7/29/2019 Bolshevism vs. SWP: To lead the working class or follow the TU bureaucracy By Ret Marut

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Leon Trotsky: I am confident of the victory of the Fourth International; Go Forward!

In an article entitled The birth of the Bolshevik partyin So-cialist Workeron 21 January last Julie Sherry correctly

sets out the differences between a revolutionary party aspioneered in theory and practice by Lenin and a reformistparty of the whole class as theorised by Karl Kautsky,

The Mensheviks stuck to the common-sense idea that a socialistparty meant one party for all workers, even if they had differentpolitics. But Vladimir Lenin, a prominent leader of the Bolsheviks,had another idea of what a party should be. His model starts withthe fact that there is a spectrum of ideas within the working classfrom revolutionary to reactionary, with most people falling some-where in between. So while some workers accept racist ideas, forexample, others are staunchly anti-racist. Lenin said a revolutionaryparty should group together those with the most advanced ideas sothey can try to win over other people.

There, in a few pithy sentences, is the essence of Lenin-ism. So the British SWP has made a great leap forwardand at last overcome its opportunism and tailendist politi-cal method? Unfortunately no because later in the pieceshe manages to assert the exact opposite to this position,

The Bolsheviks understood that the party learns from the workingclass and is forged in the thick of class struggle. Its role is not to

bring great ideas ready-made to workers too ignorant tohave them. It is to take the best ideas thrown up by workersthemselves, such as the soviets, and attempt to generalisethem.

Not even the great ideas ready-made in the works ofMarx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky were sufficient to leadthese workers; apparently, they would just lead them-selves. And this exactly fits their programme of bowing tothe TU bureaucracy. And then she finished with a tale ofhow the revolution in 1917 triumphed which is simply afairy story,

The Bolsheviks did make mistakes... Leon Trotsky de-scribed the party as lagging behind the working class. It wasdisorientated by the sudden dramatic change in the politicalenvironment.

This fails to indentify who it was lagged behind the work-ing class. The editorial board of Pravda included

Vyacheslav Molotov and Alexander Shlyapnikov who hadopposed Alexander Kerenskys provisional governmentbut these were ousted by Stalin and Matvei Muranovwhen they returned from exile in March 1917, followingthe February revolution. They swung the editorial line tothe right and to critical support for Kerensky with thehelp of Lev Kamenev. The ranks of the party were forcontinuing the revolution and so were opposed to this linethat by mid-March rank and file worker Bolshevik cellsin the Vyborg district were voting for calls to expel thePravda leadership from the party. 1917 Russian Revolu-tion - Lenin Re-arms the Party, http://

www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/1179The vacillations of the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd did notreflect the outlook of the rank and file Bolshevik workers who

were more in touchwith the mood in thefactories and bar-racks. The Bolsheviksin the Vyborg districtdemanded that powerbe taken over by theSoviet.

Bolshevism: The Roadto Revolution by AlanWoodsSo Sherrys a mas-sive argument inthe party over whatto do in a dual

power situation,in fact was a strug-gle between Leninin alliance with theranks against alayer of old Bolshevik leaders who had taken a right wingposition of support for Kerensky. When Lenin returnedin early April and put forward his revolutionary April The-ses and then Trotsky took the same line they won thisargument because there was already support for it in theranks of the Bolshevik party and some middle layers andamong the best of the other groups who were serious

about revolution.But nonetheless there is a grain of truth or, more cor-rectly, good reason for the confusion displayed in the cen-trist method of Julie Sherry and the SWP. It was notenough to simply to have the correct programme and putthat forward to the masses in a propagandistic manner.That is what Lenin learned from the failed revolution of1905 and the appearance of the soviets; there he saw howhe had bent the stick. But that did not mean that Leninnow adopted the method of the Mensheviks, which pro-duced such good but short-term results. Their opportun-ism contained an element of listening to the masses, but it

tail ended them to such a degree that it quickly led to dis-aster when reality imposed itself on the masses and onthem. From this experience he developed the theory ofthe Leninist party and with it the methodology of commu-nism, how to intervene and win the leadership of themasses. First let us say what is wrong with the Cliffitemethod of approach. These quotes here are from BruceLandau, a left Shachtmanite in the US in 2002: [1]

Cliff quotes the liberal historian Richard Pipes, who characterisesEconomism as that trend which subordinated politics as a matter ofprinciple, and Cliff affirms that here Pipes has put theeconomists in correct perspective But this critique is an ex-tremely superficial one and therefore wrong. Pipes is wrong,

(Menshevik Theodore) Dan is wrong and Cliff is wrong. All three ofthem are transfixed by Economisms form, by its temporary appear-ance, and they therefore miss its essence entirely.

Bolshevism vs. SWP: To lead the working

class or follow the TU bureaucracy By Ret Marut

The SWP tail end the working class; theUAF allow David Cameron as a sponsorbecause pretend that fascism is not aclass issue.

http://uk.mg.bt.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_edn1http://uk.mg.bt.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_edn1

7/29/2019 Bolshevism vs. SWP: To lead the working class or follow the TU bureaucracy By Ret Marut

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Leon Trotsky: I am confident of the victory of the Fourth International; Go Forward!

The essence of Economism was its funda-mental, unwavering opportunism, its deter-mination that the role of Marxists was topassively tail after the mass working-classmovement at each stage of its developmentrather than to act as the classs vanguard. Itrefused to assume the responsibility to

speak to the proletariat about its class tasksas a whole, to pound away at what the classin general did not yet know and refused tobelieve. The Economists preferred to bowbefore every prejudice currently harbouredby the workers with whom they made con-tact.

