Leninist organisational practice

[Ben Courtice <benj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is following on from the long rambling debate we had a little while back 
around
Leninism, Cannon, Zinovievism, Stalinism Trotskyism, Jack Barnes, etc. I think 
these
comments by Doug Lorimer (below) are an interesting addition to an 
understanding of how
(and why) the Bolshevik faction's organisational practices changed over the 
course of
time. I know not all here agree with Lorimer's conclusions.

The comments are taken from a March 1999 letter written to the CPGB (of "Weekly 
Worker"
fame). The whole text is at http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/279/nopubcrit.html 
and the reply
from Marcus Larsen of the CPGB is at 
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/279/revop.html for
those who want to get the full context etc.

I wanted to post this during the earlier debate, but I only just (finally) 
found the
article on the CPGB website (after searching with several search engines and 
not finding
it... until I used google, yay for google).


Ben Courtice
------------

The claim that your approach is just the "open" expression of "opinions" that 
Lenin stood
for, is ridiculous. Lenin never advocated that the paper of a revolutionary 
organisation
should print every ill-informed "opinion" held by any and every member of such 
an
organisation.

Equally ridiculous is your appeal to Lenin's "famous" comment that: "There can 
be no mass
Party, no Party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without 
an open
struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which 
leaders and
which organisations ... are pursuing this or that line." When Lenin made this 
comment, in
1907, the RSDLP was a mass party with 150,000 members. Neither the CPGB nor the 
DSP is a
mass party or anything approaching it.

Furthermore, prior to January 1912 the RSDLP was not a Bolshevik-type party 
consisting
exclusively of Marxist revolutionaries, but a party consisting of both Marxist
revolutionaries and pseudo-Marxist opportunists. Up to August 1914, Lenin 
accepted the
Kautskyist conception of the revolutionary workers' party as a party that 
should seek to
include in its ranks all those who considered themselves socialists, including 
avowed
reformists. Thus in 1909, in defending the exclusion of the ultra-leftist 
Bogdanovite
tendency from the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, Lenin argued that: "In our 
Party
Bolshevism is represented by the Bolshevik section. But a section is not a 
party. A party
can contain a whole gamut of opinions and shades of opinions, the extremes of 
which may be
sharply contradictory. In the German party, side by side with the pronoucedly
revolutionary wing of Kautsky, we see the ultra-revisionist wing of Bernstein. 
This is not
the case within a section. A section in a party is a group of like-minded 
persons formed
for the purpose primarily of influencing the party in a definite direction, for 
the
purpose of securing acceptance of their principles in the purest form. For 
this, real
unanimity of opinion is necessary. The different standards we set for party 
unity and
sectional unity must be grasped by everyone who wants to know how the question 
of internal
discord in the Bolshevik section really stands" (VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 
1977, p430).

After August 1914, Lenin rejected the Kautskyist conception of the 
"all-inclusive"
workers' party, arguing that: "The crisis [of the Second International - DL] 
created by
the great war has torn away all coverings, swept away all conventions, exposed 
an abscess
that has long come to a head, and revealed opportunism in its true role of ally 
of the
bourgeoisie. The complete organisational severance of this element from the 
workers'
parties has become imperative. The epoch of imperialism cannot permit the 
existence, in a
single party, of the revolutionary proletariat's vanguard and the 
semi-petty-bourgeoisie
aristocracy of the working class, who enjoy morsels of the privileges of their 
'own'
nation's 'great power' status. The old theory that opportunism is a 'legitimate 
shade' in
a single party that knows no 'extremes' has now turned into a tremendous 
deception of the
workers and a tremendous hindrance to the working class movement" (VI Lenin CW 
Vol 21,
Moscow 1977, p257).

