If you don’t have a particular predilection for plucky little left-wing groups, even the larger of them, you might allow yourself a quiet chuckle when reading of the inner party difficulties currently being experienced within the SWP. (New Statesman 10/5/14). But it’s no laughing matter. Because every time a progressive party, group, faction or tendency implodes, it raises the desperately critical question of just what sort of organisation, if any, is required to shift mankind from a system of private ownership to one of social ownership. A grim statistic issued recently from one of the leading NGO’s claimed that the wealthiest 1300 billionaires held 96% of the world’s wealth while the remaining seven billion of us are left to scratch around for a share of the remaining 4%.

Or, in the words of the Occupy Movement, the one percent have seized control of the world’s wealth at the expense of the ninety nine percent. Whichever way you wish to phrase it, these are truly shocking statistics. If ever there were need for some form of revolutionary organisation it surely must be now. But the perennial question: what sort of organisation is required?

The SWP, whose defining ideological premise is that the former Soviet Union was not, as orthodox Trotskyism would have it, some form of distorted, deformed or bureaucratic workers state, and definitely not, as the pro-Soviet communist Parties would contest, some sort of worker’s paradise, but in fact was still a capitalist state that had taken a state capitalist form with a fully functioning capitalist economy. This is no small inner party detail. If the SWP was and is correct, and the Soviet Union was not a significant step forward, not a project worthy of defending, then the question arises: just what would a transitional socialist state look like? If the SWP are correct then there ought to be little or no difference between the former Soviet Union with its seventy year state control of all major resources and industries, and the current regimes of Yeltsin and Putin with their network of billionaire gangster oligarchs and privatised industries? To me, this imagined thesis of capitalist continuity is patently absurd.

No, I still believe the SWP has got the whole Soviet Union thing arse up, and that the former Soviet Union, for all its blatant bureaucracy and criminality, did in fact represent humanity’s first serious attempt at socialising the means of production. All too often the Party substituted itself for the working class and a deep political alienation set in as a result. When a series of crisis emerged in the mid 1980’s barely a Soviet citizen raised a hand in defence of the Soviet state. That alone tells its own story. Yes, humanity’s very first attempt to socialise the means of production, magnificently heroic at times and quite banal at others, ended in abject failure, but this ought not to tempt us to misinterpret what was attempted and what was achieved.

So, three widely divergent interpretations of twentieth century history, with many other contending interpretations thrown into the mix as well. But they should remain just that interpretations. They need not, ought not be the basis of a revolutionary party. Whichever interpretation may be closest to reality is yet to be determined, and anyway, it’s the winners that write history. But one significant result of this ideological divergence has been to produce a plethora of warring revolutionary groups each tenaciously clinging to their cherished version of history. Dozens of organisations, each professing to have the definitive truth, each denouncing the other as petty bourgeois philistines or worse. And each, over time, replicating the same inner party mess; endless factions, splits and denunciations.

Whatever one’s views of the SWP, its current impasse over rape and sexual harassment allegations ought not be a cause for cheer. Right or wrong, there can be no doubting the sincerity of the SWP to nudge/drag/lead humankind in a socialist direction. And their current difficulties only raises yet again that thorniest of questions: what type of organisation is best? Two things seem relatively certain. Firstly, all left-wing political parties and movements operating within capitalist societies will be a ready target for State infiltration. Once infiltrated, they become easy prey for agents to ferment debilitating divisions and demoralising splits. Secondly, quite irrespective of state infiltration, humans, being what we are, will sooner or later start fragmenting over matters both big and small. We’ve seen it for centuries in religious organisations and socialist political groups have merely replicated this tendency. It’s in our DNA. Or as Mao would poetically put it, ‘one inevitable divides into two’.

Lenin was fully conversant with this human foible. In response he advocated the concept of ‘democratic centralism’, whereby the party members would have their say in a designated period prior to a party congress and then the contending positions would be thrashed out and then put to a binding vote. All would be bound by majority decision. Sounds wonderful, but as the messy business of life proceeds, particularly under the brutish sway of the capitalist state, centralism within the revolutionary party inevitably trumps inner party democracy. It’s happened in every left-wing political party in every country, on every continent. It seems Mao’s little philosophical dictum simply cannot be denied. Fractions, factions, tendencies, inner party intrigues and viscous splits seem inevitable. The revolutionary political party seems doomed before it even starts.
How to move beyond the impasse? Is the SWP implosion yet one more example of a fatal flaw in the ‘democratic centralist’ model? That is one conclusion, but we could choose to draw an altogether different one. Sure, between state infiltration and self-destruction all revolutionary parties will be plagued by division, but is it not the task of a determined leadership to persevere and navigate the choppy waters. The road to human liberation was never going to be a walk in the park and inner party trauma is just one of the trials and tribulations to be conquered. This is the default position of all revolutionary parties. Jettison the anti-party elements and carry on to the Promised Land. The glorious revolution must not be jeopardized by petty bourgeois squabbling.

Well, after a century or more of not so glorious progress, it ought to be time at least to pose the question of revolutionary organisation afresh. Of course, this has been done many times before and the result has been either a dogmatic retreat back into ‘democratic-centralism’, with a heavy emphasis on centralism, or a rapid descent into the amorphous ‘progressive movement’ where focus rapidly becomes dissipated into a thousand single issue campaigns and top down leadership is replaced with various forms of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism. ‘Movementism’, as some internal critics of the SWP leadership like to call it.

The historical answer to the conundrum of political organisation may in fact lay not in an either/or position but rather by embracing a ‘by any means necessary’ approach. By that we might include everything from small secret cell armed struggle right through the spectrum of political organisation to that of a broad front mass movement. At one moment the emphasis may be on a mass movement with a thousand competing trends, at other times, in different circumstances, the emphasis may shift to a more disciplined centralism.

Popular Fronts, united fronts, mass democratic parties or centrally controlled ‘Leninist’ style parties: they might all be regarded as weapons in the armoury. They will certainly jostle for supremacy, but more likely be forced, reluctantly, to co-exist. But the key, when considering the highly destructive nature of parasitic, global capitalism, is to focus our collective attention on the material reality that we find ourselves in, and to resist the temptation to denigrate alternative forms of organisation.

To dispossess the 0.1% and to politically and economically empower the 99.9% is presumably still the defining task. If Marx’s historical materialism is to mean anything, then this is the only task and everything else is mere froth. That is not to dismiss the question of political organisation but rather to correct the dialectic and reassert the primacy of objective materialism above the subjective question of organisation. One cannot exist without the other, they are inextricably linked. But if we become consumed by questions of organisation the historical imperative facing humanity inevitably starts to fade from view.

The dialectic between central control and popular democracy will always be fiercely contested, both in opposition and in government. Even in our much dreamed of communist utopia we will not be able to escape this tension. It’s for ever so we might as well just get used to it.