A Reply to Doug Lorimer
Posted to www.marxmail.org on
From "The Bolshevik Party and 'Zinovievism':
Comments on a caricature of Leninism" by Doug Lorimer:
Louis Proyect, a former member of the US Socialist Workers Party and the moderator of the Marxism List, has written a response to John Percy's article on that internet site. In it he attempts to defend his view that the Democratic Socialist Party's conception of the organisational character of the Leninist party is based, not on the actual Bolshevik experience, but on the distorted interpretation of this experience imposed upon the Communist International in 1924 by Comintern president Grigory Zinoviev, after Zinoviev had formed a political alliance with Stalin in the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. (The full article can be read at http://www.mail-archive.com/marxism@lists.panix.com/msg45804.)
Lorimer's entire article can be
read at: http://www.marxmail.org/Lorimer.htm.
The following are comments on selected passages.
Lorimer: The disintegration of the
Stalinist regimes in
Reply: Actually the best forum for such a debate
would be the Internet and the Marxism list specifically. Unfortunately, not a
single DSP member, including John Percy who is subbed to Marxmail
I believe, has ever taken up these questions with me. It has fallen mainly on
the shoulders of a party sympathizer Alan Bradley.
Lorimer: Proyect's
comments miss the point entirely. Lenin's concern about the 1921 resolution was
not that it would lead foreign Communists (most of whom had come from the left
wings of the reformist social democratic parties) to create parties imbued with
a "Russian spirit" or parties that were schematic caricatures of the
Bolshevik Party. As he himself says, his concern was that, because they lacked
an understanding of the history of the Russian Marxist movement, they would
fail to understand the resolution and it would therefore remain "a dead
letter", i.e., the new Communist parties would retain the
non-revolutionary, bureaucratic practices of the reformist social democracy.
The whole thrust of the resolution counterposes to
those practices the revolutionary party-building methods and organisational practices of Bolshevism. That is why Lenin
says the "resolution is excellent, and I subscribe to every one of the
fifty paragraphs".
Reply: Frankly, I don't think that Lenin had
fully grasped the nature of the problem. He was preoccupied with the survival
of the infant Soviet republic and had never really completely thought through
the problem of setting up a Comintern in
Lorimer: Thus, according to Cohen's
account, there was no public debate between Lenin and Bukharin
on the national question, and Bukharin's request to
the party's central leadership for such a public debate was opposed by Lenin, a
position the Bolshevik leadership agreed with.
In a March 1916 letter to fellow Bolshevik leader Aleksandr Shlyapnikov, Lenin
explained why he was opposed to allowing Bukharin and
his co-thinkers to have their views on the national question published in the
party press:
'We must refute such people, expose them, give
them time to study and think, and be in no hurry to humour
them: "Here are editorial rights for you, distribute your nonsense among
the workers!!"
Reply: I have no idea why Lorimer
is so committed to the idea that the Bolsheviks used Iskra
in the same way that the American SWP uses the Militant or they use Green Left
Weekly, as a way of disseminating a "line" decided by the central
leadership between conventions. Not only is this not the way that the
Bolsheviks operated, it makes for a more boring newspaper (except for my film
reviews in GLW.)
In fact there were numerous Bolshevik newspapers, all with
their own independent editorial boards that saw things their own way and wrote
about them with their own perspective. Not only that, the Bolsheviks
occasionally put out newspapers jointly with their supposedly worst enemies,
the Mensheviks. One such newspaper was 'Severny Golos' (Voice of the North) that called for a general
strike and insurrection in 1905. Around that time the Bolsheviks were grappling
with the significance of 1905. Nachalo, an official
Bolshevik paper, called for a dictatorship of the proletariat while another
paper Novaya Zhizn
advocated a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Now
we all understand that such doctrinal differences have led to numerous splits
in the Trotskyist movement, but back in the good old days it did not seem to
bother Lenin very much who wrote, "But have not disagreements of this kind
been observed at every socialist party in
Lorimer: Next Proyect
cites an incident [in John Reed's 10 Days that Shook the World] in which two
Bolsheviks voted against the position of the party in a mass meeting, implying
that such a breaking of the common party front was a norm of Bolshevik organisational practice.
