Class Independence

Formation of the concept

Class independence took shape as the nineteenth-century workers' movement worked out its relation to bourgeois parties. In his speech to the London Conference of the First International on 21 September 1871, Marx said that the workers' party "must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goal and its own policy." The speech survives as the stenographic record "Apropos of Working-Class Political Action," was delivered in French, and was first published in full in 1934. Marx's argument was that complete abstention from politics is impossible: driving workers into abstention throws them into the arms of bourgeois politics, and in the aftermath of the Paris Commune proletarian political action was already the order of the day. The abolition of classes can only be achieved through the political domination of the proletariat, and revolution, as the highest political act, requires that means, political action.

The same London Conference adopted a resolution stating that the working class "cannot act as a class except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes." This was a direct challenge to the Bakuninists, who rejected state and political party alike. On the General Council of the First International Marx defended political action through an independent workers' party and the strike as a weapon of class struggle, clashing with the Proudhonists who opposed political action.

A condition of class-consciousness

Class independence is understood not as a one-off declaration but as a condition of the development of class consciousness. Marx held that class consciousness advances rapidly once class independence is established, and he criticized attempts to skip independence and run ahead as sectarian substitutionism. Engels wrote that in every country newly entering the movement the organization of the working class as its own political party is the momentous first step, that an immature program is an unavoidable transitional evil, and that when the working class has its own movement it advances through its own mistakes. He also held that communists should take part in such large organizations, since the movement's development and splits would allow them to secure important leading positions.

Lenin and the tactical question

In "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder" Lenin argued that the Bolshevik experience could not be exported as it stood and that each country had to apply the general revolutionary goals to concrete conditions by Marxist method. The Leninist tradition holds that the proletarian revolution must be led by a vanguard party, but the concrete form in which class independence is applied, including whether communists join a labour party, remains a tactical question to be judged by national conditions.

Lenin did not decide on the basis of principle against British communists joining the Labour Party directly; lacking information, he declined to judge whether it was advantageous, and he saw the realization of class independence as an opening that would split the bourgeois representatives and create conditions favourable to revolution. He held that the condition for revolution was for the British working class to go through reformist leaders and learn the results for itself, and that parliamentary activity should make those results visible to the masses. In Lenin's view participation in government was not for administering the capitalist state but for exposing in practical struggle what the existing order fails to provide the working class, thereby building support for the communists.

Contemporary cases

In Spain, Anticapitalistas founded Podemos and built an audience and a cadre, but in the end the Iglesias group took over the party. In France, the LCR dissolved to found the NPA, which ended up smaller than at its launch; many cadres left for Mélenchon's left front, and the NPA, isolated, faced the problem of overcoming sectarian infighting. Portugal's Left Bloc was formed in response to a major defeat on abortion rights, and on the common ground of the Fourth International, Maoists and left social democrats it responded to austerity and unemployment by organizing precarious workers. In the United States, DSA was where tens of thousands of new activists gathered, initially carrying a desire to break from the Democratic Party and to organize the working class, but an internal backlash returned it to a position of historical realignment.

Debates and distinctions

In the debate over broad left parties, one current effectively equates class independence with a revolutionary program, rejecting participation in DSA and broad parties, while another holds that class independence is won through the actual process of class development and criticizes sectarian impatience. Broad left parties are a response arising from the material conditions of the disintegration of trade-union and movement organization and the collapse of the established left; they can begin a new project of class organization and class independence, but they can also be captured by opportunism or lose popular appeal. Defenders of entry into Democratic Party primaries are criticized by currents emphasizing class independence for subordinating the socialist movement to the capitalist Democratic Party. Those currents hold that supporting capitalist party candidates makes a lie of the claim to speak for the working class, and that the very notion that such a party can be a vehicle of liberation is a fiction.

The demand for class independence is presented not as an individual's "resistance" but as a workable message to the working class: "believe only in your own strength." In the conceptual history of proletarian revolution, Marx treated the class-conscious proletariat as the active subject of revolution, distinct from Blanquist conspiracy and from views that make the lumpenproletariat the motive force. In twentieth-century Marxist intellectual history, class independence runs through Lenin and Stalin into institutionalized Marxism-Leninism and the line debates of its internal factions (Trotskyism and others), where it marks the dividing point from the line of class collaboration.