Below you find a discussion on „Leninism“. The first article is written
by Alex Callinicos, a leading member of the British „Socialist Workers
Party“(SWP). It is followed by an answer published on the pages of the
US-SWP’s website. The US-SWP it must be remembered has split from the
SWP-GB led „International Socialist Tendency“ a couple of years ago. It
is not really clear which of the two is more to the right or the left.
A.Holberg
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Is Leninism finished?
Feature by Alex Callinicos, January 2013
Do revolutionary parties, like the Socialist Workers Party, that draw on
the method of organising developed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks still fit
in the twenty first century? Alex Callinicos challenges the critics and
argues that Leninism remains indispensable
The demise of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and of the political
tradition that it seeks to embody have been widely proclaimed on the
British left in recent weeks. Thus the columnist Owen Jones has
announced that „the era of the SWP and its kind is over.“ Is he right?
The flood of attacks on the SWP originates in some internal arguments
that culminated in our annual conference in January. The conference
discussed a difficult disciplinary case. But wider political differences
emerged. Two factions were formed in the lead-up to the conference to
fight for changes in the model of democratic centralism – the system of
decision making used by organisations in the revolutionary Marxist
tradition – that the SWP has developed.
These issues were argued out in vigorous political debates at the
conference, and the positions put forward on democratic centralism by
the outgoing Central Committee (the main party leadership) were approved
by large majorities. Unfortunately, a small minority refused to accept
these decisions. Through a series of leaks and briefings some ensured
that a highly distorted account of the disciplinary case was circulated
on the web and taken up by some of the mainstream media.
The minority has used this coverage to argue that the SWP was now
„toxic“ and to make a variety of demands – for example, a special party
conference to nullify the decisions just taken, the censure or removal
of the newly elected Central Committee, and various changes to the
party’s structure.
One thing the entire business has reminded us of is the dark side of the
Internet. Enormously liberating though the net is, it has long been
known that it allows salacious gossip to be spread and perpetuated –
unless the victim has the money and the lawyers to stop it. Unlike
celebrities, small revolutionary organisations don’t have these
resources, and their principles stop them from trying to settle
political arguments in the bourgeois courts.
Moreover, in this case a few individuals, some well known, others not,
have used blogs and social media to launch a campaign within the SWP.
Yet they themselves, for all their hotly proclaimed love of democracy,
are accountable to no one for these actions. They offer an unappetising
lesson in what happens when power is exercised without responsibility.
All of this would be of interest solely to the SWP and its supporters,
were it not for the political conclusions that are being drawn. Both
Owen Jones and „Don Mayo“, an ex-member of the SWP leadership who
recently left the party, have targeted what „Mayo“ calls „the orthodox
Trotskyist model of Leninism“. Like Jones, he says this is „an
historically outdated model“.
Marxist tradition
So what’s at stake here? The SWP has sought, since its origins in a
handful of people expelled from the Trotskyist Fourth International in
1951, to continue the revolutionary Marxist tradition. Started by Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, this tradition reached its highpoint in the
Russian Revolution of October 1917, when the Bolshevik Party led the
first and still the only successful working class revolution. Leon
Trotsky, who with Vladimir Lenin headed the Bolsheviks in October 1917,
then fought the degeneration of the revolution with the rise of Stalin’s
tyranny between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s.
What does continuing a tradition mean? There are plenty of sects,
Stalinist as well as Trotskyist, who think this involves the mindless
repetition of a few sacred formulas. But genuinely carrying on a
tradition requires its continuous creative renewal. Marxism is about the
unity of theory and practice so this process of renewal has both
intellectual and political dimensions.
The theoretical development of Marxism requires above all deepening and
updating Marx’s critique of political economy. His target was the
capitalist economic system: in his masterwork Capital he uncovered its
structural logic. But capitalism develops historically, and, as it does,
so must Marxist analysis. In the SWP we have contributed to this
process, most recently with Chris Harman’s great last work Zombie
Capitalism – not alone, however. There is a great renaissance of Marxist
political economy under way at present that can help political activists
understand what’s happening to capitalism during its greatest crisis
since the 1930s.
