Defend Workers' Rights from Corporate Assault
Mar 31, 2011
By Alan Jones
The corporate-funded attacks against public sector workers and labor unions are not confined to Wisconsin. Across dozens of states in the U.S., there is pending legislation that intends to weaken or destroy public services, unions and public education. These unprecedented attacks are taking place under the pretext of dealing with large budget deficits. In turn, these were caused by tax breaks for the rich and big business given by Democrats and Republicans and the economic crisis of capitalism, which affects the lives of tens of millions of working families.
In states like Arizona and Tennessee, the anti-worker legislation that is pending in state legislatures intends to strip public workers of even their most basic political rights in terms of political participation, and to ban collective bargaining. Arizona House Bill 2367 proposes that the state shall not “negotiate with a labor organization or employee association representing public employees.”
Other bills prohibit employees from engaging in “a sickout, slowdown, or strike that will disrupt delivery of service” and seek to establish a legal framework that is usually found in police dictatorships. Good examples are Arizona Senate Bill 1363 and Tennessee Senate Bill 1033, which would outlaw any sort of resistance to the corporations, including “unlawful picketing,” “unlawful mass assembly,” and “concerted interference with lawful exercise of business activity” (i.e., strikes) as part of an “employer protection law.”
Last year, Arizona introduced the racist legislation that profiles immigrants as part of the attacks against workers and democratic rights. Utah has now passed a similar anti-immigrant bill. Anti-immigrant legislation, including many bills patterned after Arizona’s racist law, is in the process of being introduced in 30 states, half of which are Republican-controlled.
In Tennessee, legislation is being passed that aims to “abolish teachers’ unions’ ability to negotiate” terms and conditions with local education boards. States like Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Florida and Oklahoma have passed legislation that aims to end collective bargaining rights for most or all public sector workers. Republican-controlled states like Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas intend to pass legislation that would in effect seek to radically weaken or destroy public sector unions through eliminating automatic dues check-off, mandating recertification elections, and putting serious limitations on the use of union funds for political purposes. Maine, Michigan and Pennsylvania have introduced so-called “right to work” anti-union legislation.
One of the most drastic measures pushed by corporate CEOs and their Republican front men is what is called Michigan’s “financial martial law.” The so-called emergency management bill would allow Republican Governor Rick Snyder to declare a “financial emergency” in a city or school district in Michigan, declare it bankrupt, and appoint a manager with the power to fire local officials, break contracts, seize and sell assets, and eliminate services! Such measures will be used to accelerate the cuts and attacks on public services and public sector workers across the state, and to privatize public services.
Bills that would effectively restrict political participation of unions have been introduced in 15 states where Republicans control the legislature and hold the governor’s office. Legislation is being introduced in 19 states that aims to eliminate “prevailing wage” laws and project labor agreements that protect construction workers and entire communities from unscrupulous contractors on taxpayer-funded construction projects. These efforts are heavily funded by large construction CEOs who are looking to increase their profits.
Backlash
These attacks have provoked an angry response among large sections of workers. In Indianapolis, over 10,000 workers, including teachers, steelworkers and building trade workers, demonstrated against attacks on public education and collective bargaining in front of the Indiana Statehouse in March. The Republicans were forced to temporarily drop their efforts to pass anti-union “right to work” legislation.
Unfortunately, union leaders in Indiana have not called for further mobilizations and demonstrations to defeat the undemocratic attacks on public education and workers’ rights. Instead, they limited their efforts to praising the Democrats – who initially fled to Illinois in order to deprive the Republicans of a quorum – and token protests.
In Lansing, 5,000 teachers, nurses, autoworkers and young people demonstrated against budget cuts and the dictatorial emergency finance law signed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder on March 17. There is enormous anger and bitterness against the $1.8 billion in tax cuts for the rich and corporations while funds for education and social services are cut and new taxes are forced on workers. The measures are widely expected to escalate conditions of poverty, homelessness and hunger in a state that is already suffering from widespread unemployment and poverty.
In a letter encouraging workers and young people to demonstrate against the measures, filmmaker Michael Moore said that Wall Street CEOs “see our state as one big fire sale – and they are licking their chops to get their hands on what is still a state rich in natural resources and industrial infrastructure.”
In Ohio, tens of thousands of workers have demonstrated in Columbus against Republican Governor John Kasich, who intends to slash spending on education and health care and create mass layoffs in order to cover an $8 billion state budget deficit. The budget cuts include a 25% reduction of state aid to cities and municipalities and massive cuts in Medicaid. Included in the governor’s measures is the privatization of the prison system.
Kasich has campaigned for the anti-worker Ohio Senate Bill 5 that was passed in March, which strips 350,000 public workers of collective bargaining rights and criminalizes resistance. The bill gives officials legal authority to prosecute workers who attempt to strike.
While tens of thousands of workers have shown their determination to challenge the plans of Republicans in Ohio and anger against the budget cuts is spreading across the Midwest, union leaders have failed to provide anything more than token resistance to the savage attacks against working people. Their main strategy remains to support the Democratic Party, which also agrees with the massive cuts in living standards and does not offer an alternative strategy. Both Republicans and Democrats agree with the budget cuts at the expense of workers and the poor, but the Democrats want to use the unions to implement the cuts while the Republicans want to destroy public unions, which tend to support Democrats in the elections.
Need for a Fight-Back
Under pressure from the size of these attacks, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) has issued a call for a nationwide “We Are One” day of action for April 4. The date was chosen to commemorate the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis 43 years ago while supporting a strike by city sanitation workers.
The AFL-CIO, the NAACP, student organizations and many individual unions, along with other organizations, support the initiative. While this is a good start, it will not be sufficient to stop the massive attacks against workers across the country. What is needed is a serious effort to urgently start organizing mass demonstrations at the local level in every state where workers face budget cuts, layoffs and attacks against their organizations. These demonstrations are needed in order to alert the wider public about what is going on, build public support, and prepare the ground for further escalation, including strike actions.
The Tea Party Republicans could be stopped dead in their tracks if their real agenda of making workers pay for the crisis is exposed. Anger is already widespread and it is likely that it would lead to massive demonstrations if the program of cuts was contrasted with the tax breaks and massive profiteering by the rich and big business. Such a struggle needs to be linked to a program that challenges the idea of making workers pay for a crisis they did not create, while the rich and big business are let off the hook. We should also demand a massive jobs program and an end to imperialist U.S. wars.
The union leadership is unlikely to mobilize serious opposition against the cuts because that brings them into immediate conflict with the Democrats, who also want to implement cuts. But on the basis of rising anger, radicalization, and widespread opposition to cuts, local coalitions of unions, socialists, community groups, and student and antiwar groups could be built at a city and state level to fight back. Conferences and local actions against budget cuts should be organized. On such a basis, it would be possible to run anti-cuts, independent candidates against Republicans and Democrats and to demand that big business pay for the crisis.
Showing posts with label student vanguardism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label student vanguardism. Show all posts
Monday, April 11, 2011
Thursday, April 07, 2011
From The Bob Feldman 1968 Blog- Mark Rudd Opposed ROTC In 2009 `Toward Freedom' Interview
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Mark Rudd Opposed ROTC In 2009 `Toward Freedom' Interview
Mark Rudd was the chairman of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] at the time of the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt; and Rudd’s autobiography, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen was finally published in March 2009.
In a 2009 email interview for the Toward Freedom anti-war website, Rudd responded to some questions about how U.S. pacifists might consider responding to the role U.S. universities play in the current historical era of “permanent war abroad and economic depression at home” and about his new book. And he also indicated, at that time, that he still opposed the training of U.S. military officers on U.S. university campuses.
(1) In 2009, some U.S. pacifists seem to regard elite universities like Columbia as institutions that have, both historically and currently, opposed war and opposed racism—since they hire both anti-war and African-American professors and administrators, implement affirmative action hiring programs, set up “peace studies” and “African-American studies” departments, steer foundation grants and scholarship money in the direction of students from historically oppressed communities and to local community groups, and provide free or low-rent meeting room space for anti-war students and off-campus pacifist groups.
Yet in the preface to your book, you write that between 1965 and 1968 you were “a member of SDS at Columbia University” and “made as much noise and trouble as possible to protest the university’s pro-war and racist policies.” In what ways were Columbia University’s policies “pro-war and racist” in 1968 and in what ways are the policies of Columbia University and other elite U.S. universities “pro-war and racist” in 2009?
Mark Rudd [MR]: The specific demands we raised leading up to the spring of 1968--training and recruitment of military officers for the war in Vietnam, weapons research for the war, the building of a gym in public park land--were only the tip of the iceberg of Columbia's policies. Within months of the strike, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) produced a book entitled "Who Rules Columbia," in which they detailed the military, State Dept., and CIA contracts and connections with the School of International Affairs, the various geographical "area studies," such as the East Asia Institute, as well as the revolving door between Columbia and the government; also Columbia's expansion into the surrounding community at the expense of non-white residents. Most of these connections and policies are still in place; almost all major research universities are still major war contractors. The point is that student activists have their work cut out for them to research and expose what's correctly called the military-industrial-academic complex.
(2) In chapter 1 of your book, titled “A Good German,” you recall that when you first met the then-chairman of Columbia’s Independent Committee on Vietnam (ICV) anti-war student group--current U.S. political prisoner David Gilbert—in early 1966, Gilbert mentioned that in May 1965 his group had “held an antiwar protest at the Naval ROTC graduation ceremony” at Columbia. And later in the “A Good German” chapter you mention that in March 1967 you had “taken part in a sit-in at a Naval ROTC class” at Columbia.
