I recently came across this. I helped to write this as a member of the Sudbury NSG Branch at the time. I would no longer use the term socialist to describe radical social transformation given its statist connotations and the white settler colonial character of ‘Canadian’ state formation needs to be much more central than it is here. But this statement still has a lot to say to statist and authoritarian currents in the left.
By the Sudbury Branch of the New Socialist Group, from the New Socialist, June/July 2004, No.47, pp.36.
Central to the revolutionary project for us is the development of workers and oppressed people’s capacities for self-organization and the establishment of their own forms of power in response to the power of capitalists, bureaucratic hierarchies and professional “experts”. The development of party projects has historically taken two major forms on the left. The first is the party of the moderate and social democratic left seen clearly in the NDP that reproduces hierarchy and bureaucracy in its own forms of organization (as in the trade union bureaucracies) and also comes to stand over and against the struggles of workers and oppressed people. This works against self-organization and the development of socialist transformation.
The second is the revolutionary party of the Leninist kind that presumes that it is the repository of revolutionary consciousness and that workers and oppressed people cannot develop revolutionary consciousness without the wisdom of this party. This party form of organization designed, in the end to “seize power” on behalf of workers and the oppressed, reproduces forms of hierarchy and command within its mode of organization which also works against self- organization and transformation from below. Even in tiny party or pre-party formations forms of social privilege can emerge for the “leadership” of the organization that stifle self-organization and critical debate.
Some claim that only a revolutionary party can develop a synthesis of all forms of oppression and exploitation in an overall revolutionary strategy, but time after time it has been precisely these party and party-type formations that have stood in the way of learning from feminist, queer, anti-racist, disability, and other revolts and movements. These revolts against oppression require their own autonomous forms of organizing as movements and also within the radical left where feminist, anti-racist, and queer revolts among others must be kept alive. At the same time a perspective that can see both the need for autonomy as well as how all the forms of exploitation and oppression are constructed in and through each other in a capitalist, white supremacist and patriarchal society needs to be developed.
Since the Zapatista revolt, and especially in the global justice movement, some of the historical differences between anti-statist marxism and social/communist currents within anarchism have been overcome in practice. This has led to the cooperation and collaboration of anarchists and marxists in the radical wing of the global justice movement and in radical anti-poverty organizing. One of the obstacles to this collaboration and learning from each other developing further is the hold that the belief in a revolutionary party or parties still has among many marxists.
In our view revolutionary organizations that do not reproduce forms of hierarchy, bureaucracy and power over others and that can bring to struggles and movements a sense of the history and memories of socialist/anarchist organizing are the best vehicles for facilitating and developing forms of self-organization and the building of people’s revolutionary capacities. A radical socialist or anarchist transformation of society can only be made by working class and oppressed people themselves. It cannot be made by any party or “leadership” from above. People themselves need to learn and develop their own revolutionary consciousness and capacities through their own experiences and struggles and from learning from and interacting with others including activists in revolutionary organizations. The focus of revolutionary organizations must therefore be on facilitating self-organization and building revolutionary capacities. Some of the acquisitions of parts of the global justice movement with consensus decision making, affinity groups, and spokes-councils can be very useful to this process.
Key to this will also be a politics of direct action (that includes mass action as a central feature) that builds social and self transformation into organizing and is designed to build people’s power against the power of capital, state and bureaucracy. A key aspect of organizing has to be the developing and holding of experiences of a possible future in our organizing in the present. This prefigurative dimension of struggle not only provides us with more commitment in our struggles today but also allows us to begin to build toward this future today. The strongest sense a number of us have had of this was on the front-lines in Quebec City in 2001 where in the midst of being doused by tear gas we also witnessed solidarity and people caring for each other combined with the moment of celebration and carnival which is what revolutionary transformation from below needs to be all about. We need forms of revolutionary organizing that can circulate these kinds of experiences and struggles.
In making these comments we are drawing upon our own experiences, Sheila Rowbotham’s socialist feminist critique of Leninism, the critique of the revolutionary party developed by CLR James, anarchist-communism, and autonomist Marxism.