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Dialectical Materialism as a Practical Method.

Part III:  Practice - Building the Party

   We have explained, at the end of the second part, the relation between theory and practice.  When we put our idea into practice we negate out a new form or forms in the physically existing external world. The form of the idea and the new form in the external world are at first identical, (in so far as the idea is rational in itself), but the content of the new form is different, contradicts the form, and at first we can have no knowledge of this contradictory content which is supplied not from our thought but objectively from the external world.  We must treat this new form as a new identity of the source of sensation and begin the process of analysis again from the beginning. If, as a result of such analysis, we find that the result of our practice confirms our theory, that is, the idea was correct, then we have made a real step forward in our knowledge of the world, and, at the same time, changed the world in such a way as to prepare the way for a fresh theoretical advance. Marx explains this in his Theses on Feuerbach; the second thesis is as follows:-

   “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.  In practice man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking.  The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is purely a scholastic question.”

   This reminds us of the example of alizarin given by Engels and which is quoted in Part One. The Ninth Thesis runs as follows:-

   “The highest point attained by contemplative materialism, [Feuerbach], that is, materialism which does not understand sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals in ‘civil society’”.

    The Tenth Thesis which follows expresses the qualitative leap Marx made towards a scientific social theory:-

   “The standpoint of the old materialism is “civil” society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or socialised humanity.”

  And finally, the eleventh and most famous of the Theses says:-

   The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

   So far we have considered the process of cognition as such, the process as we think of it as the consciousness of the individual, but we do not exist as individuals, we exist as members of society, and every individual person’s consciousness, (the Notion), is a part or fragment of social consciousness, the consciousness of society taken as a unified whole, the Notion taken at the universal level,  which arises from our collective practice, the struggle against the rest of nature to survive as a species, organised collective labour.  The method of cognising the external world we have outlined, therefore, cannot be successfully adopted in a consistent way by a single individual, it can only be done by a collective of individuals who co-operate in the struggle to cognise the world according to this scientific method. It therefore follows that, if we wish to make this method the basis of social advance for society, it is first necessary to build an organisation based upon this method, a collective of individuals who engage is a study and self-training in this science, the science of dialectical materialism as a practical method.  Further, it is self evident that such an organisation must be so constituted that it facilitates such practice in the best possible way, and such a constitution was worked out long ago, in particular by Lenin in his struggle to build a revolutionary party which finally took the form of the Bolshevik Party.

   At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century the Marxists were organised, rather loosely, in the Second International. There were leaders such as Kautsky in Germany, Adler in Austria, Harry Quelch in England and Plekhanov, Martov, Lenin and Trotsky in Czarist Russia.  There were many Marxist and socialist organisations spread out across Russia, and Lenin took the lead in the struggle to unite them into one centrally organised and led party, The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.  In 1903 they met in a congress to work out a constitution for the party, and two alternative proposals for the conditions for membership were discussed, one by Martov and one by Lenin.  Here is Martov’s proposal:-

   “A member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party is one who, accepting its programme, works actively to accomplish its aims under the control and direction of the organs of the Party.”

   Lenin’s proposal was:-

   “A member of the Party is one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organisations.”

   Lenin thought Martov’s proposal was flawed.  The “organs” of the Party were its publications, news-papers, theoretical journals etc., of which several were being published by the different groupings, and he pointed out that it would not be possible to develop proper working relations with the members in this way.  The correct way, he argued, was to organise the Party on the basis of branches and individual participation, which implied a two-way relationship between the individual member and the Party, both rights and responsibilities. Lenin was not unduly concerned about the different wording of the two proposals, considering it a purely formal matter, but in the course of discussion huge political and philosophical differences emerged between Lenin and Martov which split the Party in two, the majority, (Bolsheviks), supporting Lenin and the minority, (Mensheviks), supporting Martov.

