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Artisanal Politics, Bolshevism, and the Path to a Marxist Proto-Party

by Stephen Thompson, Aug. 13, 2025

Stephen Thompson draws on the history of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) to critique the "artisanal" character of the contemporary US Marxist Left, analyzing the recent activity of Socialist Alternative as a case study in "artisanal politics."

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Vladimir Nikolaevich Pchelin, “Meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) on October 23 (10), 1917” (1929).

1) Building the Foundations For a Mass Socialist Party in the US

The past ten years have been an interesting time for Marxists in the US. DSA became the largest socialist organization in generations, Black Lives Matter became the largest protest movement in US history, and in the labor movement there was a substantial uptick in the number of large strikes. At the same time, various polls have shown that the public wants things that neither major party will deliver but would fit well within a socialist platform.[1] A significant minority even say they have a favorable view of Marxism and want to get rid of capitalism altogether.[2]

These points speak to the potential for a mass socialist party to eventually emerge in the US. And although it will probably take decades to build a truly mass party, we should be thinking now about how we can move that process forward. Ideally, Marxists will contribute, in part, by offering answers to key political questions like: What should the party actually try to accomplish? What will be its strategy? And what will it look like to begin implementing that strategy in the US today?

If we want to actually influence the development of a future mass party, we need to provide compelling answers to these questions, and we must be able to articulate those answers to substantial numbers of people. In other words, to build the foundations for the mass socialist party of the future, we should be working now to organize a critical mass of activists into a cohesive proto-party organization with a solid Marxist program.

How do we build this Marxist proto-party? This is the key question I want to address in this essay. It will require a frank discussion about what the existing Marxist Left in the US is getting wrong. I will focus on the leaders of one particular group, Socialist Alternative, to provide some illustrative examples. As I will argue below, although Socialist Alternative’s leadership claims a Bolshevik political heritage, they are actually doing the opposite of that which made the Bolshevik Party possible in the first place. These leaders have insisted on an approach that makes little sense and is in serious need of critical reassessment. Instead of Bolshevism, their approach is something I call artisanal politics.

Artisanal politics is what happens when, instead of fighting to lead the socialist Left on the basis of a clear program, a Marxist organization tries to maintain a niche for itself within the wider ecosystem of progressive-left activism. Like the vendors who sell artisanal items at farmers markets, artisanal Marxist groups work on a small scale to carry out their own idiosyncratic projects. Although this might be a good way to create quirky products to meet varied consumer tastes, it is a terrible way to organize a socialist movement. Instead of having a unified proto-party working to win mass public support for a socialist program, we get an alphabet soup of different organizations all trying to build their own issue-based campaigns, media projects, and front groups, most of which exist on a scale that is too small to matter. To move forward, Marxists need to break decisively with artisanal politics. In this essay I explore what it could mean to do this.

I begin my argument in Section 2 with a general discussion of the contemporary political terrain in the US. Marxists need to be sober about the enormous power of our enemies and the formidable tools they have at their disposal. But I also argue that, in the coming decades, there will likely be important openings to fight back and begin charting a path to socialism. The question is: how do we build an organization that can effectively navigate these openings?

In Sections 3 and 4, I provide some historical perspective for thinking about this question. Specifically, I look at how Russian Social Democrats, beginning all the way back in the 1880s, built the foundations for what became the Bolshevik Party. This meant having a clear set of ideas for how the masses could win political power, developing a program based on those ideas, and finding ways to fight for the program even when society was not on the brink of revolution. At the same time, to create an organization that could carry out those ideas on a meaningful scale, it was necessary for Russian Social Democrats to establish a baseline level of programmatic agreement among themselves, and in the beginning, this required an enormous amount of public debate among the members of various small political groups. These debates took years, but over time they made it possible to build unity around fundamental principles without having to enforce strict conformity around secondary issues. This is how dozens of small groups transformed themselves into a unified organization from which the Bolshevik Party ultimately emerged.

Next, in Sections 5 and 6, I discuss problems of the contemporary socialist Left, looking specifically at groups like Socialist Alternative. The leaders of these groups such as these have, effectively, turned Bolshevism on its head. They seem to lack a clear idea of what it would look like for the working class to run society, and they fail to convey any real conception of how to get from here to there. Rather than working to build principled unity around a Marxist program, they separate themselves into various tiny groups which largely ignore each other, with each group distinguishing itself by its unique positions on secondary issues. This is artisanal politics, and it produces a socialist Left that is unable to build a non-negligible base of support for Marxist politics in the working class.

Finally, in Sections 7 and 8, I propose an answer to the central question of this article: how can we begin building a viable Marxist proto-party in the US today? There is already a substantial number of smart, capable, sincere Marxist activists in the US, and if a critical mass of them were united together on the basis of a compelling program, then they would be well positioned to have a noticeable impact in society and begin building an organized base of support for Marxist politics. But to a significant degree, these activists are separated by bureaucratic internal structures that inhibit frank and open political discussion among the members of different groups; this is a major obstacle to the sorts of debates that will be necessary for reaching agreement on a compelling program. I conclude that the members of these groups should fight for the right of open (public) discussion, and we should find ways to organize debate across the Marxist Left, with the aim of ultimately creating a unified proto-party organization built on a shared commitment to socialist revolution.

2) The US State, Mass Movements, and Socialist Politics

In the US, the existing state is a clear obstacle to what the Left wants to achieve. There is a long history of the military being used to break strikes, and governors deployed National Guard troops against the BLM protests in 2015 and 2020. If socialists gained a majority in Congress and held the Presidency, the political role of the military would become an even more pressing issue, because the people who run the military are firmly integrated with the ruling class and have a strong interest in maintaining the status quo.[3] The existing state, particularly including the military, has long imposed a check on what mass movements can achieve in the US. Any president trying to implement socialism in the US today would have to contend with the possibility of a Pinochet-style coup.

But mass movements in the US have not only come into confrontation with the power of the state; they have also found ways to successfully fight back. In the 1930s, workers were able to build a powerful industrial labor movement because they combated strikebreaking by National Guard troops, including by persuading the troops to stand down. As Art Pries wrote in his history of the CIO:

But strikers and their thousands of supporters did more than shame the young National Guardsmen. They educated them and tried to win them over. Speakers stood on boxes in front of the troops and explained what the strike was about and the role the troops were playing as strikebreakers. World War I veterans put on their medals and spoke to the boys in uniform like “Dutch uncles.” The women explained what the strike meant to their families. The press reported that some of the guardsmen just quit and went home.[4]

Similarly, in 1970, when Nixon deployed National Guard troops in an attempt to break a wildcat strike of postal workers, many soldiers expressed support for the strike, and some even helped to prevent the resumption of mail service by deliberately missorting items; if the National Guard troops had been more loyal to the state authority, Nixon may have been able to crush the strike, but instead the strike continued and became one of the biggest victories for public sector workers in US history.[5] There were also glimmers of this during the George Floyd uprising five years ago, when protesters persuaded members of the National Guard to lay down their shields and take a knee in solidarity with the movement.[6]

This raises the question: how could these efforts ultimately be systematized, scaled up, and escalated by a mass revolutionary movement? That will only be possible if a substantial layer of the public is willing to support attacks on the existing order, but here I think there is actually some room for optimism. In the early 1960s, for example, nearly 80% of Americans said they trusted the government to do the right thing at least most of the time, but during the decades since then, the percentage has dropped substantially, and for the past ten years it has fluctuated around 20%.[7] Another recent poll found that 58% of Americans believe the US political system needs major changes but are not confident that it can be reformed.[8] These general anti-establishment sentiments are frequently intertwined with a variety of ideas, including conservative ones. But there is evidently a deep dissatisfaction with the existing system, and an openness to other possibilities. All this underscores the need for a socialist party that can patiently argue for a clear, concise program which directly challenges the legitimacy of the system as a whole, lays out a path for replacing it with a socialist one, and begins working right now to organize the already existing public hostility toward the state.