Why did you oppose Naval ROTC at Columbia in the 1960s? And do you think U.S. pacifists should consider opposing ROTC on U.S. university campuses in 2009?
MR: The issue is fundamentally moral. Is the training of people to wage war against other countries, carrying out a criminally aggressive military policy, appropriate in an institution that pretends to seek the truth? Our answer to this question was NO, because we believed in the necessity to oppose U.S. violence as a moral value. Remember, too, that the time we lived in was essentially post-World War II, and the problem of values in society was still being debated in the aftermath of Nazism. I have no doubt that contemporary students will be taking this up again in the near future.
(3) In chapter 2 of your book, you mention that anti-war students at Columbia protested against recruitment on campus by external organizations like the CIA and the U.S. Marines. Why did you think that it was morally wrong for Columbia University to allow external organizations like the CIA and the U.S. Marines to recruit on campus in 1967? And do you think U.S. pacifists in 2009 should also protest against U.S. universities that allow the CIA and the U.S. Marines to recruit on campus while the Pentagon’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan continues?
MR: Same response as #2 above. Whether recruitment is "external" (e.g., Marine recruiters) or "internal" (Military Science Dept. training future naval officers), it amounts to the same thing. The resources of the university are being used to help wage war.
( 4) In chapter 3 of your book, titled “Action Faction,” you write that on March 27, 1968 “SDS had fifteen hundred names on a petition calling for the severing of “ Columbia University’s “ties with the Pentagon think-tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA);” and “IDA…became the shorthand symbol for Columbia’s huge network of complicity with the war.”
In 2009, IDA still exists. Do you think that U.S. pacifists should consider demanding that IDA be finally shut down by the Democratic Obama Administration and that U.S. pacifists should consider demanding that U.S. universities like Columbia, MIT and Harvard stop performing war research for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] in 2009?
MR: I believe that the entire US military budget should be cut back and the money used for social needs both in this country and around the world. Security would be much better served by the development of true international law, not more nuclear weapons. If that doesn't happen in the 21st century, we're doomed. All war research should immediately stop everywhere and the money be put into peace, diplomacy, law, and sustainable energy development. To do less now is not only suicidal, it's downright dumb.
(5) In your book, you mention that you and Abbie Hoffman were both arrested at a November 1967 anti-war protest in Midtown Manhattan against the Foreign Policy Association giving an award to then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
April 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of Abbie’s death. How would you characterize the role that Abbie Hoffman played in U.S. anti-war movement history and his historical relationship to U.S. pacifists and non-violent anti-war activists like Dave Dellinger?
MR: Abbie was essentially a comedian and an organizer. He was not at all violent; he always encouraged mass organizing, though often in the form of provocative guerilla theater, like the Yippies nominating a pig for president in 1968. I forget how he and Dave Dellinger got along in Chicago, both in 1968 and during the conspiracy trial the next year. My guess is that they respected each other. Perhaps you know more specifics.
(6) Speaking of Abbie Hoffman, how would you respond to Professor Jonah Raskin’s assertion in his review of your book which was posted on The Rag Blog that “like Abbie Hoffman, Mark Rudd wasn’t suited for the underground life—he needed attention, and attention is, of course, the last thing that any fugitive wants;” and “Underground suggests, implies, and shows that Rudd is up there, along with Abbie, near the top of the list of 1960s radicals who wanted attention, and who received far more attention than they needed…It undid Abbie, and it also helped to undo Rudd.”?
MR: I wonder if Jonah actually read my book.
(7) Why do you think the right-wing media monitoring pressure group” Accuracy In Media” [A.I.M.] apparently attempted to pressure Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins publishing firm to not promote your book, according to the” Accuracy In Media” web site?
MR: Just another way for the far right to try get at Obama, but it's so indirect that it makes zero sense to anybody else. There was a tiny connection between Obama and Bill Ayers, but that fact gained no votes for John McCain. These people are so stupid that they're still pursuing a tactic that's already failed. I find that a rather comforting fact.
(8) Do you think it’s likely that Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize Board will decide to give you a Pulitzer Prize for writing Underground—after Columbia University’s current president--a current board member of the Washington Post Company/Newsweek media conglomerate named Lee Bollinger—reads what you’ve written about Columbia University?
MR: I'm a shoe-in.
Mark Rudd Opposed ROTC In 2009 `Toward Freedom' Interview
Mark Rudd was the chairman of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] at the time of the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt; and Rudd’s autobiography, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen was finally published in March 2009.
In a 2009 email interview for the Toward Freedom anti-war website, Rudd responded to some questions about how U.S. pacifists might consider responding to the role U.S. universities play in the current historical era of “permanent war abroad and economic depression at home” and about his new book. And he also indicated, at that time, that he still opposed the training of U.S. military officers on U.S. university campuses.
(1) In 2009, some U.S. pacifists seem to regard elite universities like Columbia as institutions that have, both historically and currently, opposed war and opposed racism—since they hire both anti-war and African-American professors and administrators, implement affirmative action hiring programs, set up “peace studies” and “African-American studies” departments, steer foundation grants and scholarship money in the direction of students from historically oppressed communities and to local community groups, and provide free or low-rent meeting room space for anti-war students and off-campus pacifist groups.
Yet in the preface to your book, you write that between 1965 and 1968 you were “a member of SDS at Columbia University” and “made as much noise and trouble as possible to protest the university’s pro-war and racist policies.” In what ways were Columbia University’s policies “pro-war and racist” in 1968 and in what ways are the policies of Columbia University and other elite U.S. universities “pro-war and racist” in 2009?
Mark Rudd [MR]: The specific demands we raised leading up to the spring of 1968--training and recruitment of military officers for the war in Vietnam, weapons research for the war, the building of a gym in public park land--were only the tip of the iceberg of Columbia's policies. Within months of the strike, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) produced a book entitled "Who Rules Columbia," in which they detailed the military, State Dept., and CIA contracts and connections with the School of International Affairs, the various geographical "area studies," such as the East Asia Institute, as well as the revolving door between Columbia and the government; also Columbia's expansion into the surrounding community at the expense of non-white residents. Most of these connections and policies are still in place; almost all major research universities are still major war contractors. The point is that student activists have their work cut out for them to research and expose what's correctly called the military-industrial-academic complex.
(2) In chapter 1 of your book, titled “A Good German,” you recall that when you first met the then-chairman of Columbia’s Independent Committee on Vietnam (ICV) anti-war student group--current U.S. political prisoner David Gilbert—in early 1966, Gilbert mentioned that in May 1965 his group had “held an antiwar protest at the Naval ROTC graduation ceremony” at Columbia. And later in the “A Good German” chapter you mention that in March 1967 you had “taken part in a sit-in at a Naval ROTC class” at Columbia.
Why did you oppose Naval ROTC at Columbia in the 1960s? And do you think U.S. pacifists should consider opposing ROTC on U.S. university campuses in 2009?
MR: The issue is fundamentally moral. Is the training of people to wage war against other countries, carrying out a criminally aggressive military policy, appropriate in an institution that pretends to seek the truth? Our answer to this question was NO, because we believed in the necessity to oppose U.S. violence as a moral value. Remember, too, that the time we lived in was essentially post-World War II, and the problem of values in society was still being debated in the aftermath of Nazism. I have no doubt that contemporary students will be taking this up again in the near future.
(3) In chapter 2 of your book, you mention that anti-war students at Columbia protested against recruitment on campus by external organizations like the CIA and the U.S. Marines. Why did you think that it was morally wrong for Columbia University to allow external organizations like the CIA and the U.S. Marines to recruit on campus in 1967? And do you think U.S. pacifists in 2009 should also protest against U.S. universities that allow the CIA and the U.S. Marines to recruit on campus while the Pentagon’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan continues?
MR: Same response as #2 above. Whether recruitment is "external" (e.g., Marine recruiters) or "internal" (Military Science Dept. training future naval officers), it amounts to the same thing. The resources of the university are being used to help wage war.
( 4) In chapter 3 of your book, titled “Action Faction,” you write that on March 27, 1968 “SDS had fifteen hundred names on a petition calling for the severing of “ Columbia University’s “ties with the Pentagon think-tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA);” and “IDA…became the shorthand symbol for Columbia’s huge network of complicity with the war.”
In 2009, IDA still exists. Do you think that U.S. pacifists should consider demanding that IDA be finally shut down by the Democratic Obama Administration and that U.S. pacifists should consider demanding that U.S. universities like Columbia, MIT and Harvard stop performing war research for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] in 2009?
MR: I believe that the entire US military budget should be cut back and the money used for social needs both in this country and around the world. Security would be much better served by the development of true international law, not more nuclear weapons. If that doesn't happen in the 21st century, we're doomed. All war research should immediately stop everywhere and the money be put into peace, diplomacy, law, and sustainable energy development. To do less now is not only suicidal, it's downright dumb.
(5) In your book, you mention that you and Abbie Hoffman were both arrested at a November 1967 anti-war protest in Midtown Manhattan against the Foreign Policy Association giving an award to then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
April 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of Abbie’s death. How would you characterize the role that Abbie Hoffman played in U.S. anti-war movement history and his historical relationship to U.S. pacifists and non-violent anti-war activists like Dave Dellinger?
