The following article is the text of an introduction given at the 'Marxist Symposium' organised by the IMG in September 1977.
To begin at the beginning. Seventy-five years ago, Lenin wrote What is to be Done? — that is, one year before the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, in which the historic split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks took place. In connection with that split he wrote another work, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, and these two pamphlets embody the initial formulation of the Leninist theory of the Party and of organisation.
Now as everyone knows, two other outstanding revolutionaries of that epoch, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, opposed Lenin and criticised his works in vigorous polemics: Rosa Luxemburg in a pamphlet called Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy, Trotsky in a book called Our Political Tasks. All the signs on the eve of Luxemburg's murder in 1918 were that the differences between her and Lenin, which have in any case been exaggerated, were getting smaller. In Trotsky's case, he opposed Lenin on the question of the Party for nearly a decade and a half. Then in 1917 he was won over and joined the Bolshevik Party, and until his death he defended and fought for the revolutionary substance of the Leninist theory of organisation. But in doing that, and in order to do it, he had now to oppose the 'cult' of Lenin that was part and parcel of the emergence and triumph of Stalinism.
Now in his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky the historian, speaking of Trotsky the political actor in the third person, wrote that Trotsky came to Lenin 'as to a teacher whose power and significance he understood later than many others, but perhaps more fully than they'. Now that's not, as no doubt many would immediately want to say, immodesty or arrogance on Trotsky's part, it's a sober appraisal of his own relationship to the political legacy of Lenin.
Consider. On the one hand there is the whole army of bourgeois ideologues, social democrats, libertarians and others for whom Lenin's work is equivalent to a kind of ruthless drive for power on the part of a totalitarian elite. On the other side you have Stalinists, Stalino-Maoists, and a variety of other would-be Leninists for whom Lenin is a kind of omniscient leader, almost a god, or maybe actually a god.
Trotsky's relationship was different. After 1917 he always acknowledged the lasting importance of Lenin's theory and practice of the Party for the Russian proletariat and for the international proletariat, and that has to remain central. But there are two points. First, Trotsky's own past, his own previous opposition to Lenin, meant that he had a certain perspective on some of the earlier mistakes and weaknesses of Bolshevism which no other Bolshevik leader had. And secondly there was the vigorous struggle waged by Trotsky against the cult of Lenin, realising that the usual function of gods is to reinforce some authority, and that the main function of the myth of the great leader is to put a halo of infallibility around existing so-called great leaders. Trotsky fought against that cult, and that again, as well as his own previous opposition to Lenin, gave him a certain critical distance within the overall continuity with Lenin.
Now, in order not to be misunderstood, I don't want in turn to suggest that Trotsky is now the great hero, leader, etc., who understood everything properly and never went wrong — that's obviously not on. In relation to the cult of Lenin, in particular, Trotsky made his own mistakes. But taken all in all, Trotsky's relationship to Lenin and the work of Lenin was neither one of blind hostility nor of deification. It was a relationship of critical continuity, critical respect, and therefore that imposes a special opportunity, and at the same time a special obligation, on all those belonging to the international movement which Trotsky founded, as well as others who are influenced by his work. It's an opportunity — and I stress opportunity, not guarantee, for nothing's guaranteed, it has to be fought for — an opportunity and an obligation to seize the real substance, the revolutionary essence of the Leninist theory of organisation, and at the same time to make a critical separation from this real substance of incidental errors, blemishes, excesses in the history of Bolshevism, and perhaps more important, the numerous one-sided caricatures and distortions which masquerade under the name of Leninism — whether these are of a bureaucratic, authoritarian, sectarian elitist, or propagandist opportunist kind. That's the central theme which I want to pursue.
