“One of the reasons the ICFI/SLL [International Committee of the Fourth International / Socialist Labour League] and Workers News continue to make such a fetish of What Is to Be Done? is in order to find a cover for their refusal to adopt Lenin’s preferred principle of ‘democratic centralism’ which gives the membership control over the leadership – a concept which was an anathema to [Gerry] Healy and his proteges. Yet it is fundamental to Bolshevism”.
Among the dozens of volumes of Vladimir Lenin’s collected works, his 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done? is possibly the one work that is more misunderstood and misused than any other. It is this misunderstanding and misuse of Lenin’s famous pamphlet that Tim Peach’s “What Is to Be Done? . . . In Historical Context” seeks to rectify.
Too many Marxists have drawn one-sided and incorrect conclusions from Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, conclusions that have led to wide-ranging errors in their political practice. Some Marxists claim that What Is to Be Done? is nothing less than “Lenin’s guide to building a revolutionary party” and that its lessons are “universally applicable”. They then use the hyper-centralism of the Iskra period to justify the authoritarian internal regimes of their respective organisations.
Other Marxists argue that Lenin overemphasised the difference between spontaneity and consciousness, and rail against Lenin’s famous What Is to Be Done? formula that “class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle”. According to state capitalist theorist Tony Cliff, Lenin had by 1905 “formulated his conclusion in terms that were the exact opposite of those of What Is to Be Done?” and later expressed the view that “capitalism itself inculcates a socialist consciousness in the working class”. (Tony Cliff, Lenin Volume 1: Building the Party (1893-1914), Chapter 8: “Open the Gates of the Party”) . Cliff’s arguments are used by various ‘state capitalist’ groups to justify their economist and syndicalist practice, the very practice that What Is to Be Done? warned against.
Tim Peach’s article goes a long way to set the record straight. He takes aim at those in the “universally applicable / authoritarian regime” camp, in particular the International Committee of the Fourth Internationallinked to British Trotskyist Gerry Healy and its Australian affiliate, the Socialist Labour League (known today as the Socialist Equality Party).
Using Lenin’s own words, Peach clearly demonstrates how the lessons contained in What Is to Be Done? cannot possibly be universally applicable. He also points to the reason why Gerry Healy would argue that they were: “the reason What Is to Be Done? was ahistorically hailed as “universally relevant” was to give authority to the political corruption of the ICFI/SLL leadership. Healy’s Central Committee department and the SLL’s political committee usurped for themselves the authority of Lenin’s central organ, the Iskra editorial board, with no conception of the special conditions that prevailed in 1903 which led Lenin to exercise undemocratic rule from the top down”.
Along the way, Peach also takes the Socialist Labour League (SLL) to task for its bizarre approach to labour movement struggles. He points to the SLL’s sectarian, ultra-left approach towards the South East Queensland Electricity Board (SEQEB) dispute and the fight against deregistration of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF). Peach also refers to a lesser-known episode in which the SLL refused to support a call for a general strike to demand that the Labor government of Western Australia drop ridiculous extortion charges leveled at a local Transport Workers’ Union (TWU) leader. The SLL deemed the call for a general strike a “gross capitulation to spontaneity”.
Peach also reminds us of the SLL’s unbridled support for the regime of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddaffi, and its support for the execution of Iraqi Communist Party militants by the bourgeois government of Saddam Hussein.
Communist League
“What Is to Be Done? . . . In Historical Context” was written while Peach was a member of the Communist League of Australia. This short-lived group was a product of the 1985-86 explosion of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). The ICFI was for decades led by the notorious Gerry Healy, who was expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in October 1985 after his years of systemic sexual abuse of women comrades and physical violence against party members finally came to light.
The Communist League (CL) was formed in 1986 by former members of the Socialist Labour League (SLL), the ICFI’s Australian affiliate, and the new organisation initially lined up with the Workers Revolutionary Party (Workers Press) group of Cliff Slaughter.
However, the Communist League split just a year or two after its formation. A majority located in Sydney, New South Wales around Phil Sandford and Greg Adler kept control of the organisation and the CL’s newspaper Socialist Press. The CL majority subsequently joined the International Workers League – Fourth International (IWL-FI or LIT-CI in Spanish) of Argentine Trotskyist Nahuel Moreno. One notable CL member was the former Australian Labor Party state parliamentarian George Petersen, who joined some time after he left the NSW parliament in 1988. The CL subsequently changed its name to the Workers League, joined the Socialist Alliance in 2001, and then disappeared a few years later.
The Communist League minority was based in Melbourne, Victoria around Andy Blunden and Lynn and Gerry Beaton, and it went on to form a group called Communist Intervention (CI). This group’s claim to fame was its leading role in the Members’ Action Team (MAT), a militant left-wing ticket that won control of the 25,000-strong State Public Service Federation (SPSF) of Victoria for a three-year term (1990 to 1993). Communist Intervention took part in unsuccessful left regroupment projects such as the Independent Action electoral front, the Militant Socialist Organisation, and the Progressive Labour Party, but the group seems to have disappeared before the turn of the century.