   In a pamphlet entitled One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Lenin records the long and convoluted debate in minute detail and explains what the disagreement was really about. In the first place, Lenin insisted that the Party had to be based on the principle of centralism, that is, it must have a central Council or Committee which was invested with the authority to instruct the local organisations or branches in their organisation and day to day work.  Martov insisted that branches must be autonomous, that is, free to decide their own rules and working practice.  Secondly, Lenin insisted that the Central Council must be elected by all the members at an annual congress which would be the highest body of the Party, whereas Martov wanted the editorial board of the central organ, which would not be elected by the whole membership, to be the leading body.  Martov described Lenin’s idea as being dictatorial and bureaucratic, and Lenin countered by describing Martov’s idea as a concession to the “flabby and vacillating individualism” of the middle class intellectual, and in essence anarchistic.  Plekhanov, who agreed with Lenin, put it this way:-

   “If that were so, [that is, if the local committees or organisations were autonomous in shaping their organisation, in drawing up their rules], they would be autonomous in relation to the whole, to the Party.  That is not even a Bundist view, it is a downright anarchistic view.  That is how the anarchists argue: the rights of individuals are unlimited; they may conflict; every individual determines the limits of his rights for himself.  The limits of autonomy should be determined not by the group itself, but by the whole of which it forms a part.  The Bund was a striking instance of the violation of this principle.  Hence, the limits of autonomy are determined by the Congress, or by the highest body set up by the Congress. The authority of the central institution should rest on moral and intellectual prestige.” (One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, V.I. Lenin, Progress Publishers pamphlet, page 162)

  The Bund was the union of Jewish workers which tried and failed to win a position of autonomy for itself within the Party. By this time, as we have mentioned previously, Lenin had made a thorough-going study of Marxist dialectics and all the preceding philosophers such as Kant and in particular Hegel, and he was a master of his science. He understood, although Martov did not, that the differences between them went much deeper than the superficial political questions; were, in fact, of a deeply philosophical nature. What should be the relationship between, on the one hand, the perceiving minds of the party members and the collective consciousness of the Party as a whole, and on the other hand its formal rules and structure?  If the latter determines the former then we have a bureaucratic dictatorship, so how can the former determine the latter without descending into anarchy?  Only by constructing the party in such a way that the relations between the parts and the whole correctly reflect the laws of nature, the laws of the motion of matter we have attempted to describe in the previous parts. Lenin put Plekhanov’s somewhat loose formulation of the relation between the theoretical life and the formal structure of the Party in a more meaningful way:-

   “How many times Comrade Martov and various other “Mensheviks” have convicted me, no less childishly, of the following ‘contradiction’.  They quote a passage from What is to be Done? or A Letter to a Comrade which speaks of ideological influence, a struggle for influence etc., and contrast it to the “bureaucratic” method of influencing by means of the rules, to the “autocratic”  tendency to rely on authority, and the like.  How naїve they are!  They have already forgotten that previously our Party was not a formally organised whole, but merely a sum of separate groups, and therefore no other relations except those of ideological influence were possible between these groups.  Now we have become an organised Party, and this implies the establishment of authority, the transformation of the power of ideas into the power of authority, the subordination of lower Party bodies to higher ones.” (Op. cit., page 163. What is to be Done and A letter to a Comrade are previous works by Lenin which dealt with a different situation and did not address the problem of uniting the groups into one party.)

   The “transformation of the power of ideas into the power of authority” is the Essence of the matter. If our idea for the Party is correct and put consistently into practice we shall have a scientifically guided organisation with the necessary degree of central authority for united and determined struggle, fit to make history and transform the world in such a way as to ensure the further survival of humanity; but if the idea is wrong, the theory of the Party incorrect, or if the idea is correct but we do not adopt the correct practice, we shall repeat the mistakes of Martov and the Mensheviks and become, as the historical record shows, a reactionary force and a fatal danger to humanity. The plethora of “Socialist”, “Marxist” and “Communist” parties of which we are all painfully aware provides so many examples of organisations which failed to grasp the dialectical laws of nature and base themselves upon them and consequently which degenerated into formal cliques with the most bizarre practices. The Labour Party with its hopelessly muddled and bureaucratic structure and procedures is a classic example. Lenin describes how, in nature, the parts of a thing relate to the whole according to the dialectical motion of matter:-

