[Pen-l] The fight in the SWP, part five (Lindsey German)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

This response to Lindsey German's article is the fifth and concluding 
entry in a series of posts that is less about the specifics of the 
strategic and tactical differences between the SWP'ers and more of an 
attempt to take a step back and put the fight into a broader context. 
(I should add that I have a postscript planned that will present my 
own ideas about how to build a revolutionary party. Mostly they boil 
down to deas I absorbed from Peter Camejo in the early 1980s and have 
since embellished with my own.)

In my view, the SWP'ers are simply reaping the fruits of a sectarian 
party-building methodology that will defeat the efforts of any 
Marxist to build a party like Lenin's. Ironically, the Leninist party 
that they have in mind when they go about their tasks is not like the 
historical Bolshevik party but a schematic attempt to create a cookie 
cutter version of Bolshevism good for all countries and all times.

The man most responsible for this flawed methodology was Gregory 
Zinoviev, who made the same kinds of mistakes found in Regis Debray's 
"Revolution in the Revolution". Just as Debray sought to mechanically 
apply a rural guerrilla warfare strategy throughout Latin America 
that was based on a one-sided understanding of the Cuban revolution, 
so did Zinoviev seek to impose a one-size-fits-all version of the 
Russian party on the rest of the world. While it took about ten years 
for Latin American Marxists to figure out that the Debrayist 
conception was in error, the Zinovievist model persists until this 
day-75 years after it was conceived. Perhaps if Lenin had lived, 
another approach would have been taken. Even before Zinoviev came up 
with his party-building concepts, Lenin felt instinctively that 
something was wrong as this comment made in 1922 about attempts to 
codify a "Bolshevik model" would indicate:

"At the third congress in 1921 we adopted a resolution on the 
structure of communist parties and the methods and content of their 
activities. It is an excellent resolution, but it is almost entirely 
Russian, that is to say, everything in it is taken from Russian 
conditions. That is its good side, but it is also its bad side, bad 
because scarcely a single foreigner?I am convinced of this, and I 
have just re-read it-can read it. Firstly, it is too long, fifty 
paragraphs or more. Foreigners cannot usually read items of that 
length. Secondly, if they do read it, they cannot understand it, 
precisely because it is too Russian?it is permeated and imbued with a 
Russian spirit. Thirdly, if there is by chance a foreigner who can 
understand it, he cannot apply it?My impression is that we have 
committed a gross error in passing that resolution, blocking our own 
road to further progress. As I said, the resolution is excellent, and 
I subscribe to every one of the fifty paragraphs. But I must say that 
we have not yet discovered the form in which to present our Russian 
experience to foreigners, and for that reason the resolution has 
remained a dead letter. If we do not discover it, we shall not go forward."

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/12/25/the-fight-in-the-swp-part-five-lindsey-german/

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