It is easy to imagine the sorts of events—like overreach by the Trump administration, new climate-induced disasters, or deep cuts in public services when the dollar finally loses its international reserve currency status—that could spark massive new social crises in the coming years and decades. When these things happen, it is likely that new mass movements will emerge, and soldiers will again be called upon to restore order. To navigate those situations and be more than just spectators, Marxists will need to already have a sizable organization with some clarity about what to do. How do we get from here to there?

This is exactly the type of question I think the history of Bolshevism can shed light on. A good starting place is the Bolshevik Party program, since the program specified the key positions a person had to accept to be a member and thus created a basis for shared clarity about the aims of the party.[9] As part of this, it is useful to understand the development and origins of the Bolshevik program in the early Russian Social Democratic movement, because this history shows how Marxists laid the basis for the October Revolution through their work over a three-decade period, beginning at a time when they were a small force in society. To demonstrate these ideas, in the next section I am going to emphasize the way Russian Social Democrats navigated issues related to the military; I do this because I think it provides a useful example, and because I think these issues have an underappreciated relevance for Marxists today, but similar points could also be made about various other demands and tactics that the Social Democrats raised.

3) The Bolshevik Minimum Program: Origins, Implementation, and Some Lessons for Today

The precursor to the original Bolshevik program was the Social-Democratic Emancipation of Labor Group’s program from 1884, which had a standard minimum/maximum structure.[10] The maximum section spoke to the socialist transformation of society that would become possible once the working class won state power. The minimum section, or “minimum program”, described the things to be fought for before the working class rose to power, and included political demands that laid out what it would mean to replace the tsarist autocracy with a democratic republic. The logic of this program reflected the understanding that working-class political rule could only be exercised through a democratic system. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto: “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”[11]

As part of the call for a democratic republic, the minimum program included an important point related to the military: it demanded “the replacement of the standing army by general arming of the people.”[12] Demands like this were important because they clarified what it would mean to overthrow the existing autocracy and what the autocracy would be replaced with. Since the existing military was a cornerstone of the autocracy’s power, building a democratic republic would have to mean replacing the existing military with something else, and to the extent that they were serious, Russian Social Democrats needed to have some idea of what that “something else” would be.

At its party congress in 1903, the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) adopted a program that was largely inspired by the Emancipation of Labor group’s ideas. The RSDLP program’s minimum section called for a democratic republic and the “replacement of the standing army by universal arming of the people.” Although the program did not provide details about this—for example, it did not explain if or how the armed population would be organized into a militia—it did bring clarity to a fundamental issue: the new state power was supposed to be rooted in the armed masses, rather than the existing bureaucratic-military machine.

The 1903 congress also passed a “Resolution on Demonstrations” that gives a sense of how the party intended to deal with the military in its day-to-day work:

In view of the fact that regular troops are increasingly being used against the people in demonstrations, steps should be taken to acquaint the soldiers with the character and purpose of the demonstrations, and they should be invited to fraternize with the people; the demonstrators should not be allowed to antagonize them unduly.[13]

When a revolutionary situation developed in Russia during 1905, the Russian Social Democrats gave agitational speeches to win the military rank and file over to their side; this was powerfully portrayed in the movie Battleship Potemkin. When the Potemkin sailors took over their ship and put it under the control of an elected committee, they demonstrated what it would mean to dismantle the existing military and transfer that power to the working class through the “arming of the people.”

In 1912, when the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP formed what we now know as the “Bolshevik Party,” the RSDLP program became the Bolshevik Party program. The political demands in the minimum program continued to be central to the party’s agitational work.[14] When World War I began, the main party newspaper published a statement by the Bolshevik Central Committee which called for a revolutionary struggle against the war, and held up the Paris Commune—in which the communards built a workers’ state by suppressing the standing army and arming the people—as the example to follow.[15]

Similarly, rank-and-file party members agitated for a revolutionary struggle against the war and for a democratic republic—although many apparently ignored some of the Bolshevik Central Committee’s more radical directives regarding “revolutionary defeatism.”[16] This is because, as I will discuss in more detail below, the Bolshevik Party was held together by a shared commitment to an overarching political project, not by top-down micromanagement of members or monolithic agreement about secondary issues.

In 1917, Lenin (and some other leading Bolsheviks) became convinced that the conditions had arrived for an international socialist revolution.[17] He argued for a revised and more radical minimum program, which described the conditions under which a revolutionary socialist government of workers and peasants could take power:

The party fights for a more democratic workers’ and peasants’ republic, in which the police and the standing army will be abolished and replaced by the universally armed people, by a people’s militia; all officials will be not only elective, but also subject to recall at any time upon the demand of a majority of the electors; all officials, without exception, will be paid at a rate not exceeding the average wage of a competent worker; parliamentary representative institutions will be gradually replaced by Soviets of people’s representatives (from various classes and professions, or from various localities), functioning as both legislative and executive bodies.[18]

Despite important changes, there was a certain continuity with the old minimum program, in the sense that it described the new political system to be created through a revolution, and clarified what it would actually mean to break the power of the existing regime.[19] In essence, Lenin’s draft program kept the old RSDLP demand regarding the military, but situated it within a more radical vision of mass participatory democracy. Delegates representing the party’s hundred thousand members met to discuss these issues at the Bolsheviks’ April 1917 Conference, where the core positions in Lenin’s revised minimum program were adopted.[20]

The subsequent events of 1917 showed what it would mean to implement this minimum program in the real world. Over the course of the year, Bolshevik agitators played a key role in winning over the military rank and file to the revolution.[21] The major turning point came in August, when soldiers and sailors helped to defeat Kornilov’s coup attempt by arresting their commanding officers and setting up committees to democratically run their units themselves.[22] Once the military and the factories were under the control of the working class, it became relatively straightforward to assume state power with a brief insurrection. Although the revolution itself was clearly the product of larger historical forces, it was possible in part because Russian Marxists were finally able to persuade the public, after three decades of trying, that the standing army should be replaced by the arming of the people; only then was it possible to build the system of radical socialist democracy that the Bolsheviks advocated.