   “The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence (one of the “essentials”, one of the principle, if not the principle, characteristics or features) of dialectics. That is precisely how Hegel, too, puts the matter (Aristotle in his Metaphysics continually grapples with it and combats Heraclitus and Heraclitean ideas).” V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, page 359)

   Lenin goes on to refer to various confirmations of this conception to be found in nature and in the sciences, such as the differential and the integral in mathematics, the positive and negative in electrical theory, and the class struggle in society. He goes on:-

   ‘The identity of opposites (it would be more correct, perhaps, to say their “unity”, - although the difference between the terms identity and unity is not particularly important here.  In a certain sense both are correct) is the recognition (discovery) of contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society).  The condition for knowledge of all processes of the world in their “self-movement,” in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites.’ (Ibid. Syntax as original)

   How can we construct the Party in such a way that it becomes a “unity of opposites” that gives the best possible free expression of these dialectical laws of nature?  How best to arrange the relation between the whole and its constituent parts as a unity of diverse and contradictory parts? How can we make the Party into a living, physically existing mirror image of our practical dialectical materialist method? In other words, what should be the formal rules and constitution of the Party? 

  
   The obvious way to unite local organisations, branches, and individuals into a single whole for collective practice based on commonly agreed theory is by the democratic method ;  free and open discussion leading to proposals for action, which are then subject to a voting system to decide the majority view. Every individual has the right to participate, but once the vote is taken this right is transformed into its opposite, responsibility. Now all members must abide by the majority decision whether they agree with it or not, otherwise a democratic society or organisation would be unable to function in a unified way, we should descend into anarchy, and at worst would be paralyzed.  There is nothing new in this method; it is the essential principle of bourgeois society and was discovered long ago. It is, abstractly speaking, a reflection of the laws of the motion of matter, or more particularly in this case, the laws of motion of human society.  But there is a difference between the way it actually operates in bourgeois society, in parliaments, political parties, trade unions and so on, and the way in which it functioned in the Bolshevik Party according to Lenin’s method, the way in which our party must function.  According to the bourgeois subjective idealist outlook, the democratic method is seen as nothing but a mental construction, some-one’s good idea, rather than an expression of an objectively given law of motion of human society, and this failing leads to disastrous results, for reasons which Engels has explained:-

   “In one point, however, the history of the development of society proves to be essentially different from that of nature.  In nature – is so far as we ignore man’s reaction upon nature – there are only blind, unconscious agencies acting upon one another, out of whose interplay the general law comes into operation.  Nothing of all that happens – whether in the innumerable apparent accidents observable upon the surface, or in the ultimate results which confirm the regularity inherent in these accidents – happens as a consciously desired aim.  In the history of society, on the contrary, the actors are all endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working towards definite goals; nothing happens without a conscious purpose, without an intended end.  But this distinction, important as it is for historical investigation, particularly of single epochs and events, cannot alter the fact that the course of history is governed by inner general laws.  For here, also, on the whole, in spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, accident apparently reigns on the surface.  That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realization or the means of attaining them are insufficient.  Thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature.  The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended.  Historical events thus appear on the whole to be likewise governed by chance.  But where on the surface accident holds sway, there actually it is always governed by inner, hidden laws and it is only a matter of discovering these laws.” (F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.)