I will begin by recalling briefly the general context and the main themes of Lenin's initial formulation of the theory of the Party. Recall, then, that when Lenin wrote these words there was no revolutionary workers party in Russia, though a founding conference had taken place in March 1898 at Minsk at which there were some nine or ten delegates. (It had no effect since most of the participants were arrested immediately afterwards.) Recall that the socialist movement, such as it was, consisted of scattered groups, mainly of intellectuals beginning to make contact with the Russian working class; that there was a complete local fragmentation of these groups — no overall coordination between them — and that they had to operate in conditions of police repression, clandestinity, leaders constantly being arrested and sent to Siberia, and so forth. And recall, perhaps crucially, the important fact that What is to be Done? had a particular ideological target: that trend known as economism, which stressed the economic trade union struggle as against the need for political revolutionary perspectives; which stressed the day-to-day practical tasks — get on with the job, so speak — as against the need for broad revolutionary socialist propaganda and agitation; and which in order to reinforce these emphases made a kind of principle of the spontaneity of the working class — arguing, in other words, that this is what the workers in any case are doing, this is what we should support, and not get carried away with grand perspectives of revolutionary socialism, etc.
Against this trend, Lenin formulated the following well-known arguments: the importance of theory in the most famous formulations — without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement, or the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory — by which Lenin meant Marxism. Lenin referred to Engels' earlier formulations about the three sides of the class struggle — not only the political and economic sides of the class struggle, but also the theoretical. In a language that everyone can understand, Lenin in other words made the point which is now dignified with other names — the specificity of levels, relative autonomy of superstructures, and so on — that the workers movement needs knowledge, it needs science, to guide its political struggles, and this knowledge and science don't flow automatically from anything as if they were a gift of God, they have their own pre-conditions — theoretical production, study, ideological struggle, and the many-sided battle of ideas.
So any anti-intellectualism or philistinism in relation to ideas, theory, any getting-on with the job-ism and so forth, risks diverting the socialist movement by bringing it under the sway of false, bourgeois ideas. Bringing it under the sway of is not actually the right way of putting it; obviously the whole argument starts from the assumption, which goes back to Marx, that the dominant ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class. The workers movement will be under the sway more or less of those ideas, and thus the need for this theoretical struggle.
Second crucial theme — the distinction between trade union and socialist politics. Now this is formulated by Lenin in terms of a distinction between trade union versus socialist politics because of the economist emphasis on trade unionism; but of course, what Lenin says goes for any struggle for immediate day-to-day, partial demands, any struggle for reforms within capitalist society. Obviously trade unionism, struggle for reforms and so forth are a vital necessity, but the exclusive concentration on these doesn't represent an adequate socialist politics. It's equivalent to a self-limitation by the socialist movement within capitalism — it's equivalent to abandoning the field of battle to bourgeois ideas, because in practice it means that you accept that within the structure of capitalism an adequate amelioration of the condition of the working class can be achieved. So Lenin's essential thought here is: there is no automatic dynamic which leads from trade unionism, from immediate, everyday struggles, to revolutionary consciousness and hence to socialism. That, if you like, is the spontaneist illusion — the idea that by struggling very vigorously for higher wages, or better working conditions, this will somehow produce socialist consciousness. That's an illusion.
Now, to put the same thing perhaps a slightly different way from that which Lenin puts it, you cannot achieve what Lenin here refers to as socialist consciousness, revolutionary consciousness, from some partial, sectional perspective on society — whether this be the perspective of a group of employees in relation to a group of employers, or some other. Why? Because what that revolutionary consciousness is is a global understanding of all the class relationships, at every level of society — economic, political, cultural, but particularly at the level of the state — and that is why the indispensable precondition of revolutionary socialist consciousness is an all-round propaganda and agitation which relates to every manifestation of exploitation and oppression, whether it's economic, political, cultural or other. Thus Lenin's emphasis on the model of a revolutionary as not a trade union secretary but a tribune of the people — only in this way can socialist politics be carried out, and socialist consciousness be achieved.
Now that leads in a way to the very heart of Lenin's argument in What is to be Done? — to the whole question of spontaneity and consciousness — and here I want to say that Lenin's arguments concerning spontaneity and consciousness contain both the central proposition of Lenin's theory of the Party, on the one hand, and on the other, two unilateral arguments which, though they are explicable in terms of whom he was most polemicising against, are nevertheless in need of correction.