After the October Revolution in Russia, the expected international revolutions failed to materialize. In early 1918 the Soviet government was forced to sign a peace treaty with Germany under highly punitive terms, with calamitous effects for Russia’s economy, which was already devastated by years of war.[23] Ultimately, much of the country’s industrial capacity was destroyed, a significant percentage of workers had to become peasants, and millions faced starvation; the combined effect of these things was to eliminate any material basis in Russia for the creation of a stable proletarian democracy.[24]

But none of this should obscure the radically democratic vision upon which the Bolshevik revolution was based. And it is even more important to keep in mind that, because of the enormous degree of economic and technological development that has taken place over the past 108 years, there is a much stronger material foundation on which to build a system of radical socialist democracy today.[25] We need a program that clearly articulates what it would mean to create this system, drawing on the positive and negative lessons from the October Revolution, as well as the experiences of other parties across the world.[26]

What would this program actually look like? As a starting place, I recommend reading the fourth section of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGP) program, which describes the system of working-class political rule the party seeks to create: a state in which supreme power is held by a single popular assembly of elected delegates, who are recallable at any time and paid a workers’ wage; replacement of the standing army and police by a people’s militia; unrestricted freedom of speech; openness (transparency) in all state affairs; the radical democratization of various aspects of the economy.[27] A program for the US would need to include these sorts of points. In putting forward a vision for a democratic workers’ state, a US program would have to grapple with the specificities of racial oppression in this country and the need to complete the unfinished work of post-Civil War Reconstruction, as the Marxist Unity Group argues.[28] More generally, a Marxist program has to explain the need to fight for the international unity of working and oppressed people, and the need to fight against the ruling class, including by fighting for various immediate demands. Finally, a Marxist program should discuss the gradual transition to stateless communism that will become possible once the working class wins power (as in the fifth section of the CPGB program). These are the sorts of fundamental ideas I believe should be in a Marxist program today.

At the same time, a party program should not take a position on everything, because the program specifies the political positions that new recruits have to accept before joining, and the party will condemn itself to irrelevance if it defines its political identity too narrowly. Again, the history of Bolshevism is instructive here. At various points between 1903 and 1912, it was necessary for the Bolsheviks to form a unified party with the Mensheviks, because many workers—even the “advanced” workers the Bolsheviks wanted to recruit—needed a chance to “test” certain ideas before they could see whether those ideas were correct.[29] Lenin made similar points in 1919, when he opposed a decision by the German Communist Party to expel ultra-leftists from its ranks; although he was adamantly opposed to the “semi-syndicalist” tactics that the ultra-leftists advocated, he argued that unity in a single party was “both possible and necessary” as long as there was “agreement on the basic issue (for Soviet rule, against bourgeois parliamentarism).”[30]

All of this boils down to a simple idea: if people have the same fundamental aims, then an effort should be made to find agreement on a way to achieve those aims; if at all possible, tactical disagreements should be resolved through persuasion and debate, rather than by splitting into distinct organizations. Although we need a program that takes a clear position on fundamental issues, the program should not try to settle every tactical question at the outset.[31]

These things also need to be considered in relation to the consciousness in society as a whole. For example, in 1912, when the Bolsheviks believed that their positions were sufficiently understood by the wider working class in Russia, they became willing to build a party based on a higher level of internal agreement.[32] By the same token, because the working class in the US knows relatively little about the issues that divide the socialist Left today, Marxists should work to build a party around a relatively small number of fundamental programmatic commitments, which I discussed above, but can be summarized as follows: proletarian internationalism, socialist revolution, and the establishment of a democratic socialist state rooted in the armed working class. Relative to these fundamental aims, virtually all tactical questions—for example, questions about the usefulness of mutual aid, or the degree to which Marxists should work within the structures of existing unions—should be considered secondary.

As long as we have a shared understanding of our fundamental aims, Marxists should be able to debate secondary questions in a unified (proto-)party, and carry out whatever the majority position ends up being, while still retaining the right to argue for a different position. This can be contrasted with artisanal politics, in which Marxist organizations define their identities by taking hardened positions on secondary issues, and draw rigid organizational boundaries between themselves on that basis, rather than working toward principled unity on fundamental issues.[33]

In summary, Bolshevism was based on a program which clearly laid out what it would mean for ordinary people to collectively run society. This was a radically democratic vision, in which the basis of state power was the armed working class, rather than a bureaucratic-military machine. Bolshevism remains a crucial reference point for thinking about how to develop a program for a socialist party today.

4) Building the Bolshevik Party

In addition to having the right program, socialists need to have enough social weight to actually carry their program out. A useful analogy can be made here with a union organizing drive. It is impossible to organize a union simply by giving speeches and writing articles; there must also be organizers who can have one-on-one conversations with workers and build the union on the shop floor. That’s why, in successful union drives, there is generally at least one dedicated organizer for every hundred workers.[34] Similarly, to organize a mass political strike or an insurrection, a socialist party must have a sufficiently large base of members in relation to the broader public, so that these members can conduct the type of “patient, systematic, and persistent explanation” famously described by Lenin in the April Theses. Even in Russia, where the working class was relatively small, the Bolshevik Party had around a quarter million members by July 1917.[35] In short, a revolutionary socialist party must ultimately also be a mass workers’ party.

Although Russian Social-Democratic organizations first developed in the 1880s, there was nothing in Russia that could truly be called a workers’ party prior to 1903. In fact, before 1905, because of the political repression that existed in Russia and the absence of a legal, institutionalized labor movement, it was difficult to even hold meetings with more than a few people at once.[36] Thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian Marxists occupied themselves with organizing Social-Democratic “circles” or “groups,” which focused on intensive study of Marxist ideas with small numbers of workers (i.e., propaganda), although they also did things like distributing leaflets at strikes and demonstrations.[37]

During that time, Social-Democratic groups in Russia tended to last a matter of months before being destroyed by police arrests, so issues related to secrecy and security had an overwhelming importance.[38] The situation we face today is obviously somewhat different, and this serves as a reminder to not overgeneralize from the things that Marxists did in a specific historical context. Still, there is a useful analogy to be made between the small Marxist organizations that exist now and the Social-Democratic circles in pre-revolutionary Russia. The Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA) allude to this in their manifesto, when they discuss the current state of the Left and mention the “myriad of sectarian groupings” involved in “small-circle politics.”[39] Based on this, RCA seems to have drawn the conclusion that they can simply dismiss the rest of the Marxist left and declare themselves “the party.” I draw a very different conclusion, but I do believe the era of “small-circle politics” in Russia involved problems relevant to Marxists today.

In fact, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia’s Social-Democratic groups faced problems that I suspect some readers will find eerily familiar. For example, various groups tried to produce their own newspapers, but it was a huge challenge for any of them to find the resources to do this in a sustainable way.[40] They lacked the economies of scale that could exist in a unified movement, which meant that, as Lenin argued, the Russian Social-Democrats were organizing their work in an inefficient and “artisanal” way, roughly resembling the system of individualized craft production that was predominant when capitalism was in its infancy.[41] At the same time, because they were too marginal to have a significant impact on the world around them, some groups instead tended to tail existing consciousness, jumping from one idea to another depending on whatever was happening in the rest of society.[42]

Thus there was a need to replace these disparate groups with a party unified around a clear Marxist program. One conceivable way forward might have been for a single group to simply declare itself “the party” and dismiss the others for their “small-circle politics.” But this is not how the RSDLP was built, and, as Mike MacNair has persuasively argued, the declare-yourself-the-party strategy is unlikely to ever succeed because it does not address the underlying reasons why socialist movements tend to be weak and divided in the first place.[43]

To transcend the artisanal phase of the Russian Social-Democratic movement, it was necessary to persuade the members of the existing groups to collectively adopt a compelling Marxist program, which only became possible after a years-long period of fierce debate. It was also noteworthy that these debates happened out in the open, in the form of public polemics; as Lenin would later argue, this type of transparency is important because it creates an incentive for leaders to behave responsibly and focus attention on issues that actually matter.[44]

The early debates in the Russian Social-Democratic movement did not involve very many people—in all the years leading up to the RSDLP’s 1903 Congress, the total number who joined Russian Social-Democratic groups was only around 3,500.[45] Lenin himself appears to have devoted significant time and energy to polemics against Rabocheye Dyelo, a Social-Democratic group that published twelve issues of a newspaper from 1899 to 1902 and then faded from history.[46] Despite the relative obscurity of this group, if one searches Marxists.org for writings by Lenin that mention Rabocheye Dyelo, over a hundred hits will appear. Although the Russian Social-Democratic movement was small, Marxists had no choice but to engage with the movement that actually existed.

