Re:Sectarian factionalism (Louis' clarification on Zinoviev)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Shane Hopkinson:
> "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?

There has been a tendency to assume that because Lenin spoke of
"professional revolutionaries" that the Bolshevik party was a tight-knit
organization in the way that people educated in the Cannon tradition are
used to. In reality, this term was related to the need to defend against
Czarist repression and did not extend into the ranks.

Keep in mind that when Lenin was challenged to give an example of a
"vanguard" in action, he referred his readers in What is to be Done to the
German social democracy of Karl Kautsky. In other words, a party where the
rigid discipline of Trotskyist groups found no correlative.

I am far too busy with a couple of articles to devote much research to the
question right now, but I believe that over the next six months or so I
will have time to write an extended piece on the daily life and activity of
Bolshevik party members.



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


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