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On 11/26/13 11:00 AM, DW wrote:
Effectively you had two parties competing and barely meeting together as some sort of united "RSDLP" (though it did happen, most notably the RSDLP organization in Minsk and other parts of Byelorussia). The factoids as presented says nothing about the actual relationship between the two RDSLP groups.
The actual relationship between the two factions was bitter rivalry punctuated by corrosive polemics but you could say the same thing about the relationship between Lenin and Trotsky in the same period.
In any case, the differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were a thousand times deeper between that of the two Australian groups. I think that the legacy left behind from the understanding of "Bolshevism" by the leaders of various sects--from James P. Cannon's to David's hero Pierre Lambert--has been negative. There is an almost instinctual tendency to look for the germs that lead to gangrene, to read people out of the movement as "reformists"--in other words, the habits that led to the destruction of the American SWP and that is eating away at the British SWP.
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