RE: [Marxism] The moderator and Leninist method'gy

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rohan writes, in response to Louis: "This is a cheap shot Louis.  In the
world according to you any organisation that follows some type of Leninist
organisation model is a priori beset with all manner of sectarian errors,
including self-declared vanguarism."

It's not just Louis, but 9 decades of pretty substantial experience.

Insofar as it is attributed to Lenin, the "Leninist organisation model" is a
fake, a fraud. Lenin never devised such a schema. 

Find --citing chapter and verse-- where Lenin claims to have made an
original contribution to Marxism, or even claims to have resuscitated some
forgotten insight or principle on the "organization question."

Find when and where Lenin spoke of anything like a "party of a new type." 

Show us where he defends censorship of the public expression of debates
within the party in the name of "democratic centralism," where he supported
people being expelled for publicly voting against the Bolshevik fraction at
some congress or meeting or even just for expressing disagreements.

Find where Lenin or the central Bolshevik leadership ever tried to decide
--or even discuss-- tactical questions about what slate to back in a union
election or whether to call a strike.

The standard fake-Leninist rejoinder is that "Democratic Centralism" is a
flexible concept that must be creatively applied and so on. But that's not
the case.

Lenin had a fundamentally DIFFERENT approach to "the organization question"
than that of ANY and ALL "Leninists," because he did not start with an
"organisational model."

For HIM, like for Marx and Engels before him, organization was a function of
concrete political tasks that depended most of all on the level of the CLASS
movement.

Lenin's "party building" started from the reality of a working class that
was already cohering as a class-for-itself, as a social layer conscious that
it had separate and distinct interests from others in society. It was on the
basis of this actual motion, and as a way to cohere it and give it organized
expression, that the RSDLP was founded.

"Leninism" is an IDEALIST deviation from Marxist materialism, which
substitutes a teleological goal for the actual course of the struggle
against capitalism.

The very concept of the "Leninist organisational model," in and of itself,
is sectarian. It is an explicit and direct rejection of the precepts laid
down by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto:

*  *  *

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other
working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a
whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape
and mould the proletarian movement....

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other
proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of
the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

*  *  *

Those conclusion are fundamental, bed-rock Marxism. They flow directly from
a materialist conception of history, of political struggle and political
change. They weren't something that applied only in those days of the
nascent workers movement.

Writing nearly four decades later, after a lifetime of experience, in an
article published on the first anniversary of Marx's death, Engels quoted
those lines and the following couple of paragraphs, and said:

"Never has a tactical programme proved its worth as well as this one.
Devised on the eve of a revolution, it stood the test of this revolution;
whenever, since this period, a workers? party has deviated from it, the
deviation has met its punishment; and today, after almost forty years, it
serves as the guiding line of all resolute and self-confident workers?
parties in Europe, from Madrid to St. Petersburg."

The difference between THIS approach and the "Leninist" approach is that its
starting point is NOT the organizational form "party" in general, never mind
something like "a democratic centralist vanguard party of a new type." The
starting point is the actual class movement.

If "The Leninist strategy of Party Building" ISN'T setting up "sectarian
principles ... by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement," then I
don't know what is.

The essential sectarianism of imposing on a living social movement a reified
organizational schema is nowhere more evident than in the countless attempts
that have been made to build a "Leninist Party" in the imperialist countries
in recent decades, where the motion by the working class towards becoming a
"class for itself" has been nil or in reverse, to the degree that, for
example, speaking of a "class for itself" movement or even real motion in
that direction in a country like the United States sounds more like a sick
joke than anything else.

This has led to the flourishing of self-absorbed micro-sects, each one
seeing itself as the one true church, without real grounding in the day to
day life of working people, their struggles or social movements. In
composition they are overwhelmingly drawn from, and pretty much exclusively
led by, elements from the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. In their internal
dynamics tend to reproduce the hierarchical patterns of privilege and power
along gender, national, class and age lines inherited from broader society.
They have about as much to do with any model that might be reasonably be
inferred or deduced from the Bolshevik experience leading up to the October
Revolution as a medium-rare T-bone steak does with the general theory of
relativity. 

Joaquín


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