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.