Russian Social Democrats finally adopted a shared program and created the infrastructure for a genuine party at the 1903 Congress of the RSDLP. Fittingly, at the congress itself, there was so much debate that delegates had to continue meeting for almost a month.[47] But Marxists were willing to accept these seemingly interminable discussions because they understood the need to develop shared political clarity. Lenin summarized the significance of all this in the following way:

For the first time, a secret revolutionary party succeeded in emerging from the darkness of underground life into broad daylight, showing everyone the whole course and outcome of our internal Party struggle, the whole character of our Party and of each of its more or less noticeable components in matters of programme, tactics, and organisation. For the first time, we succeeded in throwing off the traditions of circle looseness and revolutionary philistinism, in bringing together dozens of very different groups, many of which had been fiercely warring among themselves and had been linked solely by the force of an idea, and which were now prepared (in principle, that is) to sacrifice all their group aloofness and group independence for the sake of the great whole which we were for the first time actually creating—the Party. But in politics, sacrifices are not obtained gratis, they have to be won in battle. The battle over the slaughter of organisations necessarily proved terribly fierce.[48]

Thus to build a genuine workers’ party, it was necessary to “slaughter” the existing groups and unite their members in a single organization with a shared program. And this required a battle, particularly because for some leaders, maintaining control over a small group was more appealing than submitting to the discipline of a unified party.

These issues became central to the differences between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the party, as the Menshevik leaders proved unwilling to carry out the decisions of the party congress.[49] By 1912, after multiple temporary reunifications, it became clear that the majority of the Mensheviks were unwilling to carry out the party’s program, and instead wanted to “liquidate” the RSDLP into a broad-based reformist organization.[50] At the same time, it appeared that the vast majority of militant, class-conscious workers had been won over to the side of the Bolsheviks—in fact, at that point, the Bolsheviks even dominated the leadership of the major unions.[51] For these reasons, there was a clear political rationale for a final split, and the organization we now know as the “Bolshevik Party” was formed at the Prague Conference in 1912.[52]

But the diversity of opinion in the party, and the culture of public debate that went along with that, continued, and remained an essential element of the party’s political identity.[53] For example, the positions in Lenin’s April Theses were initially opposed by the majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee, but they were still published in the party newspaper, and the next day a response from Kamenev was published, entitled “Our Disagreements.”[54] The key thing to understand is not simply that there was significant space to fight for minority ideas; the more important point is that this process was actually central to the production of majority opinion in the party: many of Lenin’s key theoretical contributions in 1916–17 drew on previous work by Bukharin that Lenin had initially dismissed as ultraleft.[55] Thus, there is a sense in which “Leninism” only exists as we know it today because there was so much room in the Bolshevik Party for members to argue against the views that Lenin actually held during much of his life.

Along with this diversity of opinion, the party also had to live with a diversity of political action, as when leaders of the Bolshevik Military Organization helped to instigate the premature “July Days” uprising in 1917 but faced little or no discipline afterward.[56] Even Lenin, who certainly did not shy away from advocating expulsion in other situations, argued against discipline for the Bolshevik Military Organization after the July Days fiasco: "It is necessary to help them, but there should be no pressure and no reprimands. To the contrary, they should be supported: those who don’t take risks never win; without defeats there are no victories."[57]

In summary, the party that led the October Revolution was in many ways a rowdy, wild, messy organization, in which a variety of political currents existed. But the party was able to maintain a certain degree of cohesion because members had a shared commitment to a set of fundamental aims.

5) What Are You Talking About?!

In a sense, the Marxist Left in the US today is the opposite of the Bolshevik Party: rather than united around a program that takes clear and compelling positions on fundamental issues, Marxists in the US are organized into an alphabet soup of tiny groups which distinguish themselves with hardened positions on secondary issues. At the same time, in many cases, the leaders of these organizations do not appear to have any idea what it would mean for the working class to win state power, or any idea of what it would look like to get from here to there.

I will now illustrate these problems by looking at Socialist Alternative (SA), an organization that I have been a member of for the past three years. I should clarify that, in the past, I have certainly made mistakes like the ones I describe below, and so my aim here is not to pontificate. Instead, my intention is to draw attention to some political problems in the Marxist Left that need to be addressed at a collective level. In this section, I am going to focus on some interrelated issues of program and organization.

At SA’s national convention last year, one of the decisions was to hold discussions throughout the organization as part of a process to eventually draft and vote on a program. In addition to this proposal, the convention also adopted a “building document,” which recognized the need for “refounding” our international organization, the International Socialist Alternative, “on a clear programmatic basis.” Thus there seemed to be widespread agreement that Socialist Alternative’s lack of a program was a problem we would need to rectify through collective discussion at all levels. The convention also elected SA’s main national leadership body, the National Committee (NC), which I became a member of, and which is supposed to be accountable to the convention’s decisions.

Unfortunately, although the convention identified the need for SA’s members to collectively discuss programmatic questions, so far the NC has declined to include space for these discussions in the priorities they set for the organization. Instead, at a meeting in February, the majority of the NC chose to adopt an updated “What We Stand For” document.[58] Despite the fact that the vast majority of members were not given a chance to weigh in on (or even see) this document before it was adopted, the document is now being treated as a program for the whole organization; the Executive Committee (EC), which is elected by the NC to oversee the day-to-day work of the organization, refers to the document as a “distilled version” of SA’s “program.” In effect, SA’s national leadership has claimed for itself the right to settle key programmatic questions on its own.

This is a recipe for building a weak organization. One reason is that, if a socialist organization is not firmly rooted in a set of shared principles established through democratic discussion and debate, there is a danger that leadership, without a firm political anchor, will erratically change positions in response to the prevailing winds in the rest of society. To see that this is more than just a hypothetical concern, consider SA’s constantly shifting position on the Democratic Party. In Spring 2022, around the time I joined the organization, the national leadership created a petition with a “never voting for a Democrat again” pledge to be used at Socialist Alternative tables, and also published an article on this theme.[59] Then, a few months later, they chose to endorse two Democrats for the Seattle City Council.[60] More recently, the NC voted to adopt the above-mentioned EC “program,” which takes an unequivocal stand against “votes or donations to any Democrats or Republicans.” But then, just five months later, the EC decided that Socialist Alternative would call upon New Yorkers to vote for Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party’s candidate for mayor.[61]

These zigzags are a violation of the SA constitution, specifically the part that states “all major policy and organizational decisions of the organization will be taken after full discussion at every level of the organization.” The above examples also illustrate the tendency for lower bodies in SA to cavalierly disregard decisions by the higher bodies that elected them (as when the Executive Committee disregards a decision by the National Committee). At the same time, the national leadership has shown a willingness to engage in bureaucratic practices, like responding to legitimate criticism with threats of disciplinary action, and using a kangaroo court to remove a political opponent from an elected body. I could easily give more examples to illustrate this, but the basic point is that, although members’ activities are often micromanaged by the national leadership, the leaders themselves are not meaningfully accountable to anyone. Thus, although SA describes itself as a “democratic centralist” organization, it is actually the opposite.

