Vol. 80/No. 22 June 6, 2016
(Books of the Month column)
‘Without theory there can be no
revolutionary movement’
Their Trotsky and Ours by Jack Barnes is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for May. It is based on a 1982 speech by Barnes, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. The book explains that to lead the working class in a successful revolution, a mass proletarian party is needed whose cadres, well beforehand, have absorbed a world communist program, are proletarian in life and work, derive deep satisfaction from doing politics and have forged a leadership with an acute sense of what to do next. The excerpt below is from the section “Marxism, Bolshevism, and the Communist International.” Copyright © 2002 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
The lessons drawn by the leaders of the Cuban, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Grenadian revolutions are part of this common revolutionary continuity. But determining just what, concretely, that consists of is a little more complicated than it might seem. Because political continuity is not like the doctrine of a church, which is ultimately judged right or wrong by some body of people who claim a direct line to someone or something you can’t argue with. That is how the articles of a faith are settled.
But as Engels wrote just two months before the formation of the Communist League at the end of 1847, “Communism is not a doctrine but a movement; it proceeds not from principles but from facts. … Communism, insofar as it is a theory, is the theoretical expression of the position of the proletariat in this [class] struggle and the theoretical summation of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat.”
Communists don’t have any articles of faith. What we have, as Engels explained, is simply the political generalizations and strategic lessons from the experiences of a class that has been marching toward taking power ever since it was born and began to wage battles in its own name — the modern working class.
This needs to be thought about, because it is alien to the way people are taught to think by the schools and other institutions under capitalism. We are trained to think in terms of ideas and individuals that float above classes and material conditions. It is easy to slip into thinking that a political program has a life of its own, like the doctrine and rituals of a church or the masonic lodge.
These doctrines don’t change until the body of people who determine them decide they should change. But that is not true of the proletariat’s program, which is changed through clarification and enrichment with every major new experience in the class struggle.
Marx and Engels explained this materialist approach in the Communist Manifesto. Communists, the Manifesto explained, “do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.” They “have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.”
What, then, does distinguish communist workers from the rest of their class? On the plane of practical action, Marx and Engels say, the communists are “the most advanced and resolute section” of the working class. On the plane of program and ideas, they have “the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”
Writing four years later to a founding member of the Communist League, then working to build the communist movement in North America, Marx explained that his own contribution to the theory of the revolutionary workers movement was not the discovery of the existence of classes or the class struggle, which many others had described and commented on. His own new contribution, Marx said, was to demonstrate “that class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
It is only by generalizing and drawing the lessons of the actual experiences of the working class that revolutionists develop a program and strategy that can help us lead our class toward that goal — the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is where our political continuity comes from.
[V.I.] Lenin said that without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement. You hear that quotation so many times that it can sometimes lose its meaning. But it is important to think about what Lenin actually said. He didn’t say that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary action. That would be wrong. Horribly and disarmingly so. There can be, have been, and will continue to be revolutionary struggles by working people that are not guided by organizations equipped with revolutionary theory. Revolutionary struggles, but not a revolutionary movement. Because building a revolutionary movement, as opposed to action alone, necessitates a conscious generalization of lessons that our class has learned through struggle into a program and strategy, a political continuity, upon which revolutionary organization is based.
These lessons — what to do, and in some ways even more importantly, what not to do — have been paid for in blood many times over by our class. They are irreplaceable.
The fact that our program and strategy are rooted in the experience of the working class, however, also means that new experiences change, better enrich, our revolutionary continuity. They cannot alter past events, of course. But our political continuity is not frozen. It is the evolving consciousness of the vanguard of a class, expressed in program and strategy and embodied in revolutionary organizations and their cadres.
We incorporate new lessons while preserving old ones and understanding them in new ways. Our revolutionary continuity is a living thing. It is our current understanding of the rich lessons of revolutions and class battles that came before us, and this understanding changes as our class goes through new experiences.
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