In Search of Praxis #2: What Type of Socialist Party, Building an Electoral Base and Party Transformation from Within

Within the parliamentary road, a consideration of the type of party, its rooting amongst the people and the conditions in Malaysia.

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Within the standard binary among socialists, if one does not choose revolution, then one is left with reform. How that can be done could take many forms. The type of party is one consideration, given that historically the choice is between mass parties along the lines of social democracy or Leninist parties that hold a vanguard ideology. With the reform strategy, the parliamentary road is most likely taken to set about that agenda, and thus leading to the question of involving the people within the reform process. This article will elaborate on the choice of the socialist party type, its challenges and pitfalls, before going into the efficacy of any parliamentary or electoral effort in the next piece.

A key factor in determining the success of any parliamentary effort within the strictures of bourgeois democracy is the type of party setup chosen as the vehicle of change. Historically, two types of parties have been seen to be the models to emulate. The first is the mass parties that have traditionally been affiliated with social democracy, think the German SPD, the Russian Mensheviks, and modern incarnations like the US Democratic Party and UK Labour Party post-Tony Blair. The mass party was characterised by its proclaimed rooting among the people, typically workers and peasants, with its membership being open to anyone willing to join. The second type is the vanguard parties organized on the principle of democratic centralism — where decisions made by the party are binding on all members, replicated to a large extent by communist, Leninist, and Trotskyist parties around the world. This party type is commonly premised on being led by a group of professional revolutionaries or an enlightened political elite, the vanguard.

Appearances aside, one should not assume one form is automatically more democratic than the other — mass parties can be controlled by a bureaucratic elite, and vanguard parties can have vibrant internal democracies. That being said, the growth and success of a party are also highly contingent on the conditions of its founding. If the party was built on the backs of an existing movement or is in leagues with larger groupings, such as unions or local council movements, it has serious consequences on the party’s democratic inclinations and resistance to the creation of party bureaucracies and oligarchies. 

The limitations of mass parties can be seen through the lens of the most successful parliamentary socialist party, the German Social Democrats (SPD) in the 20th century, a party that traces its lineage to Marx and Engels. The first flaw was its tendency towards institutionalisation — the forming of internal party structures to deal with the complexity of governing and enforce ideological coherence — typically stemming from electoral victory and its first taste of power. This quickly leads to a form of political conservatism due to the need to operate within bourgeois democracy, veering away from political revolution or even social revolution, thus increasing the likelihood of keeping capitalism intact, sometimes reinforced by the economism of the trade union leaders. The second flaw was bureaucratisation as, without a clear blueprint for workers democracy, the delegation of power to unions and the integration of union elites into the party fundamentally changes the power distance between workers and the party leaders, leading to a ‘workers aristocracy’ that is more enthusiastic about defending their privileges than overthrowing capitalism. 

Because the Bolsheviks were the first socialists to take over a country and liberate an empire from the Russian Tsar, their model of the vanguard party became the one to emulate for the next generation of liberation fighters. Despite their success, the failure of Soviet communists in preventing the creation of a ‘workers aristocracy’ laid in the central premise of the party’s role as the ultimate defenders of the revolution. Famously, this critique can be found in left-communist and libertarian socialist/anarchist analysis of the Soviet Union. Despite their conception of themselves (the Bolsheviks) as the vanguard of the revolution, ruling in the name of the workers and peasants, their self-designation as enlightened elites, wholly separate from the people, replicated the power distance and unresponsiveness of the bourgeois and feudal elites that they had overthrown. (1)

Before bringing the discussion to Malaysia, it is worthwhile elaborating on recent efforts by left-wing activists in taking over existing mass parties of social democracy, most notably Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party and Bernie Sanders with the Democratic Party. Both represented recurring instances of left forces attempting to steer the party leftwards from within its own structures — both Corbyn and Sanders took advantage of democratic openings within the two parties. Yet, despite the overwhelming energy behind both leaders, the party apparatus proved unmovable and willing to lose political power to prevent a revolution from within. (2)

As with the previous article on revolution, the following discussion also presupposes the absence of a strong Left in Malaysia as there remains a lack of strong labour unions or general mass organisation forces outside political parties. One can consider two general scenarios for party formation, the first being a situation where extra-party associations have been sufficiently developed to form the mass base of a party — a coalition of unions and groups come together to form a party — and the second in which the party is formed first before cultivating a base.

In Malaysia, the conditions for the first case are difficult to even imagine in the short term given the previously mentioned lack of organised labour and left-inclined coalitions. The existing NGO-civil society complex, largely centred around the seat of power in the Klang Valley, has in recent times been shown to be in league with the opposition parties of Pakatan Harapan coalition (and its predecessors). Made up of single-issue, technocratic and reform-minded organisations, it will not be easy prying this group from their Pakatan allies. While it may be practically conceivable to gather smaller and more scattered grassroots organisations, establishing an ideologically coherent and culturally accessible platform to unite them may prove challenging to say the least. Attempting to organize people into local associations and unions from scratch would be ideal but mobilising the human resources to do it is even more difficult to imagine. Pursuing the second scenario, establishing a party first, appears to have no better odds either. The Socialist Party of Malaysia, having done great work representing the poor and marginalised, are no closer to securing a mass electoral base after two decades of organising. 

One clear temptation would be for left forces to enter an existing, electorally-successful party and transform it through a Corbyn/Sanders-style revolution. A prime candidate is the Democratic Action Party (DAP), which claims to be within the social democratic tradition of socialism. Yet, a deeper examination would show that it has undergone the institutionalisation and bureaucratisation that characterised the German SPD of old. While the DAP has not faced such an internal revolution, I would wager that it would throw the full weight of its institution in stopping a left insurgency that it would see as an existential threat to its electoral chances. 

With all that said, what are we left with? With no existing base to quickly build from, it seems as though the only way forward is the hardest route of organising people from scratch. While setting up a party ahead of that does not hurt one’s chances of mobilisation, any electoral or parliamentary effort may take resources and attention away from the important work of organising. Between the two party types, history has shown that despite both their flaws, a mass party can be course-corrected if it is founded upon a solid set of democratic institutions and practices. Having laid out the routes to forming a party and the choice of party structure, the next article will focus on the operation and purpose of a party within a bourgeois parliamentary democracy, and ultimately its odds of success at enacting parliamentary socialism.

(1) Read the last two paragraphs of Maurice Brinton’s The Bolsheviks and Workers Control for more on the vanguard party and its discussion on the ‘division [of society] into leaders and led’ https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/maurice-brinton-the-bolsheviks-and-workers-control

(2) The ‘iron law of institutions’ is: “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution ‘fail’ while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.” http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001705.html