Re: The Revolutionary Significance of What is to be Done?

["Edward George" <ebgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis writes: 'Nearly every one of the "Leninist innovations" were simply
elements from social democracy adapted to the Russian scene.'

Well, the idea that you need to build a party is not Lenin's innovation, I
agree. The nature of the party that Lenin proposed in What is to be Done?
and thereafter is. However much Lenin might have admired the SPD (and he
admired it so much that when its voted for war credits in the Reichstag he
initially believed the issue of  its paper which reproted the event a
forgery) from afar he did not build his own organisation in the same way.
Which is why the counter-revolution was defeated in Russia but not in
Germany. However,

'So the vanguard in Lenin's view would embrace bourgeois progressives in a
fight with a royalist, the rights of artists to publish smut and the power
of the academy to choose its own academicians. What this sounds like to me
is a prescription for a militant Socialist Party that fights on all fronts
in the most uncompromising and non-sectarian manner. I agree with this
concept of a vanguard.'

Me too, absolutely! I think that our disagreement is not a disagreement of
substance. For example, when Louis says that Lenin never had the intention
of building a 'Leninist' party it depends on what you mean by 'Leninism': if
you mean the grotesque parody of 'Leninism' effected by Stalinism (and
tragically imported lock, stock and barrel into the Trotskyist movement)
then of course I agree. But in good part what I have tried to do is  to
point out the difference between, if you like, Leninism and 'Leninism'.
Whether you take the US SWP, or the Britsh SWP, or any one of the '57
varieties', what you see is not Leninism as Lenin laid it down but in good
measure the Stalinist perversion of it. What I don't want to happen is that
we end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For if we stop being
Leninist in the sense of Lenin's understanding of the type of organisation
necessary we won't build what we need to build to overthrow capitalism: and
this, historically speaking, remains our only hope.


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