Lenin And The Vanguard Party-Part Eight-The Fight (Today) For the Leninist Vanguard Party
Markin comment on this series of articles:
Oddly enough, when I first became serious about making a revolution in the early 1970s, a socialist working class-led revolution, in the eternal quest for a more just and equitable society, there were plenty (no enough, there are never enough, but plenty) of kindred spirits who were also finding out that it was not enough to “pray” such a revolution into existence but that one had to build a party, a vanguard party in order to do so. The name "Lenin," the designation "Bolshevik," and the term "world socialist revolution" flowed easily from the tongue in the circles that I began to hang around in. As I write this general introduction, right this minute in 2011, to an important series of historical articles about the actual creation, in real time, of a Leninist vanguard working class party (and International, as well) there are few kindred, fewer still in America, maybe, fewest still, and this is not good, among the youth, to carry the message forward. Nevertheless, whatever future form the next stage in the struggle for the socialist revolution takes the question of the party, the vanguard party really, will still press upon the heads of those who wish to make it.
Although today there is no mass Bolshevik-style vanguard party (or International)-anywhere-there are groups, grouplets, leagues, tendencies, and ad hoc committees that have cadre from which the nucleus for such a formation could be formed-if we can keep it. And part of the process of being able to “keep it” is to understand what Lenin was trying to do back in the early 1900s (yes, 1900s) in Russia that is applicable today. Quite a bit, actually, as it turns out. And for all those think that the Leninist process, and as the writer of these articles is at pains to point it was an unfolding process, was simple and the cadre that had to be worked with was as pure as the driven snow I would suggest this thought. No less an august revolutionary figure that Leon Trotsky, once he got “religion” on the Bolshevik organizational question (in many ways the question of the success of the revolution), did not, try might and main, have success in forming such a mass organization. We can fight out the details from that perspective learning from the successes and failures, and fight to get many more kindred.
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Markin comment on this article:
The most important point in this presentation is the notion of the continuing validity of the need for a vanguard party in order to lead the struggle for the socialist revolution. If you are not interested in socialist revolution as the solution to the crisis of human organization then you do not need a vanguard party. All others pay attention.
Moreover, if Leon Trotsky saw that, in the age of imperialism, his previously Russia-specific theory of permanent revolution about the necessity for the working class to lead that revolution (in alliance with the poor and non-owning classes and other allies) needed to be extended internationally then the same was true for the Leninist concept of the vanguard party as the organization of that struggle. If that fact was true at the time of the 1995 presentation in the immediate aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union here in 2011 it looks like the absolute beginning of wisdom.
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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.
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The following presentation by comrade Al Nelson of the Spartacist League Central Committee was first published in Workers Vanguard No. 634, 1 December 1995.
The first sentence of the founding document of the Fourth International, written by Leon Trotsky, who was the co-leader of the Russian Revolution with Lenin, reads, "The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat." Writing on the eve of the slaughter of World War II, the second interimperialist war, which ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs by U.S. imperialism that destroyed two whole Japanese cities, Trotsky said that, "The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only 'ripened'; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a social revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind."
The construction of revolutionary leadership capable of leading the working class internationally—that's what we mean by the "party question." Without a revolutionary party no socialist revolution can succeed, no matter how favorable the circumstances. Until the working class solves the problem of creating the revolutionary party as the conscious expression of the historic process, the issue remains undecided. For Marxists, therefore, it is the most important question of all—the question of the party.
Everywhere you look today you can see the effects of the absence of revolutionary leadership. There's Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, which is both a perverted response to rising black oppression and also very similar in its reactionary patriarchal ideology to the very large and mainly white male Christian "Promise Keepers," currently holding mass meetings around the country. Or look at the very important Detroit newspaper strike. The workers have shown no lack of combativity and courage yet have been systematically betrayed and demobilized by a treacherous union bureaucracy that fundamentally believes in the interests of U.S. capitalism and knows that strikes are not in the interest of capitalism.
