Re:Sectarian factionalism (Louis' clarification on Zinoviev)

[Shane Hopkinson <s.hopkinson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Date: Sat, 29 Jun 2002 10:54:40 -0400
> From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: Sectarian factionalism (was Updating Louis report (was DSP, etc))
>
> 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: <snip>

Thanks for the clarification.  Where does all this stuff come from?. 
Essentially you
are saying that Zinoviev represents the Stalinisation of the International 
movement
(called by them 'Bolshevisation') which is a caricature of what Lenin had in 
mind.
This model though seems to have been adopted as orthodoxy by both Communists
and Trotskyists.  I gather that the status of 'What is to be done?' emerges out 
of this.
So that the 'bolshevisation' process (so-called) is related to Lenin's early 
pamphlet,
which became an orthodox Marxist position.  Draper has a good critique of the
importance of "What is to be done?"

> 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.

"Free-wheeling" - This is not a term I have heard used on Bolsheviks before.
No such thing as formal membership? of what? The RSDLP - surely this
can't be right?  There has been decades of debate over this stuff.  Even if it
was looser than the Stalinst tradition proclaimed being a bolshevik was surely
more that 'agreeing with general line of Iskra"?
How about some references on this stuff?


> So the legacy of the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern was
> organizational rigidity and ideological conformity.
> 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".

Ok but this sounds like a bit of a hedge.  The Fifth Congress was the beginning 
of
Stalinisation but the "seeds' were present earlier.  So maybe the problem lies 
with
Lenin rather than Zinoviev (= Stalin)?

Regards

Shane


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