>We have to organise, and the highest form of working class
self-organisation is the mass revolutionary party and the >highest working
class law is the law of the Party.
Lotsa good stuff up to this bit, natch, but never do I see that bit of
argument which convinces that the highest party law might be the law of the
working class! Marx was ever quiet on the matter. And Lenin wrote his last
word on the matter quite a while back now, when stuff was not as it is now.
The proposition with which Lenin legitimised the substitution of party for
proletariat was that a spontaneous mass movement must inevitably be
bourgeois in character - that it needs a kernel of professional
revolutionaries to guide it if it is to attain its socialist potential. As
Kolakowski noted, Lenin's party would be Marxist because it would be led by
petit bourgeois intellectuals in possession of the right line, rather than
proletarians, who couldn't hope to escape their fetters long enough to study
the canon. To add clout to this notion, the idea of 'scientific socialism'
was deployed to render 'unscientific', 'bourgeois' and
'counter-revolutionary' any dissent from the party view. And when Martov
suggested anyone with a track record of sympathy and activism might be
allowed to join the party, Lenin rejected the notion on said grounds.
Centralist discipline was all. The check'n'balance would be something
called 'democratic centralism', whereby those who did gain entry into the
kernel could argue freely unto some inevitable moment of resolution. In the
Soviet Union's case, that democratic centralism gave way quickly to
bureaucratic centralism, as professional revolutionary inevitably morphed
into apparatchik.
Bugger that.
There was a promising tide of mass revolt afoot when Lenin made his move in
'17, and I remain to be convinced the Constituent Assembly, if supported by
Lenin's bolsheviks (sterling contributors up to then it must always be
remembered), might not have contributed to more sustainable and
democratic-socialist a political culture than the one bolshevism ushered in.
If the moment in which we live proves to be a foetal international mass
revolt, Leninist theory might, for better or worse, have a chance in those
parts of the world with weak governments, little international significance
and large proportions of struggling peasants, but none at all in the core
political economies of 2001. People just ain't what they used to be in
these parts, and one thing I doubt we're looking for today is yet another
bunch of vanguard elitists feeding us their gospels from on high. And even
if Leninism did succeed in taking the moment, Kronstadt would look like a
lover's tiff compared to what would follow. Revolution is but a means to an
end, after all, signifying nothing in itself but what hold the manner of its
execution has over what ensues.
I'm menshevik enough to suggest that we have to rely a little more on (a) a
more socialist belief in the capacity of working people collectively to act,
reflect, learn and decide for themselves, and (b) where the forces of
production have taken us (no longer necessarily enslaved by dawn-to-dusk
necessity but closer than ever to irreversible environmental species
murder/suicide).
And perhaps Leninist enough to believe Lenin would write and do things very
differently if he were around today.
Cheers,
Rob.
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