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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes Marxist Concept of Parties

Revolutionary Marxists reject all spontaneist illusions according to which the proletariat is capable of
solving the tactical and strategic problems posed by the need to overthrow capitalism and the bourgeois
state and to conquer state power and build socialism by spontaneous mass actions without a conscious
vanguard and an organised revolutionary vanguard party based upon a revolutionary programme
tested by history, with cadres educated on the basis of that programmeme and tested through long
experience in the living class struggle. The argument of anarchist origin, also taken up by ultraleftist
“councilist” currents, according to which political parties are by their very nature “liberal-bourgeois”
formations alien to the proletariat and have no place in workers councils because they tend to usurp
political power from the working class, is theoretically incorrect and politically harmful and dangerous.
It is not true that political groupings, tendencies, and parties come into existence only with the rise of
the modern bourgeoisie. In the fundamental (not the formal) sense of the word, they are much older.
They came into being with the emergence of farms of government in which relatively large numbers
of people (as opposed to small village community or tribal assemblies) participated in the exercise of
political power to some extent (e.g., under the democracies of Antiquity) Political parties in that real
(and not formal) sense of the word are a historical phenomenon the contents of which have obviously
changed in different epochs, as occurred in the great bourgeois-democratic revolutions of the past
(especially, but not only, in the great French revolution). The proletarian revolution will have a similar
effect. It can be predicted confidently that under genuine workers democracy parties will receive a
much richer and much broader content and will conduct mass ideological struggles of a much broader
scope and with much greater mass participation than anything that has occurred up to now under
the most advanced forms of bourgeois democracy. This argument is unhistorical and based on an
idealist concept of history. From a Marxist, i.e., historical-materialist point of view, the basic causes
of the political expropriation of the Soviet proletariat were material and socioeconomic, not ideological
or programmematic. The general poverty and backwardness of Russia and the relative numerical
and cultural weakness of the proletariat made the long-term exercise of power by the proletariat
impossible if the Russian revolution remained isolated; that was the consensus not only among the
Bolsheviks in 1917-18, but among all tendencies claiming to be Marxist.
Contemporary Views about the Parties

In contemporary view a political party is a political organisation that seeks to attain and maintain
political power within government, usually by participating in electoral campaigns. Parties often
espouse an expressed ideology or vision bolstered by a written platform with specific goals, forming
a coalition among disparate interests. Formal political parties originated in their modem form in
Europe and the U.S. inthe 19th century. Whereas mass-based parties appeal for support to the whole
electorate, cadre parties aim at attracting only active elite; most parties have features of both types.
All parties develop a political programme that defines their ideology and sets out the agenda they
would pursue should they win elective office or gain power through extra parliamentary means.
Most countries have single-party, two-party, or multiparty systems. In the U.S., party candidates are
usually selected through primary elections at the state level.
Classification of Political Parties

The Elitist Parties

There are thus six types of party systems in Western democracies. At one extreme are the broadly
based parties of the two-party system countries: the United States is the most perfect case of this type,
but four other countries closely approximate this model and they only diverge in as much as they
have a small centre party and are divided ideologically between conservatives and socialists. At the
other extreme, the votes of the electors are spread fairly evenly, in groups of not much more than 25%
and in many cases much less than 25% over the whole ideological spectrum, as in Holland, Switzerland,
France, and Finland. Between these two poles, one finds four types of party systems: five countries
have two-and-a-half-party systems: among them, three have a smaller centre party, while the other

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