Or look at South Africa. If you read Workers Vanguard, it's clear that we aim to construct a section of the International Communist League, a Trotskyist party, in South Africa. Reports of the various comrades who have been traveling through in the last couple of years have had the same theme: the extreme contradiction between revolutionary-minded workers who yearn for fundamental social changes that can only be brought about by social revolution and the leaders of their parties and trade unions who say, "No, no, revolution is not necessary, nor is it possible; we can accomplish our
goals gradually by supporting the African National Congress." Meanwhile the ANC's real goal is to stabilize South Africa politically so that foreign capital can exploit black South Afri¬can labor even more intensely than has been the case in the past.
Stalinism finally succeeded in destroying the Soviet Union and ushering in capitalist counterrevolution in the land of the first workers revolution, a historic defeat for the world proletariat. No longer having a common enemy, the major imperialist powers are drifting apart like great tectonic plates as they seek to divide up the world into competing trade blocs. We've had two interimperialist world wars that prove that trade wars lead inevitably to shooting wars for the redivision of the world markets.
Why the Working Class Is Key
Only the industrial proletariat, led by Bolshevik-type vanguard parties, can prevent another world war by destroying the rule of capital once and for all. So what does it actually mean when we say that the revolutionary party is the "conscious expression of the historic process"? The Manifesto of the Communist Parly was written in 1848 by two young revolutionists named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They were, respectively, 29 and 27 years old at the time—just to give a little perspective. With the addition of an updating of the Manifesto, written by Trotsky in 1937, many of the Manifesto's most important sections read as though they were written yesterday.
Its fundamental propositions can be summarized in brief as follows: in every historical epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange and the social organization following from it form the basis upon which the political and intellectual history of that epoch is built up. In other words, con¬sciousness is formed in an environment of social institutions created and controlled by the ruling class of that period.
The whole history of mankind, from the period of slavery through feudalism through the emergence of capitalism, has been a history of class struggles—con¬tests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes. As a propertied new class arising initially in the Middle Ages, the nascent bourgeoisie was able to develop its own economy, its own culture, religion, schools and so on, i.e., its own social institutions expressing its own social consciousness, within feudal society itself. The bourgeois class was able to develop organically within the feudal order. It was driven to overthrow the feudal political system and its social order only when the institutions of the old regime—the monarchy, the nobility, the church—prevented the natural expansion of the institutions of capital. The famous "Rights of Man," one of the main documents coming out of the great French Revolution of 1789, meant at that time the rights of the capitalist class to buy and sell all property, including land, as opposed to the hereditary rights of the old feudal order. It was an assertion of a new property-owning class for which competition was the driving force.
But the proletariat is not a propertied class, and therefore it is not able to construct the' institutions of a new society within the framework of capitalism. All it possesses is its labor power which it must sell piecemeal to the owners of industry in order not to starve. With all other productive classes driven out, the proletariat is the special and essential product of capitalism. So society has been split into two great and hostile camps: the working class and the bourgeoisie. They are the main forces in modern society.
Capitalism has concentrated workers in large factories and created great urban concentrations. In so doing it has created the instrument of its own destruction as an exploiting class. The working class cannot therefore emancipate itself from the yoke of capitalist exploitation without at the same time emancipating society at large from all exploitation, all class distinctions. This is what Marx referred to as the materialist conception of history.
Socialist Consciousness vs. Trade-Union Consciousness
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. But the history of all countries has shown that the working class, exclusively by its own effort and day-to-day experiences, is not able spontaneously to develop a consciousness any higher than trade-union consciousness, the need to unite in unions for economic struggle against the employers and the government. But trade-union consciousness is bourgeois conscious-ness. Unionism in and of itself does not challenge the capital¬ist mode of production but only seeks to better the immediate conditions and wages of the workers in struggles with individual employers.
Revolutionary class consciousness, represented by the theories of scientific socialism, has to be brought into the working class from the outside through the instrumentality of a revolutionary party which embodies a higher consciousness of these historically necessary tasks than the working class possesses itself. That is the only way the struggles of the workers become class struggle, when the most advanced workers become conscious of themselves as a single class whose actions are directed against the entire class of capitalists and their government.
The founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and their followers like Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotsky, in fact most of the Bolshevik leadership, all came from the educated classes. As such they were the bearers of scientific socialism into the workers movement because they were educated and were able to study history and study economics and put together the understanding of historical materialism. These revolutionists were the instruments for bringing the theories of scientific socialism into the working class from the outside.
