Lenin And The Vanguard Party
Markin comment on this series of articles:
Oddly enough, when I first became serious about making a revolution in the early 1970s, a socialist working class-led revolution, in the eternal quest for a more just and equitable society, there were plenty (no enough, there are never enough, but plenty) of kindred spirits who were also finding out that it was not enough to “pray” such a revolution into existence but that one had to build a party, a vanguard party in order to do so. The name "Lenin," the designation "Bolshevik," and the term "world socialist revolution" flowed easily from the tongue in the circles that I began to hang around in. As I write this general introduction, right this minute in 2011, to an important series of historical articles about the actual creation, in real time, of a Leninist vanguard working class party (and International, as well) there are few kindred, fewer still in America, maybe, fewest still, and this is not good, among the youth, to carry the message forward. Nevertheless, whatever future form the next stage in the struggle for the socialist revolution takes the question of the party, the vanguard party really, will still press upon the heads of those who wish to make it.
Although today there is no mass Bolshevik-style vanguard party (or International)-anywhere-there are groups, grouplets, leagues, tendencies, and ad hoc committees that have cadre from which the nucleus for such a formation could be formed-if we can keep it. And part of the process of being able to “keep it” is to understand what Lenin was trying to do back in the early 1900s (yes, 1900s) in Russia that is applicable today. Quite a bit, actually, as it turns out. And for all those think that the Leninist process, and as the writer of these articles is at pains to point it was an unfolding process, was simple and the cadre that had to be worked with was as pure as the driven snow I would suggest this thought. No less an august revolutionary figure that Leon Trotsky, once he got “religion” on the Bolshevik organizational question (in many ways the question of the success of the revolution), did not, try might and main, have success in forming such a mass organization. We can fight out the details from that perspective learning from the successes and failures, and fight to get many more kindred.
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Markin comment on this article:
The key point to be taken from this article is that the vanguard party idea, while embedded in all that Bolshevism stood for from the start in the disputes of the Russian Social Democracy, only had its parameters defined over time, and in the process of the class struggle first in Russia (in both 1905 and 1917) and later, after the formation of the Communist International in 1919, internationally. Additionally, as the recent events in the Middle East point out, once again, without a vanguard party, against a vanguard party, over the head of a vanguard party (meaning some anarchist “free for all” notion of revolution) the working masses and their allies cannot take power and institute the necessary socialist reconstruction of society. There are no short-cuts if you are serious about revolutionary change. If not, then you do not need a vanguard party, no question. But what do you have, as the Middle east situation again points out, after all those struggles?
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From-Lenin and The Vanguard Party-Preface To The Second Edition And Part One
Preface to the Second Edition
Lenin and the Vanguard Party, first issued as a Spartacist pamphlet in 1978, comprises articles by SL/U.S. Central Committee member Joseph Seymour originally published in 1977 and 1978 as a series in Workers Vanguard, newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S. The articles take up Lenin's fight to forge a revolutionary leadership, an internationalist vanguard party, to lead the proletariat to the conquest of state power through socialist revolution. The pamphlet also includes, under the title "In Defense of Democratic Centralism," excerpts from a speech by SL/U.S. national chairman James Robertson given to a national conference of the West German group, Spartacus (Bolschewiki-Leninisten), in February 1973.
In this second, slightly edited edition of Lenin and the Vanguard Party we have added the transcript of a presentation by SL/U.S. Central Committee member Al Nelson to a Spartacus Youth Club gathering in the San Francisco Bay Area which appeared originally in Workers Vanguard No. 634, 1 December 1995. Titled "The Fight for a Leninist Vanguard Party," this presentation provides an overall historical and political summation of the crucial importance of the "party question."