To understand what is at stake here, it is useful to pause for a moment and think about some of the reasons why Marxists go through the trouble to build a party in the first place, rather than working within, say, the Democratic Party. One reason is that the Democratic Party is run in an undemocratic way: the organization’s administrative staff might consult with various “stakeholders,” or even allow people to participate in the party’s nominally democratic internal processes, but at the end of the day it is the party functionaries who have their hands on the levers of power. This is why, when DSA members in Nevada were formally elected to lead their local Democratic Party, the party’s staff were able to quickly sabotage them, paving the way for the old guard to return to power shortly afterward. If our aim is to adopt a Marxist program and collectively carry it out, then we need to build a very different type of organization, which is under the collective control of its members. Unfortunately, most of Socialist Alternative’s national leadership appears committed to an undemocratic approach in which they settle the key political questions on their own, switch positions whenever it feels convenient, and expect the rest of the members to simply parrot whatever ideas are handed down to them.

Since SA’s national leadership is unable or unwilling to build a socialist organization under the control of its members, it should come as no surprise that they are unable to articulate a clear vision for a political system under the control of the working class. Just consider the EC’s “program” that I mentioned earlier. As I discussed in Section 3, during the decades before the October Revolution, Russian Marxists understood that the military was a cornerstone of the existing regime’s power, and an obstacle to the establishment of working-class political rule; this was why it was necessary to develop a program that clearly dealt with these issues, and argue for that program in society. In contrast, the EC’s program talks about the need to “drastically cut the bloated U.S. military budget” and redirect that money to other uses. In effect, rather than describing what it would look like for society to be run by the working class, the EC’s program merely raises a standard progressive demand for redistributing resources within the existing capitalist state. This is in keeping with a political vision for Socialist Alternative in which, although classical Marxist texts are sometimes discussed internally, the outward-facing work of the organization is largely confined to campaigning for progressive-left ideas while trying to build public support for socialism in the abstract.

This is a problem because a socialist society will not emerge spontaneously from workers’ fights for progressive-left demands. Instead, millions of people will have to consciously work to overthrow the existing system, and they will have to construct a new system by doing specific things. And someone, somewhere, will have to convince these people to do these things. This means that Marxists have to do more than just build movements, or try to build support for “socialism” or “revolution” as concepts. They will have to explain what socialist revolution actually means, and provide some reasonable ideas for how to get from here to there. The EC’s “program” does not do anything like this.

Even if our revolution is still a long way off, this should not stop us from thinking about how to connect a Marxist program to things happening around us today. Here it is useful to again think about the George Floyd uprising in 2020, when millions of demonstrators took to the streets and state governors called out National Guard troops to quash the protests. There were several reports of soldiers objecting to the role that they were being ordered to play.[62] Moreover, this took place in a context of more general discontent among National Guard troops, which ultimately led them to organize unions in Texas and Connecticut.[63] So, it is unsurprising that, in some cases, as I discussed in Section 2, BLM activists were able to persuade members of the National Guard to openly support the protests. What might a Marxist party have been able to accomplish in that atmosphere if it had made a concerted effort to organize and scale up these efforts on a nationwide basis? Such a party might have connected this work with a programmatic demand for replacing the existing military with a militia controlled by the working class, as part of a longer-term effort to build majority support for socialist revolution. Instead, during the George Floyd uprising, Socialist Alternative’s main focus was on fighting for more progressive tax policies.

It is also worth noting that these issues are not unique to one organization. Consider the program of the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA).[64] Although it includes more exclamation points, their program is similar in substance to the EC’s “distilled” program. In particular, the RCA program states that a workers’ government would “slash the military budget and invest in social needs,” but completely evades the question of whether the existing military should be left in place at all.[65] In other words, the RCA program, like the EC’s program, does not provide any coherent vision for what it would actually mean for the working class to win state power.

The leaders of SA and RCA like to use the word “revolution,” but when they use that word, what are they actually talking about? Without a minimum program that describes the conditions under which it would be possible for the working class to assume power, and without a plan to make those conditions a reality, the concept of “revolution” becomes a meaningless abstraction. This underscores the need for more discussion among Marxists to establish a shared understanding of our fundamental aims.

6) Artisanal Politics

The above points bring me to another question: if SA and the RCA have such similar programs, why are their members separated from each other into distinct, secretive organizations? It is difficult to find an answer to this question in SA’s public materials; in fact, SA does not have a single article on its website that even mentions RCA. Nonetheless, I believe this is an important question.

SA and RCA each have their own respective international organizations, the International Socialist Alternative (ISA) and the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI). In one of ISA’s internal spaces for discussion, a leading member was asked about RCI, and gave an answer that I will quote here in full, because I think it is very revealing:

They’re a cult around Alan Woods, with no roots in the working class anywhere, and therefore susceptible to erratic swings or zigzags, as shown by their “communist” turn of 1–2 years ago. They thought they’d found a silver bullet, frenetically and opportunistically signing up 100s on the basis of a very low level, not clearly distinguishing Trotskyism from Stalinism, using a crude anti-US line without explaining the deeper reality of today's inter-imperialist conflicts (especially China’s role). This was a 180 degree turn from their previous book club (“cadre”) emphasis, but as they’re incapable of serious interventions, it just made them a bigger, louder book club for a time. That “tactic” has predictably soured; today they are no longer so cocky, although their organisation is wealthy and can still stage grand gatherings (like any good cult). On political differences with genuine Trotskyism, there’s the national question: The IMT [the International Marxist Tendency, RCI’s former name] supported No to independence in the Scottish referendum in 2014 (“Keep Britain together in the interests of working class unity”). Then they did a 180 degree turn immediately afterwards (when Yes got 45% of the vote, stunning the IMT/RCP). They were “neutral” on Brexit in 2016 for opportunistic reasons (“two reactionary camps”). In Taiwan, the RCP doesn't support independence, has a slogan “No to Taiwan nationalism” but don’t mention Chinese nationalism. A key difference is their historical roots—they split from us in 1992 because they disagreed that capitalism had been restored in the USSR/Eastern Europe and they disagreed on doing independent work outside the UK Labour Party. Their “Marxism” is what Lenin called “repeating old formulas”—if you read their historical articles about the Russian Revolution or fascism in the 1930s, it’s not bad, sometimes quite good. If you read about what happened last week anywhere, it’s full of mistakes and weaknesses—because they're lost in the present.

To my knowledge, this is the most comprehensive account of how ISA’s leadership understands its current differences with RCI, so I think it is worthwhile to pause and make a couple points about what the comrade says here.