To begin with the unilateral arguments, these are first, in my opinion, that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade union consciousness; or, as Lenin puts it even more strongly, the spontaneous working class movement is by itself able to create, and does create, only trade unionism. Now I say that's explicable in relation to the polemic that Lenin was waging, and it even has a validity, so to speak, for large periods of time in the history of capitalist societies; but it's in need of correction because, in what we call pre revolutionary and revolutionary situations, the spontaneous working class movement goes beyond trade unionism. The second unilateral argument in my opinion is one of the meanings which Lenin gives to the well-known formula that socialist consciousness is brought to the working class from without. Now everyone's got their own idea of what this means, and there are very sophisticated ways of explaining it and somehow showing that it's all fine. I'm only interested in what Lenin actually says about that. The fact is that he uses this formula in two ways. One of them, and this I think is unilateral, is following Kautsky: Lenin says that socialist consciousness is introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without by the bourgeois intelligentsia. Outside and inside are formulated in these terms: the inside is the proletarian class struggle; the outside is the bourgeois intelligentsia, which introduces socialist consciousness.
Not to make too much of a meal of it, I just think that's wrong. It's obviously trying to state the importance of theory and so forth, but what it actually does is to fail to state what bourgeois intelligentsia this is that formulates this socialist consciousness — under what conditions, and as part of what movement. The whole idea of 'from without' in that sense is wrong, and needs correction. But there is another meaning — and this is the important meaning — of this idea of introducing proletarian socialist consciousness from without which contains what I would call the central proposition of the theory of the Party. I think the following quotation sums it up. 'The basic error', Lenin says, 'that all the economists commit is their conviction that it is possible to develop a class political consciousness of the workers from within, so to speak, from their economic struggle. Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the inter-relations between all classes.'
'Outside' and 'inside' in that passage now refer not to sociological groupings, so to speak, or vehicles of consciousness. They refer to the partial versus the global, if you like. Socialist consciousness comes not from any particular struggle — no particular struggle has this dynamic of allowing you automatically to understand — it comes from that global understanding of the relations of all classes. And I say that contains Lenin's central proposition regarding the theory of the Party, because what that theory says, in a nutshell, is that the Party is necessary as an instrument of political centralisation. Without some such instrument, all the fragmentary struggles, sectional experiences and partial perspectives of different layers of the masses cannot be combined into a successful revolutionary assault on capitalist society, which has its own organ of centralisation, its own organ of combat in the bourgeois state. The Party is required as a political centraliser to combine these partial struggles, link them up, in confrontation ultimately with that institution. So such a Party is needed with a global theory and programme capable of centralising and unifying all these different struggles.
A last word on the themes of Lenin's work in this period — what he has to say about organisation in the narrowest sense, organisational matters in the narrowest sense. Here again I think there's a central point amidst some more circumstantial matters. The central point is contained in the difference Lenin had with Martov over the definition of the Party member, which foreshadowed the Bolshevik/Menshevik split. That is to say, in Lenin's conception the Party is not a loose, amorphous body of occasional sympathisers and so forth, it's a Party of activists, of cadres, which aims in other words to assemble a class conscious proletarian vanguard, and not simply dissolve itself in the level of consciousness of the class as it is. I won't say more about that.
There are other organisational arguments in these works concerning, for example, professional revolutionaries, strict secrecy, concerning limitations on democratic procedures which Lenin justified by the circumstance of having to operate in conditions of political repression, and I'm not going to say anything more about that except that there are some polemical exaggerations of Lenin's which I will return to.
Leaving aside incidentals, what was the basis of Luxemburg's and Trotsky's opposition to Lenin? It was the charge of Blanquism, as Rosa Luxemburg put it (substitutionism was Trotsky's term). In other words, like the Mensheviks, with whom they were aligned in this matter, and like many other people since, Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky accused Lenin of wanting to replace the struggle of the proletarian masses, to replace the self-emancipation of the working class, by the actions of a self-appointed elite.
