able to maintain more uniform norms regarding the discipline, commitment, political maturity, and theoretical level.

In its political resolutions and actions Resistance has declared itself in political solidarity with the DSP. It sees the DSP as the essential programmatic nucleus of the future mass revolutionary workers’ party that will be needed to lead the Australian socialist revolution. Resistance has therefore committed itself to building the DSP. The DSP supports and maintains fraternal relations with Resistance.

The DSP supports the organisational form Resistance has adopted – that is, a broadly based independent Marxist youth organisation. Resistance is organisationally independent of the DSP. It has its own conferences, adopts its own political line, decides on its own campaigns and priorities of work and elects its own branch and national leaderships. But Resistance has a unique political relationship with the DSP. While the DSP and Resistance are separate and independent organisations with different roles to play, they are part of the same revolutionary Marxist movement.

The DSP seeks to collaborate with and aid Resistance in its goal of building a mass revolutionary socialist youth organisation. In order to maximise this collaboration, the DSP encourages all its decision-making bodies to have Resistance representatives attend their meetings either as observers or as participants with equal speaking rights.

The DSP seeks to convince Resistance members of the necessity of building a revolutionary party and win them to the perspective of becoming professional revolutionaries by joining the DSP. This can best be done by those party members who are also members of Resistance.

The role of party members in Resistance can be summarised as follows:

1. To loyally build Resistance;
2. To educate Resistance members in the Marxist program;
3. To be exemplary in their level of political activity and in observing the organisational norms of Resistance;
4. To help develop the leadership needed to carry Resistance forward;
5. To win Resistance members to the perspective of becoming members of the DSP.

Party members do not have an automatic right to become members of Resistance. The party makes them available for admission to Resistance, and the work they do there is party work. The party therefore has the right to regulate the activity its members carry out in Resistance. Party members in Resistance are subject to the party’s discipline; for these members the discipline of the youth organisation is subordinate to the DSP’s discipline. This means that party members in Resistance, even when they do not function as an organised fraction, still conduct their work in the youth organisation under the overall direction of the party. They are obliged, like all other party members, to loyally defend the party’s program and decisions to members of Resistance. This also means that political questions that are under discussion in the party may not be raised by party members in Resistance unless authorisation to do so is given by the party. Any other procedure would interfere with democratic discussion in the party, since the whole party membership would not be able to participate in the discussion.

So Resistance is a training ground. Resistance doesn’t select its members in the same way as the party. It’s easy to join. We want consistent activists, but we welcome any level of activity. We don’t set off-putting standards demanded of everyone. We try to politically motivate and inspire Resistance members to a higher level of activity, to the level of commitment that will qualify them for admission to party membership.

Internationalism

Finally, we have to stress that we’re an internationalist party and an internationalist movement.

We’ve hammered this theme very thoroughly throughout the Resistance conference. I’m sure all comrades understand it well. But it’s something we have to reaffirm constantly.

We stress that we engage in solidarity because it’s our duty, it’s an international class struggle, and oppression and injustice in any corner of the globe is our concern.

We engage in solidarity also because it’s in the interest of the struggle here. It trains and educates our comrades here, and workers and others too. The issues mobilise and recruit new activists here, and it inoculates our organisation against chauvinism and narrowness.

The Australian working class is an international working class, with a large percentage of migrants, with their international concerns, and we have to build on the basis of that.

It is impossible to be a revolutionary Marxist without at the same time being an internationalist. The program of socialism is an international program, and no narrowly national party, no matter how well-intentioned, can hope to lead the working class of its own country to socialism.

We see ourselves as part of an international working-class revolutionary movement too. Our contact and links with revolutionaries in other countries has been invaluable in the formation and development of the DSP.

At certain stages in the development of the struggle and the development of revolutionary parties around the world, we would participate in an international organisation.

The Third International in Lenin and Trotsky’s time, for example, was obviously an important development that furthered the class struggle and aided the development of revolutionary parties around the world.

The Fourth International, however, founded in 1938, is a much more problematic organisation. We were part of it throughout the 1970s, and we left the FI in the mid-1980s. Our assessment of our experiences in the Fourth International, and the reasons why we left it in 1985, are set forth in the pamphlet, The Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International, and in the exchange of correspondence we’ve had with them since then [see The Activist, Vol. 2, No. 6, July 1992].