First, the comrade accuses the RCI leadership of erratically changing positions. This seems like a pretty flagrant case of stone throwing by a person who lives in a glass house, but let’s put that aside, and ask a more fundamental question: even in a hypothetical world where RCA is led by chronic zigzagers and SA is led by people who do everything right, would it make sense for SA to simply ignore RCA? As I discussed above, Lenin devoted significant time and energy to writing public polemics against Rabocheye Dyelo, and he particularly emphasized their tendency to zigzag on key issues. These polemics were part of a long effort to unify the Social Democratic movement by exposing bad leaders, winning over those who followed them, and fighting to build agreement around a Marxist program. In contrast, by largely ignoring the RCI in public, while taking potshots at RCI’s members behind their backs, ISA’s leadership is working to reinforce existing organizational divisions. In this way, ISA’s leadership is playing a disorganizing role within the Marxist Left.

Second, in describing the political differences between RCI and ISA, the comrade puts particular emphasis on “the national question,” i.e., the right of oppressed national groups to form their own states. Apparently, RCI’s leadership called for a “no” vote during a Scottish independence referendum in 2014. Okay, but why is this position actually wrong, and even if it is wrong, how big of a deal is this? Of course, ISA’s leadership should not shy away from defending their position, but they should also explain: how do the political differences on this issue (or any other) actually justify the fact that ISA and RCI are separate organizations?

Again, consider the Bolsheviks. Although the right of national self-determination was enshrined in the party program, the Bolsheviks were far from having a unified position. When the issue was put to a vote in April 1917, the majority of Bolsheviks reaffirmed the party’s position, but a large section from the party’s left wing did not.[66] In 1915, Bukharin and other leading left Bolsheviks even wrote a public critique of the party’s position, calling it “utopian” and “harmful.”[67] And notice that the disagreement between ISA and RCI is over a much smaller issue, because both organizations adamantly support the right of national groups to form their own states; the dispute here is merely about whether Marxists should actually call for a particular group of people to leave the UK and form a separate state. In other words, ISA’s leadership is trying to build an international organization with a higher degree of political agreement than existed in the Bolshevik Party—in fact they are insisting on a significantly higher degree of political agreement than even existed in the Bolshevik Central Committee during 1917.[68] Why?

Should we call for Scotland or Taiwan to form independent states? These are important questions, and Marxists should of course defend whatever answers they think are correct. But they should also keep in mind that these are tactical questions, not questions of principle. In other words, they are the sorts of secondary questions that the Bolshevik Party (at least up through 1917) did not try to enforce monolithic agreement on and which should not prevent Marxists from building a unified organization today. Unfortunately, because we have a plethora of self-described Marxist groups that take different positions on various secondary issues, the aggregate effect is to create a socialist Left in which, rather than working toward majority agreement, activists have a strong incentive to shop around until they find the organization that is the best fit for them. The end result is artisanal politics: a Marxist Left populated by a variety of tiny groups which each implement their own ideas on a small scale and have little impact on the world around them.

We would recognize it as an obvious problem if workers in a particular shop were divided into a dozen different tiny unions that largely ignored each other. In fact, I think we can all agree that it would be extremely stupid to organize the labor movement this way, and workers would understandably wonder why they should even get involved in a labor movement organized like that. As Marxists, we should take our own work seriously enough to judge it with the same clarity. We should recognize that artisanal politics is a problem and we should do something about it.

7) Programmatic Unity Is The Antidote

From my own experiences, I am firmly convinced that, among the members of the self-described Marxist organizations in the US, there is a significant number of smart, sincere, dedicated people who want to bring about a socialist revolution and are interested in a serious discussion about how to make that happen. Of course you will sometimes find strange people in these organizations—you will find strange people in any organization!—but you will also find shop stewards who have earned the respect of their co-workers through years of patient work, presidents of medium-sized union locals, and some of the main builders of the anti-war movement. The existing Marxist organizations, whatever their problems, are not separate from the real movements of working and oppressed people that exist in the US. It is very difficult to imagine what it would look like to build a Marxist party that is rooted in existing movements while simultaneously ignoring the Marxist organizations that currently exist.

At the same time, although there are obviously a lot of disagreements about important political issues among Marxists in the US, we are often separated by organizational barriers that have an extremely flimsy political basis. In my interactions with current or former members of the larger Marxist groups, I’ve generally found that when they chose their group over the others, it was not because they had a particularly hardened or permanent commitment to the group’s ideas. Instead, they joined the group because they were in general agreement with its key positions, but they probably took a lot of things on faith, and, at best, only heard straw-man versions of the positions held by rival organizations. And then after they joined, there was even less of an opportunity for them to seriously engage with the positions held by other organizations, because most of the Marxist groups avoid public polemical engagement with one other, and because bureaucratic rules (or taboos) make it difficult for the members of the different groups to engage in frank political conversations. By the same token, if Marxists from different organizations had more meaningful and sustained contact with each other, it is entirely possible that, after a lot of discussion and debate, a critical mass would agree on enough core issues to justify the creation of a unified organization. So we should work to organize discussion across the different groups, with the aim of establishing programmatic unity among Marxists.

Such a project would have the potential to bring together a group of Marxists comparable in size to DSA’s current activist base. In addition to pulling in members of existing Marxist groups, this project could attract a substantial number who were previously active in a Marxist group but quit in frustration. Programmatic discussions like this would also potentially attract a section of DSA’s left wing. And—who knows?—there could also be people out there who are turned off by DSA, and do not see any reason to join an isolated grouplet, but could be persuaded to participate in a project to build a Marxist party. Altogether, it is not hard to imagine an initiative like this cohering five or ten thousand active members within a decade. And then, once we have cohered together a critical mass of people, much would become possible.

As an example, consider the Zohran Mamdani campaign for mayor happening now in New York City. His demand to eliminate bus fares, as well as similar points in his platform, have clearly captured the public imagination, and some 50,000 people have volunteered for his campaign, but existing laws in New York State would likely be used to block Mamdani from implementing his platform in the city, even if he gets majority support for it.[69] If this happened, what would the response from existing Marxist organizations look like? RCA would probably write a fiery denunciation of Mamdani’s reformism for the front page of its newspaper, while SA might produce a more “sensitive” and “transitional” article for its own paper. At the same time, if history is any guide, neither group’s paper would mention the other. These groups and others would then sell copies of their newspapers to an inconsequential number of people and, in the end, everything would be more-or-less the same as it was before.

Now, think about what a Marxist proto-party with 10,000 members might accomplish in this situation. For concreteness, imagine a scenario where a majority of New York City residents clearly indicate their support for eliminating bus fares, but the implementation of such a policy is blocked by a decision in Albany. Marxists could respond by making the case that, no matter what the law says, the city’s residents made a majority decision, and the working class should carry that decision out. And, crucially, if Marxists had a unified organization with 10,000 members, we could do more than just write newspaper articles; we could actually launch a viable mass campaign with the aim of persuading bus drivers to stop collecting fares and persuading riders to stop paying. In the process, this hypothetical proto-party could explain the need to fight against the undemocratic capitalist state, it could bring public attention to the points about this in its program, and it could connect this with the importance of building a mass revolutionary socialist party. We are not currently in a position to do this, but we can take concrete steps in that direction right now by working to build programmatic unity among Marxists.

