******************** 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. *****************************************************************
I have just had the pleasure of reading 'Leninism under Lenin' by Marcel Liebman. It was an enjoyable and highly informative read. Liebman does a great job of putting Lenin's political thought and practice into its context. The Lenin we are presented with is an extremely able tactician, adept at detecting sudden changes in the nature of the class struggle and adapting his praxis accordingly. It also shows that Lenin was no fetishiser of organisational forms. Nothing like those who imitate the Bolsheviks today! In 1903 he championed a tight, disciplined, centralised party so as to organise militant workers in the face of Tsarist repression. Yet in 1905-6 he was in favour of opening up the party to the masses against the will of the conservative 'committee-men'. Lenin had to fight the very apparatus that he had created. This was again the case in 1917, when the Bolshevik bureaucracy represented by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev was trying to hold the masses back and had no interest in launching an insurrection. Yet there is a contradiction which Liebman never picks up on. We stress the indispensability of the Bolshevik Party in making possible the success of the revolution. But the more one reads about the revolution one is drawn to the conclusion that it was really the indispensability of Lenin. I think this poses a problem when looking at the question of revolutionary organisation. No political organisation should be so dependent on one individual. It is a weakness of the Bolshevik organisation that it relied so much on the force of one man's personality for the seizure of power to be possible. Prior to that, the apparatus had, with mixed success, been trying to hold back the masses. Without Lenin there would still most likely have been an insurrection, but it is unlikely to have had the coordination that it did with Lenin's presence and direction. (And even then, it was something of a farce, and clumsily executed.) Local party committees and branches were already acting on their own, ignoring orders from above. It is appalling to think that without Lenin the already tenuous link between the party centre and the localities would have snapped completely. One thing which leaped out to me was Lenin's extraordinarily flexible interpretation of 'democratic centralism'. It was nothing like the interpretation that so many 'Leninist' organisations (my own ex-comrades in Socialist Appeal included) adopt. As a matter of fact, a week before the insurrection on October 25th, the party bigwigs were still squabbling about whether to launch an insurrection or not. At a meeting of the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party and the Military Organisation on October 17th, it was Sverdlov who stood up and put an end to the prattling, saying firmly that the Central Committee had decided on a course of action, insurrection, and that the purpose of the meeting was to work out how to implement that decision, not question it. The fact that Zinoviev and Kamenev, two long-standing Old Bolsheviks who should have known better, felt bold enough to go to the press with the date of the insurrection, potentially sabotaging the plans being drawn up, proves that 'democratic centralism' for the Bolsheviks had nothing of the rigidity that is now adopted by almost all 'Leninist' formations. And they weren't expelled for their transgressions! Many a dissident in most Trotskyist organisations has been thrown out for less. A big weakness in the book is that it barely covers Lenin's economic policy, which is a glaring omission. I checked the index and 'War Communism' is only mentioned three times. I think that certain aspects of War Communism were clearly ideological in nature and cannot be reduced to objective necessity, and any study of Lenin's political thought must take his economic policies into account. (Incidentally I checked my copy of Samuel Farber's book 'Before Stalinism' to see if he had read this book. Lo and behold, it appears in the bibliography, indicating that he read it and drew similar conclusions.) Liebman has an unfortunate tendency to gloss over some of Lenin's more questionable decisions and accept at face value the charge that the Bolsheviks had no choice but to implement certain policies despite the fact that they laid the basis for Stalinism. This is particularly the case when he is analysing the foreign policy of the USSR under Lenin. I was disappointed that he did not question the wisdom of sacrificing the Turkish communists to Ataturk's butchers. That is not to say he does not criticise Lenin at times. All in all, I think it is a very scholarly work which everyone on the revolutionary left should read and learn from. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
