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Marxism and the Party
Marxism and the Party dispels the myths about "democratic centralism" and demonstrates that the kind of socialist party that Lenin built had nothing in common with the Stalinist despotism that replaced it.
- GenresPoliticsTheoryNonfiction
192 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2008
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August 21, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads, #Overrated Books To Roast:
John Molyneux’s Marxism and the Party is the kind of book that sounds like it’s going to be about real, flesh-and-blood organisations—rooms thick with cigarette smoke, overflowing ashtrays, bad coffee in cracked mugs, and revolutionaries fighting over who forgot to type up the minutes—but instead it reads like a theological roll call of revolutionary saints.
It’s not so much “Marxism and the Party” as “Marxism and the Pantheon”. Imagine a Marvel movie where the Avengers never actually fight anyone but just sit around debating who had the purest ideological intent—except swap out the capes and spandex for pamphlets and manifestos.
That’s Molyneux’s vibe. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Gramsci—they’re all here, lined up like figurines in a collector’s cabinet, polished and posed, dusted reverently, but never shown doing the messy, ridiculous, often disastrous work that actual political parties did in real life. If Marxism ever wanted its own Vatican, this book is the catechism.
The funniest bit is the way Molyneux tries to psychoanalyse Marx himself. The man who lived, bled, and basically coughed up class struggle in every line of Capital gets reduced to: “a little too optimistic about workers’ consciousness”. That’s like saying Shakespeare “was a decent poet but maybe too into drama.” Marx is taken apart like a lab specimen—brilliant, yes, but naïve. And yet the very irony is that Marx had optimism for workers’ consciousness because without it, the entire theory collapses.
If workers can’t liberate themselves, then socialism is just another managerial scheme—and that’s exactly what every Marxist party became in practice: a managerial elite ruling over the masses in their name. From Russia to China to Cuba to Cambodia, it’s the same formula: a self-declared vanguard promising liberation and then delivering subjugation.
Then we get Lenin. Oh, Lenin. Molyneux can’t decide whether to canonise him or give him a performance review. On one page, Lenin is practically a demigod—the genius who cracked the eternal puzzle of spontaneity versus organisation, Newton in a trench coat. On the next, he’s docked points for leaning too heavily on the idea that workers need “consciousness from outside”. It’s like praising a chef for inventing soufflé, then blaming him when yours collapsed because you stomped around the kitchen.
Lenin built a party machine that could topple the Tsarist state, but that same machine turned into an apparatus of repression faster than you could say “proletarian dictatorship”. Molyneux glosses over the fact that Lenin’s vanguard didn’t just bring “consciousness”—it brought the Cheka, one-party rule, and gulags. The Party wasn’t the tool of the workers; it was the tool over the workers.
Trotsky fares no better. In the original edition, Molyneux is practically a Trotsky fanboy—hyping him up as strategist, orator, revolutionary dynamo. Trotsky, the rock star of the revolution, is Che Guevara with a better vocabulary.
But by the later edition, Molyneux gets cold feet, admitting he may have been “too generous.” Translation: “I wrote a book-length love letter, signed it with hearts, then ghosted him thirty years later when he was no longer in fashion.” It reads less like scholarship and more like a messy breakup—“It’s not you, Leon, it’s me.” But let’s be real: it is Trotsky too. For all his brilliance, Trotsky was still a man who believed salvation came through a disciplined revolutionary party, and wherever that formula was tried, it ended in bureaucratic despotism. The tragedy isn’t just that Stalin killed Trotsky; it’s that Trotsky’s model, if he had succeeded, would likely have led to a different flavour of the same authoritarian dish.
Gramsci is dragged onstage next. Molyneux wants to save him from the Eurocommunists who supposedly distorted him, but the effort feels less like sober analysis and more like a bitter family argument over Grandpa’s will. Every sect claims they’re the “real heirs”, accusing the others of stealing the suitcase marked “hegemony”.
Molyneux tries to stuff Gramsci back into a Trotskyist box, while sneering at anyone else who dares to quote him. The result isn’t clarity—it’s baggage claim. And meanwhile, the point gets lost: whatever Gramsci may have written, every party that waved his name in practice ended up less about “organic intellectuals” and more about bureaucrats issuing orders.
And here’s the kicker: for a book called Marxism and the Party, the “Party” barely shows up. You slog through chapter after chapter of abstract theorising before you get even a whiff of what actual organisations did. And when they do appear, they’re stripped of their dirt, sweat, and blood. There’s none of the splits over commas in resolutions, none of the ridiculous fights over who gets to keep the mimeograph machine after a split, and none of the personality cults around figures who couldn’t organise a sandwich shop, let alone a revolution. Instead, we get sterile discussions of how parties should work—pure, clinical, and sanitised. But the reality of Marxist parties—whether Bolshevik, Maoist, or some tiny Trotskyist sect—was always the same: a machine for consolidating control, disciplining dissent, and keeping the masses in line.