   The conflicting forces in a democratic system, of  course, are the efforts of all the individuals and groupings within the organisation or society to get their own way, achieve there own ends by any means, win the majority, and so on.  The “cut and thrust of the debate”, as it has somewhat romantically been put. But the subjective idealist has no idea that the rules of democracy, the conduct of debate and the decision making process, must necessarily reflect the objective dialectical laws of motion of the organisation, the relation of the parts to the whole, the movement and life of this whole which is objective and more or less independent of the wills of the individual members. Hence, as history shows with respect to all the democratic institutions of bourgeois society, political parties, parliaments, trade unions etc., democracy never works perfectly, in fact most of the time it works only partially at best, suffers all the slings and arrows of contempt for majority decisions, dishonesty, lies, bribery and corruption, and careerism is the openly accepted norm. In times of extreme economic crisis democracy becomes completely impossible and fascist dictatorship must replace it. We have suffered this kind of behaviour ad infinitum from our capitalists, bankers, politicians of all hues, trade union leaders and so on, and we are all heartily sick of it.  We call this kind of behaviour on the part of labour and trade union leaders opportunism, which for Marxists has a more concrete meaning than the normal vulgar every day use; in Form it is the use of positions of elected office, power and responsibility for personal gain, and the Essence of this form is the struggle to reach subjectively determined objectives by un-scientific means.

   This is manifestly not the kind of party the working class needs to achieve its emancipation. As Engels explains, for as long as we are not conscious of the dialectical laws of nature, human society and thought, then the result of our practice will be a series of accidents and we shall be dogged by unexpected failures and disasters. We must be conscious of the laws of motion of society in general, with particular respect to the present state of capitalist crisis, and the revolutionary class struggle in all its twists and turns, its relatively stagnant moments and its sudden unexpected leaps, in the most immediate and sensitive way, and we must work in accordance with these laws, and make them work for us instead of against us.  This means, of course, a party based on the dialectical materialist theory and practice that we have outlined, and the question of how such a party is the be brought into Being is the crucial question for mankind in general and for the working class in particular, since the working class, due to its relation to society as a whole which results from the present form of the relation of humanity to the rest of nature, is the only class subjectively motivated and therefore capable of solving the question and therefore the only revolutionary class. How must we begin?

   The necessity for effective training in materialist dialectics for every individual member becomes obvious when we consider the functioning of the Party as a whole. In order for the individual to participate in the democratic centralist life of the Party, and for the Party as a whole to function properly, every individual, or at least a substantial majority of them, must understand the dialectical relationship of the parts, (the individual member, the branches and various committees), to the whole, the Party. Without such training, the individual will inevitably relate to other individuals directly, as individuals, instead of relating to them through the whole, the Party, that is, as political beings of a particular kind. Communists do not address each other as “comrade” for nothing, it is our way of continually reminding ourselves that only political relations are permissible, and that all manifestations of opportunism, personal relations and clique ties are the kiss of death to the Party. In the approach to build the Party, therefore, the very first practice must be the training of individuals in the practical dialectical materialist method, and we shall not be ready to actually launch the Party till a well trained and strongly united group of such individuals has been brought into Being. Most importantly, as will be seen at a glance at the constitution below in the appendix, participation in such training will be a condition of Party membership, and that the leadership is constitutionally obliged to lead the education and training work.

   Since our Party must be based on our scientific method, then our practical idea is the method taken as a whole, in-and-for-itself, and the new form we negate out in the external world when we put our practical idea into practice will be identical to it, that is to say, the structure and rules of the Party will be the idea made real, clothed in flesh and blood.  In Hegel’s expression, it will be the “idea alienated”. Lenin led the construction of the Bolshevik Party and the Third International in this way, and the Bolshevik tradition lived on in the form of the Fourth International founded by Trotsky through a succession of splits and new formations, the most recent of which was the Marxist Party led by Gerry Healy. After his death in 1989, however, this party split, and the side which retained the Party identity abandoned his dialectical materialist method and consequently degenerated into a very small clique of thoroughly subjective individuals and finally ceased to exist.  The answer to the practical question as to how we should begin is therefore given, we must begin again from the beginning by training cadres in the scientific method of dialectical materialism.