MR: Abbie was essentially a comedian and an organizer. He was not at all violent; he always encouraged mass organizing, though often in the form of provocative guerilla theater, like the Yippies nominating a pig for president in 1968. I forget how he and Dave Dellinger got along in Chicago, both in 1968 and during the conspiracy trial the next year. My guess is that they respected each other. Perhaps you know more specifics.
(6) Speaking of Abbie Hoffman, how would you respond to Professor Jonah Raskin’s assertion in his review of your book which was posted on The Rag Blog that “like Abbie Hoffman, Mark Rudd wasn’t suited for the underground life—he needed attention, and attention is, of course, the last thing that any fugitive wants;” and “Underground suggests, implies, and shows that Rudd is up there, along with Abbie, near the top of the list of 1960s radicals who wanted attention, and who received far more attention than they needed…It undid Abbie, and it also helped to undo Rudd.”?
MR: I wonder if Jonah actually read my book.
(7) Why do you think the right-wing media monitoring pressure group” Accuracy In Media” [A.I.M.] apparently attempted to pressure Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins publishing firm to not promote your book, according to the” Accuracy In Media” web site?
MR: Just another way for the far right to try get at Obama, but it's so indirect that it makes zero sense to anybody else. There was a tiny connection between Obama and Bill Ayers, but that fact gained no votes for John McCain. These people are so stupid that they're still pursuing a tactic that's already failed. I find that a rather comforting fact.
(8) Do you think it’s likely that Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize Board will decide to give you a Pulitzer Prize for writing Underground—after Columbia University’s current president--a current board member of the Washington Post Company/Newsweek media conglomerate named Lee Bollinger—reads what you’ve written about Columbia University?
MR: I'm a shoe-in.
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- "Lenin And The Vanguard Party"-Part Five- The Struggle Against The Boycotters
Lenin And The Vanguard Party-Part Five- The Struggle Against The Boycotters
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.
*******
Markin comment on this article:
Leon Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionary leader, came late to an understanding of the need for a tight-knit Bolshevik-style revolutionary working class party to lead the socialist revolution. However once convinced of that necessity he held to the vanguard party organization notion until the end of his life. Along the way he noted that one of the virtues of the Russian Bolshevik Party was that it had derived its authority from having waged, unlike many Western communist parties, struggles within the party against all forms of erroneous strategies and tactics (to speak nothing of having worked under every possible kind of political condition from legal to illegal). Thus the key struggle against the Bolshevik Duma boycotters that forms the central theme of this article was already worked out early. Worked out in the sense that there was a proper communist use of non-working class political organizations. The notions of setting up as oppositions within those organizations (here the Duma, elsewhere various parliamentary formations) and the use of such places as tribunals to speak for working class issues stems from this understanding. A tip of the hat to Lenin on that one.
*********
To read about the overall purpose of this pamphlet series and other information about the history of the document go the the American Left History Archives From-Lenin and The Vanguard Party-Preface To The Second Edition And Part One, dated March 15, 2011.
The Struggle Against The Boycotters
The Fifth Congress of the RSDRP, held in London in May 1907, was almost evenly divided between the Bolsheviks with 89 delegate votes and the Mensheviks with 88. At the Fourth Congress a year earlier three associated parties—the Jewish Bund, Latvian Social Democrats and Luxemburg/Jogiches' Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL)—had been incorporated into the RSDRP on a semi-federated basis. At the Fifth Congress the Bund had 54 delegate votes, the Latvian Social Democrats 26 and the SDKPiL 45.
In the course of a year's sharp factional struggle against the Mensheviks' liberal tailism and pro-Constitutional Democrat (Cadet) policy, the Bolsheviks had overcome their minority position within the Russian social-democratic movement. However, now the factional leadership of the RSDRP depended upon the three "national" social-democratic parties. The Bund consistently supported the Mensheviks. The Lettish Social Democrats generally supported the Bolsheviks, but sometimes mediated between the two hostile Russian groups. It was through the support of Rosa Luxemburg's SDKPiL that Lenin attained a majority at the Fifth Congress and in the leading bodies of the RSDRP for the next five years. The Lenin-Luxemburg bloc of 1906-11 is significant not only in its actual historic effect, but also because it reveals the rela¬tionship between evolving Leninism and this most consistent and important representative of pre-1914 revolutionary social democracy.
The decisive issue at the Fifth Congress was the attitude toward bourgeois liberalism, and specifically electoral sup¬port to the Cadet Party. With the support of the Letts and Poles (and also the left-wing Trotsky/Parvus group among the Mensheviks), the Bolshevik line carried; the Congress condemned the Cadets:
"The parties of the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie, headed by the Constitutional Democratic Party [Cadets], have now definitely turned aside from the revolution and endeavor to halt it through a deal with the counterrevolution."
—Robert H. McNeal, ed., Decisions and Resolutions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1974)
Another resolution instructed the RSDRP Duma fraction to oppose "the treacherous policy of bourgeois liberalism which, under the slogan 'Safeguard the Duma,' in fact sacrifices the popular interests to the Black Hundreds" (ibid.). A few months after the Congress, a party conference decided to run independent RSDRP candidates in the upcoming Duma elections and to support no other parties.
While the Lettish and Polish Social Democrats supported the general Bolshevik line at the Fifth Congress, they also moderated Lenin's fight against the Mensheviks. They voted against Lenin's motion to condemn the Menshevik majority of the outgoing Central Committee. The defection of the Latvian Social Democrats and the SDKPiL also accounted for Lenin's only serious defeat at the 1907 RSDRP congress. The congress voted overwhelmingly to oppose the Bolshe¬viks' "fighting operations" for "seizing funds" of the tsarist government.
During this period the Mensheviks' attack on the Leninists centered on these armed expropriations. Their near-hysterical reaction to the Bolsheviks' expropriations flowed from its shocking impact on bourgeois liberal respectability. Also the expropriations gave the Bolsheviks a financial superiority over the Mensheviks. In condemning the Bolsheviks' expropriation of government funds, the Mensheviks were convinced that they had unimpeachable social-democratic orthodoxy on their side.
The Bolsheviks, however, did not face the normal situation in which such robbery would immediately trigger the repressive apparatus of an overwhelmingly powerful and centralized state. Neither did they risk the condemnation of workers who might think they were mere criminals in political garb. Nor did the Bolsheviks maintain these expropriations as a "strategy" to be carried out over an extended period with the likely result of degeneration into lumpen criminal activity.
Lenin believed that there was a continuing revolutionary situation, in which the mass of workers and peasants were actively hostile to tsarist legality. The Bolsheviks' expropriations were concentrated in the Caucasus, where armed peasant and nationalist bands regularly challenged tsarist authorities. Lenin regarded the expropriations as one of several guerrilla tactics in the course of a revolutionary civil war.The Bolshevik-Menshevik dispute over armed expropriations was thus inextricably bound up with their fundamental difference over the political and military vanguard role of the proletarian party in the revolution to overthrow the autocracy.
Lenin's position on armed expropriations was presented in a resolution for the Fourth Congress held in April 1906. He continued to uphold this position through 1907:
"Whereas:
(1) scarcely anywhere in Russia since the December uprising has there been a complete cessation of hostilities, which the revolutionary people are now conducting in the form of sporadic guerrilla attacks upon the enemy.... We are of the opin¬ion, and propose that the Congress should agree.... (4) that fighting operations are also permissible for the purpose of seizing funds belonging to the enemy, i.e., the autocratic government, to meet the needs of insurrection, particular care being taken that the interests of the people are infringed as little as possible."
—"A Tactical Platform for the Unity Congress of the R.S.D.L.P." (March 1906)
Tsarist Reaction and the Ultraleft Bolsheviks
Shortly after the Fifth RSDRP Congress, in June 1907 the reactionary tsarist minister Stolypin executed a coup against the Duma. The Duma was dissolved and a new (Third) Duma proclaimed on the basis of a far less democratic elec¬toral system. In addition, the social-democratic deputies were arrested and charged with fomenting mutiny in the armed forces.
Stolypin's coup marked the definitive end of the 1905 revolutionary period. The victory of tsarist reaction opened up a new, and in one sense final, phase in the Bolshevik-Menshevik conflict, over the need to re-establish the underground as the party's basic organizational structure. The onset of reaction also produced a very sharp division within the Bolshevik camp between Leninism and ultraleftism, a factional struggle which had to be resolved before the historically far more significant conflict with Menshevism could be fought to a finish.
The conflict between Lenin and the ultraleft Bolsheviks centered on participation in the reactionary tsarist parliamentary body. Behind this difference lay Lenin's recognition that a reactionary period had set in, requiring a tactical retrenchment by the revolutionary party. The first battle occurred at a July 1907 RSDRP conference to determine policy for the upcoming Duma elections. Lenin still believed that Russia was passing through a general revolutionary period but regarded boycotting the elections as tactically unjustifiable:
"Whereas,
(1) active boycott, as the experience of the Russian revolu¬
tion has shown, is correct tactics on the part of the Social-
Democrats only under conditions of a sweeping, universal, and
rapid upswing of the revolution, developing into an armed
uprising, and only in connection with the ideological aims of
the struggle against constitutional illusions arising from the
convocation of the first representative assembly by the old
regime;
(2) in the absence of these conditions correct tactics on the part
of the revolutionary Social-Democrats calls for participation in
the elections, as was the case with the Second Duma, even if all
the conditions of a revolutionary period are present."
—"Draft Resolution on Participation in the Elections to
the Third Duma" (July 1907)
In presenting this resolution Lenin found himself a minority of one among the nine Bolshevik delegates to the conference. The resolution passed with the votes of the Mensheviks, Bundists and Lettish and Polish Social Democrats; all the Bolsheviks except Lenin voted against.