A number of the organizations which nominally claimed the heritage of Leninism and whose positions are polemi-cized against in comrade Seymour's series, no longer exist as such. The British International Marxist Group (IMG), an affiliate of the "United Secretariat of the Fourth International" (USec) and in the 1970s one of the largest groups on the British left, has long since ceased to exist. Under the impact of the imperialist anti-Soviet Cold War II of the 1980s, the IMG liquidated into the pro-imperialist Labour Party. The shattered remnants regrouped into a number of much smaller organizations, including Socialist Outlook which claims affiliation to the USec.
The hallmark of the USec has long been its liquidation of the need for a revolutionary party and its corresponding pur¬suit of social forces other than the proletariat and vehicles other than a Leninist vanguard party to further the cause of human emancipation. Having spent the 1980s tailing after the social democrats and championing the cause of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe, today the USec is in a state of near-terminal disintegration. With the destruction of the bureaucratically deformed workers states in East Europe and the Soviet Union and the triumphalism of the world's bourgeois rulers over the "death of communism," the USec, together with much of the rest of the left, has repudiated even the pretense of Leninism as it seeks "regroupment" with social democrats, ex-Stalinists, Greens, other so-called "progressives" and even openly cap¬italist forces, within larger reformist organizations.
In the 1970s, Gerry Healy's International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) postured as the defender of Trotskyist orthodoxy against the USec. Healy's organization imploded in 1985 amidst a welter of exposes of its bought-and-paid-for services on behalf of a number of oil-rich Arab regimes in the Middle East (see Spartacist No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86). The criminal political machinations of the Healy-ites—which grotesquely included cheering the 1979 murder of members of the Iraqi Communist Party by the strongman regime of Saddam Hussein—were matched internally by a brutal bureaucratic regime. The Healyites practiced gangsterism, cop-baiting and a deranged interpretation of "dialectics." The purpose of these techniques was to ensure the membership's cowed acceptance of whatever line the leader¬ship divined in the pursuit of its own opportunist advantage.
It was a biographical rendition of Lenin as a Menshevik, written by British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) head Tony Cliff, which impelled us to write the Lenin and the Van¬guard Party series. Today, the SWP continues to peddle its reformist wares as a so-called "socialist alternative." The origins of the SWP lie in Cliff's rejection of the Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense of the gains of the October Revolution—which continued to be represented in the proletarian property forms of the Soviet Union, how¬ever bureaucratically deformed, and of the deformed workers states of East Europe, China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam—at the time of the Korean War. Born of capitulation to the anti-communism of the imperialist rulers, the politics of the SWP and its international satellites continue to be defined by an accommodation to the rule of capital whose "excesses" they seek merely to alleviate. Thus the Cliffites are a modern-day expression of the Kautskyite/ Menshevik rejection of the struggle for a Leninist vanguard party.
Today, in the aftermath of the final betrayal of the gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution by the Stalinist misrulers who opened the gates for the destruction of the former Soviet Union by the forces of world imperialism, the idea that the key to the liberation of mankind lies through a proletarian socialist revolution like that successfully pursued by Lenin's Bolshevik Party seems rather esoteric even to sub¬jective leftists. This is due in no small measure to the crimes of the Stalinists, who made a mockery of the ideals of revolutionary Marxism and the instrument for achieving their realization, a Leninist vanguard party.
We of the International Communist League fight for new October Revolutions. In reissuing Lenin and the Vanguard Party we intend to arm those who seek to oppose this system, which is based on the exploitation and oppression of the many by the few, with the program desperately needed to eradicate it. Serving as the memory of the working class, imbuing the proletariat and the new generations of youth with the historic lessons of those who fought before them, is a vital purpose of the vanguard party, necessary to lead the working class to new victories.
—5 August 1997
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Kautskyism & the Origins of Russian Social Democracy
Recently the British International Marxist Group (IMG) and the International Socialists (now Socialist Workers Party—SWP/IS), two of the largest groups of the British "far left," have taken to revising the history of the Bolsheviks. These groups have attempted to deny or obfuscate the principle of a democratic-centralist vanguard party by pointing to those elements of classic Social Democracy retained by the pre-1914 Bolsheviks as well as to Lenin's tactical maneuvers against the Mensheviks.
