On the Abolition of Political Parties -- II
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Weil writes with the French republic’s founding “a system of people’s representation had been adopted, for want of ability to invent any alternative.” However this was not true, what had spontaneously erupted during the revolution was a participatory council system constituted by the French citizenry. These political clubs/councils/associations sprouted instantaneously across France. The clubs became the founts of the cahiers de revendications Weil recognized as a true democratic process of the Revolution. These clubs were quickly disenfranchised by the power grab of the Jacobin party.
Arendt writes,
“We are confronted even in the midst of the French Revolution with the conflict between the modern party system and the new revolutionary organs of self-government (the clubs). These two systems, so utterly unlike and even contradictory to each other, were born at the same moment. The spectacular success of the party system and the no less spectacular failure of the council system were both due to the rise of the nation-state, which elevated the one and crushed the other.”
Arendt makes the essential point the rise of party politics is directly attributable to the establishment of the republican nation-state. The council system simultaneously had emerged as an alternative to the party, but a different government structure would be required for them to be instituted. In many modern revolutions following the French, participatory councils arose spontaneously, not at the behest of any revolutionary party, including the 1871 Paris Commune, and the soviets, literally “meetings," of the Russia revolutions of 1905 and 1917. While a decade previous to the French Revolution, the revolution of the US colonies saw the already established township system with the addition of revolutionary organizations such as the Committees of Correspondence, serve the same purpose as the spontaneous participatory councils that arose across Europe in the 19th and 20th century.
The rise of the Paris Commune did not fit into Marx’s revolutionary party theory. His greatest pupil, Lenin, was astounded by the spontaneous soviets of the 1905 Russian uprising. Arendt comments on Marx and Lenin’s confusion with the appearance of these participatory associations, “What struck them was not only the fact that they themselves were entirely unprepared for these events, but also that they knew they were confronted with a repetition unaccounted for by any conscious imitation or even mere remembrance of the past.”
Once again outside the revolutionary party teachings of both Marx and Lenin, the soviets arose again in 1917. Lenin cleverly understood his Bolshevik revolutionary party needed to co-opt the soviets to ascend to power in October. After co-opting the soviets, the Bolsheviks subjugated them to party power just as the Jacobins had previously nullified the power of the French councils. Arendt explains,
“Without Lenin's slogan, 'All power to the soviets', there would never have been an October Revolution in Russia, but whether or not Lenin was sincere in proclaiming the Soviet Republic, the fact of the matter was even then that his slogan was in conspicuous contradiction to the openly proclaimed revolutionary goals of the Bolshevik party to 'seize power', that is, to replace the state machinery with the party apparatus. Had Lenin really wanted to give all power to the soviets, he would have condemned the Bolshevik party to the same impotence which now is the outstanding characteristic of the Soviet parliament, whose party and non-party deputies are nominated by the party and, in the absence of any rival list, are not even chosen, but only acclaimed by the voters. But while the conflict between party and councils was greatly sharpened because of a conflicting claim to be the only 'true' representative of the Revolution and the people, the issue at stake is of a much more far reaching significance.”
The spontaneous eruption of these councils was not as surprising as historians and certainly revolutionary parties that encountered them thought. A most simple equation of political science is if established organizations of power are to be challenged, they will have to be met with alternative organization. Two important things to consider about the rise of these associations. Foremost, they arise easily. Association is the fundamental politics of homo sapiens as an innate social species. The most difficult political aspect is not in their creation, but organizing them together into an effective force. The second much deeper and still unanswered question is why, after what might be centuries of inaction, a disenfranchised populous suddenly becomes spurred into action?
Interestingly, the republican structure of the US nonviolently birthed reform associations in two great mass democratic movements. The first was the Populist Movement at end of the 19th century. Small yeoman farmers reacted enmasse to burgeoning industrialism and their resulting democratic disenfranchisement. Across the nation, Populist associations arose to educate, discuss, and organize a political response to the very undemocratic processes of industrialism and its greatest social innovation, the corporation.
A second great wave of democratic associations was created with the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century. Across the South, the disenfranchised descendants of American slavery met in small churches, schools, and meeting houses to educate, discuss, and organize for their fundamental civil rights.
Eventually, just as before, both movements' associations became engulfed and made impotent in party structures. The agrarian republic and its parties proved completely incapable of meeting the concerns of the Populists to in anyway democratize the Industrial Revolution. While the Black South was enfranchised into an archaic government system, best represented by its incapacitated party structures. By the end of the 20th century, the two parties had become the sepulchers of American democracy.
An alternative to the party system was always possible by building the structure of government up from the foundation of the associations. Though these councils appeared across history, presently such an alternative is not even considered. Arendt writes,
“...the leftist and revolutionary parties have shown themselves to be no less hostile to the council system than the conservative or reactionary right. We have become so used to thinking of domestic politics in terms of party politics that we are inclined to forget that the conflict between the two systems has actually always been a conflict between parliament, the source and seat of power of the party system, and the people, who have surrendered their power to their representatives; for no matter how successfully a party may ally itself with the masses in the street and turn against the parliamentary system, once it has decided to seize power and establish a one-party dictatorship, it can never deny that its own origin lies in the factional strife of parliament, and that it therefore remains a body whose approach to the people is from without and from above.”
It needs to be added, it is not just in the Jacobin model of one party dictatorship, but also in the American two-party system model, that the parties quickly derive a politics whose approach to the people is not as their representatives, but from “without and above.”
Arendt concludes,
“The historical truth of the matter is that the party and council systems are almost coeval; both were unknown prior to the revolutions and both are the consequences of the modern and revolutionary tenet that all inhabitants of a given territory are entitled to be admitted to the public, political realm. The councils, as distinguished from parties, have always emerged during the revolution itself, they sprang from the people as spontaneous organs of action and of order. The last point is worth emphasizing; nothing indeed contradicts more sharply the old adage of the anarchistic and lawless 'natural' inclinations of a people left without the constraint of its government than the emergence of the councils that, wherever they appeared, and most pronouncedly during the Hungarian Revolution, were concerned with the reorganization of the political and economic life of the country and the establishment of a new order.”
After the somnolence of two and half centuries of established republican party political order, we've forgotten the most fundamental element of politics is organization. Politics is about power, all power is organized. Presently, we conceive politics, such that we do at all, within the boundaries of an established order limited by established power, despite it being beyond obvious we live in a time of broken, dysfunctional, and corrupt politics. It’s very difficult to argue we have democracy of any sort. As Weil wrote, democracy at very least requires “the people should express their will regarding the problems of public life – and not merely choose among various individuals; or, worse, among various irresponsible organizations (for the general will does not have the slightest connection with such choices.)” Today, any ability for people to express their will exists in such distorted fashion, it can be most accurately said to exist not at all.
Continued
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