And yet Molyneux dares to frame this as a critique. He positions himself as the brave soul challenging orthodoxy, but his conclusions are as predictable as a party congress resolution. Marx was right, Lenin was mostly right, Trotsky was also right, but let’s keep him at arm’s length now, and Gramsci’s cool if you don’t water him down. It’s not a critique—it’s a loyalty oath with footnotes. This isn’t self-criticism; it’s brand management. If Stalin could call purges “rectification,” then Molyneux can call this “critique.”
The whole book reeks of 1978 Trotskyist anxieties. It’s marinated in Cold War paranoia and late-’70s leftist crises, like a mixtape of prog rock someone insists is still cutting edge. Reading it now is like being cornered in a pub by a man with too many pamphlets who explains, for two hours straight, why his sect has the one true revolutionary line. Complete with hand gestures, spittle, and zero self-awareness. For anyone not raised in that ecosystem, it’s baffling—like being dragged to a costume party where everyone is dressed as Lenin, and no one explains the joke.
And this is where the rot really shows. Marxism, in theory, is supposed to be about praxis—about grounding theory in the lived struggles of real workers.
But Molyneux’s book is the opposite: an endless seminar where intellectuals argue about where the revolution should happen, while the workers themselves have long since clocked out, gone home, and put on the telly.
s all that out. He embalms his saints, sets them on pedestals, and solemnly lectures us about their doctrinal nuances. The noise, the blood, the humanity is gone. What’s left is a mausoleum tour where the guide insists the statues are still alive.
In the end, Marxism and the Party doesn’t illuminate the real history of revolutionary movements, nor do they grapple with the central, catastrophic truth: that Marxism in power always creates a Party machine, and that machine always turns on the very masses it claims to serve.
Molyneux promises to teach you how revolutions are built, but what you get is a guided tour of the crypt, complete with hymns to dead leaders and no acknowledgement of the corpses left in their wake. It’s not history. It’s not critique. It’s a catechism for a faith that has failed every time it’s been tried.
John Molyneux’s Marxism and the Party is the kind of book that sounds like it’s going to be about real, flesh-and-blood organisations—rooms thick with cigarette smoke, overflowing ashtrays, bad coffee in cracked mugs, and revolutionaries fighting over who forgot to type up the minutes—but instead it reads like a theological roll call of revolutionary saints.
It’s not so much “Marxism and the Party” as “Marxism and the Pantheon”. Imagine a Marvel movie where the Avengers never actually fight anyone but just sit around debating who had the purest ideological intent—except swap out the capes and spandex for pamphlets and manifestos.
That’s Molyneux’s vibe. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Gramsci—they’re all here, lined up like figurines in a collector’s cabinet, polished and posed, dusted reverently, but never shown doing the messy, ridiculous, often disastrous work that actual political parties did in real life. If Marxism ever wanted its own Vatican, this book is the catechism.
The funniest bit is the way Molyneux tries to psychoanalyse Marx himself. The man who lived, bled, and basically coughed up class struggle in every line of Capital gets reduced to: “a little too optimistic about workers’ consciousness”. That’s like saying Shakespeare “was a decent poet but maybe too into drama.” Marx is taken apart like a lab specimen—brilliant, yes, but naïve. And yet the very irony is that Marx had optimism for workers’ consciousness because without it, the entire theory collapses.
If workers can’t liberate themselves, then socialism is just another managerial scheme—and that’s exactly what every Marxist party became in practice: a managerial elite ruling over the masses in their name. From Russia to China to Cuba to Cambodia, it’s the same formula: a self-declared vanguard promising liberation and then delivering subjugation.
Then we get Lenin. Oh, Lenin. Molyneux can’t decide whether to canonise him or give him a performance review. On one page, Lenin is practically a demigod—the genius who cracked the eternal puzzle of spontaneity versus organisation, Newton in a trench coat. On the next, he’s docked points for leaning too heavily on the idea that workers need “consciousness from outside”. It’s like praising a chef for inventing soufflé, then blaming him when yours collapsed because you stomped around the kitchen.
Lenin built a party machine that could topple the Tsarist state, but that same machine turned into an apparatus of repression faster than you could say “proletarian dictatorship”. Molyneux glosses over the fact that Lenin’s vanguard didn’t just bring “consciousness”—it brought the Cheka, one-party rule, and gulags. The Party wasn’t the tool of the workers; it was the tool over the workers.