The IMG, British section of the pseudo-Trotskyist United Secretariat, has performed the remarkable feat of making Lenin out to be a unity-above-all conciliator on the grounds that until 1912 the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were formally factions within a unitary Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP). The aim of this particular revisionism is to justify a grand unity maneuver for the British left. Their line is that "the political differences which Lenin and Trotsky considered could be contained within a united organization were vastly greater than those which divide the revolutionary left in Britain today" (Red Weekly, 11 November 1976). For an extended treatment of the IMG's revisionism and its shabby tactical purpose, see "IMG Turns Lenin into a Menshevik," Workers Vanguard No. 164, 1 July 1977.
The most ambitious rewriting of Bolshevik history is that of Tony Cliff, longtime leader of the workerist-reformist SUT/IS. The Cliff tendency today sports a "left" veneer" sometimes they even parade around with portraits of Lenin anc Trotsky. But this group had its 4th of August long ago, in 1950, under the pressure of intensely anti-Communist public opinion, it refused to defend North Korea ---' U.S. imperialism and broke with the Trotskyist movement over this question. And yet this utterly shameless CIA "socialist" now presumes to lecture on what Lenin reallly meant to say in What Is To Be Done?
In the past, Cliff has been a prominent, explicitly anti-Leninist purveyor of Menshevism. His 1959 pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg states: "For Marxists in the advanced industrial countries Lenin's original position can much less serve as a guide than Rosa Luxemburg's." This bald statement was the second (1968) edition, but Cliff's substantive position remained the same.
However the Cliffites are nothing if not trendy. And in contrast to the 1950s and '60s, "hard" Bolshevism is now "in" among young leftists. So recently Cliff has written a seemingly sympathetic biography of Lenin, of which two of three projected volumes have appeared. Here Cliff presents Lenin in his own image as a nationally limited, workerist eclectic. Cliff's central message is that there are no Leninist principles or even norms on the organization question:
"Lenin's attitude to organisational forms was always historically concrete, hence its strength. He was never taken in by abstract, dogmatic schemes of organisation, but always ready to change the organisational structure of the party to reflect the development of the class struggle.
"Organisation is subordinate to politics. This does not mean that it has no independent influence on politics. But it is, and must be, subordinated to the concrete policies of the day. The truth is always concrete, as Lenin reiterated again and again. And this also applies to the organisational forms needed to undertake the concrete tasks." [emphasis in original]
In other words, whatever works at the time, do it.
Genuine Leninists recognize the primacy of the principles embodied in the first four congresses of the Communist International over pre-1914 Bolshevik practice. Furthermore, Trotsky in building the Fourth International systematized and deepened Leninist concepts developed in rudimentary form during the revolutionary turmoil of 1917-23. To deny the evolution of Bolshevism from 1903 to 1917 is to obliterate the principled opposition of Leninism to Kautskyism. To appeal to pre-1914 Bolshevik practice against the democratic centralism of Trotsky's Fourth International is equivalent to citing Lenin's "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" against Trotsky's "permanent revolution."
The Kautskyan Party of the Whole Class
The first volume of Cliff's biography, subtitled "Building the Party," ends in 1914. This work mentions Kautsky exactly twice and the Second International not at all! Such an incredible omission warrants dismissing Cliff's book out of hand as a serious study of Lenin's position on the party question.
From August Bebel's offer in 1905 to mediate the Bolshevik-Menshevik split to the "unity conference" arranged by the International Socialist Bureau on the eve of World War I, the International leadership played a significant role in the internal life of the RSDRP. The pro-unity elements in particular, above all Luxemburg and Trotsky, sought to achieve through the German-centered International what they could not attain within the Russian movement.