As long as the working class is not mobilized by a party based on revolutionary theory, its consciousness remains determined by bourgeois ideology and culture, leading it to see capitalist society as fixed and not open to fundamental change by workers revolution. This "false consciousness," as Marx called it, is what we see and confront every day, all over the world. Furthermore, the working class is not some uniform average but is itself very stratified, ranging from very advanced, knowledgeable workers to the most backward layers, blinded by racism, ethnic hatreds and general social piggishness. For the working class to move from an existence as a class in itself—that is to say, simply defined objectively by its relationship to the means of production—to a class for
itself—one that is fully conscious of its historic task to overthrow the capitalist order—requires revolutionary leadership.
These are the classic Marxist propositions that Lenin argues for in What Is To Be Done? (1902) against a current then called Economism. The Economists belittled the role of the conscious factor. Instead they projected class consciousness arising "organically" and "spontaneously" out of the day-to-day economic struggles of the workers. This infatuation with spontaneity was paralleled by a movement to criticize the revolutionary principles of Marxism as dogmatic and obsolete. Essentially, Lenin said, these socialists are adapting bourgeois criticisms of Marxism in order to transform the struggle for social revolution into a struggle for social reforms. In practice this meant tailing and seeking to pressure the bourgeois liberals while limiting the struggle of the workers to union struggles.
Lenin made a particularly powerful argument against the Economists that is fully applicable today, especially in the United States. For socialists to adapt to the existing trade-union consciousness of the workers keeps the workers in a lower state of consciousness insufficient for revolutionary activity and results. Whether intended or not, this adaptation strengthens the authority of the existing union bureaucracy and thereby strengthens the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the working class. In other words, if you don't break out of the framework of simple trade unionism, you simply reinforce the authority of the treacherous misleaders of the trade-union bureaucracy.
This basic lesson is not remote in time, by the way. It is, for example, at the heart of our criticism of the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL) in the current Workers Vanguard regarding their role in the recent newspaper strike in Detroit. They formed an ad hoc committee external to the union which based itself purely on a call for more militant strike tactics: mass picketing, defying injunctions, etc. That's all very fine; these are necessary tactics. But the RWL omits completely any political characterization of the union bureaucracy and any political explanation of why the union misleaders were consciously and deliberately seeking to defuse the militancy of the workers and to wear them down and suffocate them with legal restrictions. Therefore the RWL never raised the workers' consciousness above union consciousness and actually sowed illusions that a new leadership simply has to be "more militant."
But in many unions the existing bureaucratic leaderships were the militants of yesterday. Look at the president of the Teamsters union, Ron Carey. He's supported by an outfit called the TDU, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which is an organization created by the International Socialists a long time ago. Or in the mine workers union, the Trumka leadership was hailed by all manner of fake socialists as representing a new, more militant leadership. And now he's got min¬ers—who used to know how to deal very effectively with strikebreakers—out on the tracks holding hands, singing, "We Shall Overcome." Disgusting.
And the reason that these militants of yesterday become the careerists of today is because they share and have never broken from the same pro-capitalist outlook of their predecessors. So for the RWL or anyone else to simply keep their criticisms of a given strike on the level of strike tactics and not characterize politically the existing leadership retards and damages the consciousness of the workers. Nothing is learned out of these defeated strikes except demoralization and cynicism.
Socialist consciousness therefore does not simply grow out of the economic struggle. In reality they exist side by side. The role of the revolutionary party is to saturate the working class with the consciousness of its social position and historic tasks in order to mobilize its most advanced layers in a revolutionary assault on the capitalist system itself. Against the attempt to degrade revolutionary Marxism, Lenin called for the building of a new kind of party, a combat party composed entirely of professional revolutionists. Such a party was not counterposed to the unions. The unions, he said, should be the mass organizations—a kind of united front of the mass of the workers—seeking to build as broadly as possible, to unite the greatest number of workers in defensive struggles against the employers.