   Below, in the appendix, we give a proposed constitution for the Party.  In order to act as a conduit for our practical method as a living process the material form of the Party must be a unity of parts which reflects all the living moments of the process of cognition, so that the process lives as the collective consciousness of the Party through the interaction of its various material parts.  “The splitting of a whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts … is the Essence of dialectics”, says Lenin. (Collected Works, Vol. 38, page 359.) The main parts of the Party are the Political Committee, the Central Committee, the branches, the individual members and the Congress. The branches are, of course, reflections of the particular local conditions which are parts of the general political situation taken as a whole, the crisis of capitalism and the class struggle.  Each area has its own particular and different content, e.g., the closure of a factory, and taken together they constitute a sum and unity of opposites. In our cognition of the life of the Party we have now moved from the individual to the particular, from the concrete to the abstract, and the completion of the path from the outer to the inner. At such a moment we find that the content of the forms of the opposites, the branches, which is the collective knowledge and political understanding of their members, is different and contradictory from Branch the Branch, and as the quantity and intensity of contradiction builds up a point of intensity is reached which makes necessary the calling of the Congress.  This is the leap to the path from the inner to the outer, and the ascent from the abstract to the concrete can begin.

   For the non-dialectical thinker the calling of the Congress is a purely formal and routine matter.  It is understood by leaders of non-Marxist organisations, as a matter of common sense, that all members attending the Congress must be informed in advance of the agenda and all propositions and other matter to be dealt with, but this is seen as a matter of expediency rather than a necessary law governed process of development. Consequently, as soon as difficulties or delays occur, or more particularly as soon as such leaders encounter disagreement, they feel quite free to follow any line of less resistance that presents itself. Opportunistically, they attempt to achieve subjectively determined objectives by unscientific means. In order to reach their unscientifically determined goals they become past masters at ruling un-welcome proposals out of order, falsely compositing motions, forming cliques and telling lies, subverting the election of delegates, and so on.  The result is that the Congress, and consequently the Party as a whole, fails correctly to reflect the objective situation, the crisis and the class struggle, in a scientific way and the Party practice becomes at best ineffective, and most often ends in serving the interest of our class enemy. As Engels has explained in the above quote; “The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended.”   

   Let us see how to proceed scientifically, now that we have begun the ascent from the abstract to the concrete, the path from the inner to the outer, as a practice. It is necessary to bring the Congress into Existence in the dialectical sense, not the formal, mechanical sense. “We shall reserve for such Being as is mediated the term Existence”, says Hegel in his Science of Logic. The philosophical concept of Mediation, we know, expresses the way in which the truth of a thing is revealed through its reflection of its opposite by which it is Mediated. For the Congress to come into Mediated Being, Existence, therefore, all the parts it contains must reflect each other. The Central Committee must reflect all the branches, and each branch must reflect the Central Committee and every other branch to the degree necessary to bring the Congress into Existence. This requires great care, patience and sensitivity of the part of the Party leaders in the conduct of the pre-Congress discussion as determined by paragraph g) under section 4 of the Constitution below. Absolutely no short-cuts or sloppiness is permissible if the Congress is to reflect the objective truth of the class struggle, and do its work properly. Formal thinkers have no idea of this necessity for each part to reflect every other through the whole according to the dialectical laws of motion.  All such leaders care about is that the Party shall reflect them. 

   In a more general way the relations between the parts of the Party may take the form of minority rights as determined under section 8, paragraphs b) and c) on democratic rights, which provide for the rights of minorities. This right is absolutely necessary and the members must defend it to the death, for a double reason. Firstly, it is a clear case of what Lenin referred to as the “transition of the power of ideas into the power of authority”. A minority has no essential relation with any formal part or authoritative organisation within the Party, it is simply based on the commonality of an idea across a number individual members whatever their branch or whatever formal appointments they may or may not hold. In fighting for their idea they seek to make it the majority view of the Party as expressed through the formal organisation, and upon achieving this objective the power of an idea is transformed into the power of authority, since all members are obliged to abide by majority decisions.  Secondly, any really new, revolutionising idea must of necessity begin as a minority view, and the stifling of such a minority would bring the objective law governed movement and life of the Party to an end.