Lenin was a revolutionary social democrat and, as Cliff himself notes in his second volume, Kautsky "had been the only living socialist leader whom Lenin revered." (This is actually an overstatement: in 1905 when Kautsky supported the Mensheviks, Lenin was harshly critical of him.) An understanding of Lenin's position on the party question must therefore begin with the orthodox Kautskyan position; this was the doctrine of the "party of the whole class," or "one class—one party." Kautsky's "party of the whole class" did not mean the recruitment of the entire proletarian population to the party. He recognized that the political activists within the working class would be an elite minority. No social democrat denied that membership standards involved some level of socialist consciousness, activism and discipline. What the Kautskyan doctrine did mean was that all tendencies regard¬ing themselves as socialist should be in a unitary party. Kautsky maintained that revolutionary social democrats could unite and even have comradely collaboration with non-Marxist reformists. Thus the leadership of the German Social Democracy (SPD) at various times collaborated closely with the avowedly reformist, eclectic French socialist, Jean Jaures.
The SPD leadership was immensely proud of their party's disciplined unity, which they regarded as the main source of its strength. Bebel/Kautsky played a decisive role in the 1905 reunification of the French socialists, overcoming the split between the Marxist Parti Socialiste de France led by Jules Guesde and the reformist Parti Socialiste Francais of Jaures. During the campaign to reunite the French, the Interna¬tional adopted the doctrine of "one class—one party" in resolution form at its 1904 Amsterdam Congress:
"In order that the working class may put forth all its strength in the struggle against capitalism it is necessary that in every country there exist vis a vis the bourgeois parties, only one socialist party, as there exists only one proletariat. Therefore, it is the imperative duty of all comrades and socialist organiza¬tions to make every effort to bring about this unity on the basis of the principles established by the international congresses, a unity necessary in the interests of the proletariat before which they are responsible for all fatal consequences of a continued breach." [emphasis in original]
—reproduced in Olga Hess Gankin and H.H. Fisher, eds., The Bolsheviks and the World War (1940)
Before World War I, Lenin never challenged the above principle and on occasion affirmed it. When in 1909 the Bol¬sheviks expelled the ultraleft Otzovists (the "Ultimatists") from their ranks, Lenin justified this by contrasting the exclusiveness of a faction to the inclusiveness of a social-democratic party:
"In our Party Bolshevism is represented by the Bolshevik section. But a section is not a party. A party can contain a whole gamut of opinions and shades of opinion, the extremes of which may be sharply contradictory. In the German party, side by side with the pronouncedly revolutionary wing of Kautsky, we see the ultra-revisionist wing of Bernstein." [emphasis in original]
—"Report on the Conference of the Extended Editorial
Board of Proletary" (July 1909)
In practice in Russia, Lenin strove to create a disciplined, programmatically homogeneous revolutionary vanguard. Until World War I, however, he did not break in principle with the Kautskyan doctrine of "the party of the whole class." The resolution of that dialectical contradiction was one of the important elements creating Leninism as a world-historic doctrine, as the Marxism of our epoch.
Kautsky's Analysis of Opportunism
The Kautskyan doctrine of the inclusive party was predicated on a particular historico-sociological theory oppor tunism. Opportunist tendencies, it was argued, were a survival of petty-bourgeois democracy carried mainly by the intelli¬gentsia and conditioned by the economic and ideological backwardness or immaturity of the working masses. The growth of the proletariat and of its organization would eventually strengthen revolutionary social democracy. Thus, Kautsky could tolerate a current like Jauresism as a kind of inevitable transition from radical democracy to revolutionary Marxism.
Kautsky's identification of opportunism with pre-Marxist tendencies delved from the history of the European left in the decades following the revolutions of 1848. The principal tendencies opposed to Marxism (e.g., Proudhonism, Lassalleanism, Bakuninism) all expressed the desire of the artisan class to prevent its descent into the industrial proletariat. Marx and Engels understood that artisan Utopian socialism could not be defeated simply through propaganda and agitation but required the actual development of capitalist society. It was recognized in the Second International that Marxism superseded such primitivist tendencies as Lassalleanism in Germany and Proudhonism in France primarily through the transformation of the urban artisan classes into a modern proletariat. The process by which Marxism overcame Lassalleanism, Proudhonism, Bakuninism, etc. became for Kautsky a paradigm of the strug¬gle against opportunism in general.