The Bolshevik boycotters were, to be sure, greatly over-represented at this particular party gathering. Lenin had significant support for his position among the Bolshevik cadre and ranks and was quickly able to gain more. However, the ultraleft faction of 1907-09 was the most significant chal¬lenge to Lenin's leadership of the Bolshevik organization that he ever faced. The ultraleft leaders—Bogdanov (who had been Lenin's chief lieutenant), Lunacharsky, Lyadov, Alexinsky, Krasin—were very prominent Bolsheviks. As likely as not, a majority of the Bolshevik ranks supported boycotting the tsarist Duma in this period. Only Lenin's great personal authority prevented the development of an ultraleft faction strong enough to oust him and his supporters from the official Bolshevik center or to engineer a major split.
Lenin was aided in this faction struggle by the heterogeneity of the ultraleft tendency. A not very important tactical question divided the ultraleft Bolsheviks into two distinct groupings, the Otzovists ("Recallists") and the Ultimatists. The Otzovists demanded the immediate, unconditional recall of the RSDRP Duma fraction. The Ultimatists demanded that the Duma fraction be presented with an ultimatum to make inflammatory speeches, which would provoke the tsarist authorities into expelling them from the Duma or worse. In practice, both policies would have had the same effect, and Lenin denied that there was a significant division among his ultraleft opponents.
Lenin's position on the ultraleft faction was presented in resolution form at a June 1909 conference of the expanded editorial board meeting of Proletary, a de facto plenum of the Bolshevik central leadership. At this conference, Bogdanov was expelled from the Bolshevik organization. The key passages of the resolution state:
"The direct revolutionary struggle of the broad masses was then followed by a severe period of counter-revolution. It became essential for Social-Democrats to adapt their revolutionary tactics to this new situation, and, in connection with this, one of the most exceptionally important tasks became the use of the Duma as an open platform for the purpose of assist¬ing Social-Democratic agitation.
"In this rapid turn of events, however, a section of the workers who had participated in the direct revolutionary struggle was unable to proceed at once to apply revolutionary Social-Democratic tactics in the new conditions of the counter¬revolution, and continued simply to repeat slogans which had been revolutionary in the period of open civil war, but which now, if merely repeated, might retard the process of closing the ranks of the proletariat in the new conditions of struggle." [emphasis in original]
—"On Otzovism and Ultimatumism"
Bogdanov's answer to Lenin is summarized in his 1910 "Letter to All Comrades," a founding document of his own independent group:
"Some people among your representatives in the executive collegium—the Bolshevik Center—who live abroad, have come to the conclusion that we must radically change our previous Bolshevik evaluation of the present historical moment and hold a course not toward a new revolutionary wave, but toward a long period of peaceful, constitutional development. This brings them close to the right wing of our party, the menshevik comrades who always, independently of any evaluation of the political situation, pull toward legal and constitutional forms of activity, toward 'organic work' and 'organic development'."
—Robert V. Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism (1960)
Bogdanov's phrase about "a long period of peaceful, constitutional development" is ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so. As against many Mensheviks, Lenin did not regard a new revolution as off the agenda for an entire historical epoch, i.e., for several decades. By 1908, he concluded that before another revolutionary upsurge (like that of 1905) there would be a lengthy period in terms of the working perspectives of the party and relative to the past experience and expectations of the Bolsheviks. 1908 was not 1903. And this reality was precisely what the Otzovists/Ultimatists denied.
Philosophy and Politics
Otzovism/Ultimatism was associated with neo-Kantian idealistic dualism represented by the Austrian physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach, a philosophical doctrine then much in vogue in Central European intellectual circles. Bogdanov's Empiriomonism (1905-06) was an ambitious attempt to reconcile Marxism with neo-Kantianism. In 1908 Bogdanov's factional partner Lunacharsky deepened this idealism into outright spiritualism, positing the need for a socialist religion. Lunacharsky's "god-building" was, needless to say, a great embarrassment for the Bolsheviks as a whole, and even for the Otzovist/Ultimatist faction.
Bogdanov's sympathy for neo-Kantian philosophical doctrine was both well known and longstanding. As long as Bogdanov functioned as Lenin's lieutenant, and did not in himself represent a distinct political tendency, his neo-Kantianism was considered a personal peculiarity among both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike. But once Bogdanov became the leader of a distinct and for a time significant ten¬dency in Russian Social Democracy, his philosophical views became a focus of general political controversy. Plekhanov, in particular, exploited Bogdanovism to attack the Bolshevik program as the product of flagrant subjective idealism. Lenin thus spent much of 1908 researching a major polemic against Bogdanov's neo-Kantianism, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, in order to purge Bolshevism of the taint of philosophical idealism.
Lenin's close political collaboration with Bogdanov, despite the latter's neo-Kantianism on the one hand, and his massive polemic against Bogdanov's philosophical views on the other, have been used to justify symmetric deviations on this question by ostensible revolutionary Marxists. That the neo-Kantian Bogdanov was an important Bolshevik leader is sometimes cited to argue for an attitude of indifference toward dialectical materialism, a belief that the most general or abstract expression of the Marxian world view has no bearing on practical politics and associated organizational affiliation. When he broke with Trotskyism in 1940, the American revisionist Max Shachtman justified a bloc with the anti-dialectician and empiricist James Burnham by citing the "precedent" of Lenin and Bogdanov.
At the other pole, Lenin's major polemic against an opponent's idealistic deviation from Marxism has encouraged a tendency to "deepen" every factional struggle by bringing in philosophical questions—by reducing all political differences to the question of dialectical materialism. This mixture of pomposity and rational idealism has become a hall¬mark of the British Healyite group. (The Healy/Banda group has become so outright bizarre that it can no longer be taken seriously, least of all in its philosophical mystifications.)
The Healyites justified their 1972 split from their erst¬while bloc partners, the French neo-Kautskyan Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI), by positing the primacy of "philosophy." They appealed to Lenin's 1908 polemic against Bogdanov as orthodox precedent:
"Lenin tirelessly studied the ideas of the new idealists, the neo-Kantians, in philosophy, even during the hardest practical struggle to establish the revolutionary party in Russia. When these ideas, in the form of 'empirio-criticism,' were taken up by a section of the Bolsheviks themselves, Lenin made a specialized study and wrote against them a full-length work, Materialism and Empiric-Criticism.
"Lenin understood very well that the years of extreme hardship and isolation after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution exposed the revolutionary movement to the greatest pressure of the class enemy. He knew that the most fundamental task of all was the defence and development of Marxist theory at the most basic level, that of philosophy, [our emphasis]
— International Committee, In Defence of Trotskyism
(1973)
This passage is a complete falsification at several levels. To begin with, Lenin's historically more important political struggle in the period of reaction was not against Bogdanov's ultraleft Bolsheviks, but against the Menshevik Liquidators. In this latter struggle, philosophical questions' played no particular role.
The Healyites also falsify Lenin's relationship with Bogdanov. When Bogdanov became part of the Bolshevik leadership in 1904, he was already a well-known neo-Kantian (Machian). Lenin and Bogdanov agreed that the Bolshevik tendency as such would take no position on the controversial philosophical issues. Lenin explains this in a letter to Maxim Gorky (25 February 1908) wherein he endorses his past relationship with Bogdanov, despite the latter's philosophical deviation:
"In the summer and autumn of 1904, Bogdanov and I reached a complete agreement, as Bolsheviks, and formed the tacit bloc, which tacitly ruled out philosophy as a neutral field, that existed all through the revolution and enabled us in that revolution to carry out together the tactics of revolutionary Social-Democracy (Bolshevism), which, I am profoundly convinced, were the only correct tactics." [emphasis in original] It was the right-wing Menshevik Plekhanov who brought the question of dialectical materialism versus neo-Kantianism to the forefront in order to discredit and split the revolutionary Bolshevik leadership. In defending the Bolsheviks against Plekhanov, Lenin went so far as to deny that the issue of neo-Kantian revisionism was at all relevant to the revolutionary movement in Russia. At the all-Bolshevik Congress in April 1905, Lenin stated:
"Plekhanov drags in Mach and Avenarius by the ears. I cannot for the life of me understand what these writers, for whom I have not the slightest sympathy, have to do with the question of social revolution. They wrote on individual and social organi¬zation of experience, or some such theme, but they never really gave any thought to the democratic dictatorship."
—"Report on the Question of Participation of the Social-Democrats in a Provisional Revolutionary Government" (April 1905)
In part as a result of his later fight with Bogdanov, Lenin modified his 1905 position, which drew too arbitrary a line between political and philosophical differences. He came to realize that fundamental differences among Marxists over dialectical materialism will likely produce political divergences. However, for Lenin program remained primary in defining revolutionary politics and associated organizational affiliation. Lenin never repudiated his close collaboration with Bogdanov in 1904-07. And he was absolutely right to ally with the revolutionary social democrat, albeit neo-Kantian, Bogdanov against the pro-liberal social democrat, albeit dialectical materialist, Plekhanov. Only when Bogdanov's neo-Kantian conceptions became associated with a counterposed, anti-Marxist political program did Lenin make the defense of dialectical materialism against philosophical idealism a central political task.