   It is the Party as a whole that is now in Existence as a moment of Semblance containing the sum and unity of opposites. But this is a new experience.  We can now really see the Party as a whole, a large mass of people united for a common purpose, greeting each other, bonding, and the leap from Semblance to Appearance takes place. Semblance now unfolds to the point where, as explained above, Essence comes into Existence. The Essence of such a moment is the collective consciousness and intentions of all the members, which remains hidden at first, and it must conflict with the Appearance, which still has the Form of the past of the Party, the old ideas, the leaders elected at the last congress, the existing constitution, and so on.  We are aware of this Essence, this process of change; the Essence which was locked up in the thing-in-itself in Semblance is now present to consciousness in Appearance which is a moving form, a reflection of the objective truth as Mediated by the process of human sensuous cognition.  We do not yet know precisely what changes will take place and what the results of the Congress will be.

   The key consideration is the difference between non-dialectical, unscientific thought and scientific, dialectical thought and practice. Unlike the non-dialectician, we do not attempt to achieve subjectively determined objectives by un-scientific means. We recognise that the relation between all the parts, the committees, branches and individuals, is essentially law-governed, and that the Party in general and the Congress in particular have their own movement and life and all change takes place in accordance with these laws. Because we are conscious of all this, we conduct our practice in consonance with the laws instead of in conflict with them, we know, in the struggle between all the opposite sides and parts, where lies cause and where effect. Hence the results of our practice will not be a series of unexpected accidents and failures but will be progress in the required direction.

   It will be seen at glance at the constitution below that it has been deliberately written to ensure this.  Section 4, on the congress, has been carefully thought out to ensure free movement in the relations between the whole and the parts.  Branches affect the whole by instructing their delegates to present their collective point of view and seek certain objectives, make proposals, elect particular leaders and so on. The branches through their delegate, (parts), are cause and the Party, (whole), effect. (Within the branch it is the same relation between the individual member and the branch).  However, the delegate is free to be influenced by the discussion and vote and act accordingly, and here the Party, (whole), is cause and the branch, (part), through the delegate and his report back, is effect.

   Once the congress is actually in session all the parts, even the individual members, are interacting with each other if only indirectly through delegates. However, the individuals do not exist as such, they only exist as members of branches, or committees, or officers of some kind, but most importantly, as individuals with particular and differing bodies of knowledge and points of view.  In their unity they form a concrete whole, and the inner unity of the motion of matter, (see reciprocity in Part II), is Substance. The Congress is the Substance of the Party. That is to say, the content of the agenda and debate, the resolutions passed and so on, will be specific, dealing with the political, economic and social issues of the moment, the world, the class struggle as Existence itself. However, since we have proceeded in a scientific way to this point, we can, unlike the non-dialectical thinker who sees the world as a disconnected conglomeration of superficial forms, and experiences all the slings and arrows of the class struggle as a disjointed series of events, “one damned thing after another”, penetrate beyond the Appearance to the Essence of this world.  For us, Essence has come into existence in a new moment, Actuality. (See above in Part II the three moments of Essence – Semblance, Appearance, Actuality).

   The movement of the Congress, (Party), now takes the form of consideration of all the Possible courses of action open to it, that is to say, all the proposals and other items for consideration on the agenda are subjected to the decision making process.  But once the votes are taken, and the majority position on all questions reached, then Possibility is transformed into Necessity; now the Party must proceed to act in a united way basing itself upon these decisions as the Theoretical Idea. However, in order to proceed to Practice the Congress must be concluded and the members must return to their areas. The Congress, now no longer an Actuality, lives on as the content of the newly constituted Central Committee, which, at its first meeting, formulates specific direction for the immediate and fully concrete Party practice in the Branch areas, the Practical Idea. Now at last the Ascent from the Abstract to the Concrete, the path from the inner to the outer, is complete.