But Marx’s political legacy – the necessity of working class
organisation to overthrow capital – is less secure. In 1968 the SWP’s
predecessor the International Socialists decided to adopt a Leninist
model of organisation. In other words, we decided to take our reference
point in how we organise the way the Bolsheviks organised under Lenin’s
leadership in the years leading up to the October Revolution.
Flexible tactics
In fact, as Tony Cliff (the founder of the SWP) showed in his biography
of Lenin, the Bolsheviks were very flexible in their political tactics
and organisational methods. But there were some common factors. Most
fundamentally, as has been confirmed by subsequent experience, workers‘
struggles have again and again developed into revolutionary movements
that challenge the very basis of capitalist domination.
But the same experience also shows that these revolutionary movements
tend to be held back by traditions that represent a compromise between
resistance to and acceptance of the capitalist system. Historically the
most important of these traditions has been reformism, whether in the
shape of mainstream social democracy or the Western Communist Parties
after Stalin’s triumph. But there are other ideologies embodied in
organisations that have played a similar role – social Catholicism in
Poland during the great Solidarnosc movement in 1980-1, or variants of
Islamism in Iran in 1978-9 and Egypt today.
The hold of these traditions on workers is reinforced by the way in
which the workings of capitalism tend to fragment their consciousness
and encourage them to think in terms of the interests of a smaller
section rather than the class as a whole. And so major working class
struggles, from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the Great Miners‘ Strike of
1984-5 in Britain, have ended in heroic and inspiring defeats once the
question of political power is posed. The reason why the experience of
October 1917 is so significant is because here the Bolsheviks succeeded
in breaking the grip of the reformists (in this case the Mensheviks and
the Social Revolutionaries), which had been overwhelming in the months
after the overthrow of Tsarism in February 1917, and winning the active
support of the majority of workers for the conquest of power.
What this involved was the Bolsheviks acting as what is sometimes called
a „vanguard party“. They represented for most of their existence before
October 1917 a small minority of the Russian working class. But this
minority was united by a shared Marxist understanding of the world. And,
above all, it organised and acted on the basis of this understanding.
The Bolsheviks collectively intervened in the struggles of the Russian
working class. In doing so, they put forward proposals that would help
to advance the struggle in question. But they simultaneously sought to
encourage workers to recognise that they had to fight for political
power and, to achieve this, to support the Bolshevik Party itself.
So the Bolsheviks won the majority of the working class through a
continuous process of dialogue between them and their fellow workers, in
which they sometimes changed their minds, learning from workers who had
actually moved ahead of them. But in this process the party sought to
overcome the uneven experiences of different groups of workers and the
way capitalism fragmented their consciousness.
How the Bolsheviks organised as revolutionaries became obscured with the
degeneration of the October Revolution, which developed as a result of
the isolation of the new workers‘ republic and the disintegration of the
working class itself caused by civil war and economic collapse. When we
rallied to Leninism in the late 1960s we were trying to apply this
original model. But renewing Leninism wasn’t simple. In the first place,
we faced different conditions from those confronting the Bolsheviks:
reformism, rooted in the trade union bureaucracy, was far more
entrenched in Britain and the rest of Western Europe than it had been in
Tsarist Russia.
Escalating struggle
Secondly, these conditions were changing. From 1968 onwards we were able
to turn ourselves towards a wave of escalating workers‘ struggles that
culminated in the fall of Ted Heath’s Tory government in early 1974. The
picture was the same in the rest of Western Europe: this was the era of
May 1968 in France and the Italian „hot autumn“ of 1969. But then in the
mid-1970s everything began to change. The Labour government of 1974-9
was able to halt the rising tide of workers‘ militancy and to
incorporate rank and file workers‘ leaders into managerial structures.