The strike movement to which the Econo-mists were adapting overcame its disinterestin politics by 1901 (without the help of theEconomists), producing bloody clashes withpolice and troops. Once this change wasregistered and acknowledged by the Econo-mists, they were quick to abandon their rigid

stage theory, their alleged subordination ofpolitics as a matter of principle. Theirslogan now became - still tailing after events- Lend the economic struggle a politicalcharacter!.

Did this mean that Economism as such wasnow dead? Not at all. The switch from tail-ing after the spontaneous economic strug-gles to tailing after their resultant politicalstruggles changed nothing fundamentalabout Economism. Least of all did theswitch involve abandoning their definingopportunist nature, their instinctive gravi-tation toward the line of least resistance,

their characteristic adaptation to the aver-age worker as he was at the time.

Thus, Lenin concludes (and he seemsto be arguing directly with his latestbiographer [Cliff]):

There is politics and politics. Thus, we seethat Rabochaya Mysl does not so muchdeny the political struggle as it bows to itsspontaneity, to its unconsciousness.While fully recognising the political strug-gle (better: the political desires and de-mands of the workers), which arisesspontaneously from the working-class

movement itself, it absolutely refusesindependently to work out a specificallySocial-Democratic politics correspondingto the general tasks of socialism and topresent-day conditions in Russia.

The change in organisational form ofthe SWP in 1974 from a loose, semi-anarchist one to a Leninist one in-volved no change in its fundamentallyopportunist relationship with themass of the working class at all. Theymerely centralised their opportunism.

Pham Binh, Paul Le Blanc, Lars T Lih

Now let us comment on the clashes

between Pham Binh, Paul Le Blanc,Lars T Lih etc in the pages of WeeklyWorker and Links - InternationalJournal of Socialist Renewal. It seemsto us that these long academic debatesare missing a crucial aspect of Leninsdevelopment after 1905. Bruce Lan-dau above seems to accept that by1903 Lenin was basically sussed outon what to do and how to do it. Ourtheoreticians concentrate on the splitof 1912 as a definitive turning point,or not, in his political evolution.

Of course Le Blanc, who is battingfor the US ISO group now, a Cliffiteorganisation, must be supportedagainst both Binh and Lih because heis advocating a form of Leninismagainst the Occupy Movementist Binhand the Kautskyite Lih. But we in-cluded the Landau piece to show thisLeninism is the variety adopted byCliff in the mid 1970s, it is merely abureaucratic centralist opportunisttype, i.e. not Leninism at all.

After 1903 and What is to be donethenext single major theoretical workproduced by Lenin was in 1908,Mate-rialism and Empirio Criticism. Neither inthe potted histories of Bolshevismproduced by Dave Stockton and Stu-art King of Workers Power or in thecurrent debate of the three theoreti-cians of Leninism is there an evalua-tion of this work or its place in hispolitical evolution, even by those whoacknowledged that he did evolve andhad to do so.

As we have wrote in IDOT no 3:

Trotsky continually asserted that the Bol-sheviks led the revolution in 1917 becausethey learned the lessons of 1905. We

would assert that what the Bolshevikslearned from 1905 was:1. The need for the United Front

and transitional politics. In seek-ing to develop these the realisa-tion developed this was the appli-cation of the dialectic and a newapproach to the UF was needed.

2. The need to study and developthe dialectic itself to defend anddevelop dialectical and historicalmaterialism against Mach andBogdanov. Lenin began this workas early as 1906.

When the Bolsheviks were exposed as sotactically inept in 1905 they began to seekthe roots of the problem. They had to

look into their own soul. It was notagainst the Mensheviks that Lenin con-ducted the struggle to defend and developMarxist philosophy but chiefly within theranks of the Bolshevik party. Between1906 and 1910 Lenin waged a major bat-tle in defence of dialectical and historicalmaterialism. He wrote Materialism andEmpirio Criticism in 1908 and conductedthe struggle against Bogdanov, basically indefence of Engels elaboration of thedialectic. His Ten questions to a lecturerof 1908, for example, directs this defencefrom abroad against Bogdanovs follow-ers within the party.He consulted or studied over two hun-dred publications in preparation of thismajor work, visiting libraries in Geneva,Paris and London. He spent a whole

month studying at the British Librarybecause it contained works not to be hadelsewhere. In 1914 to 1916 he conductedhis major study of Hegel and the historyof philosophy. This prepared him for thesharp turns and political struggles againstthe Bolshevik Central Committee whowere succumbing to national chauvinismin defence of the revolution when hearrived back from Switzerland in thesealed train in April 1917.

Though Lenin stressed that philosophyshould never be a split questionandthus saved the revolutionary soul of thelikes of Lunacharskynonetheless the1908 struggle educated a new layer ofBolsheviks who became the front lineleaders of the revolution in 1917.

Endnotes

[1] Lenin and the Bolshevik Party: A reply toTony Cliff and the International Socialists(2002) By Bruce Landau, http://links.org.au/node/2711[2] http://marxistupdate.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/lars-t-lih-on-pham-binh-tony-cliff.html[3] http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004785

[4] http://links.org.au/node/2832[5] http://www.laborstandard.org/Le_Blanc_Response_to_Pham.html

And the terrible consequences of the Stalinist,

Anarchist and POUM opportunist popular fron-

tist tail ending of the working class reformist

consciousness in the Spanish Civil War.