And Tim Peach? It is unclear if he sided with the CL’s Sydney-based majority, the Melbourne-based minority, or simply dropped out of Marxist politics altogether. In 1983 and 1984, Peach stood as the SLL candidate in the electorate of Fremantle (Western Australia) in successive state and federal elections. But little else is known of his role in the far-left before or after the formation of the Communist League.
For a brief period, the explosion of Gerry Healy’s ICFI led to a genuine reexamination of Marxist politics among sections of the Trotskyist movement. Tim Peach’s “What Is to Be Done? . . . In Historical Context” is a valuable product of that all too short period in time.
“What Is to Be Done? . . . In Historical Context” first appeared in Tasks of the Fourth International, Volume 1, Number 1, March 1987, pp. 16-35. The odd spelling error and inconsistency in the original text has been corrected, and quotations checked with and corrected to those available online. Titles and URL links to all cited works available online have been added in square brackets to the original footnotes.
Marxism and Labor
What Is to Be Done? . . . In Historical Context
By Tim Peach, Communist League (Australia)
When a young delegate from the Communist League in America visited Trotsky in 1938, the ‘Old Man’ warned him that the most dangerous thing in politics is to become a prisoner of your own formula, which was appropriate yesterday but is deprived of any content today.
Members of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) of the recent past are now aware that some of their formulae of yesterday were not even appropriate yesterday, so they must be doubly careful not to become such prisoners.
For this reason it was somewhat sad to read S. Longstaff’s article “In Defence of What Is to Be Done?” (Workers News, March 18th 1986[1]) which is neither a defence of Leninism nor a serious reply to Cyril Smith’s contribution in Workers Press, headed “How Should We Read Lenin”.
The Workers News article is purely a defence of the incorrect and dangerous formulations of G. Healy and both factions of the slavish ICFI.
Longstaff has in crude fashion spewed up a mish-mash of quotes out of context, bald assertions, and slander utterly devoid of any analysis. This puts it on a par with all defences of Healy and his ‘theory’.
Rather than regurgitating Healy’s positions and many of the crudities of the past Socialist Labour League / ICFI polemics and perspectives documents, Longstaff would be better employed taking Smith’s advice to “question this whole story in the light of our new-found knowledge of Healy’s practice” and I would add, what we now know of the ICFI’s theory and practice.
The introduction affixed by Workers News to Longstaff’s article states that What Is to Be Done? is “Lenin’s guide to building a revolutionary party”, and this is exactly how the book has been presented by the SLL for years. It is nothing of the sort. Lenin specifically warned against treating it as such in 1907 when it was reprinted.
“Nor at the Second Congress did I have any intention of elevating my own formulations, as given in “What Is to Be Done?” to programmatic level, constituting special principles. On the contrary …”[2]
Lenin states in the same introduction that the only reason he is reprinting the book is because it is “frequently mentioned by the Mensheviks, the present opponents of the Bolsheviks, as well as by writers belonging to the bourgeois-liberal camp”. He goes on to warn:
“The basic mistake made by those who now criticise What Is to Be Done? is to treat the pamphlet apart from its connection with the concrete historical situation, of a definite, and now long past, period in the development of our party”.[3]
The same basic mistake is made by those who still adhere to the orthodox ICFI / Healyite position: they raise the formulations to programmatic level and treat the pamphlet apart from its connection with a concrete historical situation.
Smith’s article quite correctly tries to put the work in its proper context by taking up a review article published earlier this year in the “youth” paper of the first group to split from the WRP, supporting Healy even after he was exposed and expelled. The reviewer drew the conclusion that the book is “universally relevant to the urgent political tasks facing the working class” and that in it Lenin was “elaborating his theory of the revolutionary party and the working class and developing the theoretical and practical base for the Bolshevik Party”.
Longstaff, who supported the second group to break with the WRP, opposing the WRP’s determination to break decisively with all of Healy’s legacy, also thinks “What Is to Be Done? is universally relevant”.
The reason they think this is because their organ grinder said four years earlier “in this very important book … Lenin outlined and developed the theoretical and practical base for the Bolshevik Party” and its content “is universally pertinent to the urgent tasks which we face in Britain today”.[4]
“Universally” is defined as “applicable to all cases” (Oxford English Dictionary). It is a very undialectical proposition to put in regard to What Is to Be Done?
Longstaff, who supports Healy’s fetishism with What Is to Be Done?, accuses Smith of “attempting to relegate What Is to Be Done? to the historical scrap-heap”, simply for making a serious attempt to follow Lenin’s advice and put the book in context.
When Lenin wrote What Is to Be Done? he was fighting to establish an organisation which was very different to that which participated in the 1905 revolution just three years later, led the 1917 revolution and was the authoritative section at the first four congresses of the Communist International.
The fact that none of these achievements would have been possible without Iskra’s struggle in 1900-03 does not make it correct to treat What Is to Be Done? as a handbook or guide to building the revolutionary party today.
Under conditions of no party centre, opposition within the ranks of the RSDLP to centralism and, importantly, tremendous police repression, Lenin and the rest of the Iskra editorial board fought for an all-Russian party with one paper, professional cadre and a unified political line.
