Re: J.P. Cannon on the Vanguard Party

["Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    I'm grateful that Dick Fidler took the time to scan and post James P.
Cannon's article on the role of the "Leninist" Party.

    Reading it again now, so many decades after I first read it, it is
striking how similar in nature this concept of "The Leninist Strategy of
Party Building" is to the foquista guerrilla "strategy" of the 1960s, as
expressed in Regis Debray's Revolution in the Revolution and many other
places. A sure-fire formula that if correctly understood and properly
applied, would make the revolutionaries victorious.

    Cannon wrote that piece a third of a century ago. Since then, the nature
of the "Leninist strategy of party building" as a schema has become much
clearer than it was then, at least to me. At THAT time one could --by
wearing "Trotskyist" blinders-- still argue that the failure to replicate
what was presented as the Russian model was due to the immense and
perfidious influence of Stalinism in the workers movement, which had blocked
the emergence of new mass Leninist parties.

    Since then it has become clear to me, undeniably so, that Stalinism has
not prevented the emergence of new movements which led revolutions just as
genuine as October although the form they took was different. Unless one
wishes to expand the concept of a Leninist party to encompass all sorts of
working class and plebeian revolutionary movements, it must be admitted that
for a half century, every single time the working people succeeded in
establishing their own government, a workers and farmers government, this
was done without a "Leninist Party" and without a "Leninist strategy of
party building" that would have been recognized as such by, say, a majority
of the comrades on this list. In several cases, those governments went on to
carry out an overturning of capitalist property (China, Cuba, North Korea,
etc.); others did not succeed in carrying out a socialist transformation
(Grenada, Nicaragua, Algeria, to name the three I'm most familiar with).

    I think this forces us to go back and re-examine the "Leninist Strategy
of Party Building," and Cannon's exposition of the "historic" SWP's variant
of this strategy provides a good reference in doing so.

    The first thing I'll note is that Lenin himself never, ever claimed, as
far as I know, to have made a new and distinctive contribution to Marxism
with "his" strategy, or even to have a specific theory or strategy that
hinged on how Marxists organized themselves in the workers movement.
Moreover, the specifically "Leninist" Bolshevik party did not emerge as a
separate party opposed to other working class parties out of organizational
considerations, but rather political ones.

    When Lenin led the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP to clearly and
completely BREAK with the 2nd international and the Menshevik wing of the
RSDLP, he did not claim he was improving Marx organizationally.  This
seeming violation of just about the ONLY organizational precept Marx and
Engels laid down in the Manifesto (that the Communists do not constitute
themselves into a party opposed to other working class parties), Lenin
argued, was the ONLY way to remain true to Marx politically under the
conditions of World War I. The *central* idea of the Manifesto, the
cornerstone of Marxist politics, is that the workers of all countries should
unite. And there was, quite simply no possible way this unity could come
about without breaking with those who openly supported "their own"
imperialism in slaughtering the workers of other countries and using their
own workers as cannon fodder to do that.

    Moreover, the idea of a "communists only" group was not original with
Lenin. That was *precisely*  where Marx and Engels started out, in the
Communist League. It is notable that, as soon as the revolution broke out in
Germany in 1848 literally only weeks after the publication of the Manifesto,
the Communist League ceased to function altogether, and what Marx, Engels
and several of their closest collaborators did INSTEAD of continuing to
"party-build" the League was to create the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a
political newspaper.

    It was only AFTER the defeat of the revolution in Germany that the
League was reconstituted, but as soon as it became clear to M & E that a
renewed period of capitalist expansion had set in, they dissolved their wing
of the League (by then it had split) and went on to assume what we can only
call in "Leninist" terms an absolutely liquidationist position. And this
highlights something about Marx and Engels's practical political activity.
They were never *initiators* of any organization; they were joiners (and
extremely selective joiners, at that). And the groups they belonged to or
closely associated with were simply the more advanced expressions of the
working class movement at that particular time.

    Cannon implicitly recognizes that the "strategy" attributed to Lenin
marks a break with Marx and Engels's practical activity. He begins his
article by saying:

> The greatest contribution to the arsenal of Marxism since the death of
Engels in
> 1895 was Lenin's conception of the vanguard party as the organizer and
director
> of the proletarian revolution. That celebrated theory of organization was
not,
> as some contend, simply a product of the special Russian conditions of his
time
> and restricted to them.

    A cornerstone of this "celebrated theory" is the idea that the party is
built around a fully worked out and elaborated theory. However, a
*necessary* consequence of this (and there is about three quarters of a
century of practical application to prove it) is that, quite simply, inside
the party there is no room for any differences except perhaps on the
smallest tactical issues, despite all the rigmarole about "democratic"
centralism, the right to form tendencies and factions, etc. etc. etc.

    Cannon puts it this way:

    "The earliest formations of advanced workers committed to socialism, and
their intellectual associates propagating its views, must first organize
themselves around a definite body of scientific doctrine, class tradition,
and experience, and work out a correct political program in order then to
organize and lead the big battalions of revolutionary forces."

    It is the fact that the "party" is organized around a definite
"doctrine," and that it views its central task as the propagation of that
"doctrine," that makes it impossible for such groups to maintain unity when
differences arise. This is what makes ALL groups that don't break with this
sort of idea into sects, and gives a tremendous impulse to cultism, the cult
of the party, the cult of the leadership, and eventually the cult of the
leader.

    This kind of party defines itself essentially as a priesthood, the
bearers of the sacred, "scientific" doctrine. Maintaining Talmudic purity is
the special task of a college of cardinals and bishops (central committee),
assisted by a Holy Inquisition (control commission), a Roman Curia
(politburo), and --of course, of course, of course-- a Pope.