Then in 1979 Thatcher came to office. She successfully renewed the
capitalist offensive that Heath had attempted and defeated the miners
and other key groups of workers. Her administration and that of Ronald
Reagan in the United States marked a global turning point. The
neoliberalism they pioneered sought to revive the profitability of
capital above all by fragmenting the working class and weakening its
organisations. Its effects were contradictory: as the present global
economic crisis shows, it failed to resolve the underlying problems of
profitability, but workers did emerge more divided and with less
effective organisations.
This doesn’t mean that resistance to capitalism has vanished – far from
it. The Arab revolutions were fundamentally caused by the effects of
neoliberalism in polarising societies such as Egypt, Syria and Tunisia.
But certain trends are visible.
First of all, the mainstream political organisations of the working
class continue to decline. The Italian Communist Party – in its prime
the largest Western party – has vanished almost without trace. The
social democratic parties have tried to adapt to neoliberalism by moving
rightwards and embracing the market – the project of New Labour under
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
But not only did this end in disaster (Brown’s devil’s pact with the
City helped to bring about the 2008 financial crash), but the base of
the social liberal parties (as many now call them) in a more fragmented
working class has continued to shrink. This doesn’t mean that reformism
is finished: François Hollande beat Nicolas Sarkozy in last year’s
French presidential elections and Labour is running ahead of the Tories
in the opinion polls. But it’s weaker.
Secondly, we have seen since the Seattle protests of November 1999 waves
of political radicalisation directed at neoliberalism and sometimes at
capitalism itself. The great protests against the invasion of Iraq whose
tenth anniversary we are about to celebrate were a high point. In 2011
the Arab revolutions helped to stimulate first the 15 May movement in
the Spanish state and then the Occupy movement that spread from
Manhattan around the world.
These movements are tremendously important. But they have not led to or
been sustained by workers‘ struggles that have reached a similar level
of generalisation or intensity. Of course, workers have been playing an
important role – think of the pensions strikes here in Britain on 30
June and 30 November of the same year, of the general strikes and other
workers‘ struggles in Greece, or of the strike across southern Europe on
14 November 2012.
Streets or factories?
The fact remains that, while an insurgent working class was at the
centre of the radicalisation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, so far
this is not true today. Even in Egypt, where the struggle today is most
advanced, the movement on the streets has been more central than the
movement in the factories in the two years since Hosni Mubarak was
overthrown. What conclusions should we draw from this?
It would be ridiculous to assert that the working class is finished. The
neoliberal era has seen a contradictory and uneven expansion of
capitalism that has drawn wider social layers into the net of wage
labour. The struggles that I have referred to (and there are many others
– for example in the new centres of capital accumulation such as China
and Vietnam) represent the learning experiences of a working class that
has been restructured to meet the changing demands of capital. There’s
no reason why they should repeat the pattern of the upturn of the late
1960s and early 1970s, any more than they did those of earlier waves of
working class struggle.
Nevertheless, one consequence of the form taken by the present
radicalisation is that the centrality of workers‘ struggles in the fight
against capitalism is less obvious than it was in the past. This is one
reason why – along with the atrophy of the mainstream political parties
as they are drawn deeper and deeper into the corporate world –
contemporary anti-capitalist movements tend to be suspicious of
political organisations. The burden of proof is on those of us who still
think Leninism is the best form for revolutionary organisation to show
why this is so.