In working toward programmatic unity, it will be important to focus on two questions: first, what should be the fundamental aims for Marxists today, and second, under what conditions would it make sense for Marxists from different groups to build a shared organization to carry out these aims? We need to develop collective answers to these questions, and although that process would probably begin with polemics to clarify key political differences, the aim should ultimately be to organize formal talks among those who feel they have enough common ground to develop a shared program. Some leaders will be extremely resistant to these sorts of unity discussions, because they would rather maintain control of a tiny organization than accept the risks inherent in building a unified party; in other words, some leaders will work to keep the Marxist Left in its current artisanal state. But there is no reason why we should let these leaders stand in our way.

8) Let’s Fight For a Marxist Proto-Party

The potential exists to build a mass socialist party in the US in the coming decades. As a step in that direction, Marxists should work to build a proto-party now. To that end, every Marxist should fight for the right of open (public) discussion in their own organization, and should work to foster frank political debate across the socialist Left, with the aim of forging unity around a program for socialist revolution. In the process, we need to force a debate over the silly, artisanal state of the existing Marxist Left.

As a starting point, this means refusing to play a rigged game. Members of Marxist groups have no responsibility to accept micromanagement by leaders, particularly if those leaders are not themselves accountable to anyone. Rather than submitting to bureaucratic regulations on discussion, Marxists should put forward their ideas as clearly as possible and should fight for those ideas openly. At the same time, it will be important to create spaces for Marxists from different groups to talk with each other in an ongoing way; this could start with some type of online forum.

The fights within the existing Marxist groups will be difficult, and in some cases might hit a dead end. For Marxists who feel like they have reached that point, my recommendation would be to join DSA and consider getting involved with a Marxist caucus (or even starting a new one). DSA has its own problems, but in the short term it may be the best place for socialists to debate the critical issues we have in front of us. This is because in DSA there is a well-established norm of public discussion and debate which is mainly absent in the rest of the US Left. Moreover, DSA members have shown an ability to lead major struggles, so there are reasons for Marxists to engage with the organization anyway.[70] In fact, if DSA became a rallying point for Marxists of all stripes, this could open up some interesting new possibilities.

But whatever happens in the short term, our aim during the next ten years should be to build the foundations for a socialist party with the following characteristics:

  1. The party needs to have a clear, concise, internationalist program for socialist revolution. The program should include a minimum section with political demands that clarify what it would actually mean for the working class to win power, as well as immediate demands that are winnable in the short term. The program should also discuss the socialist transition to be implemented once the working class is in power.
  2. Members should be those who accept the program as a guide to action, actively participate in one of the party’s organizations, pay dues, and agree to carry out the decisions of the most recent party congress.
  3. The party should strive for unity of action and freedom of discussion; the party certainly should not restrict recruitment to only those people who are willing to parrot the opinions of leaders. It should be the norm for organized political tendencies to exist in the party, and these tendencies should have roughly proportional representation on leading bodies. With certain rare exceptions, these tendencies should have the right to argue for their views openly. In short, all members should carry out the party’s majority decisions regarding definite actions, but minorities should not be subject to heavy-handed or undemocratic restrictions.
  4. The party should be involved in building the labor movement, as well as being involved in fights for democratic rights and against identity-based oppression. I would also advocate that the party run candidates for elected office, and if it does this, it will need to set up structures to maintain control over its elected representatives.[71]
  5. The party should have complete independence from capitalist parties (this means no “tactical use of the Democratic Party ballot line”).

It is possible to build the initial nucleus for an organization like this, i.e., a proto-party, with a membership of several thousand, during the next five or ten years. This is something that would allow us to begin building an organized, working-class base of support for socialist revolution in the US.

Liked it? Take a second to support Cosmonaut on Patreon! At Cosmonaut Magazine we strive to create a culture of open debate and discussion. Please write to us at submissions@cosmonautmag.com if you have any criticism or commentary you would like to have published in our letters section.

  1. For example, majorities say they want things like nuclear disarmament and a progressive redistribution of income. See Craig Kafura, “Americans Want a Nuclear-Free World,” Global Affairs, August 6, 2020, https://globalaffairs.org/commentary-and-analysis/blogs/americans-want-nuclear-free-world; Andy Cerda, “Most Americans continue to favor raising taxes on corporations, higher-income households,” PewResearch, March 19, 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/19/most-americans-continue-to-favor-raising-taxes-on-corporations-higher-income-households/.

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  2. “Fifth Annual Report on U.S. Attitudes Toward Socialism, Communism and Collectivism,” https://victimsofcommunism.org/annual-poll/2020-annual-poll/.

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  3. Isaac Stanley-Becker, “Corporate boards, consulting, speaking fees: How U.S. generals thrived after Afghanistan,” The Washington Post, September 4, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/04/mcchrystal-afghanistan-navistar-consulting-generals/.

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  4. Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO 1936–55 (Pathfinder, 1973), 23.

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  5. Paul Prescod, “When the Mailmen Rebelled,” Jacobin, May 24, 2018, https://jacobin.com/2018/05/postal-strike-1970-wildcat-rank-and-file-unions.

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  6. “National guardsmen put down shields at rally”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-IhRfbvsf8. Also see: “US National Guard members take the knee with protesters after Keke Palmer speech,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyX4ZxUkpD4.

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  7. “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2024,” PewResearch, June 24, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust-in-government-1958-2024/.

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  8. Richard Wike, Janell Fetterholf, Shannon Schmacher, J.J. Moncus, “Citizens in Advanced Economies Want Significant Changes to Their Political Systems,” PewResearch, October 21, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/10/21/citizens-in-advanced-economies-want-significant-changes-to-their-political-systems/.

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  9. For example, the Bolshevik Party rules from 1917 state: “A member of the party is one who recognizes the party Programme, belongs to one of its organizations, submits to all party decisions, and pays membership dues.” See Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Volume 1: The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party 1898-October 1917 (University of Toronto Press, 1974), 251.

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  10. G.V. Plekhanov, “Programme of the Social-Democratic Emancipation of Labour Group,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1883/xx/sdelg1.htm. For more on minimum-maximum programs, see: Donald Parkinson, “The Revolutionary Minimum-Maximum Program,” Cosmonaut Magazine, May 5, 2021, https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/05/the-revolutionary-minimum-maximum-program/.

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  11. Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton, 2024).

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  12. “Programme of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party”, https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/program.htm.

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  13. Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Volume 1, 52.

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  14. Ibid, 150.

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  15. Ibid, 195.

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  16. Robert B. McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions: Workers & Revolutionaries June 1907–February 1917 (Yale University Press, 1990), 361.

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  17. Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, Volume 2: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution, (Haymarket, 2009), Chapter 2.

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  18. V.I. Lenin, “Draft of Revised Programme”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/reviprog/ch04.htm.

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  19. In fact, the Emancipation of Labor Group program, the RSDLP program, and Lenin’s 1917 draft revision are strikingly similar to each other. Even in October 1917, Lenin remained adamant about the need for a minimum program; he opposed the idea of having a program that simply described the transition to socialism. See V.I. Lenin, “Revision of the Party Programme,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/06.htm.

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  20. Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Volume 1, 218-221.

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  21. Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 129.

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  22. Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (Haymarket, 2017), chapter 8.

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  23. Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Indiana, 2007).

