Martin Smith, aka “Comrade Delta” and formerly the national chairman of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, just resigned from the organization undoubtedly to relieve pressure on the party leadership that colluded to clear Smith of charges of raping a 19-year-old party member. As an irritant to the party minority (or looming majority), nobody could top Martin Smith even if they tried. When this young party member brought charges against Smith, the investigating committee asked about her drinking habits. Who could put up with such an affront except Smith’s cronies and party members who had surrendered their independence of mind? If this reminds you of how the Catholic Church, corporations, the military, and other bourgeois institutions deal with sexist behavior, you’d be right.
For me the interesting question has always been whether the party would have been roiled by mass resignations and open factional warfare if this incident had not taken place. Clearly the party was fragmenting along one political line or another for some time. The first significant split occurred in 2010 when John Rees and Lindsay German left the party to create a group around the website Counterfire mostly around differences over strategy for the mass movement.
In the more recent defections and drawing of factional lines by members still within the party, there have been debates over policy but also over the fundamental question of how to build a revolutionary organization. The members most publicly committed to the “Leninist” status quo, such as Alex Callinicos and John Molyneux, have had to put up with challenges from a range of party members including long-time Cuba “expert” Mike Gonzalez. If Gonzalez was only half as sharp on Cuba as he was on “Leninism”, I for one would be most grateful. Sam Farber, of course, is a lost cause.
After Callinicos wrote a piece for the January 2013 Socialist Review titled “Is Leninism finished?” that brazened out the sectarian status quo, he was answered by Gonzalez in an internal article titled “Who will teach the teachers” that has been circulated widely on the Internet, that dastardly petite-bourgeois medium. I liked the final paragraph best:
We should stop trading quotes from Lenin. Not that he has not much to teach us, but that the first lesson he will offer is that the forms and methods of organization of revolutionaries will be shaped by the historical circumstance, and will change constantly as those circumstances change. There are no rules to be applied, no constitutions to obey. There is a revolutionary method – one part of which acknowledges that the teachers must themselves be taught by those they set out to instruct.
While Gonzalez’s article was only for the eyes of party members, recent issues of Socialist Review reveal the debate spilling over into the public sphere. In the June issue, Ian Birchall wrote a piece titled “What does it mean to be a Leninist?” that echoed Gonzalez. This sentence pretty much encapsulated Birchall’s view and hopefully that of the faction that is challenging Callinicos:
There is no such thing as the “Leninist party”, outlined in What Is To Be Done? or any other instruction manual.
I was also pleased to see Birchall’s reference to Lenin’s worries over the organizational proposal of Wilhelm Koenen that exhibited a schematic approach to “Bolshevik” norms.
In his final speech to the Communist International in 1922 Lenin insisted: “The resolution [on organisation] is too Russian; it reflects Russian experience. That is why it is quite unintelligible to foreigners… They must assimilate part of the Russian experience. Just how that will be done, I do not know.”
I referred to Lenin’s remarks when I wrote an article titled “The Comintern and German Communism” back in 2000 or so. Now I am not so sure whether Lenin should get off the hook completely. Despite his uneasiness with Koenen’s resolution, he voted for it. More worryingly, he was adamantly for the 21 Conditions that represented a departure from the more 2nd Internationalist conceptions of party-building. Despite Lars Lih’s contention that Lenin remained a Kautskyist to the end, I am afraid that a “new party” did emerge under his stewardship. However, I am not referring to the Prague Conference of 1912 that people like Paul Le Blanc regard as a definitive break with Menshevism and the ratification of a “revolutionary” party-building model that groups like the SWP (and the ISO arguably) identify with. Instead I am talking about the efforts to impose rigid guidelines in the early 1920s under the hothouse conditions of the victorious revolution and the hatred for the Second International bred by its support for World War One.
Probably the worst part of Koenen’s resolution is item #46: “The party as a whole is under the leadership of the Communist International.” [emphasis in the original]. This, of course, is the conception fully embraced by Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev alike that led to a disaster in Germany. The best thing for Germany would have been for the Comintern to butt out.