This is the serious question raised by the polemic launched by Owen
Jones and his like. Jones seems to be stating his alternative when he
writes, „Britain urgently needs a movement uniting all those desperate
for a coherent alternative to the tragedy of austerity, inflicted on
this country without any proper mandate.“
This sounds very nice but is quite misleading, since Jones is an
increasingly high profile member of the Labour Party. And indeed he
writes, „so long as trade unions ensure Labour is linked to millions of
supermarket checkout assistants, call centre workers and factory
workers, there is a battle to be won in compelling the party to fight
for working people.“
In other words, although Jones is critical of Ed Miliband for failing to
„offer a genuine alternative to austerity“, he thinks that activists
should devote their energies to pushing Labour leftwards. This is a
project that generations of activists have pursued since the 1920s
(indeed Jones says his parents met as members of the Militant Tendency,
which fought valiantly to win Labour to socialism till most were
expelled during the 1980s).
The nature of the Labour Party
The failure of the struggle to win Labour for the left isn’t a matter of
lack of effort or determination. The very nature of the Labour Party
defeats its left wing challengers. It is geared to the electoral cycle,
so that discussion of policy and support for struggle are subordinated
to the effort to win votes on terms set by the Tories and the corporate
media. Miliband’s opposition to the pension strikes is just the latest
in a long and sad story of betrayals by Labour leaders that goes back to
Ramsay MacDonald during the 1920s and Neil Kinnock in the 1980s.
The power of the parliamentary leadership has historically been
buttressed by the social weight and financial muscle of the trade union
bureaucracy. Today the union presence still ties Labour to the organised
working class, but at a price. The role of full-time trade union
officials is to negotiate the terms on which workers are exploited by
capital. Sometimes this leads them to take action, as they did on 30
November 2011, but only in order to improve their bargaining position.
The subsequent betrayal of the pensions struggle is therefore absolutely
typical.
So the trade union bureaucracy is a conservative force within the
workers‘ movement. But, far from addressing this problem, Jones is
currently campaigning for the re-election of Len McCluskey as general
secretary of Unite. McCluskey talks a good fight, but he sat by while
other union leaders killed off the pensions strikes. He has also thrown
Unite strongly behind Labour under Miliband. This is why the SWP
conference voted to support the campaign of Jerry Hicks to challenge
McCluskey as a candidate committed to strengthening the rank and file.
Despite his radical rhetoric and the excellent stance he takes in the
media on specific issues, Jones is defending an essentially conservative
position, lining up with Labour and the trade union leaders. „Mayo“
represents an apparently more radical option. He aligns himself with
some other former leading members of the SWP, Lindsey German, John Rees
and Chris Bambery, in arguing that the mass movements that have
developed since Seattle represent an alternative to Leninist politics.
But if we look at the movements against neoliberal globalisation and
imperialist war that developed at the start of the millennium, we see
that they had an astonishing global impact, but failed to sustain
themselves. The same proved true of Occupy, which emerged very rapidly
as a worldwide symbol of anti-capitalist resistance – and then equally
rapidly dissipated.
There are various reasons for this pattern. Probably the most important
is the absence of a sustained revival of working class militancy, which
would give a social weight to the protest spectaculars offered by the
movements. But the situation hasn’t been helped by the domination of the
anti-capitalist movement by „horizontalist“ hostility to political
parties and by unworkable (and ultimately undemocratic) methods of
decision-making based on consensus.
When „Mayo“ and his like renounce Leninist politics and uncritically
embrace the movements they are evading these problems. They are equally
shifty when it comes to confronting the biggest problem facing the
progress of resistance to austerity in Britain – the role of the trade
union leaders in blocking strike action. Like Jones, „Mayo“ and his
co-thinkers are backing McCluskey on the grounds that he „is no
bureaucrat“. Neither they nor Jones are offering an alternative to the
dominant forces inside the British workers‘ movement.