Was there any validity in that charge? No. In thinking to reject elitism, what Luxemburg and Trotsky were actually doing was rejecting the necessity for an organisation of the proletarian vanguard in favour of a model of organisation which we know today as social democratic — social democratic in the contemporary sense of that word, not the sense in which it was used in those debates. They were rejecting in other words the necessity of that type of organisation, and the October revolution proved positively, and a string of failed revolutions have proved negatively, that without that type of Party, the revolutionary situations which will recur periodically cannot be consummated in successful revolutions.
So, because I'm now going to make some more critical remarks and don't want to be misunderstood, I stress that it was Lenin's incomparable historical merit — that he conceived and fought for that type of organisation tooth and nail. Does this mean that Lenin's works in this period are a kind of compendium of pure truths — and Trotsky's opposition and criticism, and Luxemburg's opposition and criticism, should be thrown in the dustbin? It is unfortunate, for example, that the Trotskyist movement has never republished Trotsky's book, Our Political Tasks, though it's a very interesting book. So is that the conclusion one draws — Lenin represents the truth and these other works are not worth reading? No — because the dialectic of truth and error, if I can put in that way, is a bit more complicated.
First of all, there's one obvious reason why that should be so. It's possible to be right about some things, even about the main things, and wrong about other things. For example, take the whole problem of the bureaucratisation of workers organisations. No-one in this epoch had an adequate grasp of that problem, and the merit for formulating a theory which provides us with an understanding of it belongs to Trotsky in coming to grips with Stalinism in the Twenties and Thirties. But in Lenin's work before 1914, in his constant emphasis and drive towards the need for a centralised organisation, there's no understanding, no inkling of a grasp of this problem, of the danger of the autonomy of an organisational apparatus — the danger of it developing its own interests, inertia, conservatism. However, there is the beginning of an understanding of that problem in Trotsky's and Luxemburg's writings before the First World War, and as that's proved to be no small problem in the history of the workers movement, Trotsky and Luxemburg should be given their due as contributors towards what today we would count as an adequate, rounded out, Leninist theory of organisation.
There's a more tricky issue, however, in what I'm calling the dialectic of historical truth and error, which I will try to get at by coming back to the whole business of spontaneity of the masses. I repeat, Trotsky and Luxemburg were wrong in their opposition to Lenin's central political project, but in being wrong and in this opposition, they also criticised — Trotsky explicitly, Luxemburg implicitly — some of those formulations regarding spontaneity and consciousness which I identified earlier as being one-sided, i.e. spontaneity leads to pure trade unionism, consciousness is brought by the bourgeois intelligentsia. Now, in their incorrect opposition to Lenin's overall project, Trotsky and Luxemburg criticised some of these unilateral arguments. So were they wrong in these particular criticisms, and if they were wrong, was Lenin wrong when he too later acknowledged the polemical one-sidedness of What is to be Done? Was he wrong in 1905 when he spoke of the working class as instinctively, spontaneously social democratic, meaning socialist in that era? Or was he wrong in 1905 to speak like this: 'Any movement of the proletariat, however small, however modest it may be at the start, however slight its occasion, inevitably threatens to outgrow its immediate aims and to develop into a force irreconcilable to the entire old order and destructive of it. The movement of the proletariat, by reason of the essential peculiarities of the position of this class under capitalism, has a marked tendency to develop into a desperate, all-out struggle, a struggle for complete victory over all the dark forces of exploitation and oppression.' Which sounds like some crazed spontaneist.
Was he wrong in these things? No, he wasn't wrong, because what 1905 as it were crystallised in Lenin's thinking — though I don't say he had no idea of it before, but it brought it out in a very sharp way — is that beyond the necessity (which is a crucial necessity) of assembling, training and preparing the proletarian vanguard, a successful revolution requires something else, of course: the winning of the masses, and that is impossible without mass explosions of spontaneous struggle, spontaneous from the point of view of the revolutionary organisation. Of course, from some point of view nothing is ever spontaneous. From the point of view of what the revolutionary organisation is capable of initiating, and what control it's capable of exercising, the mass struggles, during the course of which the masses can be won over to socialism — and of course institutions of dual power emerge and a revolution is completed, etc. — this is something which cannot be in any neat way planned and held in control. It requires massive spontaneous struggles — that's complementary to what Lenin says about spontaneity in other types of situations.