But to build the kjnd of highly disciplined, professional organization necessary to lead the proletariat in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism required that the party recruit only the most advanced workers, who would -then be systematically trained in all the necessary intellectual skills to be effective organizers and agitators able to travel broadly and organize other units of the party. In this party, he said, there shall be no distinctions between worker-Bolsheviks and the revolutionary intellectuals. This requires on the part of the intellectuals that they leave their class and come all the way over to the side of the proletarian party, where their intellectual skills are most valuable.
The 1903 Split Between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
This period from 1899 to 1902 was the beginning of Lenin's campaign to build a centralized party based on a comprehensive political program. His desire for a narrower definition of membership was motivated in those early days by a general desire to exclude opportunists and to weed out dilettantes who had been attracted to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party because of its very loose circle nature.
Later, in 1903 a split took place over Lenin's insistence on an organizational rule that party membership be limited to those who are willing to actually participate in an organization of the party, as opposed to the much looser criteria advanced by the right wing of the party of someone who merely renders personal assistance to the party—basically describing a kind of a sympathizer. Lenin wanted members who were going to devote their lives to the cause of proletarian revolution.
This split was the origin of the Bolshevik (Russian for "majority") faction and the Mensheviks ("minority"). While the split corresponded roughly to a left and right wing, the clarifying issues did not occur until later. It is a commonplace error to state that in 1902-1903 Lenin was fully conscious that his conception of the party was a definite break from social democracy and that Bolshevism began after the split in 1903.
In fact, the forming of the Iskra group in 1900 (around the newspaper of the same name), of which Lenin was the organizer, was the coming together of some of the older Russian Marxists, like George Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, with younger members like Lenin, as a revolutionary grouping within Social Democracy to defend and restore the basic revolutionary principles of Marxism. The period from the forming of the Iskra group to the final split with Mensheviks and the founding of the Bolshevik Party as such in 1912 marked the transformation of the Bolshevik faction from a revolutionary social-democratic one into an embryonic communist organization.
When reading What Is To Be Done?, it's not immediately obvious that until the February Revolution in 1917 Russia was ruled by the Romanov absolutist monarchy, and all Marxists agreed that the immediate tasks were essentially
democratic, the overthrow of tsarism. However, there was an assumption on the part of the Menshevik right wing that this necessarily meant an extended period of capitalism. Basically, this rejected a revolutionary proletarian perspective in favor of a parliamentary opposition in a capitalist government.
Lenin agreed that overthrowing tsarism was the immediate task. But he vehemently disagreed with the perspective that the Marxists should form a bloc with the liberal bourgeoisie. What he posited was an alliance between the revolu¬tionary proletariat and the poor peasantry. As opposed to the Mensheviks, he was trying to draw a class line between the proletariat, and the toiling classes in general, and the capitalist class. However, this theory that Lenin called "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" was essentially flawed in the sense that it posited a dictatorship, a state power, of two classes, one of which—the peasantry—is a property-owning class. But it did serve his main purpose of drawing a line against the Mensheviks and their purely democratic perspective. So that was the framework in which these arguments took place.
Lenin's perspective was that the overthrow of tsarism in Russia by the revolutionary proletariat and peasantry would serve as a spark for proletarian revolution in the more advanced countries, where the situation was much more ripe for socialist revolution. He saw the democratic revolution in Russia leading rather immediately to socialist revolution in West Europe, especially in Germany.
In this period up through 1912, Lenin's consistently revolutionary thrust frequently led him to break with opportunism well before he had generalized it theoretically or internationally. Until 1912, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were sometimes forced to exist as factions in the same party. While building his Bolshevik faction in a very disciplined manner, Lenin had not yet broken in principle with Karl Kautsky's conception of "the party of the whole class." This conception meant that the movement should not be split and that all shades of difference, including opportunism, could exist in one party. Karl Kautsky was the pre-eminent leader of German Social Democracy at the time. The German party was far and away the largest party in Europe. Lenin greatly respected Kautsky, and in fact in What Is To Be Done? you'll find Lenin quoting Kautsky on the basic propositions of Marxism.
