Putting Leninism in its Place

The title of this blog, and its (misspelled) URL, refer to Victor Serge's greatest, darkest novel about the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Serge explores the motivation of the revolution's heroes, even as they are (more or less) willingly devoured by the machine they themselves built. Kiril Rublev, a character clearly modelled on Nicolai Bukharin, old Bolshevik, former theoretician, now a minor official in charge of libraries, banned from writing. Now implicated in a conspiracy to murder a CC member, he awaits his trial and execution, writing a final testament charting the course of history and the reasons for the revolution's cannibalisation of its greatest.¹

I certainly don't want to lay claim to suffering the privations of the Old Bolsheviks as I watched my own party destroy itself and its greatest strength over the last eighteen months, but I started this blog in the spirit in which Rublev started his notebook – to attempt to grasp and clarify just what has gone wrong, to allow myself to say unheard of things. And I will admit to feeling a sense of hopelessness, which perhaps makes me somewhat more inclined to write freely (if anonymously): “A man feels singularly free when all is lost.”

So with that pessimism in mind, I want to address the question of how we (being the revolutionary left, SWP survivors and others) should organise. We have inherited a fetishism for Leninism, democratic centralism, a political creed whose adherents imagine to mirror the organisation built by the Bolsheviks between the Second Congress and the revolution of 1917. Enough work has been done on history of the Bolshevik organisation to, at the very least, show that their operations differed drastically over time. In addition, it is also very clear that contemporary organisations have not in fact closely emulated these structures, but built their own around certain interpreted principles and traditions.

At its best, democratic centralism can entail the kind of openness, spontaneity and dynamism of the Soviets of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Deputies in the revolution of 1917, the Petrograd soviet of 1905, or the Paris Commune, the principles of mandative democracy, instant recall, unity of action after full debate. At worst, a dreadful formalism, worse than the democratic bureaucracy of the trade union or labour movement, inflexible, dictatorial, where unity of action is expected to extend to unity of thought or theory. In practise, our experience has tended towards the latter, with occasional hints of the former.

But why the insistence on an organisational formula suited to a party in a revolutionary situation? While in prison, Rublev thinks of his wife, a conversation they may have had:

'Perhaps there are whole periods when, for men of a certain kind, it is no longer worthwhile to live...'

Kiril answered slowly: 'Whole periods, you say? You are right. But since, in the present state of our knowledge, no one can foresee the duration or the succession of periods, and since we must try to be present at the moment when history needs us...'

We schooled ourselves in the history of revolutionary movements, those decisive moments where a military discipline made the difference between revolution and reaction. When something that might legitimately be called Leninism prevented Kornilov's counter revolutionary coup, and organised the seizure of state power by the Soviets, we projected that model back all the way to 1898. Where revolutions or movements failed, as in say Allende's Chile, it is the failure of the left to have had a pre-existing Leninist party ready.

But it does not necessarily follow that the best way to ensure a mass, democratic centralist party existing at that crucial moment of crisis, is to maintain a miniature version in embryo, ready to open its doors to the radicalised. In its more thoughtful moments, even the SWP admitted this, and could pay lip service to its own transitory nature. In practise, however, maintaining this very particular, military, structure rather implies the expectation that the 'party' will remain unchanged, other than in its size, until it receives its just inheritance.

The recording and preservation of history, the continual development of theory, reconciling old ideas, new ideas, and useful ones imported from outside our ranks; involvement in the small, localised, sometimes petty (by world-historic standards) little struggles against oppression and exploitation, trade union work. These are the tasks of the left outside of the centennial moment of opportunity, and it does not require a 'combat organisation' to do it. Indeed, efforts to maintain an unsuitable method of organisation at any time might turn out to be self-defeating – the appearance of unity becomes an end in itself, diluting the capacity of members to operate independently of the relatively homogenised orthodoxy.

The SWP's intellectual activities take a peculiar form. Nothing is required of new recruits, beyond a vague commitment to some kind of social collectivist improvement – they are not Marxists in any sense of the term, and socialists only in the broadest possible sense. But just like a new employee in a workplace, they are liable to dismissal if they fail to very quickly assimilate to the intellectual environment. This process, however, is much more superficial than we would like to believe. It involves a rapid process of learning, not of how to read and comprehend theory or history, not of how to critically evaluate ideas, nor of how to generate and develop new ones.

Instead, new members are quickly galvanised, with a coating of basic truisms, seemingly logical turns-of-phrase, and a handful of dialectical thought terminating clichés. Actual intellectual activity has, since the demise of the old IS, been reserved for increasingly small upper echelons of the party. The rank and file having the duty of quickly assimilating the text, all the better to be able to defend it against all comers; it does not, on the other hand, behoove them to genuinely grasp it, only to be immune to outside critique. Soldiers must be immune to the propaganda of the enemy. This fact notwithstanding, they must still fancy themselves as experts, as organic intellectuals and independent thinkers. In reality, just like the cult member who fancies himself quite the theologian, he has simply memorised the gospel so well he can quote it at will.

This reliance on a relatively fixed theoretical framework comes, at least in part from the position of the IS at the time of its formation; in opposition both to Stalinism and orthodox Trotskyism which had, in various ways, abandoned working class self activity, an insistence on Cliff's State Capitalist thesis worked to stimulate, rather than fetter, intellectual activity. Compare, for example, Mike Kidron's Permanent Arms economy, a thesis that, although not readily admitted by the SWP now, owes a great debt to Keynesianism (a theory quite clearly from outside our ranks), to the SWP's confused responses to a far less objectionable theory, one that merely codifies the implicit and self evident.

I want to suggest that organisation today ought to have no other intellectual function than to facilitate discussion. Certainly, it is unwise to restrict the breadth of discussion, except within the broadest of limits. Not only should the class nature of the Soviet Union be contestable, but even the assumed tenets of Marxism itself. Some of the most challenging developments in left political thought in recent years have gone almost unnoticed by our comrades, or worse have been written off by their revolutionary schoolmasters².

Likewise our practical arrangements should take a facilitative form – aimed at helping activists to coordinate their efforts within the various spheres of their activities. But importantly, without fetishising uniformity, without demanding a unity of approach between unrelated spheres, and without a mechanism for demanding and enforcing unity at the expense of persuasion.

1Interestingly, it should be noted that Bukharin attempted a very similar prison notebook, which came to light only recently. Philosophical Arabesques, a monumental attempt to wrestle historical and dialectical materialism from Stalinist bastardisation. Although a difficult read, it is perhaps the most thorough and successful defence of Marxist thought, and comes closer to convincing me of the validity of dialectics than any other work has done.

2See the most recent ISJ, issue 141, for a full demonstration of this process. We have a basic article on a subject that good social democrats understood a decade ago, a treatise that painfully attempts to save Engel's philosophical pretensions, and a defensive jibe devoid of meaning.