Now Luxemburg and Trotsky grasped some of this in their erroneous opposition to Lenin, so again they must be given their due, and they grasped it in some ways earlier than Lenin.
Now this leads me to the essential point I want to make here — it relates to what you could call the art of stick-bending. Some people will say, and indeed some have said — if you want a good example of what I'm talking about you can find it in Tony Cliff's book on Lenin (which in many ways is a useful book, I don't want to suggest I'm totally critical of it or anything like that) — that Lenin was never actually wrong about anything here, he was just bending the stick. You can find the origin of that in connection with the whole split in the party and the fierce debates that took place, when Lenin said, 'the economists had bent the stick one way — in order to straighten it out I had to bend it back'. In other words, he was admitting his own polemical exaggerations and so on, Lenin was stick-bending: when it's necessary to emphasise organisation, theory, etc., you bend the stick against spontaneity; when it's necessary to emphasise the importance of the spontaneous struggles of the masses, you bend the stick another way. And so they say that that's all he was doing really — there weren't any actual mistakes.
Now first of all let's concede a certain truth in this, and that's the following: there's a kind of dialectic of political struggle which is the same dialectic as this one of historical truth and error, which means that inevitably a political argument, pamphlet, discourse, is different from — fortunately, I suppose — an academic discourse. It won't contain all the necessary qualifications, etc. Precisely because the task at one moment is this, and the opposition is that, there will come in exaggerations and so forth, one-sidednesses of a certain kind. To stress that Lenin's work is going to be marked by all this is obviously right. But there are a number of points to be made here. First, even granting that without making any qualification, still my central point would remain valid. Precisely because of that, you need to read, say, the works of Lenin — who in the global sense got the thing right — in order to liberate what is right from certain exaggerations and plain mistakes which surround it. And conversely, you need to take a serious attitude to the work of those who got it wrong to see if it might not contain in its wrongness some incidental insights. So that already supports one of the main points I want to make. But secondly, very often in this whole stick-bending, there's just the phenomenon of hindsight operating. So you have to read Lenin's What is to be Done? in conjunction with what he wrote in 1905, but of course in 1903 Lenin's opponents couldn't read what he wrote in 1905. They had to read what he was writing in 1902 and '03, and they reacted to some of those things which they saw as being wrong or exaggerated. You must take that into account. Thirdly, to admit that there's an inevitable phenomenon of stick-bending is not the same thing as to take an 'anything goes' kind of attitude towards it — that, right, in order to win this political fight anything goes in what you say.
What lurks behind this rather uncritical attitude is again the myth of the omniscient leader; all right, Lenin exaggerated in 1902, but he was there in 1905 to correct any mistakes his followers had made — basically, don't worry, Lenin saw it all right in the end. But of course this doesn't always work. For instance, Lenin, in What is to be Done?, tries to meet the criticism that his views on organisation are not in conformity with full democratic procedures. What does Lenin reply? He replies that full democratic procedures involve two things at least — full publicity, elections to all offices. He then has two arguments, a main argument and a subordinate one. In the main argument he asks: can we, in Tsarist conditions, operate full publicity and elections to all offices? His reply is no — it will simply facilitate the work of the police. In other words, Lenin's main argument is, so to speak, a circumstantial one — in Tsarist conditions it's not possible. This doesn't cast any doubt on the principle of internal democracy. But there's a subordinate argument, and that is: anyway, there will be something else operating — strict selection of members, strict confidence amongst comrades, the greatest of dedication — and Lenin then says, we will have something then even more than democracy. Now that's obviously bending the stick. Is that bending of the stick justified? No, because in a very small way it suggests that maybe the principle of internal democracy as such might under certain circumstances be substituted. I say that's a polemical exaggeration, it's not Lenin's main argument, etc., but it's an example of stick-bending which is not justified.