   The Being of such a party will be the method made real, clothed in flesh and blood; the two, the physically existing Party as a living process and the theory in the collective consciousness of the members, will be as mirror images, so that the question arises, which is cause and which effect? Historically, the method was cause and the Party effect, since it was through the dialectical materialist method that the party was conceived and made real through the practice of Marx and Engels, and Lenin and his close associates. It should never be forgotten that democratic centralism is the result of Marxist theory and practice, the “idea alienated”, the power if ideas translated into the power of organisation and authority, and that the Party Constitution and practice must forever be subordinated to the philosophical life of the Party. Formally speaking the Congress is the highest body of the Party, but dialectically speaking the Education system stands even higher, and it is this relation that makes the transition of the power of ideas into the power of authority possible.  However, the original creation of the Party was a finite historical moment, while the life of the Party is an infinite process. Once in Being it stands opposed to us as the External World, a part within the whole world, the means through which we collectively perceive the world through our practice. Hegel describes such a process as “the alienated idea returning to itself”.  In this sense cause and effect are reversed, the Party is now cause and our collective consciousness is effect.  Learning from our practice we shall continually change and develop our philosophy and political perspectives, make changes to our Constitution as necessary, and revolutionise our practice. In this infinite process cause and effect will continually be transformed into each other in reciprocal fashion.

   Now that we have considered the task of building the Party in the abstract, we can concretise our ideas on the matter to a limited extent.  A team of trained dialectical materialists will be required to launch the Party proper, hence the first task is to unite as many individuals as possible in an organisation whose sole purposed is the training of individuals in our method. Under the right conditions the Party proper can be launched, and in doing so we must from the outset be conscious of the dialectical relation between the Party and the class upon which it rests, the revolutionary working class. In the first place we must understand that the Party is not brought to the class from outside, but arises from within it, as Difference within its Identity.  It is true that the working class inherited knowledge and political theory from the bourgeoisie and middle class in the historical sense, simply because the latter class existed before the former.  Indeed, the working class inherited the science of Marxism itself from middle class intellectuals and philosophers, and it is also true that some desirable elements, middle class, intellectual and artistic influences, come from outside the class today, but our struggle is in the present and the bulk of the membership will be workers and their’s will be the decisive influence. Secondly, since it is essentially a party of a class, the working class which transcends all national boundaries, then it will be an international party, not at all to be identified directly with any particular country. In the first instance we shall have to work within our immediate surroundings, but it is essential that work to establish an international party must begin at the beginning and never cease. That must be the Essence of the work and the general orientation. All national questions are relative to class questions.

   The living relation between the Party and the class will consist in the unfolding of the Difference within the Identity, quantitative negation. Inevitably we shall begin as a tiny isolated minority and it will be necessary to recruit members and equip ourselves with all the necessary material resources to sink roots into the class and win its allegiance. The most important requirement for this is the daily newspaper, and not just for reporting and campaigning purposes, as Lenin explains:-

   “The role of a newspaper, however, is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies.  A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.  In this last respect it may be likened to the scaffolding round a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organised labour.  With the aid of a newspaper, and through it, a permanent organisation will naturally take shape that will engage, not only in local activities, but in regular general work, and will train its members to follow political events carefully, appraise their significance and their effect on the various strata of the population, and develop effective means for the revolutionary party to influence those events.” (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 5, page 22) 