War and Revolution
It was not until the outbreak of the first interimperialist war in 1914 and the total political collapse of the Socialist (Second) International that Lenin began to realize in hindsight the implications and effects of his earlier course. With the start of World War I, the parliamentary fraction of the German Social Democratic Party, on August 4, 1914, voted unanimously in favor of war credits for the government, supporting the German bourgeoisie in the war. This act had an absolutely shocking impact upon the revolutionists in the Second International. Lenin at first refused to believe the report.
But this single event was to transform Lenin from the left-wing leader of Russian Social Democracy and an embryonic communist into the founding leader of the world communist movement. Following the collapse of the German party, all the other socialist parties in Europe collapsed in the same orgy of social-chauvinism, each one urging the working class in each country to support the war aims of their own ruling class, totally ignoring thejr historical opposition to imperialist war. World War I was the most horrible slaughter yet seen on the face of the earth. Millions of the working class of each country were killed. German workers killing French and English workers and Russian workers and vice versa, all being urged on to fight for their respective fatherlands. It was a shocking betrayal of fundamental socialist principles.
Lenin's basic policy toward the war and the international socialist movement was developed within a few weeks. His policy had three elements: 1) Socialists must stand for the defeat, above all, of their own bourgeois state. 2) The war demonstrated that capitalism in the imperialist epoch threatened to destroy civilization itself. Socialists therefore must work to transform the imperialist war into revolutionary civil war, into proletarian revolution. 3) The Second International has been destroyed by social-chauvinism. A new revolution¬ary international must be built through a complete split with the opportunists in the socialist movement. These principles, these three policies remained central to Lenin's activities right up to the Russian Revolution of October 25, 1917.
Lenin understood that he was advocating splitting the international workers movement into two antagonistic parties: one revolutionary, the other reformist. While in 1903 he had split Russian Social Democracy before it had acquired a mass base, he did not at that time fully realize what he had done. Previously, he saw it as a split of proletarian socialism from petty-bourgeois democracy, i.e., that the influence for opportunism was coming from outside the party. Understanding the material basis for opportunism within social democracy was one of the main conclusions of his book, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916. It is in this period, from 1914 to 1917, that Leninism arose as a qualitative extension of Marxism.
Examining the total collapse of the German Social Democratic Party, Lenin came to understand that the source of opportunism came from within the German party itself. Its top leadership was based on a labor aristocracy—a privileged layer that was enjoying the benefits of imperialist exploitation of colonies all around the world. The political outlook of the party leadership had become totally bourgeoi-sified as a result of their social position in German society.
Now Lenin realized that in practice his Bolshevik organization had in fact not been built according to the Kautskyan formula. The selecting, testing and training of Bolshevik cadre was fundamentally different than the social-democratic model of Germany. In 1912 they had completely broken politically and organizationally from the Russian opportunists, the Mensheviks—two and a half years before the outbreak of the war. Lenin now took the Bolshevik Party as a model for the new Third International that he was calling for. Following the victory of the Russian Revolution, the Third, Communist International was founded in 1919. All over the world, including in the United States, the Socialist parties split and the left wings founded new Communist parties, organized on the principles, program and practices of the Russian Bolsheviks. That is our model and ultimately where we come from.
The 1917 Russian Revolution
To see in reality the crucial role of leadership and the role of the revolutionary party, you should examine the course of the Russian Revolution between February and October 1917. Trotsky made the statement that the leadership is to the party what the party is to the class. Many years later Trotsky looked back to 1917 and asked, could the Russian Revolution have happened without Lenin? And he said, I would have to say "no."
There was considerable confusion and disorientation in the Bolshevik Party itself at the outbreak of the February Revolution when the tsar abdicated and a capitalist Provisional Government was formed. Side by side with that gov¬ernment were the Soviets ("soviet" is the Russian word for workers council). These were mass organizations which sprang up in the 1905 Revolution. Delegates to the Soviets were elected from the factories and ranks of the army.
So between February 1917 and the October insurrection, Lenin waged a furious political struggle on several fronts simultaneously. On the one hand, to expose and defeat the authority of the petty-bourgeois parties, the Mensheviks and the peasant-based Social Revolutionaries, who in the beginning had a majority in the Soviets. On the other, struggling within his own party against a persistent right wing that was adapting to the opportunist parties who in turn supported the capitalist government. Trotsky said that it was only Lenin's far-sightedness and his considerable authority with the party cadre that enabled the Bolsheviks to seize the moment and lead the insurrection.