Against the Mystification of Dialectics
The Marxist program as the scientific expression of the interests of the working class and of social progress is not derived simply from a subjective desire for a socialist future. The Marxist program necessarily embodies a correct under¬standing of reality, of which the most general or abstract expression is dialectical materialism. However, as Marx himself wrote in 1877 to the Russian populist journal, Otechestvenniye Zapiski, he does not offer "a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being supra-historical" (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence [1975]). Dialectical materialism is a conceptual framework which permits, but does not guarantee, a scientific understanding of society in its concrete historical devel¬opment. In other words, an understanding of the dialectical nature of social reality guides a complex of historical gener¬alizations (e.g., that the state apparatus under capitalism can¬not be reformed into an organ of socialist administration, that in this epoch a collectivist economic system represents the social dominance of the proletariat) which underlies the Marxist programmatic principles.
The Healyite mystification of the Marxist attitude toward philosophy is a product of their degeneration into a bizarre leader-cult. In the early 1960s Healy's Socialist Labour League understood that dialectical materialism was nothing other than a generalized expression of a unitary worldview, and not an abstract schema or method existing independently of empirical reality. Cliff Slaughter's 1962-63 articles on Lenin's 1914-15 studies of Hegel, reprinted in 1971 as a pamphlet, Lenin on Dialectics, contain a trenchant attack upon the idealization of dialectics:
"Lenin lays great stress on Hegel's insistence that Dialectics is not a master-key, a sort of set of magic numbers by which all secrets will be revealed. It is wrong to think of dialectical logic as something that is complete in itself and then 'applied' to particular examples. It is not a model of interpretation to be learned, then fitted on to reality from the outside; the task is rather to uncover the law of development of the reality itself....
"The science of society founded by Marx has no room for phi¬losophy as such, for the idea of independently moving thought, with a subject-matter and development of its own, independent of reality but sometimes descending to impinge upon it."
Slaughter then quotes Marx's judgment on a concept of philosophy in The German Ideology: "When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence."
But by the late 1960s the Healyites had "rediscovered" a medium of existence for philosophy as an independent theory. Dialectical materialism was presented with much fanfare as "the theory of knowledge of Marxism," as an expression of the philosophical category known as epistemology. Thus in a collection of documents on the split with the OCI (Break With Centrism! [1973]), we read:
"What was most essential in the preparation of the sections was tq develop dialectical materialism in a struggle to understand and to transform the consciousness of the working class in the changing objective conditions. This means the under¬standing and development of dialectical materialism as the theory of knowledge of Marxism....
"We are certainly saying that dialectical materialism is the theory of knowledge of Marxism, of the path of struggle from error to truth—not to a 'final' truth, but continually making advances through contradictory struggle to real knowledge of the objective world."
This Healyite notion of dialectical materialism is both enormously restrictive and is an idealization of knowledge. There is no valid, separate theory of knowledge. At the level of individual cognition, a theory of knowledge is derived from biological and psychological scientific investigation. At the level of social consciousness, a theory of knowledge is a constituent part of an understanding of historically specific social relations. Thus, central to the Marxist understanding of knowledge is the concept of false consciousness, the necessary distortion of reality associated with various social roles.
The traditional philosophical category of epistemology (in both its empiricist and rationalist forms), by separating the conscious subject from nature and society, is itself an ideological expression of false consciousness. Dialectical materialism criticizes the various traditional concepts of epistemol¬ogy as well as other philosophical concepts and categories. But Marxism does not criticize traditional philosophy by positing itself as a new, alternative philosophy, which likewise exists independently of a scientific (i.e., empirically verifiable) understanding of nature and society.
The Healyite mystification of dialectical materialism— "the path of struggle from error to truth"—is primarily a justification for the infallibility of a leader-cult. The program, analyses, tactics and projections of the Healyite leadership are thus held to be exempt from empirical verification. For example, to this day the Healyites claim that Cuba is capitalist! Critics and oppositionists are told that they don't understand reality; this capacity being monopolized by the leadership, which alone has mastered the dialectical method. The similarity between the Healyite view of dialectics and religious mysticism is not coincidental.
To summarize, the systematic rejection of dialectical materialism (e.g., Bogdanov, Burnham) must lead sooner or later to a break with the scientific Marxist program. But to believe a la Healy that every serious political difference within a revolutionary party can or should be reduced to antagonistic philosophical concepts is a species of rational idealism. Such philosophical reductionism denies that political differences commonly arise from the diverse social pres¬sures and influences that bear down upon the revolutionary vanguard and its component parts, and also differences in evaluating empirical conditions and possibilities.
Significance of the Struggle Against Otzovism/Ultimatism
The end of the factional struggle between the Leninists and Otzovists/Ultimatists occurred at the previously mentioned June 1909 conference of the expanded editorial board of Proletary. The conference resolved that Bolshevism "has nothing in common with otzovism and ultimatism, and that the Bolshevik wing of the Party must most resolutely combat these deviations from revolutionary Marxism." When Bogdanov refused to accept this resolution, he was expelled from the Bolshevik faction.
As we pointed out in Part One of this series, in justifying Bogdanov's expulsion Lenin clearly affirmed his adherence to the Kautskyan doctrine that the party should include all social democrats (i.e., working-class-oriented socialists). He sharply distinguished between the Kautskyan "party" and a faction, the latter requiring a homogeneous political program and outlook:
"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 opinions, 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. This is not the case within a section. A section in a party is a group of like-minded persons formed for the purpose primarily of influ¬encing the party in a definite direction, for the purpose of securing acceptance for their principles in the purest form. For this, real unanimity of opinion is necessary. The different standards we set for party unity and sectional unity must be grasped by everyone who wants to know how the question of internal discord in the Bolshevik section really stands." [emphasis in original]
—"Report on the Conference of the Extended Editorial Board of Proletary" (July 1909)
After Bogdanov's expulsion he and his co-thinkers established their own group around the paper Vperyod, deliberately choosing the name of the first Bolshevik organ (of 1905). The Vperyodists appealed to the Bolshevik ranks in the name of true Bolshevism. Though many Bolshevik workers supported the Otzovist/Ultimatist position on participating in the Duma, they were unwilling to split from Lenin's organization on this question. Thus Lenin had to combat diffuse ultraleft attitudes from the Bolshevik ranks for the next few years until the Otzovist/Ultimatist tendencies completely dissipated.
The Otzovist/Ultimatist claim to represent the true Bol¬shevik tradition, and that Lenin had become a Menshevik conciliator, could not be dismissed out of hand as ridiculous. Bogdanov, Lyadov, Krasin and Alexinsky had been among Lenin's chief lieutenants, the core of the early Bolshevik center. Lunacharsky had been a prominent Bolshevik public spokesman. The Mensheviks thus baited Lenin over the defection of his best-known and most talented collaborators. Through the 1907-09 factional struggle against Otzovism/ Ultimatism, a new Leninist leadership was crystallized from among the more junior Bolshevik cadre—Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Tomsky and a little later Stalin. This was to be the central core of the Bolshevik leadership right through the early period of the Soviet regime.
How does one account for the fact that most of the first generation of Bolshevik leaders defected to ultraleftism, giving way to a second generation which assimilated Leninism in its developing maturity? The Bolsheviks originated not only as the revolutionary wing of Russian Social Democracy, but were also empirically optimistic about the perspectives for revolutionary struggle. And this self-confident optimism was borne out by events. The period 1903 to 1907 was in general one of a rising line of revolutionary struggle enabling the Bolsheviks to become a mass party. It is understandable therefore that a section of the Bolsheviks would be unwilling to face the fact of a victorious reaction which required a broad organizational retreat. These Bolsheviks reacted to an unfavorable reality with a sterile, dogmatic radicalism which at the extreme took the form of socialist spiritualism. It is a mark of Lenin's greatness as a revolutionary politician that he fully recognized the victory of reaction and adapted the perspectives of the proletarian vanguard accordingly, though this meant breaking with some of his hitherto closest collaborators.
Part Six of this series will be dated April 9, 2011
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.
*******
Markin comment on this article:
Leon Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionary leader, came late to an understanding of the need for a tight-knit Bolshevik-style revolutionary working class party to lead the socialist revolution. However once convinced of that necessity he held to the vanguard party organization notion until the end of his life. Along the way he noted that one of the virtues of the Russian Bolshevik Party was that it had derived its authority from having waged, unlike many Western communist parties, struggles within the party against all forms of erroneous strategies and tactics (to speak nothing of having worked under every possible kind of political condition from legal to illegal). Thus the key struggle against the Bolshevik Duma boycotters that forms the central theme of this article was already worked out early. Worked out in the sense that there was a proper communist use of non-working class political organizations. The notions of setting up as oppositions within those organizations (here the Duma, elsewhere various parliamentary formations) and the use of such places as tribunals to speak for working class issues stems from this understanding. A tip of the hat to Lenin on that one.
*********
To read about the overall purpose of this pamphlet series and other information about the history of the document go the the American Left History Archives From-Lenin and The Vanguard Party-Preface To The Second Edition And Part One, dated March 15, 2011.
The Struggle Against The Boycotters
The Fifth Congress of the RSDRP, held in London in May 1907, was almost evenly divided between the Bolsheviks with 89 delegate votes and the Mensheviks with 88. At the Fourth Congress a year earlier three associated parties—the Jewish Bund, Latvian Social Democrats and Luxemburg/Jogiches' Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL)—had been incorporated into the RSDRP on a semi-federated basis. At the Fifth Congress the Bund had 54 delegate votes, the Latvian Social Democrats 26 and the SDKPiL 45.
