[Marxism] The Bolsheviks and Rspect

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://liammacuaid.wordpress.com/2007/11/03/the-bolsheviks-and-respect/
The Bolsheviks and Respect
Posted on November 3, 2007 by Liam

Here is a letter from a Manchester Socialist Resistance supporter to his 
local SWP branch. He begins by thanking them for organising a meeting to 
celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution and goes on to 
explore the idea of democratic centralism. If you want to leave comments 
on it please save your thoughts on state capitalism and bureaucratically 
deformed workers’ states for our Christmas special on the theme. There’s 
something to look forward to!

Open Letter to Manchester SWP

Comrades,

Thank you for organising Thursday’s public meeting on the 90th 
Anniversary of the Russian Revolution, something which is well worth 
celebrating.

Both Chris Nineham and Colin Barker mentioned some of the disagreements 
that had wracked the Bolshevik party during 1917. If anything, they 
understated the extent of those disagreements. The entire central 
committee maintained, prior to Lenin’s return in April, that socialist 
revolution simply wasn’t on the cards in Russia, at least until such 
time as capitalism had been allowed to develop the productive forces, 
and hence the relative social weight of the working class. As Chris 
pointed out, the majority of the population were peasants, and the 
economy was the most backward in Europe.

Trotsky had developed a different analysis, based on his experiences in 
1905. But of course he wasn’t a member of the Bolsheviks at that time, 
and only joined the party after Lenin’s return. Trotsky argued that the 
bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying out even the democratic tasks of 
its own revolution, that the role of leadership fell to the working 
class (at the head of the peasantry) and that in taking power the 
workers would not halt the revolution at its bourgeois democratic stage, 
but would allow it to pass over uninterruptedly into a socialist 
revolution (i.e. in the words of Marx, one that would make despotic 
inroads into private property.) In response to the central committee’s 
conservativeness, Lenin wrote the April theses, which agreed in essence 
with Trotsky’s analysis. He was even prepared to break discipline in 
order to appeal over the heads of the central committee to the most 
advanced workers.

Was Lenin threatened with expulsion for this indiscipline? Of course he 
wasn’t.

By October, after Lenin had won a majority, there were Bolsheviks who 
argued publicly against the insurrection. Were even these comrades 
expelled? No they were not.

Nor did the Bolsheviks always vote rigidly as a bloc within the soviets. 
The disciplined democratic centralism of the Bolsheviks, which is so 
poorly understood by many of those who describe themselves as Leninists, 
has to be understood not in the abstract but in the real historical 
context in which it operated, i.e. as a means of defending the party 
from a highly repressive Tsarist state apparatus. It was not intended as 
a means of constraining party members to the extent that they would 
appear as a monolithic bloc within the workers movement.

I am sure the point I am making here has not escaped you, comrades. It 
is that the Bolsheviks enjoyed a vibrant and dynamic internal life and 
were exceedingly tolerant of dissent, even when that dissent was 
expressed publicly.

On the subject of the behaviour of Bolsheviks within the soviets, Colin 
later remarked that: “Some people didn’t like the Bolsheviks, just as 
some people don’t like the SWP. Some of them are even here tonight,” 
which of course earned a big laugh. Aside from the fact that such 
remarks are intended to make people from other tendencies feel 
uncomfortable and unwelcome, which is disingenuous when you have 
advertised the meeting as a public one, it does betray an element of 
paranoia. It’s not that we don’t like you, comrades; it’s that on some 
issues we sometimes disagree with you. Is that so hard to bear?

And I don’t think the analogy between the Bolsheviks and the SWP was 
entirely accidental either. The entire tenor of the meeting seemed 
intended to imply that Bolshevik Party = SWP. It is perfectly 
conceivable that your current may constitute a part of some future mass 
revolutionary party. But if you actually believe that you are already 
there, that the SWP is the last word in Bolshevism, that you can safely 
insulate yourselves from every other strand of Marxist thinking, that 
every other Marxist current is wrong and you are right, then quite 
frankly you are deluding yourselves.

(clip)

Roy

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