Re: Sectarian factionalism (was Updating Louis report (was DSP, etc))

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Shane Hopkinson:
> I wonder if someone could clarify the term "Zinovievist" for me.  Do you
> "Leninist"
>  or Stalinist or something in between?


Zinoviev's party-building recipes arose in the context of a crisis in the
German revolutionary movement, which were entirely the result of
ill-considered Comintern interventions. To summarize:

1) Bela Kuhn, the Comintern agent "assigned" to Germany, inspired the party
to take part in the ultraleft 1921 putsch. After Paul Levi, the German
Communist Party leader, objected to this course and spoke up publicly, he
was expelled for his trouble.

2) Levi was replaced by Ernst Reuter-Friesland, who objected to Comintern
"intervention" in German trade union politics. He was also accused of being
too friendly to the recently expelled Levi who had argued for a united
front of working class parties, which subsequently became official
Communist policy. Reuter-Friesland was expelled in 1922.

3) After Reuter-Friesland's expulsion, the mediocre Heinrich Brandler took
over. Summoned to Moscow, Brandler--against his own instincts--was
persuaded to embark on a fight for state power in early November, 1923.
Trotsky's role was to convince Brandler to organize an insurrection and to
set a fixed date. When the isolated German Communist Party failed to lead
the masses to power, the Comintern once again found a convenient scapegoat
in Brandler. He was expelled and replaced by the ultraleftist Ruth Fischer,
who had been lining up support in the USSR.

While these wrenching changes were being foisted on the German Communist
Party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was going through its own
tumult. Factional lines between the triumvirate of Zinoviev, Stalin and
Kamenev on one hand, and Trotsky on the other were being drawn. The
triumvirate decided to use the German events as a bludgeon against Trotsky,
since Karl Radek, his close ally, was the chief architect of the failed
German revolution. The scapegoating of Radek was in line with the
degenerating state of affairs in Russian politics.

The Russian party had become more and more bureaucratized. Lenin proposed
to Trotsky that they wage a fight against Stalin, who they saw as a
emerging bureaucratic dictator. Stalin's heavy-handed treatment of the
Georgian nationality particularly incensed Lenin. When Lenin's wife
Krupskaya was dispatched by Lenin to gather information on Stalin's
handling of the Georgians, he treated her rudely. Lenin interpreted this as
a declaration of war.

Meanwhile Trotsky had developed criticisms of the NEP. He thought that too
many concessions were being made to the peasantry and to the NEP-men.
Trotsky won the support of many veteran Bolsheviks who were disturbed by
the trends in the party and nation. They put forward a New Course that
articulated their ideas on the direction the Soviet Union should take. It
was the first formal critique of the embryonic Stalinist system. In a
letter to branches of the Communist Party, Trotsky defended the New Course:

"Away with passive obedience, with mechanical leveling by the authorities,
with suppression of personality, with servility, and with careerism! A
Bolshevik is not merely a disciplined man [sic]: he is a man who in each
case and on each question forges a firm opinion of his own and defends it
courageously and independently not only against his enemies but inside his
own party."

While Trotsky surely believed these words, it is regrettable that he did
not take them seriously himself when he was wearing down the hapless
Brandler. It was a servile Brandler who decided to plunge ahead with the
foolish bid for state power in Germany and it was the decidedly courageous
Paul Levi who would have stood up to Trotsky's pressure.

In any event, Trotsky's letter captured the imagination of many Communists.
An organized grouping already existed that concurred with many of Trotsky's
New Course criticisms, even though the group could hardly be considered
Trotskyist. While it included his close allies like Preobrazhensky and
Antonov-Ovseenko, it also included members of the ultraleft Workers
Opposition. Shortly after the opposition emerged, it began to win followers
everywhere. At least one-third of the Red Army party units sided with the
opposition as did a majority of the student organizations.

The triumvirate launched a bitter and unprincipled counter-attack which
culminated in the thirteenth party conference in May, 1924. They did
everything they could to turn the fight into one of the Old Bolsheviks
versus the upstart. Trotsky was depicted as "anti-party", a rather
inflammatory but meaningless term that is often used myself against
factional opponents in any internal struggle in a "Marxist-Leninist" group.
While Trotsky spoke in the name of the workers, the triumvirate claimed
that he was really articulating the interests of the students and
intelligentsia. In other words, he was a spokesman for the
petty-bourgeoisie. Finally, they said his hatred for the party machine
indicated that he continued to harbor anti-Leninist sentiments. He was an
unreformed semi-Menshevik.

In brief, all of the methods of dehumanizing and smashing a political
opponent were mobilized against Trotsky. He was a petty-bourgeois and a
Menshevik. He did not believe in the primacy of the working class. The
triumvirate's underhanded attack on Trotsky is of course the first line of
defense of so-called "Marxist-Leninists". What better way to demonize one's
political opponents than by treating them as a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Bolshevik in name only, the opposition was in league with the
counter-revolution.

The problem that the triumvirate faced was that Trotsky had an unblemished
reputation internationally. He was considered to be the preeminent leader
of the Russian Revolution, next to Lenin. When word was received of the
anti-Trotsky crusade, the French and Polish Communist Parties protested and
demanded that the differences between the two factions be resolved in a
comradely manner. Unfortunately, most of the other Communist leaders had
long given up any pretense of independence. In the process of eviscerating
the German Communist Party leadership, the Comintern eliminated the
possibility of independent voices being heard against bureaucratic
maneuvers. Unfortunately, Trotsky himself had participated in the weakening
of the German party. At the May, 1924 Russian CP conference, only the
French delegate Boris Souvarine stood up for Trotsky. The rest of the
delegates joined in a procession of anti-Trotsky denunciations.

