The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
Divisions within the party
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Divisions within the partyWoody, 2020 (Gus. “Revolutionary Reflections: Moving towards an ecological Leninism” rs21. December 18, 2020. https://www.rs21.org.uk/2020/12/18/revolutionary-reflections-moving-towards-an-ecological-leninism/ ///MF) This points to a further urgent issue when moving towards an ecological Leninism, one that the preceding authors vary on– the organisation of revolutionary socialists and its relationships with mass movements. In particular, the ecological Leninists are split on the question of the party. Dean and Heron are open in their desire for an ecological Leninist party, Malm reads ecological Leninism as a collection of principles not implying an actually existing party, Wall is focused on the need for grassroots organising rather than any formal party. This reflects a wider crisis among revolutionary socialists, one that has extended through the long 20th century into the 21st, that of the ‘Leninist party’ and the different organisational models proposed for revolutionaries. Outside of Dean and Heron’s calls for a party, both Wall’s Climate Strike and Malm’s upcoming How to Blow up a Pipeline focus on engaging with the variety of strategies environmentalists can take to disrupt fossil capital. Whilst both are certain to be crucial contributions, just as Lenin railed against the economist and terrorist strategies of simply organising around workplace conflicts or conducting isolated violent actions, there is still the tricky problem of creating an organisational form with the strategic acumen to transcend the limits of both. Contra Malm, who in Chronic Emergency talks of ‘popular pressure brought to bear’ on the state, there is a need to think through how this ‘popular pressure’ is not co-opted by opportunist forces and remains revolutionary, international, and eco-socialist in its content and form. Just as Lenin in What is to be Done? points to the need for Marxists to organise to ensure that economic struggle is not seen as subservient for the need to organise and agitate for revolutionary socialism, today simply hoping for rising radicalism from ecological struggle is insufficient. Only through attempts to agitate and organise as a body of revolutionary socialists can these struggles be converted into a confrontation with fossil capital. But if we reject the reading of Lenin as party builder, as many contemporary eco-socialists do, where does this leave us? Here, there is an urgent need for ecological Leninists to critically engage with the organisational failures of the groups that have adopted the Bolshevik banner in the long century since 1917. With a century where the centralist aspects of democratic centralism have been all too brutally wielded, now more than ever is a time for the comradely but disciplined development of revolutionary socialist organisation. Or in the words of Gittlitz, reflecting on the strange case of the Posadist International: The challenge, then, is neither to recreate the revolutionary movements of the past, nor to totally revise their history, but to salvage the functional truth of their mission for the struggle ahead. [20] It would be remiss of any ecological socialist to ignore the pioneering work of early anti-capitalist environmentalists like Bookchin, whose social ecology was deeply critical of Leninist, Trotskyist and other socialist party formations as they emerged in the US. [21] Bookchin of course, was just as comfortable critiquing anarchist organisational forms, attempting to steer a course between Marxism and Anarchism. Just as the Paris Commune was instructive to Marx and Lenin, modern ecological Leninists should consider the organisation of the revolution and state in Rojava, inspired by Bookchin and Ocalan. [22] Rojava contains within it lessons on striking a balance between the need for direct democracy and having a disciplined cadre, pointing to the many ways in which these needs are not necessarily contradictory. This is just one of many ‘ecological regimes’ which are attempting to grow today, and they should be used to inspire and develop contemporary Leninism. Given the often-rapid nature of rebellion and wider social change, the difficulty of how any Leninist organisation relates itself to the spontaneous actions of the working class and other social formations rears its head. What has prevented analysis of this question in many quarters is the wider tendency of environmentalists being uncomfortable using class analysis in proposing key agents for a revolutionary movement. One of the first eco-socialist thinkers, Andre Gorz, famously said Farewell to the Working Class, as did Bookchin in his own way in Listen Marxist! [23] This reflected the reality that the ‘industrial working class’, a stereotypical creation of both left and right, has fractured and reformed in the increasingly global economy. Yet recognising that the working class and peasants of 1917 are different from the working class and peasants of 2020 should not cow Leninists, it should inspire the further development of Marxist thought and our programme. Today we have traditions of racial capitalism, social reproduction theory and more to explain and identify revolutionary potential across the global working class. With this come new spaces to intervene, agitate, and form solidarity to organise a global revolutionary movement. Ecological struggle provides an opportunity to reformulate alliances between peasants, workers, land defenders, students and others exploited peoples, creating new avenues to analyse and shift the balance of class forces necessary for a revolutionary situation. We see glimpses of this in what Naomi Klein calls ‘Blockadia’, the coalitions of students, leftists, and often Indigenous land defenders who oppose new fossil fuel infrastructure. [24] Transforming this opposition to particular pieces of fossil fuel infrastructure into a total and international opposition to fossil capitalism is crucial. Recent instructive work in this area is that of Arboleda, whose studies of Chile’s mining supply chains point to the emergence of revolutionary potential across peasants being proletarianized by mining, extractive workers racialized and faced with outsourcing, and wider movements for Indigenous sovereignty. [25] There are no easy answers to the questions of revolutionary agents and revolutionary organisations, which Leninists of various stripes have tackled with mixed results over the last hundred years. However, rather than rejecting the concern or falling back onto the old cry of ‘the party’, ecological Leninists must work through the contradictions of organising in a warming world, with the weight of a thousand failed projects on our head. Perhaps the best summation of this project has been made by Mohandesi: I suggest we think of the “party” as an organization among others, one defined by its articulating function, as that which unites disparate social forces, links struggles over time, and facilitates the collective project of building socialism beyond the state. [26] Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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