United fronts
But maybe the SWP is just too hopelessly sectarian to provide the basis
of this alternative. Yet Jones pays us a curious if back-handed tribute:
„The SWP has long punched above its weight. It formed the basis of the
organisation behind the Stop The War Coalition, for example, which –
almost exactly a decade go – mobilised up to two million people to take
to the streets against the impending Iraqi bloodbath. Even as they
repelled other activists with sectarianism and aggressive recruitment
drives, they helped drive crucial movements such as Unite Against
Fascism, which recently organised a huge demonstration in Walthamstow
that humiliated the racist English Defence League.“
So the SWP is awful, but it has played a crucial role in the most
important movements of the past decade. How can this contradiction be
resolved? In reality we are committed to the politics of the united
front. In other words, we will work, in a principled and comradely way,
with political forces well to our right to build the broadest and
strongest action for common if limited objectives – for example, against
the „war on terror“ or the Nazis. We have followed the same practice in
Unite the Resistance, an important alliance of activists and trade union
officials to campaign for strikes against the coalition.
Moreover, what our critics dislike most about us – how we organise
ourselves – is crucial to our ability, as Jones puts it, to punch above
our weight. Our version of democratic centralism comes down to two
things. First, decisions must be debated fully, but once they have been
taken, by majority vote, they are binding on all members. This is
necessary if we are to test our ideas in action.
Secondly, to ensure that these decisions are implemented and that the
SWP intervenes effectively in the struggle, a strong political
leadership, directly accountable to the annual conference, campaigns
within the organisation to give a clear direction to our party’s work.
It is this model of democratic centralism that has allowed us to
concentrate our forces on key objectives, and thereby to build so
effectively the various united fronts we have supported.
But this model is now under attack from within and without.
Scandalously, a minority inside the SWP are refusing to accept the
democratically reached conference decisions. What they, and some other
more disciplined and more reflective comrades are arguing for is a
different model involving a much looser and weaker leadership, internal
debate that continually reopens decisions already made, and permanent
factions (currently factions are only allowed in the discussion period
leading up to the annual party conference). If they succeeded, the SWP
would become a much smaller and less effective organisation, unable to
help build broader movements.
The stakes in these debates are very high. The New Anticapitalist Party
(NPA) in France imploded in 2011-12, leading to a very serious breakaway
to the Front de Gauche led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This has weakened the
far left in Europe, and indeed the rest of the world. The implosion was
caused by political differences and setbacks, but it was exacerbated by
an internal regime very similar to the one advocated by some SWP
members. All the debates within the NPA went through the filter imposed
by the struggle between four permanent factions. Members‘ loyalties
focused on their factional alignments rather than the party itself.
I am confident that the SWP is politically strong enough to overcome its
internal differences. Our theoretical tradition and our democratic
structures will allow us to arrive at the necessary political clarity
and to learn the lessons of the disciplinary case. But if I am wrong and
the SWP did collapse, this would not solve the political problem that it
exists to address. The anti-capitalist struggle won’t be advanced by
relying on Labourism and the trade union leaders or by uncritical
worship of the movements. If the SWP didn’t exist, it would be necessary
to invent it.
Published online on 28 January 2013. This article will be in the
February issue of Socialist Review
The SWP crisis and Leninism
Paul D’Amato, author of The Meaning of Marxism, examines the arguments
put forward about Leninism by a leading member of the Socialist Workers
Party-Britain.
February 11, 2013
A LONGSTANDING discussion on the left about Leninism and revolutionary
organization has reemerged in a new light in the context of a crisis in
the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain–more specifically, with an
article titled „Is Leninism Finished?“ written in relation to the party
crisis by Alex Callinicos, probably the best-known member of the SWP’s
Central Committee (CC).
The disagreements within the SWP stem from the handling of accusations
of rape and sexual misconduct against a leading member, but also revolve
around the party leadership’s response to the accusations and to the
sharp debate that followed, inside and outside the party. Written with
specific reference to this debate, Callinicos‘ article in the February
2013 Socialist Review is, by turns, a sketchy history of certain
concepts related to Leninism, like democratic centralism, and a bitter
denunciation of critics of the SWP leadership’s actions.