    It is, I think, testimony to the caliber of the revolutionists who
founded the U.S. SWP's predecessor in 1928, and outstandingly Cannon
himself, that during his active political lifetime, the SWP did not undergo
the kind of degeneration that is intrinsic to this idea of the party as
embodiment of the Word to become a Cannon cult.

    But the fact is that even those trained directly by Cannon and those who
collaborated with him for decades, the generation of leaders that emerged
out of the youth radicalization, were unable to prevent --or even clearly
perceive as the process unfolded-- the SWP's degeneration into a typical
"Trotskyist" sect/cult.

    The pressure towards becoming a cult around a single leader is built
into the idea of the party as bearer of THE one and only true scientific
doctrine. Over time, it is extremely difficult to maintain an organization
around such a revealed truth without a supreme authority of what does and
does not form part of that truth. This is why the SWP of Cannon's lifetime
spawned a new sect every few years, the "Oehlerites," the "Schactmanites,"
the "Johnsonites," the "Cochranites," the "Marcyites" and so on. If what a
group is about is practical activity and measures, differences can be
contained, and often there can be compromises and accommodations. But if the
disputes are about "principle," which means really what you're going to say
in a newspaper or magazine article, THEN the differences become
uncontainable, because ideological truth is binary, something either IS or
IS NOT true.

    Even leaving aside the question of whether this is what Lenin actually
was about, at the very dawn of the Communist movement Marx and Engels
specifically rejected the idea that their central, lifelong task was
building an organization whose boundary was set by a fully worked out
doctrine, and whose essential purpose was to spread that doctrine.

    In early October of 1847, Engels, in an article called "The Communists
and Karl Heinzen" takes up exactly this point, which is what is the *nature*
of the communist movement.

    "Herr Heinzen imagines communism is a certain DOCTRINE which proceeds
from a definite theoretical principle as its CORE and draws further
conclusions from that. Herr Heinzen is very much mistaken.

    "Communism is not a doctrine but a MOVEMENT; it proceeds not from
principles but from FACTS. The Communists do not base themselves on this or
that philosophy as their point of departure but on the whole course of
previous history and specifically its actual results in the civilised
countries at the present time. Communism has followed from large-scale
industry and its consequences, from the establishment of the world market,
of the concomitant uninhibited competition, from the ever more violent and
universal trade crisis, which have already begun full-fledged crisis of the
world market, from the creation of the proletariat and the concentration of
capital, from the ensuing class struggle between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie.

    "Communism, insofar as it is a theory, is the theoretical expression of
the position of the proletariat in this struggle, and the theoretical
summation of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat."

    Marx and Engels would have viewed Cannon's exposition of the overriding
importance and permanent tactic of building a propaganda nucleus with their
scientific doctrine at its "core" as a misunderstanding. It is wrong to
define Communism as mainly a question of doctrine or theory. It is first of
all a social product of the development of capitalism.

    And that Marx and Engels never wavered from this view, formulated on the
eve of their writing the Manifesto, is clear from Marx's letter to a leader
of the German Social Democratic Workers Party to whom he sent his Critique
of the Gotha Program nearly 30 years later: "Every step of real movement is
more important than a dozen programs."

    A separate organization exclusively of that subset of the communists who
agree on everything, down to the last comma on even historical questions, is
inevitably going to become a more of a straitjacket than a lever. Most of
the rest of Cannon's argumentation speaks to the obvious truth that any
revolution is going to have a leadership, and that this leadership will have
to win the broad masses to succeed, that this is a process that is going to
take time and so on. But none of that requires a specifically "Leninist"
Party as that term is used and understood on the Left or even in the
Trotskyist movement. It's like defending foquismo with the argument that,
almost certainly the bourgeoisie will not allow the workers to come to power
peacefully, so you might as well take to the hills with an armed band. Yes,
a vanguard will be necessary, and, yes, the working people will, almost
certainly, need to defend their democratic right to establish a worker's
government forcefully, but that doesn't mean either getting together a
couple of hundred or a couple of thousand people and proclaiming yourself
"the" vanguard (or "the essential programmatic nucleus" thereof), just as it
would be crazy to round up 100 activists and head for the Rocky Mountains to
establish a "foco."

    I take all of this up in much greater detail in a post called
Organizational Flexibility in Building Revolutionary Parties that I wrote a
year ago, which is in the list archives at the following URL:

http://www.marxmail.org/archives/July99/organizational_flexibility_in_bu.htm

    There are a couple of mistakes in that post that I should note here, in
case people read it. One is that I incorrectly attribute to Marx the article
on Heinzen from which I quote (the same quote I use here). The second is
that I say after the defeat of the revolution of 1848, M & E did not try to
maintain an organization. The history was a little more complicated as I
outlined above. (They did reconstitute the Communist League for a brief
period, until it became clear that the victory of reaction wasn't just
momentary).

    One last footnote. Real life phenomena are quite complicated, they often
combine features and aspects that one would, with formal logic, consider
mutually exclusive. The SWP was more than the weaknesses that led to what it
has become today (and in wasn't JUST those weaknesses that led to this,
objective conditions had a tremendous amount to do with it), the history of
the SWP (like other groups, I might add) holds positive as well as negative
lessons for the future.

José

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Fidler" <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Marxism list" <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, September 09, 2000 1:32 PM
Subject: J.P. Cannon on the Vanguard Party


> Our list moderator has several times cited statements by James P. Cannon,
> usually made in the late 1940s or early 1950s, lauding the SWP as the
> already-existing party of the American (socialist) revolution. On their
face,
> these egregiously triumphalist declarations are sectarian nonsense, I
agree. But
> do they express the essence of Cannon's mature assessment of the role and
> function of the vanguard party? And to what degree did such declarations
inform
> the practice and self-conception of the SWP cadres in subsequent years?