I agree mostly with Mark here. I may of brought the counter positioning of the pre-October Bolshevik Party to the post-October Communist Party with him in a discussion at one point discussing this with Mark on the phone. At any rate, it is a salient criticism...the "Party in power" never made a revolution, it was the party "out of power" and for a few years after that, that lead the workers revolution there. As I may of noted here in the past, every post-October self-described "Leninist" party models themselves on the dictates of the 1919 Comintern...none of which lead to a successful seizure of power though they did lead mass parties of the working class.
Some the problems, besides the material isolation of the Russian workers state itself and the failed revolutions in the rest of Europe, I lay at the feet of Zinoviev, who lead the Comintern as its first General Secretary. For example, his concept of "One State, One Party" was idiotic to the extreme, modeled as it was on the anti-Federalism of the RSDWP after 1903, where the Comintern had Irish Communists joining the CPGB and Algerian Communists having to join the Algerian branch of the PCF. That lasted, I believe, less than a year as it was really, really stupid and the ECCI dropped it without much discussion. But I think it is more than just what Mark wrote about in terms of the Comintern dictating to the Sections how to conduct business. I think it was party organization, where by the increasing centralization of the party in power, now the Soviet Communist Party, imposed its internal norms of all Sections of the Comintern, all of whom were out of power. This had the effect of actually increasing factionalism, not ending it as the Soviet Communist Party banned faction s (meaning any organized tendency for any reason). Those are my thoughts on this historic question of "The Party". David -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39532): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39532 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116410536/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
