By Jim Hargreaves
If we are to build a kautskyian mass party, we would obviously need members and the support of the proletariat. So, how do we obtain this? Agitation: agitate inside your union for a rank and file workers union, rather than the bureaucratic, class collaborationist organisation that the majority of unions are today; agitate in your workplace for strikes; agitate on the streets by handing out leaflets and papers; agitate online by making your own site or on Facebook.
By doing this, it will:
A) increase class consciousness
B) lead to others joining you in your agitation
C) increase the numbers of the party, therefore giving it more power, thus giving it more influence in unions, which will give it more influence among the working class as a whole.
With each strike the proletariat will grow in confidence, leading to more strikes and demonstrations, which will boost its confidence even more! We need to agitate for independent working class organisations, not just ones set up by one of the many ‘communist’ parties; we need to agitate for committees to be formed- people’s councils; we need to agitate for the workers running their own factories, and their own lives without the bourgeois state moralistically regulating what we can and can’t do. We need to agitate for freedom and for the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat.
What needs to be formed is something similar to the soviets which were formed in Russia- democratic, independent working class organisation which are suitable of superseding the bourgeois state apparatus.
Our demands are simple: we want those who work to receive the full fruits of their labour; we want to do away with bosses, policemen, soldiers and bureaucrats; we want to run our own lives. We can only do this by overthrowing the bourgeois state and replacing it with the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat.
Very good! Though, I’d prefer a vanguard party rather than a mass party. Regardless, all revolutionary socialists and communists should be doing these things! 😀
You do know that Lenin wished to imitate the SPD? Of course, due to Tsarist repression they were unable to. I’d say that the best party would be a combination of:
1) a kautskyian mass party
2) a party as outlined in WITBD
3) and Is ran democratic centralism (originally a Menshevik concept)
Try to dispel any rumours of a vanguard party being an enlightened intelligentsia seizing power in a coup d’état. Lenin’s point was that the spontaneous economic actions of the workers are unlikely to lead to the highest form of class consciousness, and that the intervention of a Marxist party was necessary for this consciousness to form.
Quite frankly I don’t see how a mass party cant be the vanguard party.