Trotsky fares no better. In the original edition, Molyneux is practically a Trotsky fanboy—hyping him up as strategist, orator, revolutionary dynamo. Trotsky, the rock star of the revolution, is Che Guevara with a better vocabulary.
But by the later edition, Molyneux gets cold feet, admitting he may have been “too generous.” Translation: “I wrote a book-length love letter, signed it with hearts, then ghosted him thirty years later when he was no longer in fashion.” It reads less like scholarship and more like a messy breakup—“It’s not you, Leon, it’s me.” But let’s be real: it is Trotsky too. For all his brilliance, Trotsky was still a man who believed salvation came through a disciplined revolutionary party, and wherever that formula was tried, it ended in bureaucratic despotism. The tragedy isn’t just that Stalin killed Trotsky; it’s that Trotsky’s model, if he had succeeded, would likely have led to a different flavour of the same authoritarian dish.
Gramsci is dragged onstage next. Molyneux wants to save him from the Eurocommunists who supposedly distorted him, but the effort feels less like sober analysis and more like a bitter family argument over Grandpa’s will. Every sect claims they’re the “real heirs”, accusing the others of stealing the suitcase marked “hegemony”.
Molyneux tries to stuff Gramsci back into a Trotskyist box, while sneering at anyone else who dares to quote him. The result isn’t clarity—it’s baggage claim. And meanwhile, the point gets lost: whatever Gramsci may have written, every party that waved his name in practice ended up less about “organic intellectuals” and more about bureaucrats issuing orders.
And here’s the kicker: for a book called Marxism and the Party, the “Party” barely shows up. You slog through chapter after chapter of abstract theorising before you get even a whiff of what actual organisations did. And when they do appear, they’re stripped of their dirt, sweat, and blood. There’s none of the splits over commas in resolutions, none of the ridiculous fights over who gets to keep the mimeograph machine after a split, and none of the personality cults around figures who couldn’t organise a sandwich shop, let alone a revolution. Instead, we get sterile discussions of how parties should work—pure, clinical, and sanitised. But the reality of Marxist parties—whether Bolshevik, Maoist, or some tiny Trotskyist sect—was always the same: a machine for consolidating control, disciplining dissent, and keeping the masses in line.
And yet Molyneux dares to frame this as a critique. He positions himself as the brave soul challenging orthodoxy, but his conclusions are as predictable as a party congress resolution. Marx was right, Lenin was mostly right, Trotsky was also right, but let’s keep him at arm’s length now, and Gramsci’s cool if you don’t water him down. It’s not a critique—it’s a loyalty oath with footnotes. This isn’t self-criticism; it’s brand management. If Stalin could call purges “rectification,” then Molyneux can call this “critique.”
The whole book reeks of 1978 Trotskyist anxieties. It’s marinated in Cold War paranoia and late-’70s leftist crises, like a mixtape of prog rock someone insists is still cutting edge. Reading it now is like being cornered in a pub by a man with too many pamphlets who explains, for two hours straight, why his sect has the one true revolutionary line. Complete with hand gestures, spittle, and zero self-awareness. For anyone not raised in that ecosystem, it’s baffling—like being dragged to a costume party where everyone is dressed as Lenin, and no one explains the joke.
And this is where the rot really shows. Marxism, in theory, is supposed to be about praxis—about grounding theory in the lived struggles of real workers.
But Molyneux’s book is the opposite: an endless seminar where intellectuals argue about where the revolution should happen, while the workers themselves have long since clocked out, gone home, and put on the telly.
s all that out. He embalms his saints, sets them on pedestals, and solemnly lectures us about their doctrinal nuances. The noise, the blood, the humanity is gone. What’s left is a mausoleum tour where the guide insists the statues are still alive.
In the end, Marxism and the Party doesn’t illuminate the real history of revolutionary movements, nor do they grapple with the central, catastrophic truth: that Marxism in power always creates a Party machine, and that machine always turns on the very masses it claims to serve.
Molyneux promises to teach you how revolutions are built, but what you get is a guided tour of the crypt, complete with hymns to dead leaders and no acknowledgement of the corpses left in their wake. It’s not history. It’s not critique. It’s a catechism for a faith that has failed every time it’s been tried.
June 16, 2023
The book goes through contributions to and conceptions of the party from Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Gramsci. It is written from a Leninist perspective and doesn't mention Mao at all. It was a good read and really deepened my understanding of the leninist conception of the party and the way it emerged out of its historical situation.
