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We inherit from the wreckage of the British left a single approach towards the question of organisation. It says that although the revolutionary party has no interests other than those of the working class, the class is divided, with some parts showing greater degrees of class consciousness. While the recognition that most workers are not yet revolutionaries sounds at first like a dispiriting insight, all is not lost. The distinctive Communist solution to the problem of uneven class consciousness is said to have been to form a revolutionary party, composed only of the most class conscious people. And, such a party will be more effective than any other party, because its members say and do the same things.
In the last year we were told repeatedly that this model of a small party, able to have an effect out of all proportion to its size only because of its members’ constant unanimity of thought and action, explains the success of the Bolsheviks in 1917.
But Lenin did not advocate the virtues of ideologically homogeneous parties between 1889 and 1903, when he worked in diverse groups and then a party (the “RSDLP”) with other socialists (Martov, Plekhanov, Bogdanov) who were at every point of the future social democratic “left”, “right” and “centre”. Nor was he a “Leninist” between 1903 and 1914, when the RSDLP was split at times into three, four and then five distinct blocs, just two of which were the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, and Lenin called for a re-unification of the party, under the influence of a Socialist International dominated by the “centrist” leadership of the German SPD. Between 1914 and 1918, when Lenin worked with pacifists and “centrists” in the Zimmerwald International, he did not make a festish of political homogeneity. About the only credible moment when you could plausibly say that Lenin and the Bolsheviks argued for a party with no more than one view in it, came in 1920, when the Communist International announced that it would accept membership applications only from parties that signed up to “twenty-one conditions”. The conditions excluded parties led by those who had supported the recent war. “Left” and “centrist” Marxist parties (eg the Italian Socialist Party) were allowed to join the International while, generally, parties of the “Right” were excluded. But seeing this as the moment when “Leninism” was born, securing the victory of 1917, is far-fetched for two reasons.
full: http://livesrunning.wordpress.com/2014/04/26/marxism-in-mono/ ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
