The SWP vs. Lenin BUREAUCRATIC CENTRALISM OR DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM?
The SWP vs. Lenin BUREAUCRATIC CENTRALISM OR DEMOCRATIC
CENTRALISM?
Introduction The proletariat does not recognise
unity of action without freedom to discuss and criticise...There
can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity
of essential shadings, without an open struggle between various
tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and
which organisations of the party are pursuing this or that line.
Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built.-- Lenin
One of the central ideas of the revolutionary Marxist tradition
is the need to unify intervention in the class struggle with the
task of developing the theoretical basis of Marxism in order to
make it more effective. Marxism is unique among anti-capitalist
traditions in its understanding of the significance of both
these elements, and its refusal to privilege one at the expense
of the other. Lenin's famous remark that "Without revolutionary
theory, there can be no revolutionary practice" does not just
express the idea that theory is essential for revolutionary
practice; it also means that revolutionary theory is inseparable
from its practical application in the class struggle. Marx made
the same point in the Theses on Feuerbach:
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human
thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical
question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is, the
reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking. The
dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is
isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
The history of the attempt by Marxists to apply this
understanding shows, however, that it is one thing to grasp it
abstractly, but quite another to carry it through as a guide to
action. The revolutionary left is littered with examples of
those who, despite their protests to the contrary, either
collapse into unthinking activism (syndicalism and 'economism')
or build elaborate theoretical constructs with no bearing on, or
relationship to, class struggle. Understanding the 'unity of
theory and practice' in theory is clearly not enough to make it
a reality. However, many Marxists seem to think that repeating a
phrase often enough is the same as to carrying out its meaning.
This failing has had disastrous consequences for attempts to
build revolutionary groups and parties. The experience of even
Marxist organisations that are also anti-Stalinist - the
Trotskyists - follows a depressingly familiar pattern. They
either adopt an insanely 'pure' theoreticism which only
marginalises them from mainstream working class organisation and
experience, heightening their sectarianism and encouraging the
development of an internal regime that is ossified and
inflexible; or, they become solely 'activist' organisations in
which theory is the preserve of the leadership and the members
are discouraged from developing anything but the most cursory
understanding of the Marxist tradition. In both cases, the
result is elitist.
Neither of these types of organisation has the capability to
develop into a mass working class party with the ability to lead
a revolution, as neither can recruit the best worker activists
and develop them into revolutionary leaders with the ability to
fight both inside and outside the party for the strategy and
tactics necessary to win in any struggle. Without a membership
capable of formulating strategy, testing the perspectives of the
party in the working class movement, and, if necessary,
challenging the party leadership when it makes mistakes - in
other words, without a membership that is loyal to the party but
not deferential to its leadership - no revolutionary
organisation can develop strategy and tactics, maintain a
healthy internal regime, and recruit militants.
Many working class militants are suspicious of the revolutionary
left for this reason. Anybody who has spent time involved in
'Leninist' organisations will have come across workers who agree
with Marxist politics but refuse to join the party because they
believe it to be undemocratic and authoritarian. Many draw the
conclusion that Leninism itself is at fault, as every
organisation that proclaims itself Leninist appears to follow
the same pattern.
Only one organisation on the British revolutionary left - the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP), formerly the International
Socialists (IS) - has a tradition of at least attempting to
avoid these dangers. The SWP prides itself on its serious
orientation on the working class movement, and also on its
distinctive theoretical contribution to the development of
Marxism as a tool capable of understanding an ever-changing
reality. Through its theories of state capitalism, the permanent
arms economy, and deflected permanent revolution, the SWP has
shown the continuing relevance of Marxism for anyone who wants
to overthrow class society. For this reason, the SWP is by far
the largest and most visible revolutionary organisation in
Britain today, and has managed to avoid, to some extent, the
pitfalls that have engulfed other organisations.