Callinicos gets in the last word in an article in the latest issue of Socialist Review titled “What sort of party do we need?“ As might have been expected, he reduces the differences to one over “reform” versus “revolution”, as if belonging to a revolutionary party is some kind of condom that protects you against counter-revolutionary practice. Without adequate protection, you open the door to the nasty germs of reformism. One foolish act can haunt you for the rest of your life. This Platonic understanding of “revolutionary” has little in common with the way that the Bolsheviks functioned. It has more to do with sacraments taken in the Catholic Church that protect you from Satan.
Unfortunately Callinicos has nothing to say on the more interesting question, namely how the organizational principles of the SWP developed. To make a long story short, Tony Cliff embraced the more conventional understandings of democratic centralism that were handed down from Trotsky to his next generation of followers even if he decided that the “workers state” ideology was to be discarded. I doubt that any of the groups based on these precepts, from Cliff’s to Ted Grant’s, really gave much thought to the question of why you would form a group based on a given analysis of the “Russian question”. Did Lenin ever consider the position one takes on when the French revolution became degenerated a litmus test? Nor has Alex Callinicos ever considered why the norm of “internal documents” has some special hallowed importance in “Leninist” organizations. The truth is that none were published in Lenin’s day prior to the seizure of power in 1917. If it was a practice never carried out in the days of the printing press, how much more irrelevant does it seem today when everything is either digitized or easily converted from print to electronic format?
To conclude, it seems obvious that things are very fluid on the far left in terms of the “Leninism” question. There are three approaches that appear to be crystallizing, largely out of discussions prompted by Lars Lih’s book on “What is to be Done”, initiatives being taken in Australia and France by groups committed in the past to one degree or another to Zinovievist practices, and perhaps most powerfully by the crisis in the SWP. One approach is supported by Callinicos and other Trotskyist groups such as those led by Alan Woods and Peter Taaffe. Basically, nothing has changed for them. There is a clear line that connects them to Wilhelm Koenen’s organizational guidelines presented to the Comintern in 1921, even if not carried out to the letter. These guidelines were absorbed and deepened in the 1924 “Bolshevization” Comintern presided over by Zinoviev.
The second approach is embodied by groups like the Socialist Alliance in Australia and the NPA in France that have moved radically to drop the Zinovievist baggage. Groups moving in this direction are the ISO in the USA and the Socialist Alternative in Australia that understand that something was wrong in the way that the SWP conducted itself but are reluctant to go so far as to break with some key “Leninist” norms, most particularly being organized around a program that is fairly tightly circumscribed. This leads to a party that is homogeneous and by necessity subject to a glass ceiling on future growth.
The third approach was first developed by Solidarity in the USA, a group launched in 1986 as a multi-current formation dispensing with Leninist norms. Unfortunately inertia and aging cadres have served to limit its usefulness. Today, I look forward to multiple initiatives taking place in Britain to break with “democratic centralism”, at least in the way it is understood by groups like the SWP. I am very encouraged by the example being set by the comrades who resigned en masse from the SWP now known as the International Socialism Network. They are iconoclasts organizationally in exactly the fashion that is needed. By, for example, publishing their steering committee minutes on the Internet, they are clearly thinking outside the box. More power to them.
Finally, there are the young people associated with the North Star website who are becoming a pole of attraction for others in the USA who want to lay the groundwork for a new left committed to socialism and the right of every member of an organization that emerges out of a long and necessary process to be treated with respect. Revolutionary organizations operating in capitalist society are not some kind of coming attraction of the socialist world we all seek, but we can certainly hope that they can at least operate on the basis of genuine equality. In my time in the American SWP, I always felt that there was a hierarchy in some ways worse than the banks and insurance companies that employed me. This was a complaint I heard repeatedly about the British SWP’s central committee that in its own way was as unaccountable as a corporate board.
Those days must come to an end, not just from the standpoint of respect for the individual, but out of a need for collective thinking—the only way to make an organization powerful. If the American SWP had paid more attention to the concerns that the ordinary member had over the “turn to industry”, perhaps the group might have not imploded (this leaves aside the question of course whether it could have ever developed into a mass party.) If the British SWP had not taken the word of a top leader like Martin Smith automatically over the word of a 19-year-old female, the crisis would have not happened.
In any case, without ceding any ground to some of the lamer conceptions that go along with the word favored so much in autonomist circles, a whole lot more “horizontalism” is needed—the sooner the better.
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Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist 