Definition of the sect

Louis Proyect lnp3 at panix.com
Fri Jun 12 06:54:51 PDT 1998



>Along with "racism" and "sexism," "sectarianism" must be one of the most used
>and abused terms in the left-wing political lexicon. Would someone
explain to
>me what it means? Or is it simply a generic term of abuse?
>
>Dan Lazare.

Hal Draper's "Toward a New Beginning - On Another Road"

ANATOMY OF THE SECT

To sum up: we have seen three approaches so far. One we can throw out: the approach of confining oneself only to individual militants without any political center. The real problem is whether the political center must necessarily be a sect. It is a question of the relationship between the vanguard and the class, not merely of two organizational forms.

The sect establishes itself on a HIGH level (far above that of the working class) and on a thin base which is ideologically selective (usually necessarily outside working class). Its working-class character is claimed on the basis of its aspiration and orientation, not its composition or its life. It then sets out to haul the working class up to its level, or calls on the working class to climb up the grade. From behind its organizational walls, it sends out scouting parties to contact the working class, and missionaries to convert two here and three there. It sees itself becoming, one day, a mass revolutionary party by a process of accretion; or by eventual unity with two or three other sects; or perhaps by some process of entry.

Marx, on the other, saw the vanguard elements as avoiding above all the creation of organizational walls between themselves and the class-in-motion. The task was not to lift up two workers here and three there to the level of the Full Program (let alone two students here and three intellectuals there!) but to go after the levers that could get the class, or sections or the class, moving as a mass onto higher levels of action and politics.

The sect mentality sees its sanctification only in its Full Program, that is, in what separates it from the working class. If, god forbid, some slogan it puts forth bids fair to become to popular, it gets scared. "Something must be the matter! We must have capitulated to somebody." (This is not a caricature: it is drawn from life.) Marx's approach was exactly the opposite. The job of the vanguard was to work out slogans that would be popular in the given state of the class struggle, in the sense of being able to get broadest possible masses of workers moving. That means: moving on an issue, in a direction, in a way that would bring them into conflict with the capitalist class and its state, and the agents of capitalists and state, including the "labor lieutenants of capitalism" (its own leaders).

The sect is a miniaturized version of the revolutionary party-to-be, a "small mass party," a microscopic edition or model of the mass party that does not yet exist. Rather, it thinks of itself this way, or tries to be such a miniature.

Its organizational method is the method of "as if": let us act as if we were a mass party already (to a miniscular degree, naturally, in accordance with our resources), and this is the road to becoming a mass party. Let us publish a "workers' newspaper," just as if we were a workers' party; and if we cannot publish a daily like a real mass party, at least we can publish a weekly or bi-weekly by draining all our resources -- this makes us a small (unreal) mass party. (But such a facade is only self-deluding, since if it ever succeeds in deluding a single worker, he finds out soon enough that there is little behind it.) Let us build a "Bolshevik" party be being "disciplined" like good Bolsheviks. (So, on the basis of a false notion of "Bolshevik" discipline absorbed from the enemies of Leninism, the sect is "Bolshevized" into a contracting, petrifying coterie, which replaces the bonds of a political cohesion by iron hoops such as are needed to hold together the staves of a crumbling barrel.

There is a fundamental fallacy in the notion that the road of miniaturization (aping a mass party in miniature) is the road to a mass revolutionary party. Science proves that the scale on which a living organism exists cannot be arbitrarily changed: human beings cannot exist either on the scale of the Lilliputians or of the Brobdingagians*; their life mechanisms could not function on either scale. Ants can life 200 times their own weight, but a six foot ant could not lift 20 tons even if it could exist in some monstrous fashion. In organizational life too, this is true: If you try to miniaturize a mass party, you do not get a mass party in miniature, but only a monster.

The basic reason for this is the following: The life- principle of a revolutionary mass party is not simply its Full Program, which can be copied with nothing but an activist typewriter and can be expanded or contracted like an accordion. Its life-principle is its integral involvement as a part of the working-class movement, its immersion in the class struggle not by a Central Committee decision but because it lives there. It is this life-principle which cannot be aped or miniaturized; it does not reduce like a cartoon or shrink like a woolen shirt. Like a nuclear reaction, this phenomenon comes into existence only at critical mass; below critical mass, it does not simply become smaller, it disappears.

Hence, what can the would-be micro-mass party ape in miniature? Only the internal life of the mass party (some of it, in a way); but this internal life, mechanically carried over, is now detached from the reality which governs it in a real mass party. Detach the guts of a lion from its body, and what you have in reality is -- tripe. This is why the internal life of a sect has a tendency to be an exercise in unreality, in facades, in ritual imitations.

Also, since only the mass party's internal life is available for ritualized parody, the set mentality finds only internal life congenial. For outside of that internal life, the harsh realities of isolation and impotence are unbuffered and unbearable, having not the slightest resemblance to the external life of a mass party. The internal life of the sect becomes not a necessary evil keyed to its outside activities, but rather a substitute gratification. On the one hand, the mass-party worker chafes at the necessity of spending much time at internal branch meetings, fraction meetings etc., even if he is a good enough Marxist to understand that these things are necessary. The sect mentality, in contrast, finds comfort and zest only in such ingrown activities, where suitably revolutionary talk can be enjoyed, whereas a trade-union meeting is just a drag.

WELL, WHAT ABOUT THE BOLSHEVIKS?