(clip)
What the incident might suggest to Leninists is that Riazanov and Lozovsky were
"beta" Bolsheviks, who had not firmly understood that "to weaken
or break the unity of the common party front is the worst breach of discipline
and the worst mistake that can be made in the revolutionary struggle". In
fact, Riazanov and Lozovsky
were recent recruits to the Bolshevik Party, joining it in 1917. Fortunately,
their breach of discipline did not result in the defeat of Lenin's motion.
Reply: So Riazanov and
Lozovsky were not "real" Bolsheviks. Even
though this sort of business reminds me of unsavory "old Bolshevik"
attempts to isolate Trotsky, I will refer once again to John Reed. In Chapter 2
("The Coming Storm"), Reed refers to the fight in the Bolshevik party
about whether power should be seized from Kerensky:
"However, the right wing of the Bolsheviki,
led by Riazanov, Kameniev
and Zinoviev, continued to campaign against an armed uprising. On the morning
of October 31st appeared in 'Rabotchi Put' the first
installment of Lenin's 'Letter to the Comrades,' one of the most audacious
pieces of political propaganda the world has ever seen. In it Lenin seriously
presented the arguments in favour of insurrection, taking
as text the objections of Kameniev and Riazanov."
Can't get much more "old Bolshevik" than Kameniev and Zinoviev, can we? They somehow had no problems
with airing their differences in public, did they?
Lorimer: While there is a paucity of documentation
on individual expulsions from Lenin's party (since such expulsion would have
been carried out by local party units), there are two well-documented examples
of mass expulsions. The first was in April 1905. At the Third Congress of the
RSDLP, which was attended only by Bolsheviks, on the initiative of Lenin a
resolution was adopted expelling all the Mensheviks -- several hundred RSDLP
members at the very least.
Reply: And right after the expulsion, Mensheviks
and Bolsheviks were putting out newspapers together. On the other hand, when
people got expelled from Cannon's party, they were not only cut out of the
party political life; they became persona non grata.
Just talk to Cynthia Cochran if you want to know what happened to people who
got on James P. Cannon's wrong side. It is like being excommunicated from the
Catholic Church--probably worse.
Lorimer: Not only does Proyect imply that the Bolsheviks weren't really concerned
about their organisation's internal discipline, but
he asserts that "ideological uniformity" is a deadly threat to the
political health of a revolutionary party. By contrast, Lenin was very
concerned about building up the internal discipline of the Bolshevik organisation and saw its ideological uniformity as
essential to developing and maintaining such discipline.
Reply: This is followed by long quote from
"Ultraleft Communism, an
Infantile Disorder" to the effect that ideological homogeneity is a good
thing--in other words, the sort of boilerplate self-justification that is found
in all small socialist groups today. However, at the very time that Lenin was
writing this, the Communist Party of the
Lorimer: The implication of the last
paragraph is that the DSP is politically "based on an interpretation of
some historical question, such as the class nature of the
Reply: No, they only have to be reconciled to
belong to an organization that will never publish an alternative
interpretation. I myself think that it is preferable to leave aside questions
of "bureaucratic degeneration", etc. even if you are not required to
"agree" with it. (I can't imagine having much of a social life in the
DSP if you think that Stalin was not all bad.)
Lorimer: After the Bolsheviks
constituted themselves as the RSDLP in 1912, they rejected the idea that
minorities had a right to use the public press to criticise
the majority position.
Reply: By your own admission, Lenin thought
exactly the opposite in 1906. In any case, according to John Reed, public
debates between Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev over
whether to seize power or not were being held in 1917. So I wouldn't put much
stock in Bolshevik history, especially when you are embarked on a
"turn" that has very little in common with that history. If a
Socialist Alliance is to succeed, it will have to have much more diversity and
public airing of differences than anything seen in the Bolshevik Party, which
operated under Czarist repression.