In a revolutionary situation, the consciousness of the workers goes through very rapid changes from day to day, and often even the Bolsheviks lagged behind. But finally there comes a time that Trotsky refers to as the revolutionary moment, when the working class has rejected by experience all other possibilities and now has come to be fully conscious that there is no other, lesser course: We must take the power ourselves! Now they looked to the Bolsheviks to lead them.
The other prerequisite for a successful insurrection is the temporary exhaustion and confusion of the ruling class itself and a situation where it is denied the instruments of its own state power, essentially the army. You can't have an insurrection while the powers of the capitalist state remain intact. The capitalist state, as explained by Lenin, is the special bodies of armed men whose purpose is to defend the property forms of capitalism. The state, any state, is an instrument of coercion of one class over another. So you cannot have an insurrection without being able to split the army and take away the power of the bourgeoisie to militarily crush the revolution.
By early October 1917, all of these factors came together. The army garrisons in Petrograd refused to take orders from the Provisional Government. They would only take orders from the Soviets. Thus the insurrection itself, and the seizure of power, was extraordinarily bloodless.
But as Trotsky says, woe unto any party that flinches at this moment and begins to overestimate the forces of the bourgeoisie or simultaneously underestimates the revolutionary capacity of the working class at the crucial moment. This is what led to the failure of the German Revolution in Octo¬ber 1923, and that failure closed the door for extending the revolution to industrialized Germany and opened the door for German fascism. A frightened ruling class is a very dangerous opponent. Having almost had their power taken away from them, they were going to see that that was not going to happen again. They started financing fascist thugs to break up first the Communist Party and then the labor unions. Then they went after the Jews.
The failure of the German Revolution also ended the revolutionary period that had begun in Russia in October 1917 and left the economically devastated and exhausted young Soviet Republic completely isolated. Lenin and Trotsky knew that for the revolution to survive in backward Russia it must immediately extend to industrialized Western Europe. That was the basic understanding of classical Marxism: You cannot have a revolution remain isolated in one country, especially a backward one; you will be attacked immediately by the other imperialist powers. Therefore, you must take the revolution into the camp of the imperialists.
The closing of that door to Germany demoralized the Russian workers and sections of the Communist Party itself, resulting in a political counterrevolution led by Stalin and his faction in 1924 against the program and leadership of the October Revolution.
Democratic Centralism
The organizational practice of a Leninist party is based on the principle of democratic centralism, which means full freedom in internal discussion, complete discipline and unity in action. As Trotsky put it, without inner democracy, no revolutionary education. Without discipline, no revolutionary action. I couldn't do any better than to read a section from our founding documents to describe the basic conceptions of democratic centralism:
"The Spartacist League takes its organizational forms and practices from the evolved institutions and experiences of the Leninist movement, and seeks to function according to the best traditions of Leninism. We seek to make use of the widest amount of internal democracy and discussion which is compatible with functioning in an effective and disciplined way. Unlike many organizations, which give only lip service to the idea of factional democracy, the SL recognizes that the right to factions is basic and that factional struggle is not only educational but is, in cases of sharp difference, the only way in which the party can arrive at the correct political line....
"The SL must be primarily an action organization, not a discussion group. Once a position is arrived at, it may always be overturned by a higher body or later reversal, but until then it must be carried out."
Or, as James Cannon put it, "Only a self-acting and critical minded membership is capable of forging and consolidating the revolutionary party and of solving its problems by collective discussion and decision. A loosely knit, heterogeneous, undisciplined, untrained organization is utterly incapable."
Basically, democratic centralism is a simple principle. If there are disputes or differences in the party, they are discussed and debated up through the national conference, which is the highest body of the organization. But after a decision is reached by majority vote, the minority is bound by that decision in the public actions of the party, includ¬ing in its press. This does not mean that you have to abandon or give up your opinions. That was the bureaucratic and destructive practice instituted by Stalinism. They called this practice "criticism, self-criticism," culminating in the concept of unanimity. What it really meant was that if you came up on the wrong side of a question, that wrong side being decided by the leadership, you were required to stand up before the membership and criticize yourself for holding the wrong views. In other words, you had to get up and explain what kind of a bad person you were, some sort of petty-bourgeois dilettante or whatever.