This relative success has, however, been achieved despite a
failing that threatens to drive the SWP down the same dead-end
that the rest of the left has ended up in. The SWP has never
developed a coherent theory of the party and its relationship to
the working class, and, in the absence of such a theory, it
exhibits features of authoritarianism and sectarianism that mark
other revolutionary organisations. The SWP's 'theory' of party
and class - and its practical implementation - consists of
one-sided borrowings from various of Lenin's writings that are
completely insensitive to the context in which they were
written, their limitations, and even where Lenin was just plain
wrong. As such, they are an inadequate guide to action and lead
to practical political failings. This is not, then, just a
theoretical question, but one that has a real impact on the
growth of the revolutionary movement and its capacity to lead
workers' struggle. If the conclusion drawn is that the SWP's
weakness in this area has fatal consequences, revolutionaries
must draw practical lessons from this fact and act accordingly.
Which Leninism? It is impossible to understand the development
of Lenin's thinking about revolutionary organisation and its
relationship to the class struggle without recognising its
historical context. On the question of how the working class
develops political consciousness, for instance, the Lenin of
1894-96 appears to contradict the Lenin of 1902, and the Lenin
of 1905 again contradicts the Lenin of 1902:
...the workers' struggle against the factory owners for their
daily needs automatically and inevitably spurs the workers on to
think of state, political questions, questions of how the
Russian state is governed, how laws and regulations are issued,
and whose interests they serve. Each clash in the factory
necessarily brings the workers into conflict with the laws and
representatives of state authority. (1895, Collected Works Vol.
5, p.115.)
...the spontaneous development of the working class movement
leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology... for the
spontaneous working class movement is trade unionism..., and
trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers
by the bourgeoisie. (1902, Collected Works Vol. 5, p.384.)
Revolution undoubtedly teaches with a rapidity and thoroughness
which appears incredible in peaceful periods of political
development. And, what is particularly important, it teaches not
only the leaders, but the masses as well... But the question
that now confronts a militant political party is: shall we be
able to teach the revolution anything? (1905, Selected Works
pp.50-51.)
This contradiction can only be resolved, and organisational
conclusions drawn for revolutionaries today, by understanding
how Lenin's theoretical development is bound up with the
historical experience of the Russian working class. This is not
to say that Leninism is irrelevant outside of the Russian
experience, as some have claimed, but it means that
revolutionaries should be suspicious of schematic, one-sided
applications of this or that element of Lenin's thought. An
example of this schematicism is the way that Lenin's 1902
polemic What is to be Done?, with its attacks on the 'economist'
idea that working class struggle inevitably leads to political
consciousness, and its emphasis on the need for a highly
centralised organisation of professional revolutionaries to
bring socialism to the working class 'from without', is held up
in practice by contemporary Leninists as the model of democratic
centralist politics. But Lenin himself wrote in 1907 that "What
is to be Done? is a controversial corrective to 'economist'
distortions and it would be wrong to regard the pamphlet in any
other light" (Collected Works Vol. 13 p.108). Lenin was right to
attack the 'economists', and right to call for an independent
organisation of revolutionaries, but his argument that socialist
consciousness comes to the working class only 'from without' is
not just a case of 'bending the stick too far'; it is wrong.
The period beginning in 1894 saw the transformation of the
Russian Marxist intelligentsia from an utterly marginal force of
propagandistic study circles, of necessity involved in
theoretical debate about the nature of the coming revolution,
the role of the peasantry in relation to the working class, and
so on, into a still marginal but nonetheless significantly more
agitational force with emerging success in the leadership of
sectional strike activity. Lenin was involved with Martov and
others in the St Petersburg League, which had a systematic
orientation on the St Petersburg working class movement and
regarded agitational activity as crucial to winning workers to
Marxism.
The success of this movement of the intelligentsia into direct
involvement with the class struggle was the spur to the
development of the 'economist distortions' that Lenin later
attacked in What is to be Done? Economism drew the conclusion
that Marxists should subordinate everything to the economic
struggle of the working class; that such struggle, inevitably
and by stages, would lead to the development of socialist class
consciousness. This tradition mirrored that of Bernstein's
'revisionism' in Germany, with its sharp division of economics
from politics and its emphasis on gradualism as the key to
socialist transformation of society. The logic of this position
is well described by Richard Pipes:
Whereas in theory agitation was political, in practice it
remained confined to economics. From agitation, which pushed
politics into the background as a matter of political
expedience, it was only one step to economism proper, which
subordinated politics to economics as a matter of principle.
