Re: [Marxism] Building France's New Anti-capitalist Party

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Fidler wrote:
> A very interesting account of the approach of the LCR, the main
> initiator of France's new anticapitalist party, which is to hold
> its founding convention in late January:
> 
> http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=512&issue=121
> 

Btw, I just noticed that there is another article about the LCR/NPA 
development in the ISJ. Written by Panos Garganas, a Greek member of the 
Cliffite movement, it betrays a certain cluelessness about what the LCR 
is up to. Garganas, like most SWP'ers I suppose, thinks that we need to 
come up with something like the 21 conditions today:

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=513&issue=121
Even the “21 conditions” of the Comintern were no guarantee against 
opportunistic currents. But who would argue that the 21 conditions were 
not a step in the right direction? As revolutionaries we have to raise 
the demand that the radical left shifts to anti-capitalism and 
opposition to centre-left governments today.

---

Well, I argued that the 21 conditions were not a step in the right 
direction in the 1920s and even less so today. It is too bad that the 
SWP'ers have not really paid much attention to what these 21 conditions 
really amounted to politically.

From: 
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization/comintern_and_germany.htm

The favorable news of Red Army advances emboldened triumphalist moods in 
the Kremlin. Even though the French Socialist Party and the German 
Independent Socialist Party attended the congress as friendly 
consultative delegates, the Russian Communists seemed in no mood to 
placate these "half-hearted" or centrist formations. To the contrary, 
this congress passed the famous 21 conditions for entry into the 
Comintern, which they envisioned as a single Communist Party with 
branches in different countries. These 21 conditions were drafted by 
Zinoviev with Lenin's agreement. One provision urged by the Italian 
ultraleftist Bordiga was particularly stringent. It demanded that all 
party members be expelled if they rejected the 21 conditions. These 21 
conditions could only be considered a slap in the face by the French and 
German socialists, who in every other way were sympathetic to the 
revolution.

When the congress was over, Levi returned to Germany in a mood of 
despair. The Independents also faced a difficult situation. Even though 
they felt constrained by the 21 conditions, they still sought to ally 
themselves with the Soviet revolution and the organized revolutionary 
movement that identified with it. They convened a special congress to 
consider the 21 conditions. A debate was held between Zinoviev in favor 
of the 21 conditions and Rudolf Hilferding opposed. The hall was decked 
out with Soviet regalia, which helped to deepen the polarization of an 
already polarized situation. Hilferding argued, quite correctly, that 
the 21 conditions were a schematic projection of Russian organizational 
norms on other countries with different traditions.

236 delegates at the meeting accepted the 21 conditions and 156 rejected 
them. The Comintern had successfully split the Independent Socialist 
Party in half. The organizational consequences of the vote was that 
300,000 out of 890,000 Independents joined the new Communist Party in 
December 1920.

Two events slowed the leakage of the Independent Socialist Party into 
the Communist Party. First, the Red Army offensive slowed and German 
workers grew skeptical about the notion of a Red Army-assisted 
proletarian revolution in Western Europe. The other event was the 
creation of the Profintern, the Communist Trade Union International. 
This was an attempt to create unions independent of the Socialist-run 
unions. German workers traditionally had a very strong identification 
with their unions, even more so than with their party, and this move 
alienated many of them.

At a ceremony to celebrate the admissions of the Independents into the 
Communist Party, the Russian-inspired triumphalist mood infected the 
leadership, including Paul Levi. All doubts about the wisdom of a 
wholesale ingestion of hundreds of thousands of new party members were 
thrown to the wind. Levi gave a speech to the gathering which hardly 
touched on German conditions at all. He spoke mostly about Asia and the 
Anglo-American world and concluded his remarks with the bombastic 
salutation, "Enter, ye workers of Germany, enter our new party, for here 
are thy gods."

The German Communist Party owned its enormous growth not to the skill of 
the leadership, but merely to the authority of the Russians. Lenin, 
Trotsky and Zinoviev looked unblinkingly at this artificial and inflated 
monstrosity with high expectations. These expectations would be dashed 
over and over again in the next couple of years for reasons inevitably 
linked to the ill-considered manner in which the party was created. It 
entered the center stage of German politics not through strenuous 
exercises in the mass movement, but through the steroids of Comintern 
intervention.

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