But this kind of false confession, this abdication of one's views, simply guts you as a revolutionist. And that mechanism selected people out. What remained were those that learned to live within the framework of a bureaucratic organization where they were expected not to do their own think¬ing. Whereas we value the critical thinking of our own membership, and encourage it.
In fact that's the fundamental reason for the creation of a separate youth organization, so that it can be a training ground for the party, learning how to build a local, learning how to run local executive committees, how to be sales directors and organizers and writers and put out a paper and run a whole national organization parallel to the adult party itself. And they do so in a way where they're not surrounded by 20-year members of the party, which makes youth feel like they're the dumbest guys in the room, but amongst their peers. This encourages the fullest kind of critical discussion to take place. This is how you build critical thinking and higher consciousness.
Bolshevism vs. Bureaucratism
Social-democratic organizations, because they do not have a perspective of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, but rather seek to pressure its so-called liberal wing, denounce Leninist democratic centralism as being the forerunner of Stalinist bureaucratism. That's the standard anti-Communist syllogism, which you hear all the time now since the bankruptcy of Stalinism caused the collapse of the Soviet Union: Stalinist bureaucratism flowed from Leninist democratic centralism.
Anybody can say almost anything they want in a social-democratic organization, reflecting their completely heterogeneous political composition. Except, there is a party line. It is carried in the newspaper and someone creates it, generally the ruling clique of the moment, which tends to change without any particular democratic discussions. Centrist and social-democratic organizations are always in practice bureaucratic organizations. Centrism is defined as that current which exists between the poles of revolution and refor¬mism. Even in the most left-sounding of the centrist groups there is a conflict between their stated aims—their paper positions—and their real practice.
Another definition of centrism is: revolutionary in words, opportunist in deeds. In fact this contradiction is the source of all bureaucratism. The Stalinists, from 1924 until the 1989-91 collapse of bureaucratic rule, were a living lie. They published the Collected Works of Lenin while seeking to conciliate imperialism by preventing workers revolutions. That profound contradiction was the basis for the police state and for the bureaucratism.
The understanding that the consciousness of the revolutionary party is higher than the consciousness of the work¬ing class means that we do not go outside the party seeking to mobilize more backward workers to pressure the party internally. Many years ago, we wrote "that the fundamental principle for communists is that one struggles among one's comrades to gain a majority for one's program, and that anyone who seeks to mobilize backward forces and alien class elements from outside a revolutionary Marxist organization in order to struggle for ascendancy inside that organization is no communist." Building and maintaining the party requires the highest level of conscious effort.
To ensure the revolutionary integrity of the whole party, the leadership must scrupulously guard the rights of all comrades or groupings in the party who have differences with the party. After all, they may be right. We were a left-wing opposition known as the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) in the Socialist Workers Party in the early 1960s. The SWP greatly abused our democratic rights. They kept us from doing public work in arenas of our differences. They kept us off the leading bodies of the party, they denied our right to exist as a faction in the party, and we constantly struggled to simply exist as an organized group trying to bring our views to the party members.
So we learned from this experience, being on the short end of a very bureaucratic stick, and that reflects itself in our organizational rules and guidelines where the rights of factions are codified, the right to proportional representation on leading bodies if the differences are not resolved at a national conference. Once during a debate in the New York local of the Socialist Workers Party, the national secretary, Farrell Dobbs, looked at me, a young supporter of the RT, and said, "The majority is the party!" And that was dead wrong, that was a fundamentally bureaucratic statement. The party is both the majority and the minority.
So we learned from this negative experience. We also understood that these departures from the norms of Leninism were because the SWP had lost its revolutionary perspective and was very rapidly moving toward reformism. They no longer required the practices necessary for a revolutionary party.
I welcome those of you who are joining the youth club this weekend. It is the first important step toward devoting your life to the cause of the proletariat. There is no higher form of service to humanity.
This article concludes this Lenin and The Vanguard Party series.
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