Marxist Parties Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Karl Marx said little about the political party as such. Marx assumed that the party was the essential means of expression of the proletariat, the class he saw as having a vocation to usher in a new world. In the first chapter of his 1848 Communist Manifesto, Marx stated that the organization of the proletariat into a class “that is to say into a party” is continually being upset but continually remade. In Marx’s theory the proletariat needed to be aware of its own interests, and this would be the work of the political party. Ultimately, the party organization would tip the balance of forces in favor of the working class and of revolution. As to the program of the party, this was equally vague and is confined to a few points in the Communist Manifesto.

But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Marx appeared to have provided the burgeoning workers’ parties with a powerful theory about the nature of industrial society and of the forces that would lead to the socialist revolution and to establishment of the reign of the working class. These parties had extensive organizations associated with them, including unions, cooperatives, newspapers, and self-help societies. With only a few exceptions in Europe (including Britain and other countries of the British Empire), these parties rose on the back of the new industrial working class coming into existence. They expressed a belief that there would be a proletarian “revolution” and that it would be socialist.

By the 1900s, however, this belief had come under attack; the principal parting of the ways came with the Russian Revolution. On the one side were the mass parties of industrial Europe that saw parliamentary systems, human rights, and above all reform as the way forward, and on the other were the Marxist-Leninist communist parties that endorsed the revolutionary vocation. For the Western European parties, the idea of revolution was being diluted by the 1920s, turning the term from “violent uprising” to “big but benevolent change,” and most had abandoned it altogether by the 1950s.

Communism

What are usually called Marxist parties today are the communist parties that signed up to the “21 Conditions” of membership of the Third “Communist” International (founded by Lenin after the Russian Revolution in 1919). These were revolutionary organizations run by the Moscow Third International (and then directly by the Soviet Union). They were, as befits “revolutionary” parties with a quasi-military discipline, hierarchical (the top being in Moscow), run by a caste of professional revolutionaries (permanent employees of the party), and secretive. The party core was the professional apparatus, but the lowest unit was the “cell,” a group of members that would be organized in the workplace (the emphasis was on the industrial, not electoral, struggle) or district, and they were given orders from above through the centralized command structure known as “democratic centralism. ”This organization was well adapted to infiltration (of unions, for example) and to clandestine operations under, for example, dictatorships, when other parties were eliminated. These parties were set up to make possible the control of the state and to pervade civil society once they gained power. Their discipline and hierarchy were both the image of the future communist society and the means of controlling and running such societies.

Not the least of the ironies of communism is that its history is at odds with the direction predicted by Marx. Russia, in 1917, was not an industrial society; the communist parties did best in peasant and underdeveloped societies and made little progress in advanced western countries. In the mid-twentieth century, Finland, Italy, and France were the only industrial societies that had mass communist parties. There they found support in industries such as steel, mining, and metalworking (destined to decline in the late twentieth century) and in rural areas such as Alantejo, central France, and northern Finland. However, there were large communist parties where the system had been imposed by the Red Army (in Eastern Europe) and also in the third world (China, Vietnam, and Cuba, for example).

Two further splits among communist parties must be mentioned. The Sino-Soviet split of 1963 led to the creation of “Maoist” parties of the same organizational form but taking their orders from Mao Zedong and the Communist Party in Peking. The Trotskyites belonged to parties set up by the devotees of Joseph Stalin’s most important rival in the USSR, Leon Trotsky, and these parties were, if anything, more disciplined than the communist parties the Trotskyites despised. Their view, not obvious given Trotsky’s complicity in early communism, was that if Trotsky had been in control rather than Stalin, the workers’ utopia would have materialized rather than the Stalinism of the USSR. Trotskyites remained a marginal irritant on the far left, usually trying to outflank the communist parties in revolutionary zeal in strike movements and uprisings, but they did have some electoral success (notably in Sri Lanka) and have remained as a distinctive—albeit small— component of the far left in many European countries.

Marxist Parties Today

With the collapse of communism and the end of the world communist movement, most communist parties have dissolved or transformed themselves into left wing defenders of welfare and workers’ rights against globalization and the advance of the neoliberal ideology. This group of parties, among which can be counted the French Communist Party, the Portuguese Communist Party, the Italian Rifondazione Communists, and a number of Indian parties, refer back to the work of Marx but have little of the revolutionary ardor that animated the Moscow-run parties. Other parties reference Marx as a theorist and the predictions made in Marx’s works (notably about “crisis”) but those, too, are marginal aspects of current politics. Marx’s value as a prophet seems, with the collapse of the socialist systems, to be played out. Former communist parties of the communist bloc, when confronted with free elections, had to change radically to avoid compete obliteration and retained little of their Marxist origins.

There are still some other groups for whom the Marxist outlook is important (notably the French Socialist Party, ant globalization movements, and some green parties), but these are more moral condemnations of the capitalist system than plans of action. Maoist parties have been prone (more than other Marxists) to splits and rivalries but have continued in some societies as splinter or terrorist parties (like Shining Path in Peru) and in others as critical minorities within the left. Only perhaps Cuba and North Korea remain as authentic communist regimes, although in China the party remains in control despite a move away from central planning and state control of the economy.

Bibliography:

Bull, M. J. and Heywood, P., eds. Western European Communist Parties after the Revolutions of 1989. New York: Macmillan, 1994.
Conway, D. A Farewell to Marx. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Pelican, 1987.
Kelly, G. ed. The New European Left. London: Fabian Society, 1999.
Kitschelt, H. “Left-Libertarian Parties.” World Politics 40, no. 2 (January 1988): 194–234.
Marx, K. Communist Manifesto. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982.
March, L., and C. Mudde. “What’s Left of the Radical Left?” Comparative European Politics 2005, no. 3 (2005): 23–49.
Marcou, L. L’Internationale après Staline. Paris: Graset, 1979. Sassoon, D. One Hundred Years of Socialism. London: Fontana, 1997.
Sferza, S. “What is Left of the Left?” Daedalus 128, no. 2 (1999): 101–126.
Waller, M. Democratic Centralism. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1981.
Wright, A. Socialisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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