Lenin and the Revolutionary Party

The one serious Leninist alternative, the U.S. Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers party, was able to have a major impact on the intellectual life of the left, and also to play a significant part in the class struggle (for example, in the Minneapolis teamsters’ strikes). The Trotskyists, however, never were able to accumulate more than 2,000 members; although their growing numbers and influence in the 1960s and 1970s seemed to indicate an impressive vitality and a promising future, the organization was wracked by a devastating political and organizational crisis in 1979–1983. The party’s new leadership fundamentally changed the party program by fiat, grotesquely tightened organizational norms, and expelled scores of dissidents. While the Socialist Workers party may not be dead as a potentially revolutionary force, its recent experience has done little to inspire confidence in the “Leninism” it raises as its own banner.31

To capitalist economists and politicians, railroads, matches, sewerage systems and warehouses are progress and culture. Of themselves such works, grafted upon primitive conditions, are neither culture nor progress, for they are too dearly paid for with the sudden economic and cultural ruin of the peoples who must drink down the bitter cup ‘of misery and horror of two social orders, of traditional agricultural landlordism, of supermodern, super-refined capitalist exploitation, at one and the same time. Only as the material conditions for the destruction of capitalism and the abolition of class society can the effects of the capitalist triumphal march through the world bear the stamp of progress in a historical sense. In this sense imperialism, too, is working in our interest.9

Revolutionary Marxists argued, as the Dutch socialist Herman Gorter put it, that “it makes no difference to the working class as a whole whether England or another country possesses a greater part of the world. . . . They should oppose capitalistic colonial policies, because they aim at a better society than this capitalistic one, a society that needs no colonies to exploit. . .

One member of a Bolshevik committee in Baku during this period, Cecilia Bobrovskaya, has described a strike in the oil fields in which “a very good agitator” from the Menshevik faction “was never tired at mass meetings of discussing minor questions like the provision of aprons, mitts, etc., by the employers, without touching upon the real significance of the strike.” Acknowledging that the local Bolshevik committee “adopted a somewhat academic approach to the working masses,” she has offered this account of the workers’ reactions to the Bolshevik speakers: “They were often interrupted by uncomplimentary shouts about the Bolsheviks who instead of demanding mitts and aprons demanded the overthrow of the autocracy.”28

Consequently, when the overthrow of the autocracy became a real issue for Russian workers in 1905, the Bolsheviks were, to a large extent, not in a position to provide leadership. At the beginning of that year, Lenin complained to Bolshevik underground organizers: “Really, I sometimes think nine-tenths of the Bolsheviks are actually formalists. . . . You must be sure to organize, organize, organize hundreds of circles, completely pushing into the background the customary, well meant committee (hierarchic) stupidities. . . . Either you create new, young, fresh, energetic battle organizations everywhere for revolutionary Social Democratic work of all varieties among all strata, or you will go under wearing the aureole of ‘committee’ bureaucrats.”29

Too often, Lenin’s ideas on organization have been abstracted from his commitment to the working class and socialism, from his views on the revolutionary program, and from the vibrancy of Russia’s labor and socialist movements. This approach gives a cold and lifeless quality to Lenin’s organizational perspectives. I have tried to avoid that difficulty in this study by giving greater attention to the “nonorganizational” matters that must be grasped to appreciate his views on the revolutionary party.

Several serious studies of Lenin’s thought take up his views on the party, perhaps the most valuable being Marcel Liebman’s Leninism Under Lenin, Neil Harding’s two-volume Lenin’s Political Thought, and Tony Cliff’s four-volume Lenin. While these deal with the whole range of Lenin’s politics, the present contribution attempts to focus more sharply on his organizational thought; in doing this, it also challenges some of their interpretations. There seem to me to be underlying deficiencies in the works by Liebman and Harding, both well-deserved recipients of the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, which result in distortions precisely on the question of the Leninist Party.