The view of reformism as a historic lag or regression accounts for Kautsky's limited aims in the "revisionist" con¬troversy with Bernstein. He drew a sharp line between naive, pre-Marxian reformists, like Jaures, and the conscious revisers of Marxism. In a letter of 23 May 1902 to Victor Adler, Kautsky defended the Belgian Socialist leadership from the charge of revisionism on the grounds that they were never Marxists to begin with, nor did they pretend to be:
"I maintain an entirely unprejudiced attitude towards them; the talk about their revisionism leaves me cold. They have nothing to revise, for they have no theory. The eclectic vulgar socialism to which the revisionists would like to reduce Marxism is something beyond which they [the Belgian Socialists] have not even begun to advance. Proudhon, Schaffle, Marx—it is all one to them, it was always like that, they have not retrogressed in theory, and I have nothing to reproach them with." —quoted in George Lichtheim, Marxism (1961)
Kautsky's aim in the "revisionist" controversy was not to purge the Second International of reformist tendencies or even practices, but to preserve the doctrinal integrity of the Marxist camp. If this were achieved, believed Kautsky, the development of the class struggle would eventually ensure the triumph of revolutionary social democracy.
Kautsky located the weakness of revolutionary social democracy in the backwardness of the proletariat, which reflected either a continued identification with the petty bourgeoisie or a lack of confidence in the strength of the workers movement:
"To a large degree hatched out of the small capitalist and small farmer class, many proletarians long carry the shells of these classes about with them. They do not feel themselves proletar¬ians, but as would-be property owners.... Others, again, have gone further, and have come to recognize the necessity of fighting the capitalists that stand in antagonism to them, but do not feel themselves secure enough and strong enough to For Kautsky, the growth of the proletariat, of the trade unions, etc. strengthened the objectively revolutionary forces in society. What was required of Social Democracy was a patient, pedagogical attitude toward backward workers, although Kautsky also recognized that class consciousness could leap ahead during a revolutionary crisis.
With the partial exception of Luxemburg, no pre-war social democrat located the main source of reformism in the conservatism of the socially privileged bureaucracy created by the growth and strength of the labor movement, of the social-democratic parties and their trade-union affiliates.
Lenin's Sociological Analysis of Menshevism
Lenin, following Kautsky's methodology, regarded Menshevism as an extension of 19th-century petty-bourgeois radicalism into the workers movement. Because he considered the Mensheviks an "intellectualist" tendency, in a sense standing outside of the workers movement, he could split from them without positing the.existence of two competing social-democratic parties, the one revolutionary, the other reformist. Lenin was convinced that the growth of social democratic organization among the Russian proletariat would ensure the triumph of Bolshevism.
Lenin regarded the 1903 Martovite grouping as an expression and the attitudes and values of the old, freewheeling, individualistic revolutionary intelligentsia, as a rebellion of the circle spirit against against the construction of a real workers party:
Nonetheless, we regard the Party's sickness as a matter of growing pains.
We consider that the underlying cause of the crisis the transition from the circle form to party forms of the life of the Social Deemocracy; the essence of its internal struggle is a conflict between the circle spirit and the party spirit. And, consequently, only by shaking off this sickness can our Party become a real party....
Lastly, the opposition cadres have in general been drawn chiefly form those elements of our Party which consist primarily of intellectulas. The intelligentsia is always more individualistic than the proletariat, owing to its very conditions of life and work which do not directly involve a large-scale combination of efforts, which do not directly educate it through organised collective labor. The intellectual elements therefore find it harder to adapt themselves to the discipline of Party life, and those of them who ar enot equal to it naturally raise the standard
organisational limitations."