In analysing the opportunist degeneration of the west European social 
democratic parties
Lenin also reviewed the history of the RSDLP and of the struggle within it of 
Bolshevism
against opportunist currents (economism, Menshevism, liquidationism). He 
recognised that
the Bolshevik organisation had not, in practice, been built upon the Kautskyist 
conception
of an "all-inclusive" workers' party. It had constituted itself as a centralised
organisation of Marxist revolutionaries separate from the Russian opportunists 
- formally
in 1912, but in practice long before then - and he held up the Bolshevik 
organisation as a
model for Marxist revolutionaries around the world. He observed that: "The 
Russian Social
Democratic Labour Party has long parted company with its opportunists. Besides, 
the
Russian opportunists have now become chauvinists. This only fortifies us in our 
opinion
that a split with them is essential in the interests of socialism ... We are 
firmly
convinced that, in the present state of affairs, a split with the opportunists 
and
chauvinists is the prime duty of revolutionaries, just as a split with the 
yellow trade
unions, the anti-semites, the liberal workers' unions, etc was essential in 
helping speed
up the enlightenment of backward workers and draw them into the ranks of the 
Social
Democratic Party.

"In our opinion, the Third International should be built up on that kind of 
revolutionary
basis. To our Party, the question of the expediency of a break with the 
social-chauvinists
does not exist: it has been answered with finality. The only question that 
exists for our
Party is whether this can be achieved on an international scale in the 
immediate future"
(ibid pp329-330).

When the Bolsheviks constituted themselves as a separate party organisation 
from the
opportunist Mensheviks in 1912, they adopted precisely the rules that you 
falsely
attribute to being an innovation of Jim Cannon's: ie, they prohibited the right 
of
minorities within the Bolshevik party from making public "pronouncements 
disruptive of the
actions and decisions of the majority". Instead, minorities within the party 
were to have
"the right to discuss before the whole Party, disagreements on programme, 
tactics and
organisation in a discussion journal specially published for the purpose" (VI 
Lenin CW Vol
20, Moscow 1977, p519).

This Leninist application of democratic centralism was reaffirmed in the 
'Theses on the
organisational character of the communist parties' adopted by the 3rd Congress 
of the
Comintern in 1921, viz: "In their public appearances members of the Party are 
obliged to
act at all times as disciplined members of a militant organisation. If there are
disagreements on the correct methods of action on this or that question, these 
should, as
far as possible, be settled in the Party organisation before any public 
activity is
embarked upon and the members should then act in accordance with the decision 
made. In
order that every Party decision is carried out fully by all Party organisations 
and Party
members, the largest possible number of Party members should be involved in 
discussing and
deciding every issue. The different levels of the Party apparatus must decide 
whether any
given question should be publicly discussed by individual comrades (in the 
press, in
pamphlets), in what form and to what extent. If the decision of the 
organisation or
leading Party body is in the view of certain other members incorrect, these 
comrades must
not forget, when they speak or act in public, that to weaken or break the unity 
of the
common front is the worst breach of discipline and the worst mistake that can 
be made in
the revolutionary struggle."

This Leninist position - that whether or not internal political disagreements 
on any given
issue within a Bolshevik-type party should be publicly discussed by individual 
members is
a matter for the party, not individual members, to decide - was the viewpoint 
upheld by
Cannon.

In opposition to this position you counterpose, not the mature post-1914 
Leninist
position, but the Kautskyist conception of pre-war social-democracy, a 
conception of
party-building which Tony Cliff articulated in its most "refined" and 
opportunistic form
in 1960: "Since the revolutionary party cannot have interests apart from the 
class, all
the party's issues of policy are those of the class and they should therefore 
be thrashed
out in the open in its presence. The freedom of discussion which exists in a 
factory
meeting, which aims at unity of action after decisions are taken, should apply 
to the
revolutionary party. This means that all discussions on basic issues of policy 
should be
discussed in the light of day, in the open press. Let the mass of the workers 
take part in
the discussion. Put pressure on the party, its apparatus, its leadership" 
('Trotsky on
substitutionism' International Socialism No2, autumn 1960).

Long before 1914, Lenin had become convinced (as a result of the rise of 
economism in the
RSDLP in the late 1890s) that such a conception of the relation between the 
revolutionary
vanguard organisation and the mass of the workers was bankrupt and that an 
organisation of
revolutionaries in Russia whose actual functioning was based on such a 
conception would
repeatedly succumb to tail-ending the spontaneous, bourgeois-reformist, 
politics of the
ideologically backward mass of the workers. Of course, it is possible to 
proclaim
agreement with such a conception and to "safeguard" the organisation from this 
fate - by
creating a culture of sect-like ultra-factionalism behind a demagogic public 
posture about
openly airing differences.

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