On 1/8/21 3:22 PM, Roger Kulp wrote:
This is what Lenin ,and others, taught us
*/No, it's not./* It is what the PSL leaders learned from the people who
learned from Sam Marcy's acolytes, like Deirdre Griswold. Sam learned
his "Leninism" from James P. Cannon, who learned it in turn from Leon
Trotsky. The problem is that the Leninism they all practiced was based
on Grigory Zinoviev's attempt to bureaucratically control the Soviet CP
as well as the Comintern parties in the aftermath of the disastrous
defeat of the German CP in 1923. In 1924, the Comintern held a
"Bolshevization" congress in which a caricature of Lenin's party became
the norm.
I don't know how to put it to you, Roger, but you have joined a mailing
list where many people, including me, have given a lot of thought and
devoted serious research into the history of the sect form. I invite you
(and others) to read how this came about in a series of articles I wrote
in 1999 or so:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization/comintern_and_germany.htm
Here is an excerpt:
A month later the "Bolshevization" Fifth Congress of the Comintern took
place. This congress was designed by Zinoviev and Stalin to export the
monolithic model that the Russian party had adopted. Whatever
independence remained in the world-wide Communist movement would soon
disappear after this congress. Zinoviev and Stalin had one and one
interest only: to line up the world's revolutionary forces behind their
faction. Ironically, the model that this monstrous Comintern congress
adopted was identical to the one that the world Trotskyist movement
itself adopted. This "Marxist-Leninist" monstrosity has been the
organizational lynch-pin of all party-building attempts from 1924 on.
Trotskyists have always disavowed the political decisions made at this
congress, but have never addressed the organizational methodology that
was ratified at the same time. The bureaucratic politics and the
monolithic party-building model go hand in hand.
The Fifth Congress gave the new leader of the German Communist Party,
Ruth Fischer, the opportunity to rail against Radek, Trotsky and
Brandler. They were all Mensheviks, opportunists and "liquidators of
revolutionary principle." In the words of Isaac Deutscher, "she called
for a monolithic International, modelled on the Russian party, from
which dissent and contest of opinion would be banished. 'This world
congress should not allow the International to be transformed into an
agglomeration of all sorts of trends; it should forge ahead and embark
on the road which leads to a single Bolshevik world party.'"
The Statutes of the Communist International adopted at the fifth
congress were a rigid, mechanical set of rules for building Communist
Parties. All of the Communist Parties were subordinate to the Comintern
and members of the parties had to obey all decisions of the Comintern.
The world congress of the Comintern would decide the most important
programmatic, tactical and organizational questions of the Comintern as
a whole and its individual sections. It would be appropriate, for
example, for the Comintern to overrule a member party that had decided
to support Trotsky's New Course. The Statutes also included the sort of
ridiculous measures that mark most of the sect-cults of today. For
example, statute 35 declares that:
"Members of the CI may move from one country to another only with the
consent of the central committee of the section concerned. Communists
who have changed their domicile are obliged to join the section of the
country in which they reside. Communists who move to another country
without the consent of the CC of their section may not be accepted as
members of another section of the CI."
It was a ruling like this that was used as the pretext to expel Peter
Camejo, long-time leader of the American Socialist Workers Party. Camejo
had moved to Venezuela for a year to take a leave of absence to study
Lenin and develop a critique of SWP sectarianism. When he returned to
the United States, he was prevented from rejoining because his move was
"unauthorized." He was victimized for his political beliefs rather than
any form of "indiscipline." Compare these unbending strictures with the
norms of the Bolshevik Party. In the Bolshevik Party, there was no such
thing as formal membership. A Bolshevik was simply somebody who agreed
with the general orientation of Iskra. Nobody had to get permission to
transfer from one Bolshevik branch to another because such a concept was
alien to the way the free-wheeling Bolsheviks functioned.
Even more insidious than the Statutes were the Theses of the Fifth
Congress on the Propaganda Activities of the CI and its sections. This
document sets in concrete the methodology of dividing every serious
political disagreement into a battle between the two major classes in
society. It states:
"Struggles within the CI are at the same time ideological crises within
the individual parties. Right and left political deviations, deviations
from Marxism-Leninism, are connected with the class ideology of the
proletariat.
Manifestations of crisis at the second world congress and after were
precipitated by 'left infantile sicknesses', which were ideologically a
deviation from Marxism-Leninism towards syndicalism....The present
internal struggles in some communist parties, the beginning of which
coincided with the October defeat in Germany, are ideological
repercussions of the survivals of traditional social-democratic ideas in
the communist party. The way to overcome them is by the BOLSHEVIZATION
OF THE COMMUNIST PARTIES. Bolshevization in this context means the final
ideological victory of Marxism-Leninism (or in other words Marxism in
the period of imperialism and the epoch of the proletarian revolution)
over the 'Marxism' of the Second International and the syndicalist
remnants."
So the legacy of the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern was
organizational rigidity and ideological conformity. This has been the
unexamined heritage of the Marxist-Leninist movement since the 1920s.
Any attempt to veer from this method has been dubbed "Menshevik."
Zinoviev was the architect of these measures. He himself was soon
deposed by Stalin who found the guidelines perfect for his own
bureaucratic consolidation. "Trotskyism" soon entered the vocabulary of
curse-words that now included "Menshevik", "opportunist" or "syndicalist".
The Comintern was transformed by these measures, even though the seeds
of the transformation were present at the time of the 21 Conditions.
There were signs that Lenin was troubled by the drift of the Comintern.
He considered moving the headquarters to Western Europe where the
Russian influence would be much less preponderant. He also was
developing a critique of the organizational model of "democratic
centralism" that had been encoded in the Second World Congress in a
document he found "all too Russian".
But Lenin did not survive his stroke. We have no way of knowing what the
outcome would have been had he lived. After all, Stalin's power did not
rest on his charisma but on his roots in a powerful social layer: the
state bureaucracy. The only way that history can be changed is not by
rewriting it but by creating it anew. We have the opportunity today to
uproot this rotten "Bolshevization" methodology which belongs to the
tortured early years of the Soviet Union.
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