-"To The Party" (August 1904)
Lenin likewise analyzed Menshevik Liquidationism during the 1908-12 period (opposition to the underground party) in terms of intellectuals versus the proletariat:
"The first to flee from the underground were the bourgeois intellectuals who succumbed to the counter-revolutionary mood, those'fellow-travellers' of the Social-Democratic working-class movement who, like those in Europe, had been attracted by the liberating role played by the proletariat...in the bourgeois revolution. It is a well-known fact that a mass of Marxists left the underground after 1905 and found places for themselves in all sorts of legal cozy corners for intellectuals."
—"How Vera Zasulich Demolishes Liquidationism" (September 1913)
Lenin's sociological analysis of Menshevism was valid as far as it went. The Martovite grouping in 1903 did represent in part the habits of the old revolutionary intelligentsia; one thinks of Vera Zasulich in this regard. Menshevik Liquida¬tionism did represent in part the fleeing of intellectuals from the RSDRP toward bourgeois respectability during a period of reaction. But Menshevism was not primarily a tendency external to the labor movement. The Russian Mensheviks antici¬pated the labor reformism of the Second International as a whole, including particularly its mass parties. It was only dur¬ing World War I, in the studies which led to Imperialism, that Lenin located the source of social-democratic opportunism within the workers movement—in a labor bureaucracy resting on the upper stratum of the working class.
Iskraism
Organized Russian Marxism originated in 1883 when Plekhanov broke from the dominant populist current to form the tiny exile Emancipation of Labor group. During the late 1880s-early '90s, Marxism in Russia consisted of localized propaganda circles designed to educate a thin layer of advanced workers. In the mid-1890s, the Marxist propaganda circles turned toward mass agitation intersecting a major strike wave. This turn was in part inspired by the Jewish Bund. Ethnic solidarity enabled the Jewish Marxist intelli¬gentsia to reach and organize Jewish workers in advance of Russian Social Democracy as a whole.
In part because of the imprisonment of the more experienced Marxist leaders (e.g., Lenin, Martov), the turn towatd mass agitation rapidly degenerated into reformism. This tendency, dubbed Economism by a hostile Plekhanov, limited its agitation to elementary trade-union demands, while passively supporting the bourgeois liberal efforts to reform tsarist absolutism. In terms of international Social Democracy, the Economists were hostile to orthodox Marxism and consequently were loosely associated with Bernsteinism in Germany and possibilisme in France. In the later 1890s, Economism was the dominant tendency among Russian social democrats.
In 1900, the second generation of Russian Marxists (Lenin, Martov) coalesced with the founding fathers (Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich) to return Russian Social Democracy to its revolutionary traditions as embodied in the original Emancipation of Labor program. The revolutionary Marxist tendency was organized around the paper Iskra. Lenin was the organizer of the Iskra group. He ran the agents in Russia whose task was to win over the local social-democratic committees or if necessary split them. Iskra provided, for the first time, an organizing center for a Russian social-democratic party.
In polemicizing against Lenin's successful splitting tactics, the Economists pointed out that the German center did not seek to exclude the Bernsteinians. Lenin did not and in a sense could not argue for the exclusion of opportunists from the social-democratic party as a principle. Rather he justified his splitting tactics by a series of arguments based on the particularities of the Russian party situation. Right up to World War I, Lenin would appeal to one or another aspect of Russian particularism to justify constructing a programmatically homogeneous, revolutionary vanguard.