My article is written in response to Callinicos‘ piece, and the
conclusions it draws about Leninism and revolutionary organization for
socialists today.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
THE DEBATE within the SWP has continued since a national conference in
early January, despite Callinicos‘ claim that disagreements are confined
to a „small minority.“ The CC has told SWP members that discussion of
this highly charged question must cease, even though several votes on
contentious issues at the conference were decided by narrow margins.
This attitude has provoked organized opposition among SWP members,
including the declaration of a faction last week that is challenging the
actions of the CC and National Committee since the conference.
Callinicos‘ article is plainly meant to be the statement of the SWP
leadership defending itself, and claiming the authority of Leninism back
to the Russian Revolution as justification.
It’s more than a little ironic that the SWP leadership has used one of
the party’s magazines to respond publicly about an internal dispute that
it has declared closed, but it doesn’t afford the opposition the same
right–at the same time as it complains about its critics‘ use of „blogs
and social media“ to air their views.
In the article, Callinicos links together a response to Owen Jones, a
left-wing Labour Party supporter who argued in the Independent that the
SWP’s crisis proved the futility of building a far-left party based on
Leninism, with a response to the SWP leadership’s internal critics.
Leon Trotsky once described this debating technique as an
„amalgam“–linking two separate things together in order to create guilt
by association. Callinicos not only avoids having to respond seriously
to the issues raised by SWP members, but he is able to declare them
opponents of Leninism like Owen Jones. This dangerous misuse of the
label „Leninism“ does a disservice to the political tradition we
share–indeed, arguments of this kind are certain to convince many
people outside the SWP that „Leninism“ should be given a wide berth.
„A minority inside the SWP are refusing to accept the democratically
reached conference decisions,“ Callinicos writes–something he describes
as „scandalous.“ This minority, he claims, is seeking a „different“
model of organizing that involves „a much looser and weaker leadership,“
endless internal debate, and „permanent factions.“ Added together,
Callinicos concludes, this is a recipe for a „much smaller and less
effective organization, unable to help build broader movements.“
So what does all this have to do with the actual tradition of Leninism?
To start with, it is pure formalism to claim, as Callinicos does, that
votes were taken at an SWP conference, and therefore, everything is
settled. Contentious disagreements within a revolutionary organization
can’t be resolved by administrative or coercive means. No healthy
organization responds to such an outcome on an important issue by
telling its members to cease discussion–still less, by inventing
political differences to justify denouncing those you disagree with.
The issue in the SWP is this: A section of the organization has lost
confidence in the leadership because of its actions–and leadership in a
Leninist organization must be won, not imposed. The leadership’s
circling of the wagons through a reliance on organizational formalities
to defend its position has nothing at all to do with Bolshevism or Leninism.
Trotsky called this „ostrich“ politics. Is the SWP so fragile that it
cannot allow a discussion to go beyond what the rules formally allow?
Surely airing a debate and letting all shades and positions be expressed
as fully as possible would only strengthen the organization–whereas
clamping down would make it more brittle, and therefore, more prone to
shatter.
SWP leaders might consider the advice that Trotsky gave in 1940 to
members of the SWP-U.S., when they were going through an acute internal
debate over the nature of the Soviet Union:
The continuation of discussion bulletins immediately after a long
discussion and a convention is, of course, not a rule but an exception,
a rather deplorable one. But we are not bureaucrats at all. We don’t
have immutable rules. We are dialecticians also in the organizational
field. If we have in the party an important minority which is
dissatisfied with the decisions of the convention, it is incomparably
more preferable to legalize the discussion after the convention than to
have a split.
Callinicos, moreover, denounces members who criticize the leadership for
positions they don’t hold. If they aren’t for closing off discussion,
then they must be for „endless internal debate.“ If they don’t accept
that factions can exist only for three months before a national
conference–and in practical terms, for a shorter period than that–then
they must be for „permanent“ factions. If they question the actions of
the leadership, then they must be for „weak“ leadership. And on and on.
