What Kind of Party and Why?

Simon Swartzman

MARTA HARNECKER’s REBUILDING the Left is a major influence in my thinking in this article. In that book, she synthesizes lessons for the Left from her direct experience within socialist governments like Allende in Chile and Chavez in Venezuela, as well as her study of “Pink Tide” governments throughout Latin America in the 21st Century, and failed left governments of the 20th Century.

Her view of a “new political instrument” is an organization that can synthesize between politicians and social movements, between indirect and direct lessons of the struggle, and jointly design a path out of capitalism. This instrument is necessary as “a body that unifies and coordinates the various emancipatory practices around goals common to all actors.”

She later says, “If political action is to be effective, and the popular movement’s acts of protest, resistance and struggle are to achieve their anti-system goals, there needs to be an organizing subject capable of directing and unifying the multiple initiatives that arise spontaneously and capable of encouraging more initiatives.”

She then goes on to explain some lessons on how this instrument should function both internally –developing programs, developing members, developing capacities — and as a force in government, in a way that avoids the mistakes of the past: too top-down or not top-down enough, etc.

She turns to case studies of Latin American popular municipal governments that have “set themselves the goal of creating a social project in which civil society, and particularly the popular sectors, are the protagonists.” She notes how Left political organizations, after winning election and draining their cadres to fill the government positions (as we saw in Chicago), learn the difficulty of going from opposing to governing.

In this moment, there develops a disconnect between the government and those movement organizations: “debilitated by the loss of their cadres, powerless to follow the rhythm of decision making required by an executive body of this kind and unable to understand the difference between being the opposition and being the government — instead of playing the role of guide to the new government’s actions, tend to adopt an attitude of critical opposition, at times even harsher than that of the Right.”

This diagnosis is very familiar to those of us in the Chicago Left right now, with many organizations like IPOs, CTU, and labor-community coalition members who have “lost” many of their cadre to roles in government. The desire to re-balance our forces from “governing power” to base-building and class power above is reacting to this same “brain drain.”

Instead of just re-balancing forces between social movements and government, Harnecker sees a party as the way to overcome this contradiction. The Left requires “a party mediating body at the highest level — national or state — to resolve the differences that often arise between municipal political leaders; and a political team that looks beyond day-to-day affairs, that considers the big picture and that, at given intervals, critically evaluates the way the government is going so it can correct its course in time if it has lost its way, or if new situations arise that demand an unplanned change of direction.”

The political organization should be mature and experienced enough to make constructive public criticisms of its government to maintain the legitimacy of both in the eyes of the public.

A large factor in Harnecker’s focus on legitimacy and criticism comes from her focus on popular understanding and developing what she calls “popular protagonism,” the idea that regular working people understand and act upon their own agency in transforming the world.

She sees left parties as pedagogical, teaching everyday people about the capacities they have when acting together, and the barriers that capitalism erects against those capacities. But this pedagogical role depends on the party and its cadre collaborating to maintain a legitimate leadership of the broader populace.

Without this legitimacy (like Gramsci’s idea of hegemony), or without the collaboration between the party and its cadre, the left can barely hold onto a government let alone use it to transform popular consciousness.

January-February 2025, ATC 234