A month later the "Bolshevization" Fifth Congress of the Comintern took
place. This congress was designed by Zinoviev and Stalin to export the
monolithic model that the Russian party had adopted. Whatever independence
remained in the world-wide Communist movement would soon disappear after
this congress. Zinoviev and Stalin had one and one interest only: to line
up the world's revolutionary forces behind their faction. Ironically, the
organizational model that this monstrous Comintern congress adopted was
identical to the one that the world Trotskyist movement itself adopted.
This schematic version of democratic centralsim has been the organizational
lynch-pin of all party-building attempts from 1924 on. Trotskyists have
always disavowed the political decisions made at this congress, but have
never addressed the organizational methodology that went with it. The
bureaucratic politics and the monolithic party-building model go hand in hand.

The Fifth Congress gave the new leader of the German Communist Party, Ruth
Fischer, the opportunity to rail against Radek, Trotsky and Brandler. They
were all Mensheviks, opportunists and "liquidators of revolutionary
principle." In the words of Isaac Deutscher, "she called for a monolithic
International, modelled on the Russian party, from which dissent and
contest of opinion would be banished. 'This world congress should not allow
the International to be transformed into an agglomeration of all sorts of
trends; it should forge ahead and embark on the road which leads to a
single Bolshevik world party.'"

The Statutes of the Communist International adopted at the fifth congress
were a rigid, mechanical set of rules for building Communist Parties. All
of the Communist Parties were subordinate to the Comintern and members of
the parties had to obey all decisions of the Comintern. The world congress
of the Comintern would decide the most important programmatic, tactical and
organizational questions of the Comintern as a whole and its individual
sections. It would be appropriate, for example, for the Comintern to
overrule a member party that had decided to support Trotsky's New Course.
The Statutes also included the sort of ridiculous measures that mark most
of the sect-cults of today. For example, statute 35 declares that:

"Members of the CI may move from one country to another only with the
consent of the central committee of the section concerned. Communists who
have changed their domicile are obliged to join the section of the country
in which they reside. Communists who move to another country without the
consent of the CC of their section may not be accepted as members of
another section of the CI."

It was a ruling like this that was used as the pretext to expel Peter
Camejo, long-time leader of the American Socialist Workers Party. Camejo
had moved to Venezuela for a year to take a leave of absence to study Lenin
and develop a critique of SWP sectarianism. When he returned to the United
States, he was prevented from rejoining because his move was
"unauthorized." He was victimized for his political beliefs rather than any
form of "indiscipline." Compare these unbending strictures with the norms
of the Bolshevik Party. In the Bolshevik Party, there was no such thing as
formal membership. A Bolshevik was simply somebody who agreed with the
general orientation of Iskra. Nobody had to get permission to transfer from
one Bolshevik branch to another because such a concept was alien to the way
the free-wheeling Bolsheviks functioned.

Even more insidious than the Statutes were the Theses of the Fifth Congress
on the Propaganda Activities of the CI and its sections. This document sets
in concrete the methodology of dividing every serious political
disagreement into a battle between the two major classes in society. It
states:
"Struggles within the CI are at the same time ideological crises within the
individual parties. Right and left political deviations, deviations from
Marxism-Leninism, are connected with the class ideology of the proletariat.

Manifestations of crisis at the second world congress and after were
precipitated by 'left infantile sicknesses', which were ideologically a
deviation from Marxism-Leninism towards syndicalism....The present internal
struggles in some communist parties, the beginning of which coincided with
the October defeat in Germany, are ideological repercussions of the
survivals of traditional social-democratic ideas in the communist party.
The way to overcome them is by the BOLSHEVIZATION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTIES.
Bolshevization in this context means the final ideological victory of
Marxism-Leninism (or in other words Marxism in the period of imperialism
and the epoch of the proletarian revolution) over the 'Marxism' of the
Second International and the syndicalist remnants."

So the legacy of the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern was
organizational rigidity and ideological conformity. This has been the
unexamined heritage of the Marxist-Leninist movement since the 1920s. Any
attempt to veer from this method has been dubbed "Menshevik." Zinoviev was
the architect of these measures. He himself was soon deposed by Stalin who
found the guidelines perfect for his own bureaucratic consolidation.
"Trotskyism" soon entered the vocabulary of curse-words that now included
"Menshevik", "opportunist" or "syndicalist".

The Comintern was transformed by these measures, even though the seeds of
the transformation were present at the time of the 21 Conditions. There
were signs that Lenin was troubled by the drift of the Comintern. He
considered moving the headquarters to Western Europe where the Russian
influence would be much less preponderant. He also was developing a
critique of the organizational model of "democratic centralism" that had
been encoded in the Second World Congress in a document he found "all too
Russian".

But Lenin did not survive his stroke. We have no way of knowing what the
outcome would have been had he lived. After all, Stalin's power did not
rest on his charisma but on his roots in a powerful social layer: the state
bureaucracy. The only way that history can be changed is not by rewriting
it but by creating it anew. We have the opportunity today to uproot this
rotten "Bolshevization" methodology which belongs to the tortured early
years of the Soviet Union.


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


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