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  24. George Collins, Russia: How the Bureaucracy Seized Power (Socialist Alternative, 2018), https://www.socialistalternative.org/russia-bureaucracy-seized-power/.

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  25. Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (Verso, 2019).

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  26. For an interesting discussion related to this, I recommend reading Mike MacNair, “The minimum platform and extreme democracy”, Weekly Worker, May 17, 2006, https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/625/the-minimum-platform-and-extreme-democracy/.

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  27. Communist Party of Great Britain, Draft Programme, https://communistparty.co.uk/draft-programme/.

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  28. See: Marxist Unity Group, “Seven Points of Unity,” https://www.marxistunity.com/.

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  29. See paragraph 19 of Executive Committee of the Communist International, “Theses On The United Front,” https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/united-front.htm.

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  30. V.I. Lenin, “Letter To The Central Committee Of The Communist Party Of Germany Regarding The Split,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/oct/28a.htm; also see: Pierre Broué, The German Revolution 1917–1923, (Haymarket, 2006), Chapter 15.

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  31. This is roughly the argument that Lenin made when the RSDLP program was being developed. He wrote: “Questions of tactics, however, can hardly be introduced into the programme (with the exception of the most important questions, questions of principle, such as our attitude to other fighters against the autocracy). Questions of tactics will be discussed by the Party newspaper as they arise and will be eventually decided at Party congresses.” V.I. Lenin, “A Draft of Our Party Programme,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/dec/draft.htm.

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  32. Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, Volume 1: Theory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution (Haymarket, 2009), Chapter 11.

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  33. Bolshevism and artisanal politics can both be distinguished from classic sectarianism, in which socialists set up their programs against “the real movement of the workers in the class struggle.” The quote is from Hal Draper, “Anatomy of the Micro-Sect,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1973/xx/microsect.htm.

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  34. Kate Bronfenbrenner, “Successful Union Strategies for Winning Certification Elections and First Contracts: Report to Union Participants (Part 1: Organizing Survey Results),” https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/webform/uploads/kate_bronfenbrenner-report_0.pdf.

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  35. Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Volume 1, 249.

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  36. Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov, A Radical Worker In Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford University Press, 1986), 234.

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  37. Neil Harding, ed., Marxism in Russia: Key Documents 1879–1906 (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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  38. Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (Haymarket, 2008), 8, 767.

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  39. A Manifesto for America’s Communist Generation, https://communistusa.org/a-manifesto-for-americas-communist-generation/; This language is almost identical to Lenin’s comments about the “traditions of circle sectarianism.” See: V.I. Lenin, “Letter to Iskra,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1903/nov/25a.htm.

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  40. Kanatchikov, A Radical Worker In Tsarist Russia, 210-221.

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  41. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, 453-456.

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  42. Ibid, 453–56, 763–812.

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  43. Mike MacNair, “Bringing about a Marxist party,” Weekly Worker, September 20, 2006, https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/641/bringing-about-a-marxist-party/.

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  44. V.I. Lenin, “Letter to Iskra,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1903/nov/25a.htm; this contrasted with some of the unhealthier traditions of the small-circle era. See: Cecilia Bobrovskaya, Twenty Years in Underground Russia: Memoirs of a Rank-And-File Bolshevik (International Publishers, 1934), 39–40.

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  45. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, 443.

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  46. Ibid, 281.

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  47. Minutes of the Second Congress of the RSDLP (New Park, 1978).

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  48. V.I. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/r.htm.

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  49. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, chapter 9; Also see: Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Haymarket Books, 2015), 67.

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  50. Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, Volume 1, chapter 10.

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  51. Ibid, 284.

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  52. Technically, even the “Bolshevik Party” included so-called Party Mensheviks, or members of the Menshevik faction who agreed to continue carrying out the RSDLP program; one of the seven members elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912 was a Party Menshevik. Additionally, the Prague Conference report from local organizations claimed that “everywhere at the local level, without a single exception, party work is being conducted jointly and amicably by Bolsheviks and Party Mensheviks”. See: Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Volume 1, 146-149.

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  53. Murray Smith, “Internal Democracy and Public Debate in Revolutionary Parties,” International Viewpoint, May 16, 2005, https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article782.

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  54. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (Haymarket, 2018), 349.

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  55. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (Oxford University Press, 1980), chapter 1.

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  56. Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Indiana University Press, 1968).

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  57. Ibid, 226.

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  58. “What We Stand For,” https://www.socialistalternative.org/get-involved/.

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  59. Grace Voss, “Why I’m Never Voting for a Democrat Again,” Socialist Alternative, May 4, 2022, https://www.socialistalternative.org/2022/05/04/never-voting-for-a-democrat-again/.

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  60. “Kshama Sawant & Socialist Alternative Endorse DSA Candidates & Call For Them To Break With The Democratic Party,” Socialist Alternative, July 31, 2022, https://www.socialistalternative.org/2022/07/31/kshama-sawant-socialist-alternative-endorse-dsa-candidates-call-for-them-to-break-with-democratic-party/.

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  61. Gabe Berry, "Zohran Wins In NYC—All Out To Defeat The Establishment In November & Beyond," Socialist Alternative, July 9, 2025, https://www.socialistalternative.org/2025/07/09/zohran-wins-in-nyc/.

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  62. Aaron Ross Coleman, “Black National Guard members express discomfort with quelling Black Lives Matter protesters,” Vox, June 11, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/6/11/21288006/black-national-guardsman-discomfort-enforcers-black-lives-matter-protests-george-floyd.

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  63. Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon, “Texas Soldiers Are Unionizing After Facing Attacks by a Right-Wing Governor,” Jacobin, May 9, 2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/05/texas-soldiers-unionizing-right-wing-governor-greg-abbott-tseu-national-guard-organizing.

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  64. For a detailed discussion of RCA, I recommend reading: Marxist Workers Group, “Marxism or Grantism? Our balance sheet of the Revolutionary Communist International,” https://whatistobedone.ca/statements/marxism-or-grantism.

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  65. “A Fighting Program for the Revolutionary Communists of America,” https://communistusa.org/program/.

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  66. Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Volume 1, 218.

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  67. Georgy Pyatakov, Yevgenia Bosch, and Nikolai Bukharin, “Theses on the Right of Nations to Self-determination,” https://libcom.org/article/theses-right-nations-self-determination-georgy-pyatakov-yevgenia-bosch-nikolai-bukharin.

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  68. Bukharin was part of a left grouping on the Central Committee during 1917 and 1918. The Central Committee meeting minutes from this time “show the Central Committee deeply split on almost every major issue of the day.” See: The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (bolsheviks) August 1917–February 1918 (Pluto Press, 1974), 1.

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  69. Paul Demarty, “After Mamdani’s victory,” Weekly Worker, July 3, 2025, https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1545/after-mamdanis-victory/.

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  70. Emily Comer, “Myths and Realities of the Education Strike Wave,” Jacobin, April 26, 2019. https://jacobin.com/2019/04/red-state-revolt-review-teachers-strike.

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  71. I hate to bring up the Bolsheviks again, but I think this is another area where there are a lot of useful lessons to be learned from them. See: August H. Nimtz, The Ballot, The Streets, or Both?: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution (Haymarket, 2019).

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About
Stephen Thompson –

Stephen Thompson is a member of Socialist Alternative. He lives in Chicago.