(Social Democracy and the St Petersburg Labour Movement, 1963,
p.124.)
Lenin's response to this development in What is to be Done? was
to insist - against his own earlier writing and practice as well
as against the economists - that socialist politics had to be
brought to the economic struggle from the outside, from an
organisation of professional revolutionaries "trained to respond
to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse, no
matter what class is affected." (What is to be Done?, p.69.)
Spontaneous trade union activity would not lead to social
democratic (Marxist) consciousness.
What is to be Done? is not only an attack on economist
spontaneism, however; it is also a statement of the kind of
organisational structure Lenin felt was needed if Marxists were
to capitalise on the growing confidence of the working class
movement and win a leadership position within it. But again, the
structure that Lenin recommends cannot be understood without
recognising that the revolutionaries were operating in an
autocratic state under conditions of complete illegality. Lenin
argues for a tightly disciplined, centralised, top-down
structure and a membership limited to those who are willing to
be professional revolutionaries. He did not, however, regard
this as a necessity under all circumstances, but purely as a
response to the political repression meted out by Tsarism. It
should be remembered that in this period he still regarded Karl
Kautsky as his mentor, and the German SPD as a model of
political organisation in a bourgeois democracy:
in an autocratic state, the more we confine the membership of
such an organisation to people who are professionally involved
in revolutionary activity and who have been professionally
trained in the art of combating the political police, the more
difficult will it be to unearth the organisation. (What is to be
Done?, p.121.)
Under conditions of political freedom our party will be built
entirely on the elective principle. Under the autocracy this is
impracticable for the collective thousands of workers who make
up the party. (Collected Works Vol. 8, p.196, my emphasis)
The 1905 revolution necessitated another change of direction,
with Lenin arguing that the working class is "spontaneously,
instinctively social-democratic" and fighting hard against
sectarian and conservative tendencies within the Bolshevik party
that had developed precisely as a result of the earlier emphasis
on centralism and anti-spontaneism. The 'spontaneous' invention
of the soviet by the Russian working class in 1905, and the
distrust of sections of the Bolsheviks towards it, showed
clearly that centralised vanguard organisation alone does not
guarantee political clarity, and that leadership both inside and
outside the party has to be won and re-won as circumstances
change.
The above sketch should show that present-day Leninists cannot
simply parrot isolated quotes from Lenin and call the result a
theory of party and class. It is not Lenin's attitude at any
particular moment, but his method that needs to be applied, and
it is in this light that I now want to turn to the SWP's
approach to these questions. The SWP's Leninism The two most
important attempts within the SWP tradition to understand
Lenin's theory of democratic centralism are Chris Harman's
pamphlet Party and Class (originally published in International
Socialism journal at the end of 1968), and Cliff's four volume
biography of Lenin published between 1975-79. Harman's pamphlet
was written against the backdrop of the explosive growth of the
revolutionary left after May 1968, a left which in many cases
rejected Leninism in favour of various strands of libertarian
Marxism and anarchism. Harman's pamphlet is an attempt to
explain why party organisation is necessary, and to justify it
theoretically. Cliff's biography, however, has a much more
directly practical purpose: to defend a particular conception of
party leadership through historical illustration. Harman makes
this point himself in the preface to his pamphlet:
[Party and Class] does not begin to deal with the immense
practical and political problems of building a socialist party
in actual historical circumstances, of the twists and turns that
are needed from time to time to ensure that the revolutionary
organisation is combining principled politics with an organic
connection with the most militant and active sections of the
class. For this, readers are advised to follow up this pamphlet
by reading the first volume of Tony Cliff's biography of Lenin."
(Harman, Party and Class, SWP 1983, p.3.)
I want to argue that this is bad advice, because Cliff's reading
of Lenin is used by the SWP leadership to justify an
undemocratic, militarised and unprincipled attitude to both
party and class; and that this contradicts the conception of
Leninism that Harman argues for in theory. I also want to argue,
however, that Harman's pamphlet itself contains confusions that
carry the seeds of an authoritarian reading of Lenin. Harman's
Party and Class Harman stresses, rightly, that the apparently
contradictory elements of Lenin's thought sketched above (his
emphasis on the spontaneous possibilities of working class
struggle on the one hand, and his insistence that
revolutionaries must organise as a vanguard on the other) can be
resolved. As Harman explains:
... the real theoretical basis for [Lenin's] argument on the
party is not that the working class is incapable on its own of
coming to theoretical socialist consciousness... The real basis
for his argument is that the level of consciousness in the
working class is never uniform. However rapidly the mass of
workers learn in a revolutionary situation, some sections will
be more advanced than others. To merely take delight in the
spontaneous transformation is to accept uncritically whatever
transitory products this throws up. But these reflect the
backwardness of the class as well as its movement forward, its
situation in bourgeois society as well as its potentiality of
further development so as to make a revolution. Workers are not
automatons without ideas. If they are not won over to a
socialist world view by the intervention of conscious
revolutionaries, they will continue to accept the bourgeois
ideology of existing society. (Harman, p.13.)
This unevenness in the working class does not only make it
necessary for Marxists to form a party; it also determines the
organisational form this party should take. The aim of the party
is to organise the most advanced, class-conscious workers in
such a way that they can most effectively intervene in the class
struggle to win the rest of the class away from bourgeois and
reformist leadership. In order to achieve this, the party must
be both politically principled and tactically flexible. Hence
Lenin's formula of 'democratic centralism.' Again, Harman puts
this well:
The revolutionary party exists so as to make it possible for the
most conscious and militant workers and intellectuals to engage
in scientific discussion as a prelude to concerted and cohesive
action. This is not possible without general participation in
party activities... 'Discipline' means acceptance of the need to
relate individual experience to the total theory and practice of
the party. As such it is not opposed to, but necessary
prerequisite of the ability to make independent evaluations of
concrete situations. That is also why 'discipline' for Lenin
does not mean hiding differences that exist within the party,
but rather exposing them to the full light of day so as to argue
them out. (Harman, p.17.)
Democratic centralism, thus understood, has nothing in common
with either its Stalinist distortion in the Communist Parties or
the abstract leadership fetishism of the various Trotskyist
groups which, ironically enough, mirror the Stalinist tradition
in this respect. The picture Harman paints is of a party with
both the most thorough-going internal democracy and the
strongest possible external cohesiveness, with both elements
essential to the party's development as a vanguard organisation
of the working class in fact as well as theory. However, some of
Harman's formulations contain dangers.
First, he argues that centralism is primary in the sense that it
is the prerequisite for party democracy:
Centralism for Lenin is far from being the opposite of
developing the initiative and independence of party members; it
is the precondition of this. (Harman, p.17.)
Now, while it is true that centralism is necessary for the
democratic decisions of the revolutionary party to have any
practical impact on the class struggle, Harman is overstating
the case. In fact, his position is the exact opposite of that
argued by Lenin even in 1902, at the height of his polemicising
against the economists for a centralised vanguard party:
We must centralise the leadership of the movement. We must
also... as far as possible decentralise responsibility to the
party on the part of its individual members, of every
participant in its work, and of every circle belonging to or
associated with the party. This decentralisation is an essential
prerequisite of revolutionary centralism and an essential
corrective to it. (Lenin, Letter to a Comrade on Our
Organisational Tasks , 1902.)
Harman's position carries the danger that democracy can be
treated as useful or necessary only when it complements the
centralism of the party; but if this is the case, then it isn't
really democracy at all. Sometimes revolutionary democracy is
directed against the centralised organs of the party, and with
good reason. Think of the numerous occasions during the 1905 and
1917 revolutions when the party organs were to the right of the
mass of the party membership and had to be pushed from below
to respond properly to changes in the objective situation. Lenin
is right: in these circumstances, the democracy of the party is
what shifts it, not its centralised 'will.' If centralism is to
be a political centralism, and avoid the dangers of
bureaucratism and authoritarianism, it must be based on a
political culture of independent and critical thinking from the
party membership.
Harman's second weakness is related to the first. Both Rosa
Luxemburg and Trotsky criticised Lenin's formulations in What is
to be Done? as being substitutionist and bureaucratic. Harman
gives the two most famous quotes:
The unconscious comes before the conscious. The logic of history
comes before the subjective logic of the human beings who
participate in the historic process. The tendency is for the
directing organs of the socialist party to play a conservative
role. (Rosa Luxemburg, Organisational Questions of Russian
Social Democracy, 1904, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder
1970, p.121.)
the organisation of the party substitutes itself for the party
as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for
the organisation; and finally 'the dictator' substitutes himself
for the Central Committee. (Trotsky, quoted in Isaac Deutscher,
The Prophet Armed, Oxford 1954, p.90.)
Harman's response is that bureaucratism is only a danger for
certain types of organisation:
In the writings of Lenin there is an ever-present implicit
recognition of the problems that worry Luxemburg and Trotsky so
much. But there is not the same fatalistic succumbing to them.
There is an increasing recognition that it is not organisation
as such, but particular forms and aspects of organisation that
give rise to these. (Harman, p.11, my emphasis.)
This is an inadequate response to the very real problems
Luxemburg and Trotsky raise. Whilst it is undoubtedly true Lenin
was right against both Luxemburg and Trotsky in his
organisational formulations, it is simply complacent to assume,
as Harman does and Lenin never did, that the organisational form
itself is a sufficient guard against the dangers of
substitutionism and bureaucratism. Such distortions arise
organically in any organisation that has a central leadership
and they must be recognised and consciously fought. This is not
because of 'human nature', or because 'power corrupts', as the
anarchists would have it, but because the development of a party
is always uneven. As the class struggle rises, new leaders
emerge, but when the struggle ebbs, these leaders become
separated from those that put them in power, they begin to
develop their own interests (mostly in clinging on to their
power), and a low level of struggle means that the rank and file
lack the confidence to hold them to account. In this way, the
development of bureaucracy is rooted in the combined and uneven
development of the class struggle.
Once again, the best guarantee against such distortions is for
party democracy to act as a limit on the centralism of the party
organs and leadership. This is not to argue for federalism, or
some kind of libertarian alternative to Leninism, and is the
very opposite of fatalism, as it recognises that the party
regime must be continuously shaped and reshaped through the
experience of the struggle. It is simply to recognise the
reality that Luxemburg and Trotsky were right to attack the
dangers of bureaucratism regardless of the fact that they were
wrong against Lenin in the specific circumstances of the debate
surrounding What is to be Done?
Harman's argument that only particular kinds of organisation are
prone to bureaucratism leads him to confusion on the debate
between Lenin and Luxemburg. He suggests that Luxemburg's
critique of Lenin is really directed against the German SPD:
there is a continual equivocation in Luxemburg's writings on the
role of the party... Such equivocation cannot be understood
without taking account of the concrete situation Luxemburg was
really concerned about. She was a leading member of the SPD, but
always uneasy about its mode of operation. (Harman, p.8.)
This suspicion of the SPD is hardly a criticism of Luxemburg! It
is important to recognise that in the period 1903-04, when Lenin
was attacking opportunism and revisionism, his target was not
Karl Kautsky - Lenin still regarded Bolshevism as a continuation
of Kautskyism - but Bernstein. It was Luxemburg who recognised
the conservatism of Kautskyism and her attacks on Lenin have to
be understood in this light. When she argues against Lenin that
organisational methods may encourage opportunism and
bureaucratism, not guard against them, she is right and Lenin is
wrong, and the experience of Kautskyism is proof of this. As
Trotsky wrote in 1934, in an article defending Luxemburg against
Stalin:
There is no gainsaying that Rosa Luxemburg impassionately
counterposed the spontaneity of mass actions to the
'victory-crowned' conservative policy of the German social
democracy especially after the revolution of 1905. This
counterposition had a thoroughly revolutionary and progressive
character. At a much earlier date than Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg
grasped the retarding character of the ossified party and trade
union apparatus and began a struggle against it. (Trotsky,
Luxemburg and the Fourth International, in Rosa Luxemburg
Speaks, p.452.)
One does not need to be a defender of spontaneism or an opponent
of Lenin to see that Harman's metaphysical idea that democratic
centralist organisation is in some way inoculated against
bureaucratism does not stand up to scrutiny. When Leninists talk
of the vanguard party, of the correct balance between democracy
and centralism, they should be wary of assuming that declaring
it to be so is sufficient to make it so. The revolutionary party
has a duty to prove to the working class that it is capable and
worthy of leadership. Democratic centralism is a necessary, but
not a sufficient, condition for the revolutionary party to lead
a revolution. And the party's centralism, as Luxemburg suggests,
must arise from the actions and will of the most class-conscious
sections of the working class. If it does not, it will
inevitably mark a break with the norms of the revolutionary
Marxist tradition.
The fact is that the social democracy is not joined to the
organisation of the proletariat. It is itself the proletariat.
And because of this, social democratic centralism is essentially
different from Blanquist centralism. It can only be the
concentrated will of the individuals and groups representative
of the most class-conscious, militant, advanced sections of the
working class. It is, so to speak, the 'self-centralism' of the
advanced sectors of the proletariat. It is the rule of the
majority within its own party.
The indispensable conditions for the realisation of social
democratic centralism are: (1) The existence of a large
contingent of workers educated in the political struggle. (2)
The possibility for the workers to develop their own political
activity through direct influence on public life, in a party
press, and public congresses, etc. (Luxemburg, op. cit. p.119.)
Cliff's Lenin If Harman's Party and Class contains the seeds of
an authoritarianism quite alien to the spirit of the IS
tradition, surely Cliff's monumental four volume biography of
Lenin can act as a corrective?
Sadly, this is not the case. Cliff's reading of Lenin,
particularly in volume one, suffers from the same weaknesses as
Harman's pamphlet. However, these weaknesses are amplified by
the fact that Cliff makes Lenin's tactic of 'stick bending' (or,
rather, his own interpretation of it) the organising principle
of the book. This is the point at which the argument is no
longer simply one of theory; a close reading of Cliff's book
shows that the authoritarian and undemocratic internal practices
of the SWP discussed elsewhere in this pamphlet have their roots
here.
Cliff's study of Lenin is inseparable from the history of the
SWP. It was at least partly written as an intervention in an
internal debate the IS conducted in the late 1960s as to whether
to move from a federal structure to a centralised, Leninist
organisation. As a result, the book still has the status of a
cadre's handbook in the organisation - in early 1994 leading
comrades and organisers were once again being encouraged to
study it - and the leadership techniques the party have adopted
show its influence clearly.
The book suffers, however, from a schematicism that is at odds
with the spirit of Lenin's writings, and from the fact that it
exhibits a method that elevates one tactic - stick bending - to
the status of a general strategy for party building. So, what is
Cliff's understanding of 'stick bending', and how does it relate
to Lenin's? Cliff's clearest statement of the method is this:
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. (Cliff, Lenin Volume One, Pluto 1975, p.67.)
Leaving aside that final sentence for a moment, the rest is pure
hagiography. It gives a picture of a Lenin who always understood
the full complexity of any given situation, and deliberately
exaggerated the most important task in order to shift his
comrades in the right direction. It is a top-down view of
Lenin's role and completely at odds with historical fact. There
is no evidence, for instance, that Lenin made the shift towards
industrial agitation in the period 1894-96 as the result of some
great tactical genius; he was just as convinced as everybody
else at the time that economic agitation could provide the
solution to the politicisation of the class struggle. In other
words, his actions in that period reflect a learning process,
not a worked-out strategy. To say this is not to deny that Lenin
recognised sooner than most the dangers inherent in the
agitational approach; it is simply to insist that very often
when Lenin argued something he later rejected he wasn't doing it
for tactical reasons but because he happened to genuinely
believe it at the time. And should this be so surprising?
Lenin did sometimes practice 'stick bending.' Given the
complexity of any given period, and the political unevenness
within the party as well as within the class, there is no doubt
that sometimes it is necessary to stress the main task - 'seize
the key link' in Lenin's words - in order to move the party in
the correct direction. However, four important points need to be
considered:
Stick bending is about tactics. Emphasising the key point is
not the same thing as reducing reality to one point, and Lenin
never did so. Cliff, on the other hand, suggests Lenin's method
is essentially to reduce everything to one idea and then repeat
it 'ad infinitum', 'single mindedly' and with 'hammer blows'.
This is a completely anti-democratic notion, as it rests on the
idea that the party membership have the role of extras, dupes
carrying out the 'task of the day' when directed by an
omniscient leadership. Stick bending is not the only method for
coping with the complexity of reality and not always the most
appropriate. Sometimes open debate is the only way to carry an
argument, even though it may take longer to move the party, and
so from the point of view of the bureaucrat is 'less efficient'.
Lenin never dodged such arguments when they were necessary.
(Just two examples: the debates at the 1903 congress of the
RSDLP as to what kind of organisation was necessary; and the
debate about the treaty of Brest-Litovsk.) Indeed, this is
generally the way that Lenin attempted to win the party to his
positions. When differences of strategy and tactics emerged,
Lenin always fought openly and encouraged his opposition to do
so also. This is in marked contrast to the 'stick bending'
political culture of the SWP leadership, where such debate is
regarded as a diversion from the tasks of party building, not
essential to them. Overuse of stick bending can exacerbate the
problems of unevenness within the party, not solve them. If the
party's tasks are always stated in an exaggerated, one-sided
way, the party membership can develop an exaggerated, one-sided
way of carrying them out. The result is that the party's members
do not develop as fully-rounded Marxist cadres, capable of
acting independently, but become politically schizophrenic,
zig-zagging from one one-sided perspective to another. The
result is the sort of 'monochromatic Marxism' that characterises
the SWP today. Stick bending is only effective if the party
correctly identifies the key link to seize. In order to achieve
this, the highest level of debate and analysis is necessary. A
party that is unable to develop a cadre for the reasons given
above is unable to properly debate its tasks. The result is the
intensification of the tendency for the key link to be passed
down from the leadership without any real discussion. Even if
the key link is correctly identified, the danger is that it will
be implemented mechanically and thus ineffectively.
In short, Cliff's reading of Lenin has disastrous consequences
for the reality of democracy within the revolutionary party,
despite the richness of the IS tradition which he was
instrumental in building. His ground-breaking work on the theory
of state capitalism saved the revolutionary Marxist tradition
from the twin spectres of Stalinism and orthodox Trotskyism. His
theory of the party - and more importantly, its implementation
in the SWP - threatens to alienate the working class from that
tradition. Conclusion It is our argument that the political
culture of the SWP is based on a bureaucratic distortion of
Leninism. It should also be clear that the anti-democratic norms
of the SWP are no historical accident, but the logical
progression of a theory of organisation held by the leadership
and unchallenged by the membership. In recent years the
shrillness of the SWP leadership's attacks on any criticism of
its methods - from both inside and outside the organisation -
has increased, and the cadre of the party has consequently been
almost entirely extinguished or demoralised. This is not to
suggest that the SWP is on the verge of collapse - it is still a
large organisation, capable of interventions in the class
struggle that have genuine short-term success. It is, however,
to suggest that the SWP is incapable of building or maintaining
a cadre; and that, therefore, it is incapable of leading the
revolution its members are fighting for.
This article was written by ex-SWP comrades, September 1994.
