Fwd: Re Draper on organising for socialism [was Party Building]

["chen9692000" <s.hopkinson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

--- In GreenLeft_discussion@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Pip, Peter & Zoe" 
<ppz@xxxx> wrote:
A brief reply to Ed Lewis and Shane Hopkinson on Draper's take on the
Bolshevik experience

I think the problem with Draper's "Toward a New Beginning" is that it
poses an organisational schema to get around some real challenges of
building a mass revolutionary party, in short, a loose, non-
membership,
multi-tendency network based around a revolutionary "political 
center".
He says this is the actual Bolshevik experience in building a mass
revolutionary party but in doing so he actually has to misrepresent 
and
skim over the real experience of the Bolsheviks and throw out valuable
lessons from Lenin.

It also forces Draper to treat Bolshevik organisation outside the
historical framework -- a mirror of the error of those "Leninists" who
think they can distill from the Bolshevik experience a timeless
organisational formula.

The Bolsheviks built their party through a complex struggle that
involved several very different stages and organisational forms,
including:

1900-1904: As an emerging faction in the multi-tendency Russian Social
Democratic Labour Party, then largely a party of radicalised
intellectuals with a weak base in the working class.[ "As a current of
political thought and as a political party, Bolshevism has existed 
since
1903", Lenin was to note in LWC.]

1905-1906: The revolutionary upsurge which caught both Bolshevik and
Menshevik factions by surprised but in which the RSDLP opened up won a
mass base.

1907-1912: The years of reaction, sharp conflict and eventual total
organisational split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

1912-1914: When the new Bolshevik party grows rapidly on the back of
increasing working class militancy with its revolutionary class-
struggle
program.

1914-1917: The First World War and the historic betrayal of Social
Democracy in the face of patriotic hysteria and mass slaughter.

1917-1923: The tumultuous years of revolutionary insurrection,
government and civil war.

"Only the history of Bolshevism during the entire period of its
existence can satisfactorily explain why it has been able to build up
and maintain, under most difficult conditions, the iron discipline
needed for the victory of the proletariat,"

There were great differences in the organisational forms that Lenin
argued for and used in each of these periods. No single organisational
schema, including Draper's, fits all these stages.

"Only the history of Bolshevism during the entire period of its
existence can satisfactorily explain why it has been able to build up
and maintain, under most difficult conditions, the iron discipline
needed for the victory of the proletariat."

And of course, it wasn't a matter of developing the perfect
organisational form through experience, as some "Leninists" have 
argued.
Indeed this is one way in which some of the sharp early struggles are
conveniently brushed aside.  Lenin, repudiated What Is To Be Done, is
one such argument, when all he did later was to warn readers to see it
as a polemic in a particular context (a warning that we should heed 
for
all polemics).

But every serious study of the Bolsheviks captures the fact that this
was a struggle to politically and organisationally centralise and
prepare the revolutionary movement. Despite their very different
political and philosophical outlooks, for instance, both Marcel 
Liebman
(Leninism Under Lenin) and Paul Le Blanc (Lenin And The Revolutionary
Party) capture this dynamic.

Such a process obviously cannot be carried out by some little 
socialist
group's organisational decrees. Every single bit of meaningful and
sustainable political centralisation has to be won politically. Real
vanguards have to earn that position, etc.

"The first questions to arise are: how is the discipline of the
proletariat's revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is
it reinforced? First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian
vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity,
self-sacrifice and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, 
maintain
the closest contact, and -- if you wish -- merge, in certain measure,
with the broadest masses of the working people -- primarily with the
proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working 
people.
Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by 
this
vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics,
provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that
they are correct. Without these conditions, discipline in a
revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced
class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform
the whole of society, cannot be achieved. Without these conditions, 
all
attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in
phrasemongering and clowning. On the other hand, these conditions 
cannot
emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won
experience. Their creation is facilitated by a correct revolutionary
theory, which, in its turn, is not a dogma, but assumes final shape 
only
in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and
truly revolutionary movement."

I think any serious socialist would agree with this, as does Draper in
"Toward a New Beginning":

"The painstaking formation of the Bolshevik tendency accomplished 
three
things in the course of time ? three things which, it seems to me, 
apply
in almost every case, and certainly apply to what we are obliged to 
do.

"The process of formation of the Bolshevik tendency ?

"1.created a body of doctrine, a body of political literature 
expressing
a unified kind of revolutionary socialism; 2.formed cadres of party
workers and militants around this political core; 3.established its
"kind of socialism" as a presence in left politics, with its own
physiognomy and name.

"This sums up our tasks too."

As I said, any serious socialist should agree on these tasks but 
working
out how to get there, is very concrete. And the route to a mass
revolutionary party is not going to be a straight line as the 
experience
of other successful revolutionary movements, including the Bolsheviks,
indicates. We cannot predict the route but we have to start somewhere.

In a country like Australia today, socialists (revolutionary or not) 
are
a tiny minority and comprise mainly  what might be termed "socialist
intellectuals" relatively isolated from the working class. Further, 
this
working class is largely depoliticised and generally in retreat in the
face of a continuing capitalist neo-liberal offensive. What
politicisation that has taken place recently has been episodic and 
mixed
in its direction. So, inevitably, these socialists' tasks are mainly,
propagandistic and educational. But we have some (mostly episodic)
opportunities. Cadre accumulation is slow and difficult.

How should the actually existing socialists in Australia best organise
to do these tasks today?

If we were to apply Draper's formula we should set up a "a
non-membership propaganda/educational center as distinct from a
membership group enclosed in organizational walls ? has taken the
concrete form a publishing enterprise and its editorial board, with 
more
or less an organizational apparatus attached to it for the purpose of
carrying out the political tasks of the center."

A handful of socialist intellectuals can set up an e-list, a website 
and
perhaps put out a magazine and get involved in whatever movement 
action
they can. And this has been done.

But in actual fact all this is also done on a larger if still modest
scale ? and I would argue more effectively -- by the existing 
socialist
groups. Sure these groups have their distortions (arising out of
dogmatism, misplaced mini-cominternism but essentially out of their
relative isolation) but if they can work together and relate better to
the "class-in-motion".

You could say, accurately, that they are ALL little  "political 
centres"
with varying degrees of modest influence. But they have constitutions,
and memberships, and most claim to apply "democratic centralism" and
some version of "Leninism". Now Draper argues that these are all 
doomed
to be irrelevant micro-sects and to escape that fate socialists must
avoid setting up a "membership organisation".

But then what is to stop the self-selected group of socialist
intellectuals running a political centre, without a membership
organisation, from propagating the most sectarian politics?

Worse still, as Draper has to agree that if you want the political
centre to have any political impact it has to have "more or less an
organizational apparatus attached to it for the purpose of carrying 
out
the political tasks of the center". So is this apparatus going to make
any attempt to be democratic? And how is this going to be done without
rules, membership, leadership elections, etc, all the things he so
blithely mocks? I think Lenin made this point in more that one of his
battle for organisation in the early years.

Even Draper is forced to concede that  "The real problem is whether 
the
political center must necessarily be a sect." I'd say it has more 
chance
of becoming a sect if it disdains even the most basic democratic
organisation.

I think any attempt to apply Draper's organisational schema would be a
step back even for the embryonic socialist movement in Australia 
today.
The better course is for all the existing socialist organisations 
which
are willing to unite together to do so along with socialist 
individuals
in a multi-tendency socialist formation like the Socialist Alliance 
and
seek to work together with the minority militant current in the trade
union movement, seek to take initiatives to build whatever progressive
mass movements that can be built in today's conditions.

Peter Boyle
--- End forwarded message ---



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