In the course of a year's sharp factional struggle against the Mensheviks' liberal tailism and pro-Constitutional Democrat (Cadet) policy, the Bolsheviks had overcome their minority position within the Russian social-democratic movement. However, now the factional leadership of the RSDRP depended upon the three "national" social-democratic parties. The Bund consistently supported the Mensheviks. The Lettish Social Democrats generally supported the Bolsheviks, but sometimes mediated between the two hostile Russian groups. It was through the support of Rosa Luxemburg's SDKPiL that Lenin attained a majority at the Fifth Congress and in the leading bodies of the RSDRP for the next five years. The Lenin-Luxemburg bloc of 1906-11 is significant not only in its actual historic effect, but also because it reveals the rela¬tionship between evolving Leninism and this most consistent and important representative of pre-1914 revolutionary social democracy.
The decisive issue at the Fifth Congress was the attitude toward bourgeois liberalism, and specifically electoral sup¬port to the Cadet Party. With the support of the Letts and Poles (and also the left-wing Trotsky/Parvus group among the Mensheviks), the Bolshevik line carried; the Congress condemned the Cadets:
"The parties of the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie, headed by the Constitutional Democratic Party [Cadets], have now definitely turned aside from the revolution and endeavor to halt it through a deal with the counterrevolution."
—Robert H. McNeal, ed., Decisions and Resolutions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1974)
Another resolution instructed the RSDRP Duma fraction to oppose "the treacherous policy of bourgeois liberalism which, under the slogan 'Safeguard the Duma,' in fact sacrifices the popular interests to the Black Hundreds" (ibid.). A few months after the Congress, a party conference decided to run independent RSDRP candidates in the upcoming Duma elections and to support no other parties.
While the Lettish and Polish Social Democrats supported the general Bolshevik line at the Fifth Congress, they also moderated Lenin's fight against the Mensheviks. They voted against Lenin's motion to condemn the Menshevik majority of the outgoing Central Committee. The defection of the Latvian Social Democrats and the SDKPiL also accounted for Lenin's only serious defeat at the 1907 RSDRP congress. The congress voted overwhelmingly to oppose the Bolshe¬viks' "fighting operations" for "seizing funds" of the tsarist government.
During this period the Mensheviks' attack on the Leninists centered on these armed expropriations. Their near-hysterical reaction to the Bolsheviks' expropriations flowed from its shocking impact on bourgeois liberal respectability. Also the expropriations gave the Bolsheviks a financial superiority over the Mensheviks. In condemning the Bolsheviks' expropriation of government funds, the Mensheviks were convinced that they had unimpeachable social-democratic orthodoxy on their side.
The Bolsheviks, however, did not face the normal situation in which such robbery would immediately trigger the repressive apparatus of an overwhelmingly powerful and centralized state. Neither did they risk the condemnation of workers who might think they were mere criminals in political garb. Nor did the Bolsheviks maintain these expropriations as a "strategy" to be carried out over an extended period with the likely result of degeneration into lumpen criminal activity.
Lenin believed that there was a continuing revolutionary situation, in which the mass of workers and peasants were actively hostile to tsarist legality. The Bolsheviks' expropriations were concentrated in the Caucasus, where armed peasant and nationalist bands regularly challenged tsarist authorities. Lenin regarded the expropriations as one of several guerrilla tactics in the course of a revolutionary civil war.The Bolshevik-Menshevik dispute over armed expropriations was thus inextricably bound up with their fundamental difference over the political and military vanguard role of the proletarian party in the revolution to overthrow the autocracy.
Lenin's position on armed expropriations was presented in a resolution for the Fourth Congress held in April 1906. He continued to uphold this position through 1907:
"Whereas:
(1) scarcely anywhere in Russia since the December uprising has there been a complete cessation of hostilities, which the revolutionary people are now conducting in the form of sporadic guerrilla attacks upon the enemy.... We are of the opin¬ion, and propose that the Congress should agree.... (4) that fighting operations are also permissible for the purpose of seizing funds belonging to the enemy, i.e., the autocratic government, to meet the needs of insurrection, particular care being taken that the interests of the people are infringed as little as possible."
—"A Tactical Platform for the Unity Congress of the R.S.D.L.P." (March 1906)
Tsarist Reaction and the Ultraleft Bolsheviks
Shortly after the Fifth RSDRP Congress, in June 1907 the reactionary tsarist minister Stolypin executed a coup against the Duma. The Duma was dissolved and a new (Third) Duma proclaimed on the basis of a far less democratic elec¬toral system. In addition, the social-democratic deputies were arrested and charged with fomenting mutiny in the armed forces.
Stolypin's coup marked the definitive end of the 1905 revolutionary period. The victory of tsarist reaction opened up a new, and in one sense final, phase in the Bolshevik-Menshevik conflict, over the need to re-establish the underground as the party's basic organizational structure. The onset of reaction also produced a very sharp division within the Bolshevik camp between Leninism and ultraleftism, a factional struggle which had to be resolved before the historically far more significant conflict with Menshevism could be fought to a finish.
The conflict between Lenin and the ultraleft Bolsheviks centered on participation in the reactionary tsarist parliamentary body. Behind this difference lay Lenin's recognition that a reactionary period had set in, requiring a tactical retrenchment by the revolutionary party. The first battle occurred at a July 1907 RSDRP conference to determine policy for the upcoming Duma elections. Lenin still believed that Russia was passing through a general revolutionary period but regarded boycotting the elections as tactically unjustifiable:
"Whereas,
(1) active boycott, as the experience of the Russian revolu¬
tion has shown, is correct tactics on the part of the Social-
Democrats only under conditions of a sweeping, universal, and
rapid upswing of the revolution, developing into an armed
uprising, and only in connection with the ideological aims of
the struggle against constitutional illusions arising from the
convocation of the first representative assembly by the old
regime;
(2) in the absence of these conditions correct tactics on the part
of the revolutionary Social-Democrats calls for participation in
the elections, as was the case with the Second Duma, even if all
the conditions of a revolutionary period are present."
—"Draft Resolution on Participation in the Elections to
the Third Duma" (July 1907)
In presenting this resolution Lenin found himself a minority of one among the nine Bolshevik delegates to the conference. The resolution passed with the votes of the Mensheviks, Bundists and Lettish and Polish Social Democrats; all the Bolsheviks except Lenin voted against.
The Bolshevik boycotters were, to be sure, greatly over-represented at this particular party gathering. Lenin had significant support for his position among the Bolshevik cadre and ranks and was quickly able to gain more. However, the ultraleft faction of 1907-09 was the most significant chal¬lenge to Lenin's leadership of the Bolshevik organization that he ever faced. The ultraleft leaders—Bogdanov (who had been Lenin's chief lieutenant), Lunacharsky, Lyadov, Alexinsky, Krasin—were very prominent Bolsheviks. As likely as not, a majority of the Bolshevik ranks supported boycotting the tsarist Duma in this period. Only Lenin's great personal authority prevented the development of an ultraleft faction strong enough to oust him and his supporters from the official Bolshevik center or to engineer a major split.
Lenin was aided in this faction struggle by the heterogeneity of the ultraleft tendency. A not very important tactical question divided the ultraleft Bolsheviks into two distinct groupings, the Otzovists ("Recallists") and the Ultimatists. The Otzovists demanded the immediate, unconditional recall of the RSDRP Duma fraction. The Ultimatists demanded that the Duma fraction be presented with an ultimatum to make inflammatory speeches, which would provoke the tsarist authorities into expelling them from the Duma or worse. In practice, both policies would have had the same effect, and Lenin denied that there was a significant division among his ultraleft opponents.
Lenin's position on the ultraleft faction was presented in resolution form at a June 1909 conference of the expanded editorial board meeting of Proletary, a de facto plenum of the Bolshevik central leadership. At this conference, Bogdanov was expelled from the Bolshevik organization. The key passages of the resolution state:
"The direct revolutionary struggle of the broad masses was then followed by a severe period of counter-revolution. It became essential for Social-Democrats to adapt their revolutionary tactics to this new situation, and, in connection with this, one of the most exceptionally important tasks became the use of the Duma as an open platform for the purpose of assist¬ing Social-Democratic agitation.
"In this rapid turn of events, however, a section of the workers who had participated in the direct revolutionary struggle was unable to proceed at once to apply revolutionary Social-Democratic tactics in the new conditions of the counter¬revolution, and continued simply to repeat slogans which had been revolutionary in the period of open civil war, but which now, if merely repeated, might retard the process of closing the ranks of the proletariat in the new conditions of struggle." [emphasis in original]
—"On Otzovism and Ultimatumism"
Bogdanov's answer to Lenin is summarized in his 1910 "Letter to All Comrades," a founding document of his own independent group:
"Some people among your representatives in the executive collegium—the Bolshevik Center—who live abroad, have come to the conclusion that we must radically change our previous Bolshevik evaluation of the present historical moment and hold a course not toward a new revolutionary wave, but toward a long period of peaceful, constitutional development. This brings them close to the right wing of our party, the menshevik comrades who always, independently of any evaluation of the political situation, pull toward legal and constitutional forms of activity, toward 'organic work' and 'organic development'."
—Robert V. Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism (1960)
Bogdanov's phrase about "a long period of peaceful, constitutional development" is ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so. As against many Mensheviks, Lenin did not regard a new revolution as off the agenda for an entire historical epoch, i.e., for several decades. By 1908, he concluded that before another revolutionary upsurge (like that of 1905) there would be a lengthy period in terms of the working perspectives of the party and relative to the past experience and expectations of the Bolsheviks. 1908 was not 1903. And this reality was precisely what the Otzovists/Ultimatists denied.