What were Lenin's arguments for building the RSDRP without and against the Economists? The German party had strong revolutionary traditions and an authoritative leadership. The Russian party was embryonic and could easily fall prey to opportunism. The German leadership, Bebel/Kautsky, were revolutionary while the Bernsteinians were a small minority; in contrast, the Economists were temporarily the dominant trend in Russian Social Democracy. The German "revisionists" accepted party discipline, the Russian Economists were incapable of accepting party discipline. And in any case, the RSDRP did not exist as a centralized organization. These arguments are presented in What Is To Be Done? (1902):
"The important thing to note is that the opportunist attitude towards revolutionary Social-Democrats in Russia is the very opposite of that in Germany. In Germany...revolutionary Social-Democrats are in favor of preserving what is: they stand in favor of the old program and tactics which are universally known.... The 'critics' desire to introduce changes, and as these critics represent an insignificant minority, and as they are very shy and halting in their revisionist efforts, one can under¬stand the motives of the majority in confining themselves to the dry rejection of 'innovation.' In Russia, however, it is the critics and Economists who are in favor of what is; the 'critics' wish us to continue to regard them as Marxists, and to guarantee them the 'freedom of criticism' which they enjoyed to the full (for, as a matter of fact, they never recognized any kind of Party ties, and, moreover, we never had a generally recognized Party organ which could 'restrict' freedom of criti¬cism even by giving advice)." [emphasis in original]
As is generally recognized, Lenin's 1902 What Is To Be Done? was the authoritative statement of Iskraism. Despite his supposed sympathy toward Lenin, Cliff is much too much a workerist and Menshevik to accept What Is To Be Done? In fact, a central purpose of his biography is to argue that the 1902 polemic is an exaggerated, one-sided statement which in substance Lenin subsequently repudiated.
First Cliff vulgarizes Lenin's position and then polemi-cizes against his own straw-man creation:
"In general the dichotomy between economic and political struggle is foreign to Marx. An economic demand, if it is sectional, is defined as 'economic' in Marx's terms. But if the same demand is made of the state it is 'political'.... In many cases economic (sectional) struggles do not give rise to political (class-wide) struggles, but there is no Chinese wall between the two, and many economic struggles do spill over into political ones." [emphasis in original]
Lenin did not attack the Economists for being indifferent to governmental policy. The Russian Economists agitated for state-initiated economic reforms and supported democratic rights, particularly the right to organize. In this purpose they passively supported the liberals. In What Is To Be Done? Lenin attacks the Economists' political program as encapsulated in the slogan "giving the economic struggle itself a political character":
"Giving 'the economic struggle itself a political character' means, therefore, striving to secure satisfaction for these trade demands, the improvement of conditions of labor in each separate trade by means of 'legislative and administrative measures'.... This is exactly what the trade unions do and have always done....
"Thus, the pompous phrase 'giving the economic struggle itself a political character' which sounds so 'terrifically' profound and revolutionary, serves as a screen to conceal what is in fact the traditional striving to degrade Social-Democratic politics to the level of trade union politics!" [emphasis in original]
For Lenin political class consciousness, or socialist consciousness, was the recognition by the proletariat of the need to become the ruling class and reconstruct society on socialist foundations. Anything less was trade-union consciousness.
Like all other current workerists and social democrats, Cliff must attack Lenin's famous statement that socialist consciousness is brought to the workers from without by revolutionary intellectuals, that political class consciousness does not arise simply through the proletariat's struggles to improve its conditions. Here are Cliff's fatuous remarks on this question:
"There is no doubt that this formulation overemphasized the difference between spontaneity and consciousness. For in fact the complete separation of spontaneity from consciousness is mechanical and non-dialectical. Lenin, as we shall see later, admitted this. Pure spontaneity does not exist in life.... "The logic of the mechanical juxtaposition of spontaneity and consciousness was the complete separation of the patty from the actual elements of working-class leadership that had already risen in the struggle. It assumed that the party had answers to all the questions that spontaneous struggle might bring forth. The blindness of the embattled many is the obverse of the omniscience of the few." [emphasis in original]
It is important to quote Lenin's statement in full to under¬stand what it means and does not mean:
"We said that there could not yet be Social-Democratic con¬sciousness among the workers. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realize the necessity of combining in unions, for fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the govern¬ment to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals. Accord¬ing to their social status, the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bour¬geois intelligentsia. Similarly in Russia, the theoretical doc¬trine of Social-Democracy arose quite independently of the spontaneous growth of the labor movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of ideas among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia." [emphasis in original]
—What Is To Be Done?