But Callinicos offers no evidence that SWP members who oppose closing
this particular discussion hold such positions. That’s because, as far
as can be told from what has been written, no such evidence exists.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
MUCH OF the rest of what Callinicos writes in his article is an
unobjectionable, though extremely abbreviated, response to Owen Jones.
There are generalities about the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the
Bolshevik Party led by Lenin, about democratic centralism, about the
changing nature of capitalism and the working class, about the nature of
the Labour Party and the trade union bureaucracy, the decline of
traditional left parties (though he leaves out the obvious–the decline
of the organized revolutionary left), the rejection of political
organization by many of today’s activists, and so on.
The problem is that whatever truth these generalities may have in the
abstract, they are press-ganged here into service for a cause they can’t
support.
„Our version of democratic centralism,“ writes Callinicos, „comes down
to two things. First, decisions must be debated fully, but once they
have been taken, by majority vote, they are binding on all members. This
is necessary if we are to test our ideas in action.“ The SWP model of
democratic centralism, Callinicos says, calls for „strong political
leadership“ that „campaigns within the organization to give a clear
direction to our party’s work.“
The concept of democratic centralism that Callinicos outlines here has
to do with decisions regarding political policies and actions, not
disciplinary cases. There is no „testing our ideas in action“ concerning
such cases, so this argument is a red herring. The point is that a
substantial minority in the party does not feel that the issues involved
in the disciplinary dispute have been „debated fully.“
There is nothing wrong with strong political leadership. But it is
one-sided to present the party leadership as a homogeneous body that
„campaigns“ in the organization for its line. The key to a healthy
revolutionary organization is in its „cadres“–that is, in the size and
influence of its experienced members. Such an organization constantly
strives to create a membership of sufficient strength and confidence
that its leadership can be constantly replenished.
Such a cadre can’t be built if the organization’s conception of
leadership is one in which a politically homogenous central committee
„campaigns,“ and the membership is the passive receiver of the
leadership’s decisions. There must be a give and take, a flow of debate
and discussion.
The question is not one of formalism, but of a political method.
Democracy in a revolutionary organization with a strong and sizable
cadre means fruitful debate and decision-making, coupled with the
flexibility to adapt and, without defensiveness, to reassess and change
direction.
In The New Course, written in 1923, Trotsky made an impassioned plea
against a conception of leadership in which all wisdom flows from the
top down, and in which the formation of factions is viewed suspiciously:
It is in contradictions and differences of opinion that the working out
of the party’s public opinion inevitably takes place. To localize this
process only within the apparatus, which is then charged to furnish the
party with the fruit of its labors in the form of slogans, orders, etc.,
is to sterilize the party ideologically and politically.
To have the party as a whole participate in the working out and adoption
of the resolutions is to promote temporary ideological groupings that
risk transformation into durable groupings and even into factions. What
to do? Is it possible that there is no way out? Is it possible that
there is no intermediate line between the régime of „calm“ and that of
crumbling into factions? No, there is one, and the whole task of the
leadership consists, each time that it is necessary and especially at
turning points, in finding this line corresponding to the real situation
of the moment.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
LENIN WAS anything but an organizational fetishist. Organizational
methods for Lenin were–as Callinicos notes in one of his general
sections surveying the experience of the revolutionary tradition of the
past–adaptable to the conditions of the day. Illegal conditions
required certain forms of clandestine organization, for example, that
weren’t applicable in periods of revolutionary upheaval.
Moreover, Lenin did not stick to the letter of organizational norms when
he felt something crucial to the success of the revolution was at stake.
On more than one occasion in 1917, he went around the Central Committee
in order to appeal to other leadership bodies and sections of the party
to win his position.