But didn't the Bolshevik party have to develop from a sect to a mass party? If they can do it, so can we . . .

No, that is not how the Bolsheviks became a mass party -- not by the road of the sect. And there is no proposal for a sect form of organization in What Is To Be Done?. The whole mass of fairy-tale history about Lenin's party conceptions is an invention of the professional anti-Bolsheviks and Stalinists; however, we obviously cannot go into that here, The following will suffice for the present problem:

Take the route embodied in What Is To Be Done? In the preceding period, the preliminaries for a mass party had taken shape in Russia in the form not of sects but of local workers' circles, which remained loose. and founded loose regional associations. They had not developed as branches of a central organization but autonomously, in response to social struggles -- loosely.

What Lenin set out to organize abroad, first of all, was not a sect, not any membership organization, but a political center: a publication (Iskra) with an editorial board. The Iskra tendency was embodied as an editorial board, not a sect. The membership organization to which Lenin looked was to be a mass party, not one consisting exclusively of those who agreed with his revolutionary Marxism, but rather a mass Party broad enough to include all socialists, indeed all militant workers. It would have different tendencies within it, and the consistent Marxists might be a minority at least for a while.

But while Lenin did not make the mistake of proposing to interpose the walls of a sect between his tendency (i.e. the one with the correct line) and the broad movement of the class- in-struggle, he also did not make the other mistake: the mistake of neglecting to build a political center and thereby a Marxist cadre.

It was the Mensheviks and right-wingers, not Lenin, who split rather than permit a left-wing majority. Nor, in the years of the Bolshevik party's formation, did Lenin make a virtue out of necessity: he did not adopt the view that the Party had to be limited to Bolsheviks. On the contrary, he fought consistently for the conception of a broad Party in which, however, the left wing had as much right to take over the leadership by democratic vote as did the right wing. This is what the Bolshevik-leadership split was all about, on the organizational side.

Of course, the state of illegality in which the movement functioned conditioned organizational forms in many ways, but it is not illegality that determined that Lenin refused to take the road of forming a Bolshevik sect. If Iskra had been set up in Petrograd instead of abroad, the essential relation would not have changed; and in fact, when partial legality was attained for a short period after the 1905 revolution, one of the consequences was temporary fusion of the Bolshevik and Menshevik groups in a united mass party, though Lenin retained a political center in the form of a publication and its editorial board. The onset of a measure of legality did not push Lenin toward a Bolshevik sect formation but in the opposite direction, toward unity with the Mensheviks in a mass party (not unity of the ideological political centers).

But weren't both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks "factions" of the split party? -- Yes, formally speaking they were; but a faction meant something else again in those days. On both sides, as well as for other organized tendencies in the Russian movement, a "faction" functioned as a public political center with its own publication and editorial board as the carrier of its politics.

Nor were these factions (Bolshevik as well as Menshevik) "membership organizations" in the sense of the sects we hive been trying to build. Look at the documents written by Lenin shortly before 1914 when the Socialist International bureau was inquiring into the Bolshevik-Menshevik unity question: - Lenin, to prove that the Bolsheviks had the support of a majority of the socialist workers in Russia, gives statistics on circulation of organs, financial contributions, etc., but not membership. Nor did anyone expect membership figures. For the membership organizations in Russia were local and regional party groups which might be part Bolshevik and part Menshevik in sympathy, or might shift support from one to the other from time to time, etc. Every time a "party congress" or conference was held, each party group had to decide whether to attend this one or that one, or both.

What this points at is the fact that both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were, in organizational form, not membership sects, and not even "factions" in any organizational meaning relevant to today. What were they? Both were political centers based on a propaganda/publishing enterprise, plus a central organizational apparatus for forging links with all sections of the workers' movement, through "agents", literary collaborators, etc. (This plus is a crucial addition, though we do not dwell on it at this point.) Individual party members in Russia, or party groups, might decide to distribute Lenin's paper or the Menshevik organ or neither -- many preferred a "non-faction" organ such as Trotsky put out in Vienna; or they might use in their work those publications of the Bolsheviks which they liked plus those of the Mensheviks and others, on a free-wheeling basis.

Obviously much of this scene was conditioned by illegality; much of it by the nature of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, etc. It is not we who propose it as an automatic model for us today; we are discussing it for the very opposite reason: viz., because there are some who, erroneously thinking that the Bolsheviks developed in the shape of a sect, erroneously propose the "Bolshevik-type sect" as a model. But there never was anything like a "Bolshevik sect." That invention came later, after the Comintern.

In any case, it is obvious there must be the following tentative conclusion: If the Bolshevik party did not develop as a revolutionary party through the road of the sect, then there must be another way.

In fact, the historical conclusion goes farther: There is no revolutionary mass party, or even semi-revolutionary mass party, which ever became a mass party by the road of the sect.

That does not prove there never will be. That does not prove, by itself, that it is forever impossible for a sect to evolve into a mass party in some organic way, that is, without at some point realizing it is on the wrong road and taking a different route. But we are not interested in proving that. All that needs to be understood is that there must be another road -- a road which was in fact actually taken by revolutionary socialists, and with more or less success.

What is proved is that the road of the sect should not be followed uncritically, without thinking it through, as if it were the only one possible or thinkable. On the contrary the road of the sect has never worked up to now at all. What has worked is a quite different road, one which therefore at least deserves consideration.

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list