   The work of distributing and selling the newspaper through the branch structure of the organisation is of course what imparts to it the nature of a scaffolding, and brings every member into contact with the masses in the act of selling, training every individual member in political work. It is through this kind of work that the Party will penetrate the class as an opposite, (Difference), within it, raising the level of class consciousness and practice from the spontaneous struggle for defence of its living conditions and rights to the understanding that only a revolutionary struggle for working class political power can offer the possibility of emancipation. It is a question of giving conscious expression to the unconscious processes of the class struggle:-

   “The connection between distribution [of wealth] and the material conditions of existence of society at any period lies so much in the nature of things that it is always reflected in popular instinct.  So long as a mode of production still describes an ascending curve of development, it is enthusiastically welcomed even by those who come off worst from its corresponding mode of distribution.  This was the case with the English workers in the beginnings of modern industry…. Only when the mode of production in question has already described a good part of its descending curve, when it has half outlived its day, when the conditions of its existence have to a large extent disappeared, and its successor is already knocking at the door – it is only at this stage that the constantly increasing inequality of distribution appears as unjust, it is only then that the appeal is made to the facts which have had their day to so-called eternal justice.  From a scientific standpoint, this appeal to morality and justice does not help us an inch further; moral indignation, however justifiable, cannot serve economic science as an argument, but only as a symptom.  The task of economic science is rather to show that the social abuses which have recently been developing are necessary consequences of the existing mode of production, but at the same time also indications of its approaching dissolution; and to reveal, within the already dissolving economic form of motion, the elements of the future new organisation of production and exchange which will put an end the these abuses.” (F. Engels, Anti-Düring, pp. 206-207. Our emphasis)

   Our Party must be the scientific institution for the achievement of this purpose, to show that capitalism has completed its descending curve and that the transition to socialism is a historic necessity, and it must win the allegiance of the working and middle class and lead the political struggle for the socialist transformation of society. But the working class is not passive, mere inert clay to be moulded by its leadership, it has its own movement and life and does struggle spontaneously against the injustices of decaying capitalism, and in doing so seeks to organise itself, typically by building soviets, and to appoint leaders.  In other words, the working class instinctively seeks out the Party and penetrates it by providing personnel and resources.  Leon Trotsky, the unchallengeable authority on such process, draws the appropriate lesson from historical experience:-

   “The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime.  Only the guiding layers of a class have a political programme, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses.  The fundamental political process of a revolution thus consists in the gradual comprehension by a class of the problems arising from the social crisis – the active orientation of the masses by the method of successive approximations.  The different stages of a revolutionary process, certified by a change of parties in which the more extreme always supersedes the less, expresses the growing pressure to the left of the masses – so long as the swing of the movement does not run into objective obstacles.” (L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Sphere Books Ltd., Vol. 1, page 16)

   Thus in such moments of history the Party and the class as dialectical opposites reciprocally interpenetrate till a moment of Identity is reached which gives rise to the qualitative leap, the revolutionary transformation of the class structure of society. But it is not an automatic process, hence Trotsky’s warning concerning objective obstacles; as Engels has informed us, “in the history of society, on the contrary, the actors are all endowed with consciousness”. Each new moment in the process must be negated into the consciousness of the Party and synthesised into new theory as a guide to practice, according to our scientific dialectical materialist practical method.  Here is the road to the emancipation of the working class and the transition to socialism, the first and "lower" stage of communist classless society, a society in which the Party, along with the state, will in time become unnecessary, “unreal” in the Hegelian sense, and will surely cease to exist.  For the present however, the revolutionary Party as the living embodiment of the practical method of dialectical materialism is the essential requirement for the further survival and evolution of the human race.

Appendix

THE MARXIST PARTY 2009 CONSTITUTION

1. AIMS

2.  MEMBERSHIP

3. BRANCHES

4. NATIONAL CONGRESS

5. CENTRAL COMMITTEE AND POLITICAL COMMITTEE
 

6. DISTRICT COMMITTEE

7. FINANCIAL CONTRIBUTIONS

8. DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS

9. DISCIPLINE

10. PUBLICATIONS

Terry Button, April 2009 

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