In other words, the leadership of the Bolshevik Party during the Russian
Revolution was not monolithic. Lenin often found himself in a minority
in 1917. During key moments in and after 1917, factions developed with
sharply different positions. Historian Marcel Leibman, in his book
Leninism under Lenin, reviews a number of key decisions voted on by the
Bolshevik Central Committee and by delegated conferences during 1917,
none of which were unanimous, and concludes:
All these votes show that a strong minority, the numbers of which
fluctuated, but which was always there, existed among the Party cadres,
and there was never any question of excluding this minority from the
executive organs of the Party….
This desire to associate the minority with the deciding and application
of Party policy is to be seen in other ways: the presence of „minority“
members in the Bolshevik press organs, and the practice of providing for
a „minority report,“ giving a representative of the „opposition“ an
opportunity of expounding the latter’s view in thorough fashion at
important Party meetings.
Expulsions for political reasons, moreover, were extremely rare, as
Trotsky noted in 1931, writing about the Bolsheviks and against the
„monolithism“ of Stalinism after the rise of a counterrevolutionary
bureaucracy:
This unanimity is represented as a sign of the particular strength of
the party. When and where has there yet been in the history of the
revolutionary movement such dumb „monolithism“? …
The whole history of Bolshevism is the history of intense internal
struggle through which the party gained its viewpoints and hammered out
its methods. The chronicles of the year 1917, the greatest year in the
history of the party, is full of intense internal struggles, as also the
history of the first five years after the conquest of power; despite
this–not one split, not one major expulsion for political motives.
Alexander Rabinowitch, in his excellent book The Bolsheviks Come to
Power, which describes in detail the role that the Bolsheviks played in
1917, notes the open, democratic and freewheeling character of the party
in this period:
Perhaps even more fundamentally, the phenomenal Bolshevik success can be
attributed in no small measure to the nature of the party in 1917. Here,
I have in mind neither Lenin’s bold and determined leadership, the
immense historical significance of which cannot be denied, nor the
Bolsheviks‘ proverbial, though vastly exaggerated, organizational unity
and discipline. Rather, I would emphasize the party’s internally
relatively democratic, tolerant and decentralized structure and method
of operation, as well as its essentially open and mass character–in
striking contrast to the traditional Leninist model.
As we have seen, within the Bolshevik Petrograd organization at all
levels in 1917 there was continuing free and lively discussion and
debate over the most basic theoretical and tactical issues. Leaders who
differed with the majority were at liberty to fight for their views, and
not infrequently Lenin was the loser in these struggles.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
THE FACT that the SWP-Britain adheres to Leninist principles is not by
itself a defense against mistakes or bureaucratic tendencies.
There is nothing wrong with making mistakes. The problem comes in an
organization that refuses to acknowledge, discuss or rectify them. As
Lenin noted in Left Wing Communism, „Frankly acknowledging a mistake,
ascertaining the reasons for it, analyzing the conditions that have led
up to it, and thrashing out the means of its rectification–that is the
hallmark of a serious party.“
Granted, the SWP is not a mass, vanguard party in the Leninist sense. If
by vanguard, we understand, as summarized by the late Duncan Hallas, „an
organized layer of thousands of workers, by hand and by brain, firmly
rooted amongst their fellow workers and with a shared consciousness of
the necessity for socialism and the way to achieve it,“ then no such
party exists anywhere in the world today. What does exist are
organizations that aspire to build one, or to be part of a process that
leads to building one.
The SWP, with its membership numbering in the low thousands, is probably
the largest revolutionary organization in the English-speaking world.
But it is not close to being a party embracing the working-class
vanguard–for a host of reasons, not least because the organization,
combativeness and class consciousness of the working class, in Britain
as elsewhere, are nowhere near the stage of development where the
constituent elements of such a vanguard could clearly emerge.
When we talk, therefore, of drawing lessons from the Bolshevik
tradition, there must be a strong sense of humility and recognition of
the enormity of the tasks, compared to the puniness of our resources,
and a realistic assessment of where we stand, if we are to avoid falling
into what a leading member of the SWP once called „toy Bolshevism.“