January 26, 2010
I have been trying to gain a clearer understanding of the Marxist concept of the party lately, partially in an effort to understand Noam Chomsky's criticisms of the Bolshevik party and partially because we desperately need a new party in the US. Molyneux's "Marxism and the Party" examines the evolution of the concept of a revolutionary party as synthesized by some of history's more well-know revolutionaries. In particular, he discusses the contributions that Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Gramsci have made to the theoretical and ideological principles of a revolutionary party. According to Molyneux, Marx's concept of a revolutionary party were necessarily premature, given the nascent stage that capitalism was in at the time, but several principles can be drawn from Marx's work. The most important principle is of course is the need for the revolutionary party to be based in and to represent the proletariat. Lenin made a significant contribution to the Marxist concept of a revolutionary party by introducing the concept of the (oft misunderstood) 'vanguard party'. While Lenin's earliest ideas inappropriately proposed that Marxist concepts would need to be introduced to the working class from without, his experiences just prior to and during the Russian revolution corrected this misconception and convinced Lenin that the vanguard party should consist of working class members who understand their position in the capitalist system of exploitation recognize the need for a proletarian revolution. The need for unity of action convinced Lenin that the vanguard party must also be democratic centralist, meaning that the range of debate and proposals was entirely free, but that once a course of action was voted upon, all the members would work to carry it out. Luxemburg added to Lenin's concept the need to maintain a direct connection between the party and the rest of the working class, the inherent link between political and economic struggles, and the observation that much of the initiative and creativity comes from the seemingly spontaneous actions by the workers (as opposed to the central committee). Trotsky's experience with Stalinism reinforced his recognition of the need for democracy in the party, as well as the need for a 'united front' that allows the party to co-operate with other (often bourgeois) movements on issues of strategic importance to the working class without compromising the revolutionary nature or integrity of the party. Trotsky also emphasized the need for an international proletariat that recognizes the class division as the primary division, and that the ruling class uses nationalism, racism, sexism, and other differences to divide the working class. Finally, Gramsci points out that in more mature capitalist societies, both state power and the institutions of civil society work to maintain the system of exploitation, and that a revolutionary party must address both systems--the former in the war of maneuver, and the former in the war of position. Consequently, the revolutionary party must work to simultaneously win over members of the working class and help them to develop and internalize their understanding of the revolutionary movement for which they are fighting.
The conclusion discusses the stagnation of the development of the theory of the revolutionary party since Gramsci and attributes it largely to the ways in which the capitalist class adapted to the conditions left by World War 2. As capitalism advances further into its largest crisis since the Depression of the 1930s, however, the time to implement and refine the theory of the revolutionary party through practice rapidly approaches.
The conclusion discusses the stagnation of the development of the theory of the revolutionary party since Gramsci and attributes it largely to the ways in which the capitalist class adapted to the conditions left by World War 2. As capitalism advances further into its largest crisis since the Depression of the 1930s, however, the time to implement and refine the theory of the revolutionary party through practice rapidly approaches.
November 29, 2019
I read this book in conjunction with Donny Gluckstein’s The Western Soviets, and it was a brilliant companion. In addition, it filled in gaps in my knowledge, going into detail about Marx’s party building efforts, what the deal is with the Fourth International, and why Gramsci is so great.
An indispensable read for anyone wanting to fight for socialism.
An indispensable read for anyone wanting to fight for socialism.
January 17, 2020
A thorough yet concise analysis of some of the most important Marxist thinkers on the role of revolutionary leadership in generating class consciousness and stoking political action. Really accessible too.
May 10, 2016
A short but decent read. As the title states, it's about Marxism & how that ties into a political party. The bulk of the book covers how some key Marxists, from Marx himself, to Lenin, to Rosa Luxemburg, to Trotsky & finally Antonio Gramsci, view the role of the party & how it rates to the working class & revolution. Each had their own views but they are all ultimately tied to the conditions they faced. There is no one size fits all approach, which Lenin & Trotsky started to acknowledge all too late & Gramsci did realize but his approach has yet to be tried n the real world. Most suffered from not being able to anticipate the adaptability & resilience of the capitalist system. The book closes with some general guidelines of what a socialist party heading toward revolution should look like without being so strict that it would ignore the conditions in any given place in which a party might be established.
It was a decent read to understand some key historical theoretical conceptions of the party & a few general guidelines for w h at the party should be when organizing. There may be better books suited for this, but this a good place to start, especially for the history presented.
It was a decent read to understand some key historical theoretical conceptions of the party & a few general guidelines for w h at the party should be when organizing. There may be better books suited for this, but this a good place to start, especially for the history presented.
August 19, 2014
This is a really great history of Marxism. It shows it's leading people as well as how they came to adopt the philosophy that they did. Furthermore, it dictates their contribution to the party. It is well researched and a great introduction for anyone that wishes to be involved with Socialism or simply wants to know more.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews