chapters 1-5, "lenin: building the party"

The uneven development of different aspects of the struggle made it necessary always to look for the key link in every concrete situation. When this was the need for study, for laying the foundations of the first Marxist circles, Lenin stressed the central role of study. In the next stage, when the need was to overcome circle mentality, he would repeat again and again the importance of industrial agitation. At the next turn of the struggle, when “economism” needed to be smashed, Lenin did this with a vengeance. He always made the task of the day quite clear, repeating what was necessary ad infinitum in the plainest, heaviest, most single-minded hammer-blow pronouncements. Afterwards, he would regain his balance, straighten the stick, then bend it again in another direction. If this method has advantages in overcoming current obstacles, it also contains hazards for anyone wanting to use Lenin’s writing on tactical and organisational questions as a source for quotation. Authority by quotation is nowhere less justified than in the case of Lenin. If he is cited on any tactical or organisational question, the concrete issues that the movement was facing at the time must be made absolutely clear.

(...)How could the endorsement of this dictatorship be reconciled with the demand for a democratic republic? One of the delegates, Posadovsky, asked the Congress whether the party ought to subordinate its future policy to this or that basic democratic principle, as having an absolute value, or “must all democratic principles be subordinated exclusively to the interests of the party?” Plekhanov gave a clear and decisive answer:

Every democratic principle must be considered not by itself, abstractly, but in relation to that which may be called the fundamental principle of democracy, namely salus populi suprema lex. Translated into the language of the revolutionist, this means that the success of the revolution is the highest law. And if the success of the revolution demanded a temporary limitation on the working of this or that democratic principle, then it would be criminal to refrain from such a limitation. As my own personal opinion, I will say that even the principle of universal suffrage must be considered from the point of view of what I have designated the fundamental principle of democracy. It is hypothetically possible that we, the Social Democrats’ might speak out against universal suffrage. The bourgeoisie of the Italian republics once deprived persons belonging to the nobility of political rights. The revolutionary proletariat might limit the political rights of the higher classes just as the higher classes once limited their political rights. One can judge of the suitability of such measures only on the basis of the rule: salus revolutiae suprema lex.

And we must take the same position on the question of the duration of parliaments. If in a burst of revolutionary enthusiasm the people chose a very fine parliament – a kind of chambre introuvable – then we would be bound to try to make of it a long parliament; and if the elections turned out unsuccessfully, then we would have to try to disperse it not in two years but if possible in two weeks.

Plekhanov’s statement precisely described the actual policies of the Bolsheviks, especially in 1917; he lived to bitterly regret his own words. Martov, who by the time the Congress ended had become Lenin’s opponent, did not at this stage disagree with Plekhanov’s statement regarding the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, his definition was much less extreme. A few weeks later, in a report on the Congress to the League Congress of Russian Social Democrats Abroad, Martov tried to “defend” Plekhanov by toning down his statement: “These words [Plekhanov’s] aroused the indignation of some of the delegates; this could easily have been avoided if Comrade Plekhanov had added that it was of course impossible to imagine so tragic a situation as that the proletariat, in order to consolidate its victory, should have to trample on such political rights as freedom of the press. (Plekhanov: “Merci.”)”

(...) How could Martov and Trotsky, who wholeheartedly supported Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, which proposed that absolute authority should be given to the Central Committee of the party, reject Lenin’s definition of party membership? To combine a strong centralist leadership with loose membership was eclecticism taken to an extreme.

The harsh necessity for democratic centralism within the revolutionary working-class party is derived from the harsh imperatives of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Martov and Trotsky balked at this. Moreover, the leadership of a revolutionary party must provide the highest example of devotion and complete identification with the party in its daily life. This gives it the moral authority to demand the maximum sacrifice from the rank and file. Years earlier, Engels, in arguing against the anarchists, had said that the proletarian revolution demanded a very strong discipline, a strong authority.

Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. [23]

Thus the revolutionary party cannot avoid making strong demands for sacrifice and discipline from its own members. Martov’s definition of party membership fitted the weakness of his conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

(...) In his 230-page review of the 1903 Congress and its aftermath, called One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (written February–May 1904), he says that to “the individualism of the intellectual, which already manifested itself in the controversy over Paragraph 1, revealing its tendency to opportunist argument and anarchistic phrase-mongering, all proletarian organisation and discipline seems to be serfdom.” [50]

He quotes a letter written to Iskra (now a Menshevik paper), which denounced him for visualising the party as “an immense factory” headed by a director in the shape of the Central Committee. Lenin’s comment is that the writer

never guesses that this dreadful word of his immediately betrays the mentality of the bourgeois intellectual unfamiliar with either the practice or the theory of proletarian organisation. For the factory, which seems only a bogey to some, represents that highest form of capitalist co-operation which has united and disciplined the proletariat, taught it to organise, and placed it at the head of all the other sections of the toiling and exploited population. And Marxism, the ideology of the proletariat trained by capitalism, has been and is teaching unstable intellectuals to distinguish between the factory as a means of exploitation (discipline based on fear of starvation) and the factory as a means of a technically highly developed form of production. The discipline and organisation which come so hard to the bourgeois intellectual are very easily acquired by the proletariat just because of this factory “schooling.” [51]

(...) In tsarist Russia, the differentiation between consistent revolutionaries, centrists, and reformists was impeded by the autocratic regime itself. In Western Europe, the most moderate elements of the labour movement were frankly describing themselves as reformists. But under the tsarist regime, even the most moderate of socialists could not constitute themselves into a party of reform. The “parliamentary road to socialism” could not attract where parliament did not exist. A semi-parliament at least was needed – the Tsarist Duma of later years – for a parliamentary cretinism to raise its head. Nobody in the Russian socialist movement in 1903 openly unfurled the banner of reformism.

(...) The difference between the concept of centralism expressed in What Is to Be Done? or Letter to a Comrade on our Organisational Tasks, and the reality among the Bolsheviks in 1904 and 1905 is remarkable! There was a total cleavage between the ideal of a coherent, efficient party structure as visualised in Lenin’s writings, and the ramshackle party organisation that existed. Lenin had to strive with all the power at his command, to build up an organisation independent of and in opposition to the Mensheviks, and to create a party machine. He was so absorbed in the struggle against the Mensheviks that, incredible as it may seem, during the whole of the year 1904, there are only three references in his writings to the Russo-Japanese war. The overwhelming dominant theme is the split with the Mensheviks. A whole volume of his Collected Works, one of the stoutest, is all but filled with his writings on the Congress and the split, written in the most polemical, hard and irritable fashion. Was it not madness to concentrate on building a party machine while an earthquake was shaking the state? But Lenin was not one to deviate from a decision arrived at centrally.

(...) Unlike Marx and Engels, who lived in a period of expanding capitalism and hence did not emphasise party organisation, the immediacy of revolution for Lenin meant that party organisation was of cardinal importance. He could never have written, as Marx did to Engels on February 11, 1851:

I am much pleased with the public and authentic isolation in which we now find ourselves, you and I. It perfectly corresponds to our principles and our position. The system of reciprocal concessions, of half-measures tolerated only in order to keep up appearances, and obligation to share in public with all these asses in the general absurdity of the party – all that is done with now.

Nor could he have replied to Marx as Engels did on February 12, 1851:

We now have a chance again at last ... to show that we need no popularity, no support from any party whatsoever ... From now on we are responsible only to ourselves, and when the moment comes that these gentlemen need us, we shall be in a situation to be able to dictate our own terms. Till then we shall at least have peace. To tell the truth, even a certain loneliness ... How can people like us, who avoid official positions like the plague, ever find ourselves at home in a “party”? ... The principal thing for the moment is: some way of getting our ideas into print ... What will all the gossip and scandal mean which the whole émigré pack may circulate against you, once you answer them with your political economy?

(...) To a person standing on the sidelines – even to many of those involved – 1903–04 was a period of squabbles, interminable discussions, splits between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, argument, and splits inside the Bolshevik faction itself – at a time when Russia was on the eve of a revolution. Trotsky at that time considered Lenin’s factionalism to be sheer lunacy. In a pamphlet written in April 1904, he states: “Just at a time when history has placed before us the enormous task of cutting the knot of world reaction, Russian Social Democrats do not seem to care for anything except a petty internal struggle.” What a “heartrending tragedy” this was, and what a “nightmarish atmosphere” it created; “almost everybody was aware of the criminal character of the split.”