What might be the danger? Well, in 1905, when Lenin wanted to open up the party in the sense that there were now masses of workers in struggle who were candidates in his view for a much more open, bigger party, he met opposition amongst Bolshevik cadres, committee men, trained in the arguments of What is to be Done?, who accused Lenin of wanting to play at democracy. Another example: you can take the sectarian response of many Bolshevik cadres to those spontaneous, non-party institutions, the soviets, and ask whether that sectarian response might not have had something to do with some of the one-sided formulations in the earlier period. And more tragically, and more importantly than that, take the Stalinist use of some of these formulas to justify the crimes and horrors which everybody knows about. I'm not saying, in any form or shape, that there is a germ of Stalinism contained in Lenin's work — what I am saying is that, in 1977, a kind of glorification of stick-bending requires a certain qualification: yes, there will be polemical exaggeration inevitably in any party/faction/tendency struggle, etc., but it has to be kept very carefully within bounds.
Now Trotsky senior — the mature Trotsky — central to his whole political life, his political work, was to build on, to continue to fight for the Leninist theory and practice of organisation, recognising what I've called Lenin's incomparable historical merit in founding this theory and practice. But despite Trotsky's recognition of his own central misjudgement in the years before the revolution, he still referred on the eve of his death to the erroneousness of some of Lenin's arguments in What is to be Done? That's not something you very often find reference to — that Trotsky, in admitting his own mistake, was not taking over lock, stock and barrel all the arguments of What is to be Done? He still referred to the erroneousness of some of these formulas on spontaneity and consciousness. And he didn't totally disown his own book, Our Political Tasks. Though he said that in a central respect it was wrong, unjust and a misjudgement in relation to Lenin, he said it contained some insights into the mentality of some Bolshevik committee men in that period.
Secondly, and more importantly really, I believe that Trotsky's own role after 1923 is not unrelated to the fact that he was the one outstanding revolutionary of that generation who had the independence and courage to oppose Lenin in the pre-revolutionary period. Of course, it wasn't only over the Party, it was over other issues on which Trotsky was right. But I believe that that very courage and independence, which were used in many ways wrongly before, played a role after the death of Lenin in the fact that it was Trotsky who came finally to recognise the mistakes which had been made under Lenin's leadership and his own, by Lenin's party: the mistake of banning factions within the party, and the mistake of banning, at the end of the civil war, the legal soviet opposition — mistakes which played their part, albeit not the main part, in the demise of soviet democracy.
On the question of proletarian democracy, internal to a revolutionary organisation and within the workers movement as a whole, Trotsky was second to no-one, and what I've argued is that it's his own opposition to Bolshevism up to 1917, and then his opposition to the cult of Lenin after 1917, which played some role in this trajectory of Trotsky in laying the basis for a rounded out theory of democracy in the proletarian socialist movement.
I want to end with some reflections on this. So far I've stressed political unification — the Party as political unifier and centraliser of the different struggles — but a vital ingredient of the Leninist theory of organisation is the most vibrant internal democracy in the Party. Why? Well you can refer back to the whole discussion of what I have, perhaps rather pretentiously, called the dialectic of truth and error. It's because, outside Stalinist textbooks and Maoist fantasies, there's no great leader who knows all the answers of political struggle. There's only one way, and that is through a fierce, vigorous struggle of ideas, lines and so on, that the correct way can be found. I can quote from Lenin to show that this is not something just put about by Trotskyists: 'There can be no mass Party, no Party of the class, without full clarity of essential shading, without an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organisations of the Party are pursuing this or that line — without this, a Party worthy of the name cannot be built.'
Or look at the actual practice of the Bolshevik Party. Not in quiet periods or something, but over matters of vital importance, matters of life and death — Brest-Litovsk, etc. — and the vigorous battles then between different groupings and tendencies in the Party. It's not some demented militant of the Fourth International but a very sober historian, E.H. Carr, who speaks of the Bolshevik Party as manifesting a freedom and publicity of discussion rarely practised by any party on vital issues of public policy.
So, to conclude, the opportunity and the obligation which I say falls on those influenced by Trotsky's work is to fight for the substance of the Leninist theory of organisation as vital to the self-emancipation of the working class — to reject contemptuously all those ideas of Lenin as a kind of unprincipled dictator who just wanted power, to reject them completely but without any apologetics, cultism, etc., in relation to Lenin.
