Comments on Hal Draper’s “On Another Road: The Alternative to the Micro-Sect”

by Charlie Post

Hal Draper’s provocative essay is an important contribution to the discussion of socialist organization. His rejection of the notion that small propaganda groups can, through individual recruitment to a “chemically pure Marxist programme,” transform themselves into mass revolutionary parties is on target. He demonstrates clearly how such a perspective has only produced small, socially and politically inconsequential, and highly authoritarian groupings that make no contribution to working class self-organization. 

While Draper’s critique of the ‘micro-sect’ model, which still dominates much of the revolutionary left’s organizational practice in North America, is on target, his analysis and alternative strategy for building a Marxist current in the working class suffers from a number of problems. 

The essay is very ahistorical. Draper presents no analysis of the evolution of the workers' movement and its vanguard layers. The shrinking size and social and political disorganization of the workers’ vanguard after the Comintern’s adaptation of the “popular front” strategy in 1935, which is central to my and Kit Wainer’s understanding the difficulties of "party-building" in this period is never mentioned. Instead, one, time-less and ahistorical model of "party building”—the creation of a “political center”—is substituted for another time-less and ahistorical model—the ‘micro-sect.”  

The notion of the "political center" is highly abstract and has many difficulties. The notion that revolutionary Marxists should limit their activity to publishing materials aimed at the most political workers  (a necessary element of any socialist group's activity) and shun the building of a membership organization is inadequate. It ignores the central issue facing revolutionary socialists’ historically—how to organize a cadre of worker activists who can actually intervene in the ongoing class struggle. 

The most successful example of revolutionary socialist organization, that of Russia before 1917, is misinterpreted in Draper’s piece. First, Russian revolutionary socialists—the Bolsheviks-- built a faction-tendency within the Russian social-democracy, with a press, publications, and a membership. The reason they could not provide membership figures to the Socialist International had more to do with the clandestine conditions of their work than any "political center" project they had. Clearly some groups of Russian socialist workers may have shifted their allegiances between the factions, or stood "above factions" after

1905. However, most of the research (David Lane, Roots of Russian Communism) on the social base of Russian social-democracy indicates that the Bolsheviks had a fairly stable base among the most political workers in the larger industrial enterprises, while the Mensheviks drew support from workers in small enterprises. 

Draper’s strategy of building a non-membership group makes the construction of a cadre of worker socialists impossible. Without a common practice--within reasonable and historically sane conditions—you can not forge a layer of workers or social movement activists who are both Marxists and militants. The Bolsheviks, whatever their political-theoretical errors organized a revolutionary workers’ organization in Russia. Rosa Luxemburg, because she failed to build a membership group (a faction/tendency within the German Social Democratic party) failed to do this. In fact, one could argue that Luxemburg and her collaborators in the German party (Paul Levi, Clara Zetkin) created a "political center" with publications and newspapers. What they did not create was a group of militants with a common practice who could develop a strategy and tactics for the workers' vanguard in Germany. The absence of such an organization of revolutionary worker militants in Germany was a central factor in the failure of the German revolution of 1918-1919. 

Despite Draper’s desire to find an alternative to the authoritarian internal life of the “micro-sect,” the idea of a "political center" run by an editorial board without a membership organization is inherently undemocratic. The editorial board of a “political center” would take on the functions of a political leadership, issuing positions, and strategic and tactical advice to its supporters. Without a membership organization of some kind, there is no way that the supporters of a newspaper can hold the editorial board accountable. There would be no way for the experience and thinking of those "on the bottom"—the worker militants to have input into the politics of the editorial board. From advocates of "socialism from below,” the notion of such a "political center" is highly problematic.