Philosophy and Politics
Otzovism/Ultimatism was associated with neo-Kantian idealistic dualism represented by the Austrian physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach, a philosophical doctrine then much in vogue in Central European intellectual circles. Bogdanov's Empiriomonism (1905-06) was an ambitious attempt to reconcile Marxism with neo-Kantianism. In 1908 Bogdanov's factional partner Lunacharsky deepened this idealism into outright spiritualism, positing the need for a socialist religion. Lunacharsky's "god-building" was, needless to say, a great embarrassment for the Bolsheviks as a whole, and even for the Otzovist/Ultimatist faction.
Bogdanov's sympathy for neo-Kantian philosophical doctrine was both well known and longstanding. As long as Bogdanov functioned as Lenin's lieutenant, and did not in himself represent a distinct political tendency, his neo-Kantianism was considered a personal peculiarity among both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike. But once Bogdanov became the leader of a distinct and for a time significant ten¬dency in Russian Social Democracy, his philosophical views became a focus of general political controversy. Plekhanov, in particular, exploited Bogdanovism to attack the Bolshevik program as the product of flagrant subjective idealism. Lenin thus spent much of 1908 researching a major polemic against Bogdanov's neo-Kantianism, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, in order to purge Bolshevism of the taint of philosophical idealism.
Lenin's close political collaboration with Bogdanov, despite the latter's neo-Kantianism on the one hand, and his massive polemic against Bogdanov's philosophical views on the other, have been used to justify symmetric deviations on this question by ostensible revolutionary Marxists. That the neo-Kantian Bogdanov was an important Bolshevik leader is sometimes cited to argue for an attitude of indifference toward dialectical materialism, a belief that the most general or abstract expression of the Marxian world view has no bearing on practical politics and associated organizational affiliation. When he broke with Trotskyism in 1940, the American revisionist Max Shachtman justified a bloc with the anti-dialectician and empiricist James Burnham by citing the "precedent" of Lenin and Bogdanov.
At the other pole, Lenin's major polemic against an opponent's idealistic deviation from Marxism has encouraged a tendency to "deepen" every factional struggle by bringing in philosophical questions—by reducing all political differences to the question of dialectical materialism. This mixture of pomposity and rational idealism has become a hall¬mark of the British Healyite group. (The Healy/Banda group has become so outright bizarre that it can no longer be taken seriously, least of all in its philosophical mystifications.)
The Healyites justified their 1972 split from their erst¬while bloc partners, the French neo-Kautskyan Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI), by positing the primacy of "philosophy." They appealed to Lenin's 1908 polemic against Bogdanov as orthodox precedent:
"Lenin tirelessly studied the ideas of the new idealists, the neo-Kantians, in philosophy, even during the hardest practical struggle to establish the revolutionary party in Russia. When these ideas, in the form of 'empirio-criticism,' were taken up by a section of the Bolsheviks themselves, Lenin made a specialized study and wrote against them a full-length work, Materialism and Empiric-Criticism.
"Lenin understood very well that the years of extreme hardship and isolation after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution exposed the revolutionary movement to the greatest pressure of the class enemy. He knew that the most fundamental task of all was the defence and development of Marxist theory at the most basic level, that of philosophy, [our emphasis]
— International Committee, In Defence of Trotskyism
(1973)
This passage is a complete falsification at several levels. To begin with, Lenin's historically more important political struggle in the period of reaction was not against Bogdanov's ultraleft Bolsheviks, but against the Menshevik Liquidators. In this latter struggle, philosophical questions' played no particular role.
The Healyites also falsify Lenin's relationship with Bogdanov. When Bogdanov became part of the Bolshevik leadership in 1904, he was already a well-known neo-Kantian (Machian). Lenin and Bogdanov agreed that the Bolshevik tendency as such would take no position on the controversial philosophical issues. Lenin explains this in a letter to Maxim Gorky (25 February 1908) wherein he endorses his past relationship with Bogdanov, despite the latter's philosophical deviation:
"In the summer and autumn of 1904, Bogdanov and I reached a complete agreement, as Bolsheviks, and formed the tacit bloc, which tacitly ruled out philosophy as a neutral field, that existed all through the revolution and enabled us in that revolution to carry out together the tactics of revolutionary Social-Democracy (Bolshevism), which, I am profoundly convinced, were the only correct tactics." [emphasis in original] It was the right-wing Menshevik Plekhanov who brought the question of dialectical materialism versus neo-Kantianism to the forefront in order to discredit and split the revolutionary Bolshevik leadership. In defending the Bolsheviks against Plekhanov, Lenin went so far as to deny that the issue of neo-Kantian revisionism was at all relevant to the revolutionary movement in Russia. At the all-Bolshevik Congress in April 1905, Lenin stated:
"Plekhanov drags in Mach and Avenarius by the ears. I cannot for the life of me understand what these writers, for whom I have not the slightest sympathy, have to do with the question of social revolution. They wrote on individual and social organi¬zation of experience, or some such theme, but they never really gave any thought to the democratic dictatorship."
—"Report on the Question of Participation of the Social-Democrats in a Provisional Revolutionary Government" (April 1905)
In part as a result of his later fight with Bogdanov, Lenin modified his 1905 position, which drew too arbitrary a line between political and philosophical differences. He came to realize that fundamental differences among Marxists over dialectical materialism will likely produce political divergences. However, for Lenin program remained primary in defining revolutionary politics and associated organizational affiliation. Lenin never repudiated his close collaboration with Bogdanov in 1904-07. And he was absolutely right to ally with the revolutionary social democrat, albeit neo-Kantian, Bogdanov against the pro-liberal social democrat, albeit dialectical materialist, Plekhanov. Only when Bogdanov's neo-Kantian conceptions became associated with a counterposed, anti-Marxist political program did Lenin make the defense of dialectical materialism against philosophical idealism a central political task.
Against the Mystification of Dialectics
The Marxist program as the scientific expression of the interests of the working class and of social progress is not derived simply from a subjective desire for a socialist future. The Marxist program necessarily embodies a correct under¬standing of reality, of which the most general or abstract expression is dialectical materialism. However, as Marx himself wrote in 1877 to the Russian populist journal, Otechestvenniye Zapiski, he does not offer "a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being supra-historical" (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence [1975]). Dialectical materialism is a conceptual framework which permits, but does not guarantee, a scientific understanding of society in its concrete historical devel¬opment. In other words, an understanding of the dialectical nature of social reality guides a complex of historical gener¬alizations (e.g., that the state apparatus under capitalism can¬not be reformed into an organ of socialist administration, that in this epoch a collectivist economic system represents the social dominance of the proletariat) which underlies the Marxist programmatic principles.
The Healyite mystification of the Marxist attitude toward philosophy is a product of their degeneration into a bizarre leader-cult. In the early 1960s Healy's Socialist Labour League understood that dialectical materialism was nothing other than a generalized expression of a unitary worldview, and not an abstract schema or method existing independently of empirical reality. Cliff Slaughter's 1962-63 articles on Lenin's 1914-15 studies of Hegel, reprinted in 1971 as a pamphlet, Lenin on Dialectics, contain a trenchant attack upon the idealization of dialectics:
"Lenin lays great stress on Hegel's insistence that Dialectics is not a master-key, a sort of set of magic numbers by which all secrets will be revealed. It is wrong to think of dialectical logic as something that is complete in itself and then 'applied' to particular examples. It is not a model of interpretation to be learned, then fitted on to reality from the outside; the task is rather to uncover the law of development of the reality itself....
"The science of society founded by Marx has no room for phi¬losophy as such, for the idea of independently moving thought, with a subject-matter and development of its own, independent of reality but sometimes descending to impinge upon it."
Slaughter then quotes Marx's judgment on a concept of philosophy in The German Ideology: "When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence."
But by the late 1960s the Healyites had "rediscovered" a medium of existence for philosophy as an independent theory. Dialectical materialism was presented with much fanfare as "the theory of knowledge of Marxism," as an expression of the philosophical category known as epistemology. Thus in a collection of documents on the split with the OCI (Break With Centrism! [1973]), we read:
"What was most essential in the preparation of the sections was tq develop dialectical materialism in a struggle to understand and to transform the consciousness of the working class in the changing objective conditions. This means the under¬standing and development of dialectical materialism as the theory of knowledge of Marxism....
"We are certainly saying that dialectical materialism is the theory of knowledge of Marxism, of the path of struggle from error to truth—not to a 'final' truth, but continually making advances through contradictory struggle to real knowledge of the objective world."
This Healyite notion of dialectical materialism is both enormously restrictive and is an idealization of knowledge. There is no valid, separate theory of knowledge. At the level of individual cognition, a theory of knowledge is derived from biological and psychological scientific investigation. At the level of social consciousness, a theory of knowledge is a constituent part of an understanding of historically specific social relations. Thus, central to the Marxist understanding of knowledge is the concept of false consciousness, the necessary distortion of reality associated with various social roles.
The traditional philosophical category of epistemology (in both its empiricist and rationalist forms), by separating the conscious subject from nature and society, is itself an ideological expression of false consciousness. Dialectical materialism criticizes the various traditional concepts of epistemol¬ogy as well as other philosophical concepts and categories. But Marxism does not criticize traditional philosophy by positing itself as a new, alternative philosophy, which likewise exists independently of a scientific (i.e., empirically verifiable) understanding of nature and society.