Some of the problems of the Fourth International and the parties that affiliated to it included the fact that the parties were very small, often without any base in the working class and oppressed, without any real authority, yet many of them certainly had illusions of grandeur, and they adopted rigid structures and statutes for the international body as though they led mass working-class parties around the world.

This attitude was not as bad as most of the Trotskyist sects. The Fourth International made many mistakes and had lots of faults but was still a lot better than some of the sects we’re familiar with. Nevertheless, it still suffered from the sectarianism unfortunately endemic in the small isolated Trotskyist groups.

Cominternism

Very often the leadership of the FI has tried to impose a global line on parties, and intervene in parties around the world. They had a conception of democratic centralism operating on an international scale in much the same way it is applied by national parties – what we have referred to as Cominternism. That is they conceived of the FI as a centralised world party, like the Comintern. But the Comintern, in contrast to the FI, had a leadership that enjoyed enormous respect and political authority because it had led a revolution. And, in Lenin’s day, that leadership was very cautious in how it used its authority to lead the international organisation.

We learned early on the necessity for an independent party, a party that is able to stand on its own, think things out for itself.

The most fundamental difference between the situations facing national parties and an international organisation of revolutionary parties stems from the uneven unfolding of the world revolutionary process. Although the objective conditions for socialism exist on a world scale, socialist revolutions occur within national boundaries, and the stage of the class struggle can vary widely even between neighbouring countries.

To lead the workers and other oppressed of any country in the overthrow of capitalism requires a party that is not only internationalist but also “home grown” – a party that knows the thoughts of the country’s working class because it is based in that class. It requires a party that at crucial points can stand on its own and have the confidence to make decisions because it has learned through its own experience and has trained and selected a leadership in which it is confident.

The Leninist concept of how an international of revolutionary parties should operate is quite different from the monolithism of the Comintern under Stalin or the caricature of that model provided by some of the Maoist sects, and is different from the conception of most of the Trotskyist sects, and the Fourth International as well. This was laid down very clearly for us in the 1930s by James P. Cannon:

… we don’t believe parties which will permit proconsuls to be imposed upon them as leaders are worth a damn. We don’t think a revolutionary party anywhere amounts to much until it is able to throw up a cadre of indigenous leaders, who have grown out of its struggles, who are known to its members and trusted by them. You can’t monkey with the question of leadership.

We came out of the Comintern, as I said, and we remembered the crimes of the Comintern. “Socialism in one country” was not the only crime. One of the greatest crimes was the destruction of the self-acting life of the individual communist parties. The Stalinist Comintern overthrew the indigenous leaders everywhere. Where they couldn’t overthrow them directly, they would conspire against them, set faction on foot, with secret backing, to undermine and finally get rid of all the independent characters in the leadership.

Cannon’s relations with Trotsky in this regard are set down in his History of American Trotskyism, and also in his talk “Internationalism and the SWP”, reprinted in Speeches to the Party and which was reprinted as a pamphlet. They were very clear lessons, and we took them to heart too.

In the early 1980s the current leadership of the US SWP headed by Jack Barnes began doing to us what Cannon would not have accepted from Trotsky, and we reaffirmed our understanding of the need for an independent party. This was one big component of the US SWP’s sectarian degeneration in the 1980s. They tried to intervene in our party and challenge our leadership team when they saw we were thinking for ourselves, standing on our own feet. We broke off relations with them – we had learned well the lessons from Cannon about Cominternism, and applied them to the US SWP.

But we are still the most internationalist in our political outlook – providing solidarity to struggles; reaching out to and trying to foster links with fellow revolutionaries in our region and around the world; learning from the experiences and struggles of other comrades around the world.

* * *

I hope this outline will help comrades to a better understanding of our organisational concepts and methods, and how to be a better revolutionary socialist today.

Many of these concepts would already be familiar to comrades. Many are truisms, they’re obvious, but all too often have been ignored or breached in the revolutionary movement in the past. And I hope this talk will have encouraged comrades to go to the sources, to read, to study the history of the movement on this question.

The organisation question is a political question of the highest order. In the history of our party and Resistance, it’s been key. Our seriousness on this has been central to our formation, our growth, our existence.

The right approach on these questions will be essential for the development of a mass revolutionary socialist party and youth movement that’s essential for bringing about fundamental social change here and around the world.