THE discussion about what kind of party the working class needs has, for the present, centred on the political crisis inside Your Party and its seeming resolution as a ban on people belonging to what Claudia Webbe describes as “vanguard parties.”

These she describes as “disciplined, tightly co-ordinated, capable of swift unified action” and “theorised for conditions of revolution and repression, for moments when rapid centralised decision-making was essential to survival.”

Her framing of the issue posits a disciplined vanguard against a broad democratic mass party; an organisation built around the co-ordination of professional revolutionaries, or one built around the self-activity and democratic participation of the widest possible cross-section of the working class itself?

Is this a meaningful distinction in British conditions?

In explicitly banning members of half a dozen Trotskyist groups of varying degrees of significance and sectarian character, Your Party has not so much rejected “democratic centralism” as a parody of this important organisational principle.

Democratic centralism has its roots not in an abstract political theory or the practice of parasitic sects, but the daily practice of workers’ organisations. When a trade union takes a decision that the decision is binding on the workers concerned and that every breach of this principle is a weakening of the action.

Every successful revolutionary overthrow of capitalist relations of production and every example of a credible construction of the socialist order has been carried through by parties organised on the basis of a model of democratic centralism shaped by the material conditions in which each party worked.

In underground work and in armed struggle, centralised leadership and absolute discipline are matters of life and death and the success of the revolutionary process is inconceivable without this.

But even in these conditions the widest possible democratic participation in policy formulation and decision-making is a necessary precondition in formulating a political line. In fact, once the political line has been determined, organisation decides everything. Unless it is carried out in a united and disciplined manner it becomes impossible to evaluate where it was correct or not.

If this is obviously true in clandestinity it is also true in societies where the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is exercised through representative parliamentary politics.

No trade union leadership will tolerate organised resistance to a collective decision and workers at the sharp end of disputes regard workmates who fail to follow collective decisions with contempt.

As is the case in broad, mass working-class organisation, a necessary precondition of collective action is the widest participation in formulating policy. This, combined with unity in action, is the essence of democratic centralism.

Where Webbe argues that mass democratic socialist parties and vanguard parties built on democratic centralism are fundamentally different organisational forms designed for different tasks, she makes an artificial distinction that not only cannot be sustained in a revolutionary situation where discipline and unity are vital, but is also mistaken in each of the transitional stages towards a rupture with capitalist relations of production.

It is hard to theorise such a rupture at the present moment, but confronted with the world’s most experienced bourgeoise with — in Gramsci’s conception — an extensive hinterland of of institutions and social practices shaped to maintain bourgeois hegemony, we need a theory of the party adequate for the task of winning working-class power in our real conditions.

Your Party is not yet organised to contest elections but a good sign is that this is seen as a vital part of its campaigning work in the community in ways that are quite different from Labour. Where it is weak is in links with the trade union movement, even with groups of workers that are well organised, militant and with left leaderships.

Some of those purged from Your Party argue that Labour was itself a federal body that included various socialist groups at its foundation.

This is hardly relevant today. Firstly Labour was based upon the affiliation of trade unions and co-operative societies with millions of members which gave it a social weight and character that Your Party lacks.

And secondly, in the intervening years, with the expulsion of communists following the defeat of the General Strike 100 years ago next month and subsequently the affiliation of socialist parties was ending.

The distinguishing feature of the various bodies banned by Your Party is their open advocacy of Trotskyist ideas and the political practice generally associated with this trend. Their evident fissiparous nature militates against the notion that they embody any measure of unity around centralised decision-making.

The tendency to split is so ingrained in the political DNA of Trotskyism that even when they achieve success and attract allies, this asserts itself.

The most authoritative British writer on the subject, John Kelly, professor emeritus of industrial relations at Birkbeck, dismisses the idea that splits arise in small groups isolated from the working class and the labour movement. He argues that when the movement was growing during what he describes the post-1968 years of “the Golden Age of British Trotskyism” the “escape from isolation did not lead to fewer splits … but to a meteoric rise in splits, 20 all told in the space of just 20 years.”

In his book Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain, he explores the way these organisations have developed from three angles — their attempt to present as legitimate political parties, the countervailing tendency to sect-like behaviour and the attempts, sometimes relatively successful, to work within broad social movements and even to lead them.

Examples are the Anti-Nazi League in which the SWP (now with at least three schismatic breakaways) played an important part and the Anti-Poll Tax campaign in which Militant (now divided into three competing franchises) was a leading force.

This Kelly counterposes to the distinctive features of Trotskyism — most marked in Britain — a relentlessly high turnover of members, especially of young people, born of a drive to unrelieved activism; an ideological stasis born of the need to differentiate themselves from competing franchisees; with this extreme hostility to rivals combined with periodic mergers and further schism; and intensely hierarchical organisational structures and a particularly British tendency to combine the cult of personal leadership with a predatory sexual culture.

In fact the outfits now proscribed by Your Party are mostly a busted flush and are anxious to renew themselves with a transfusion of new blood with Your Party as the unwilling donor.

The SWP has never really recovered from an explosive sexual scandal which saw the departure of many younger members and several schismatic breakaways; similarly the Socialist Party is a shadow of its former self; the Alliance for Workers Liberty long has a reputation for a virulent anti-communism, along with positions which mirror British foreign policy wherever it is challenged; the CPGB (PCC) micro-sect has changed, chameleon-like, its ideological orientation many times over the last decades without ever growing beyond a few dozen members or changing its leadership.

After sitting out the cold war, and making a virtue of being buried in the Labour Party, Socialist Appeal, which stayed put when Militant was expelled from Labour, has now morphed into the Revolutionary Communist Party, cosplaying the communist tradition with hammer and sickle flags.

The RCP’s tiny veteran core has abandoned any attempt to extend its privately held materialist critique to counter the dominant idealism of its newly acquired student membership now hopelessly lost in self-delusion and identity politics.

Many drawn into Your Party will have some experiences of the ultra left in Labour, trade unions and campaigning organisations and, at the leadership level, are clearly determined to establish an internal regime hostile to such influence.

The calculation is that, on balance, Your Party is more likely to play a positive role unburdened by these largely parasitic groups, although they will have lost some capable and experienced organisers. It is notable that it has not completely excluded the possibility of affiliates, which makes this decision a rather pointed repudiation the proscribed bodies.

It offers a welcome to activists who join as individuals and abandon their former affiliation and this may entice some into membership as well as others who make a pretence of leaving their former group.

The brutal truth is that parties organised to win working-class power and establish socialism need both to become mass parties of the working class and to be organised to negate both the dominant ideas of the ruling class and the coercive power of the capitalist state.

We only need to see where this has happened to see what we need in Britain.