This is not a programmatic statement, but rather a historical analysis with implications for the organizational question. The socialist movement predated the development of mass economic organizations of the industrial proletariat. The socialist movement arose out of the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary currents (the Babouvist tradition represented by Blanquism in France and the League of the Just in Germany). Except for Britain, the earliest trade unions arose through the transformation of the old mercantilist artisan guild system.
For example, in the German revolution of 1848 Stephan Bora's mass trade-union movement, the Workers Brotherhood, was largely based on the traditional guild structure. The leaders of the embryonic trade unions were generally the traditional authority figures of the plebeian community. Methodist ministers, like the Tory radical J.R. Stephens, played a significant leadership role in the early 19th-century British workers movement. Catholic priests played a similar role in the first French trade unions, for example among the rebellious silk workers of Lyons. In most countries the emergence of a socialist labor movement resulted from the political victory of the revolutionary intelligentsia over the traditionalist leaders of the early workers organizations. When Lenin wrote What Is To Be Done? the mass economic organizations of the Russian working class were the police-led unions (Zubatovite) whose most prominent leader was the priest Gapon.
Lenin was a dialectician who understood that the consciousness and leadership of the working class underwent qualitative changes historically. With the important exception of the U.S., trade-union economism (associated with bourgeois liberal illusions and religious obscurantism) is no longer the dominant ideology of the world's proletariat. In the advanced capitalist countries, it is socialist reformism, carried through the social-democratic and Stalinist labor bureaucracies, which binds the working class to the bourgeois order. In backward countries, populist nationalism with a socialist coloration (e.g., Peronism, Nasserism) is the characteristic form of bourgeois ideological dominance over the working masses.
In the Russia of 1902, a small, homogeneous Marxist vanguard, composed of declassed intellectuals with a thin layer of advanced workers, was able to break the mass of the workers from police trade unionism and the Orthodox church. Today it requires an international Trotskyist vanguard, necessarily composed in its first stages of declassed intellectuals with relatively few advanced workers, to break the world's working classes from the domination of social-democratic and Stalinist reformism and populist nationalism. In exactly the opposite sense of Cliff, What Is To Be Done? cannot be regarded as the definitive Leninist statement on the party question. Despite the angularity of its formulations, the 1902 polemical work does not go beyond the bounds of orthodox, pre-1914 Social Democracy. If this work had represented a radical break with Social Democracy, Plekhanov, Martov et al. would never have endorsed it. It was only after the split in 1903 that Martov, Axelrod and other Menshevik leaders discovered in What Is To Be Done? alleged substitutionalist and Blanquist conceptions. It was Lenin's intransigent attitude in practice toward opportunism, circle-spirit cliquism and all obstacles to building a revolu¬tionary RSDRP that caused the Menshevik split, not particularly the ideas expressed in What Is To Be Done? If Cliff finds What Is To Be Done? too Leninist for his liking, it is because his hostility to Bolshevism is so strong that he must reject Lenin even when the latter was still a revolutionary social democrat. In reality the 1902 work is an anticipation, not a full-blown exposition, of post-1917 communism.
It is common in left-wing circles to regard What Is To Be Done? as the definitive Leninist statement on the party question. For example, the American Shachtmanite Bruce Landau, in a critical review of Cliff's biography (Revolutionary Marxist Papers No. 8), concentrates on the Iskra period. He justifies this narrow focus by quoting Trotsky on Lenin's development:
"It was precisely during this short time that Lenin became the Lenin he was to remain. This does not mean that he did not develop further. On the contrary. He grew in stature...until October and after; but this was really organic growth." —On Lenin: Notes for a Biography (1924)
Trotsky is here referring to the development of Lenin's political personality, not to his ideas and their programmatic expression. The decisive period for the development of Leninist communist doctrine was 1914-17, not 1900-03.
Part Two Will Appear On March 20, 2011.
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