Now, I've mentioned two phenomena of ideological and political life in the Twentieth Century related to Lenin: one is cultism, and the other is that Lenin equals a totalitarian dictator. There is a third approach today which I think one has to be very careful about, and which I will refrain from labelling: it consists of pretending — without explicitly repudiating Lenin or anything like that — to go beyond the Leninist theory of organisation. But what this going beyond actually consists of, what its actual details are, is rather mysterious or unspecified. I will give three recent examples of this. First, Ralph Miliband, in an article in the Socialist Register 1976 called 'Moving On', refers to the need for a new organisation of the left. I can't go into all the arguments, but importantly related to this theme, he deals with the Communist Party and the sham of its claims about internal democracy. Now here I'll read you the sign that something important is wrong, because he puts under the same heading the sacred cows of democratic centralism and the ban on factions, as if they were in the same field. Then he speaks of the revolutionary left organisations and he puts them all under the same blanket or umbrella, and he says that the internal regimes of these organisations make the CP's internal regime appear as a model of internal democracy. Now first of all you don't need to be a genius to recognise that this refers to something; but it's not true of all the organisations of the revolutionary left, and what's more Miliband knows it, because I've heard him say it in public delivery of this same argument where his criticism was interestingly different: the CP's internal democracy was a sham, but the British section of the Fourth International was written off because of the large number of tendencies within it, all fighting. Whatever else Miliband may want to say about it, that is something different from rigidity and so forth. But in any case that's not the main point. The main point is that Miliband speaks of 'moving on', but having written everybody else off, suggests now the need for a new socialist formation. What would its programme be? What would its structure be? How would it be different from the 'out of date' Leninist vanguard, etc.? Silence. Not a word. Literally not one word. So that 'Moving On', this going beyond Leninism, is a complete mystery.
My second example is the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, in an interesting intervention in the recent debate in the French Communist Party over the dictatorship of the proletariat. Now he has a lot of valid things to say about the need for real debate, but what's interesting is this. He says — differences, yes, this is what we must have. Organised tendencies, no. Though he does acknowledge, and this is worth noting, that they did exist in the Bolshevik Party; but no. Why? Because they're a threat to the unity of the organisation. Then he says, 'If recognised and organised tendencies are rejected, it is not so as to fall behind that political practice [of the Bolshevik Party] towards less freedom.... it is to go beyond it.' Not organised tendencies but what? 'Real discussions', 'new forms of expression', 'exchange of experiences'. Well that's in some ways beyond belief. In our history of 60 years, everything we know today about the evolution of workers organisations, he says, yes differences, not organised tendencies, but what — real discussions. But how will you have these real discussions, how will you ensure them if they can't be organised; and if you are going to organise them, how do you get away from the absolute vital necessity of tendencies and so forth? There you have another suggestion of going beyond the Leninist theory and practice of the Party which is a sham.
My third example is in the booklet, which some of you may have seen, put out by the Communist University of London. Gerry Leversha has an article there on 'Beyond Spontaneity', where the Leninist type of organisation is said to be unrealistic in the West. He refers to it as an elite Party and then says this: 'Reared in conditions of clandestinity, it relied far more upon unquestioned obedience than on equal debate.' Now as far as I'm concerned that's simply derisory: Gerry Leversha diplomatically refrains from mentioning that the Party to which he belongs is actually behind, falls short of the Leninist norms of internal democracy in speaking about unquestioned obedience, etc. Anyway, what does Gerry Leversha argue for — transcend the limits of Jacobinism in favour of the fullest flowering of debate, inner party democracy, adequate channels of expression for dissenting viewpoints, etc? How are WE going to ensure this full flowering of debate? What mechanisms, how will it relate to tendencies, factions? Silence. So again it's a 'going beyond' which leads nowhere.
* See Louis Althusser, 'On the Twenty Second Congress of the French Communist Party', in New Left Review 104, especially pp200-22.