Re: DSP on Cannon (Re: Camejo's article)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>Jose,
> Seems you leave out Lenin's' role in the building of the Third
>International. He was not just an innocent bystander through all this
>"sectarianism." I think you are correct that splitting from the Debs led SP
>was a colossal mistake. But, Lenin was the central leader of this attempt to
>extend the revolution through the founding of communist parties through
>splitting the social-dems.
> You must indict the entire Leninist experiance to be consistent.
>Nick Spero

I am absolutely positive that Lenin would have rejected the
"Bolshevization" turn. There is ample evidence that he was growing
uncomfortable with the sort of schematic understanding of democratic
centralism, etc. that was developing in the aftermath of the Russian
revolution. That being said, there is no doubt that Lenin gave his official
blessing to certain documents that had exactly this quality.

The first clear statement on organizational guidelines were contained in
the July 12, 1921 Theses on the Structure of Communist Parties, submitted
to the Third Congress of the Comintern. W. Koenen, a German delegate,
confessed that they were hastily drafted and were referred without further
discussion to a commission. Two days later, they were passed unanimously
without discussion. The purpose of the theses was to impose a uniform model
on Communist Parties worldwide.

For example, they state that "to carry out daily party work every member
should as a rule belong to a small working group, a committee, a
commission, a fraction, or a cell. Only in this way can party work be
distributed, conducted, and carried out in an orderly fashion." Of course,
what this led to everywhere is the immediate creation of fractions or
cells. Anybody who has been a member of a "Marxist-Leninist" group will be
familiar with this approach to political work. Nobody has ever thought
critically about what it means to have a "cell" or a "fraction" in a union
or mass movement that speaks with the same voice on behalf of a single
tactical orientation, but nevertheless the rule--hardly discussed at the
Congress--became law.

Poor Lenin was trying to sort out all sorts of problems that year and
probably didn't have the minutiae of organizational resolutions upper-most
in his mind, but there is some evidence that these sorts of rigid
guidelines did not sit well with him. A year later, at the fourth congress,
Lenin offered some critical comments on them:

"At the third congress in 1921 we adopted a resolution on the structure of
communist parties and the methods and content of their activities. It is an
excellent resolution, but it is almost entirely Russian, that is to say,
everything in it is taken from Russian conditions. That is its good side,
but it is also its bad side, bad because scarcely a single foreigner--I am
convinced of this, and I have just re-read it--can read it. Firstly, it is
too long, fifty paragraphs or more. Foreigners cannot usually read items of
that length. Secondly, if they do read it, they cannot understand it,
precisely because it is too Russian...it is permeated and imbued with a
Russian spirit. Thirdly, if there is by chance a foreigner who can
understand it, he cannot apply it...My impression is that we have committed
a gross error in passing that resolution, blocking our own road to further
progress. As I said, the resolution is excellent, and I subscribe to every
one of the fifty paragraphs. But I must say that we have not yet discovered
the form in which to present our Russian experience to foreigners, and for
that reason the resolution has remained a dead letter. If we do not
discover it, we shall not go forward."

This resolution, which was composed in haste and which Lenin described as
"too Russian", was never subjected to the sort of critical evaluation that
he proposed. The opposite process occurred. The rigid, schematic
organizational forms were not only accepted, but turned even more rigid and
schematic. Part of the explanation for this is that Lenin himself died and
nobody in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had the sort of subtle
understanding that he did about such questions. The party hack Zinoviev
became the supreme arbiter of organizational questions and took the
communist movement in exactly the opposite direction. The Comintern ended
up proposing organizational guidelines that were even "more Russian" than
the ones that were adopted in 1921.

The explanation for this is twofold. The party leadership--including all
factions left and right--understood only the outward forms of the Bolshevik
Party rather than its inner spirit. Also, the reversals in the class
struggle in the early 1920s--especially in Germany--tended to create a
crisis atmosphere in the Russian party and the Comintern. Under such
conditions, the tendency is to circle the wagons and enforce ideological
uniformity on the basis of the orientation of the current leadership.
Criticism is considered "anti-party" and ultimately an expression of alien
class forces.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



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