Proletarian parliamentarism
Revolution at the ballot box?
Joseph Choonara, the editor of International Socialism, the journal of the Socialist Workers Party, has written an essay entitled “Revolutionaries and elections”.
He writes:
“Up to the point when a revolutionary insurrection can destroy the capitalist state, socialists should seek to engage with elections and, where possible, stand candidates. This is not due to any illusion in parliamentary reform. The role of revolutionaries sitting in parliament is to propagandise for socialism, to agitate, raising the combativity and confidence of the working class, and to assist in the construction of mass revolutionary parties based primarily on extra-parliamentary activity. The ultimate goal is to dissolve parliament, as part of a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class and their institutions, replacing it with a far richer form of democracy. This new form of democracy would be born of mass working-class struggle, which, at its high points, can throw up workers’ councils”. [1]
Before this paragraph, Choonara quotes from Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, written in 1920, which contains a critique of anti-parliamentarism. In the context of the working class taking political power, the quote contains the phrase “disperse the bourgeois parliament and every other type of reactionary institution”. [2]
But a few decades later, after the defeat of European fascism which emerged as a response by the bourgeoisie to the rise of the workers’ movement, Italian Communist leader Togliatti wrote:
“An analogous process is being carried out, as regards Parliament, to that carried out in its historical period, regarding, in general, democratic liberties, and their application and development. The bourgeoisie made use of these liberties to assert its power and become the ruling class. However, when democratic liberties began to be utilised by the workers to develop their organisation and give life to a socialist movement, and when this movement gradually became stronger, then the leading bourgeois groupings took to saying that democratic liberties had to be limited, controlled, reduced, and so in reality they did.
“Something similar happens for Parliament too. The bourgeoisie exalts parliamentarism as long as it succeeds in keeping Parliament to the character of the representation of an oligarchy. It considers it with distrust and suspicion, when, through universal suffrage and the principle of proportional representation, important opposition forces, having a programme of profound transformations of the economic and social order, advance upon the parliamentary scene.” [2]
It follows from this that a majority in parliament can be won by the proletariat in its quest to become the ruling class. Parliament should not be dissolved in the course of a workers’ revolution, this is a threat which comes from bourgeois-backed fascists in alliance with sections of the state apparatus.
Revolutionaries as the best reformists
Choonara goes on to say:
“Parliament should nonetheless be used by revolutionaries in the way Lenin suggests precisely because the mass of workers, in non-revolutionary times and in parliamentary democracies, have illusions in parliament and in the potential for parliamentary reform. This makes parliamentarians important tribunes for socialism, and parliament and elections useful platforms for socialists.”
It is not merely the case that representation in parliament is a means of championing extra-parliamentary struggle. Legislative reforms can be won, even before the formation of a workers’ government. In this sense, workers do not have illusions in parliament.
Furthermore, a socialist republic will need an elected legislature to counter moves towards bureaucratisation from within and counter-revolution from without. This entails constitutional provisions for the freedom of association and expression, and regular elections.
Choonara goes on to say that ”revolutionaries should stand on a “minimum programme”, advocating mass workers’ struggle to achieve far-reaching reforms that begin to push against the logic of the capitalist system.” (Emphasis added.)
Talk of a programme from the SWP is positive, but the programme cannot be:
1. Strikes leading to workers’ councils
2. ?
3. Communism
Nor can it merely be a list of immediate demands of the kind included in an election manifesto.
A minimum programme in Britain has to commit to establishing a constituent assembly and creating a democratic republic. Not because this is an unfinished task of the bourgeois revolution, but because it is the state-form through which the working class can best advance its interests.
This is an intervention!
Choonara outlines three types of revolutionary electoral intervention:
“(1) formations with an explicitly reformist orientation in which revolutionaries seek to intervene; (2) formations in which revolutionaries seek to create a “united front of a special type”, preserving the independence of revolutionaries within a broader reformist electoral coalition; (3) “strategically non-delimited” formations that claim to go beyond old formulae that distinguish between reformist and revolutionary organisations, and in which revolutionaries often seek to retain an inbuilt hegemony.”
The first is entryist or interventionist – the involvement of revolutionaries is not enthusiastically welcomed by reformist leadership.
The second involves a formal coalition (the SWP in Respect, for example).
The third is preferable but not always possible: revolutionary leadership in a mass multi-tendency party.
At present, revolutionaries can work with reformists on a united front in the form of a workers’ list of candidates for the general election: the SWP should consider rejoining TUSC and again working alongside the Socialist Party.
People Before Profit as a model
International Socialism has published a reply to Joseph Choonara’s essay from Paul Murphy, a member of parliament in the Republic of Ireland for People Before Profit, a multi-tendency workers party which organises across the island.
Murphy’s response to Choonara is more about the party question than how the constitutional transition to socialism takes place. But these issues are inextricably linked, in my view.
He is completely correct here:
“Choonara, seemingly reflecting the traditional opposition of the Socialist Workers Party to “permanent factions” (apparently meaning factions lasting longer than the three months before the annual party conference) appears to consider this as a negative. Yet, it is absolutely inevitable that there will be different trends of opinion within genuinely broad parties. If these different trends are not facilitated through organised political expression – networks, caucuses or platforms – they will express themselves in much less healthy ways: cliques and leadership groupings.” [4]
Murphy writes of a viable split from Labour in Britain:
“If revolutionaries have the chance to be in at the ground floor, with the right to maintain their organisation and publications and to argue for their politics, would it not make sense to do so?”
Coalitions and ministries
The longer term challenges which a new “left of Labour” workers’ party would face include the conditions of parliamentary support for a Labour government or Labour-led coalition in opposition to the return of a Tory government.
The chances of the votes of left of Labour MPs being decisive appear remote, but the very idea of this leverage existing would create a divide between revolutionary electoral intervention and left-reformism. This is not a familiar situation for the left in Britain as this divide has not been manifested electorally since the 1940s.
In the Republic of Ireland, if People Before Profit grows the number of its parliamentary delegates, it will face the challenge of coalitionism and the temptation of ministerialism.
The challenge of coalitionism is about balancing, on the one hand, the expectation on the part of class-conscious workers and progressive allies that a left party will kick out the right, and on the other hand, the reality of governing within the capitalist state which, if it does not involve going from immediate demands to the implementation of the minimum programme, will default to managing the capitalist system for the capitalists.
The temptation of ministerialism is that the possibility of realising immediate demands and implementing reforms which are part of the minimum programme can draw even the best revolutionary into association with failed strategies of gradualism and reformism – bringing the more radical workers’ party into coalition with the bourgeoisie just like a bourgeois workers’ party when in government.
The point at which formal coalitions and the taking of ministries should be seriously considered by revolutionaries is if there’s a genuine prospect of implementing the minimum programme. If this is not the case, then it may be better to exercise a strategy of patience rather than fall into the trap of junior partnership when it is not essential to blocking the right.
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1. Joseph Choonara, Revolutionaries and elections • International Socialism
2. V.I. Lenin “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder
3. Palmiro Togliatti - Parliament and the Struggle for Socialism
4. Paul Murphy, Learning to swim: revolutionaries, broad parties and elections