The Healyite mystification of dialectical materialism— "the path of struggle from error to truth"—is primarily a justification for the infallibility of a leader-cult. The program, analyses, tactics and projections of the Healyite leadership are thus held to be exempt from empirical verification. For example, to this day the Healyites claim that Cuba is capitalist! Critics and oppositionists are told that they don't understand reality; this capacity being monopolized by the leadership, which alone has mastered the dialectical method. The similarity between the Healyite view of dialectics and religious mysticism is not coincidental.
To summarize, the systematic rejection of dialectical materialism (e.g., Bogdanov, Burnham) must lead sooner or later to a break with the scientific Marxist program. But to believe a la Healy that every serious political difference within a revolutionary party can or should be reduced to antagonistic philosophical concepts is a species of rational idealism. Such philosophical reductionism denies that political differences commonly arise from the diverse social pres¬sures and influences that bear down upon the revolutionary vanguard and its component parts, and also differences in evaluating empirical conditions and possibilities.
Significance of the Struggle Against Otzovism/Ultimatism
The end of the factional struggle between the Leninists and Otzovists/Ultimatists occurred at the previously mentioned June 1909 conference of the expanded editorial board of Proletary. The conference resolved that Bolshevism "has nothing in common with otzovism and ultimatism, and that the Bolshevik wing of the Party must most resolutely combat these deviations from revolutionary Marxism." When Bogdanov refused to accept this resolution, he was expelled from the Bolshevik faction.
As we pointed out in Part One of this series, in justifying Bogdanov's expulsion Lenin clearly affirmed his adherence to the Kautskyan doctrine that the party should include all social democrats (i.e., working-class-oriented socialists). He sharply distinguished between the Kautskyan "party" and a faction, the latter requiring a homogeneous political program and outlook:
"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 opinions, 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. This is not the case within a section. A section in a party is a group of like-minded persons formed for the purpose primarily of influ¬encing the party in a definite direction, for the purpose of securing acceptance for their principles in the purest form. For this, real unanimity of opinion is necessary. The different standards we set for party unity and sectional unity must be grasped by everyone who wants to know how the question of internal discord in the Bolshevik section really stands." [emphasis in original]
—"Report on the Conference of the Extended Editorial Board of Proletary" (July 1909)
After Bogdanov's expulsion he and his co-thinkers established their own group around the paper Vperyod, deliberately choosing the name of the first Bolshevik organ (of 1905). The Vperyodists appealed to the Bolshevik ranks in the name of true Bolshevism. Though many Bolshevik workers supported the Otzovist/Ultimatist position on participating in the Duma, they were unwilling to split from Lenin's organization on this question. Thus Lenin had to combat diffuse ultraleft attitudes from the Bolshevik ranks for the next few years until the Otzovist/Ultimatist tendencies completely dissipated.
The Otzovist/Ultimatist claim to represent the true Bol¬shevik tradition, and that Lenin had become a Menshevik conciliator, could not be dismissed out of hand as ridiculous. Bogdanov, Lyadov, Krasin and Alexinsky had been among Lenin's chief lieutenants, the core of the early Bolshevik center. Lunacharsky had been a prominent Bolshevik public spokesman. The Mensheviks thus baited Lenin over the defection of his best-known and most talented collaborators. Through the 1907-09 factional struggle against Otzovism/ Ultimatism, a new Leninist leadership was crystallized from among the more junior Bolshevik cadre—Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Tomsky and a little later Stalin. This was to be the central core of the Bolshevik leadership right through the early period of the Soviet regime.
How does one account for the fact that most of the first generation of Bolshevik leaders defected to ultraleftism, giving way to a second generation which assimilated Leninism in its developing maturity? The Bolsheviks originated not only as the revolutionary wing of Russian Social Democracy, but were also empirically optimistic about the perspectives for revolutionary struggle. And this self-confident optimism was borne out by events. The period 1903 to 1907 was in general one of a rising line of revolutionary struggle enabling the Bolsheviks to become a mass party. It is understandable therefore that a section of the Bolsheviks would be unwilling to face the fact of a victorious reaction which required a broad organizational retreat. These Bolsheviks reacted to an unfavorable reality with a sterile, dogmatic radicalism which at the extreme took the form of socialist spiritualism. It is a mark of Lenin's greatness as a revolutionary politician that he fully recognized the victory of reaction and adapted the perspectives of the proletarian vanguard accordingly, though this meant breaking with some of his hitherto closest collaborators.
Part Six of this series will be dated April 9, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
From The "International Socialist Review" Website- The Student Upsurge In Britain
Click on the headline to link to an International Socialist Review online article on the student upsurge in Britain.
Markin comment on this article:
Or rather on an archival article from the Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (1972) giving my comments on the question of youth vanguardism posed in that article. The comments used for that article, reposted below, can be aptly applied to the thrust of this article.
"This 1972 RCY Newletter article is more directly timely than some of the other material I have placed under this headline. In 2010 there were significant student strikes in Europe as well as important, if smaller and more localized (mainly California), student strikes in the United States against budget cuts to public education, including, critically, public higher education. The obvious need is to link up the student struggles against budget cuts, increased tuition, and harder financial aid standards with the other struggles of the working class to defend its historic and hard fought gains like pensions, social services, and health care, as noted in France where masses of students came out to support the struggle against raising pension eligibility ages. There will be more such struggles ahead, in Europe and elsewhere.
Sometimes student struggles have their own parochial quality (around specific campus issues like dormitory regulations, etc.), other times they intersect the working class. What is important to remember is that it is the working class that has the social power (and has had it for a long time now, although mainly unused) to bring society to a standstill but also to win victories, defensive or offensive as the case may be, against the bourgeoisie. That simple fact, as the article here alludes to, often got lost in the old days of the 1960s old New Left. Youth vanguardism was rampant. The assumption then (and maybe now, a little) was that the working class, at least in the advanced capitalist countries had been “bought off” (at least relatively) and therefore was no longer, as Marx and his followers projected, a potentially revolutionary force. A very dangerous, but very common notion then, and now as well.
This time around, hopefully, we will not have to “relive” history on that question. At least for those of us who have seen a few things, especially the volatility of the petty bourgeois students, over time. There is, unfortunately, nothing inherently revolutionary about youth, in itself, all self-image to the contrary. Let’s, however, not neglect to work in that milieu and see what flies out in the days ahead.
Note: In the interest of full disclosure, as I have mentioned before, I did not come to Marxism early in my political career (I was nothing but a left-liberal and then soft social-democrat, at best), not did I, in many ways come to this strategy willingly. Along the way I had imbibed in virtually every leftist political fad or trend, including the above-mentioned youth vanguardism. I have written about my “conversion” elsewhere but the point here is, although I came from nowhere but deep in the heart of the working poor, I did not see that class as “worthy” of ruling in its own interests. No I preferred Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Michael Harrington (author of The Other America and leading social democrat in those days), hell, even Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman if it came down to it. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and the working class, no way. Well, we learn a few things in life, and one that should be etched on every militant leftist’s brain is those who make the stuff of society must rule. Labor must rule. Simple, right?"
Markin comment on this article:
Or rather on an archival article from the Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (1972) giving my comments on the question of youth vanguardism posed in that article. The comments used for that article, reposted below, can be aptly applied to the thrust of this article.
"This 1972 RCY Newletter article is more directly timely than some of the other material I have placed under this headline. In 2010 there were significant student strikes in Europe as well as important, if smaller and more localized (mainly California), student strikes in the United States against budget cuts to public education, including, critically, public higher education. The obvious need is to link up the student struggles against budget cuts, increased tuition, and harder financial aid standards with the other struggles of the working class to defend its historic and hard fought gains like pensions, social services, and health care, as noted in France where masses of students came out to support the struggle against raising pension eligibility ages. There will be more such struggles ahead, in Europe and elsewhere.
Sometimes student struggles have their own parochial quality (around specific campus issues like dormitory regulations, etc.), other times they intersect the working class. What is important to remember is that it is the working class that has the social power (and has had it for a long time now, although mainly unused) to bring society to a standstill but also to win victories, defensive or offensive as the case may be, against the bourgeoisie. That simple fact, as the article here alludes to, often got lost in the old days of the 1960s old New Left. Youth vanguardism was rampant. The assumption then (and maybe now, a little) was that the working class, at least in the advanced capitalist countries had been “bought off” (at least relatively) and therefore was no longer, as Marx and his followers projected, a potentially revolutionary force. A very dangerous, but very common notion then, and now as well.
This time around, hopefully, we will not have to “relive” history on that question. At least for those of us who have seen a few things, especially the volatility of the petty bourgeois students, over time. There is, unfortunately, nothing inherently revolutionary about youth, in itself, all self-image to the contrary. Let’s, however, not neglect to work in that milieu and see what flies out in the days ahead.
Note: In the interest of full disclosure, as I have mentioned before, I did not come to Marxism early in my political career (I was nothing but a left-liberal and then soft social-democrat, at best), not did I, in many ways come to this strategy willingly. Along the way I had imbibed in virtually every leftist political fad or trend, including the above-mentioned youth vanguardism. I have written about my “conversion” elsewhere but the point here is, although I came from nowhere but deep in the heart of the working poor, I did not see that class as “worthy” of ruling in its own interests. No I preferred Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Michael Harrington (author of The Other America and leading social democrat in those days), hell, even Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman if it came down to it. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and the working class, no way. Well, we learn a few things in life, and one that should be etched on every militant leftist’s brain is those who make the stuff of society must rule. Labor must rule. Simple, right?"
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