Lenin described the sort of party he envisaged as the only way to achieve Iskra’s aims in his “Letter to a Comrade on Our Organisational Tasks”.[5]
It was a party in which every aspect of affairs would be dominated by the Iskra editorial board, the central organ from exile. The Central Committee’s responsibilities would be to organise literature distribution and the work of lesser committees, it had no say in determining party policy. Every party position, including rank and file membership and even conference delegates, had to be appointed or approved from above in these particular conditions. Lenin speaks of “military discipline” by unelected leaders who were appointed from above.
To introduce any “elective principle” under the conditions of repression would merely make the job of the police easier.
In this context, Lenin spoke of the Economists’ call for “broad democracy” in party organisation as a “useless and harmful toy”.
Trotsky recounts the following conversation with Lenin:
“I arrived abroad with the belief that the editorial board should be made subordinate to the Central Committee. This was the prevailing attitude of the majority of the Iskra followers”.
“It can’t be done,” objected Lenin. “The correlation of forces is different. How can they guide us from Russia? No, it can’t be done. We are the stable centre, we are stronger in ideas, and we must exercise the guidance from here.”
“Then this will mean a complete dictatorship of the editorial board?” I asked.
“Well what’s wrong with that?” retorted Lenin. “In the present situation it must be so””. [6]
Elsewhere Trotsky writes: “For Lenin, the most important problem was how to organise the “central organ” (that is Iskra) in such a way that in practice it should play the role of the Central Committee”.[7]
At the time Trotsky vehemently disagreed with Lenin but with hindsight he endorsed Lenin’s actions and his “impressive singleness of purpose which allowed him to embark upon his task and conclude it”.
These measures won the support of workers and activists not least because of the difficulties in working under police repression. (See the letter from a worker, Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 7, p. 137).
A participant in the Marxist study groups on which Iskra was founded estimated, from his own experience, that on average they survived only three months before they were discovered by the police. This was in the period from 1895 to 1903.
(l will not dwell on the odious comparison between the sect practices of the ICFI/SLL of ruling “from the top down” and Lenin’s envisaged party of 1900-1903, but it is clear that the reason What Is to Be Done? was ahistorically hailed as “universally relevant” was to give authority to the political corruption of the ICFI/SLL leadership. Healy’s Central Committee department and the SLL’s political committee usurped for themselves the authority of Lenin’s central organ, the Iskra editorial board, with no conception of the special conditions that prevailed in 1903 which led Lenin to exercise undemocratic rule from the top down. This was crudely summarised by Linda Tenenbaum’s proud refrain to the SLL congress that “the PC is the party”, made six months after Healy’s expulsion and the winding-up of his CC department, actions which she and her PC opposed).
While Trotsky realised he was wrong in 1903, he did not ever try to recreate the conditions of organisation laid down then to build a party on the 1903 lines and neither did Lenin after 1903 attempt to revert to the harsh, but at the time necessary, intense centralisation at the expense of internal democracy after that period.
Lenin never pretended there was anything particularly original about his book: “What Is to Be Done? is a summary – of Iskra tactics and Iskra organisational policy in 1901 and 1902. Precisely a summary, no more no less”.[8]
He then goes on to give a warning which Healy and his ideologues never took, and which we should pass on to Longstaff: “But to pass judgement on that summary without knowing Iskra’s struggle against the then dominant trend of Economism, without understanding that struggle, is sheer idle talk”.
In 1907 Lenin clearly stated how he regarded What Is to Be Done?:
“The expression I used – and it has been frequently quoted – was that the Economists had gone to one extreme. What Is to Be Done?, I said, straightens out what had been twisted by the Economists (cf. Minutes of the 2nd RSDLP Congress in 1903, p. 170). I emphasised that just because we were so vigorously straightening out whatever had been twisted, our line of action would always be the straightest. The meaning of this is clear enough: What Is to Be Done? is a controversial correction of Economist distortions and it would be wrong to regard the pamphlet in any other light”.[9]
If the Healy position flagrantly flouts Lenin’s specific advice and the spirit of all Marxist writing, how has it fared in the practice of the ICFI?
As might be expected, not very well. The ICFI/SLL’s corruption of What Is to Be Done? contributed to an irresolvable confusion on the fundamental question of the role of the revolutionary party in the everyday lives and struggles of workers.
In Australia this led to the SLL calling in 1984-85 for “the working class to bring down the Hawke government and replace it with a workers’ government based on the smashing of the capitalist state and the establishment of organs of workers’ power (soviets)”.
This anarchist call for the formation of soviets in Australia in 1984 was justified by countless references to What Is to Be Done?
In December 1984 an SLL national conference unanimously condemned the Western Australia branch of the SLL for supporting a trade union call for a general strike demanding the state Labor government drop extortion charges against the state secretary of the Transport Workers’ Union, who had demanded back wages for a worker who had been underpaid. The conference ruled that such support was a gross capitulation to spontaneity.
The same sectarian outlook (which has no echo in What Is to Be Done?) was seen at a recent mass meeting in Sydney. There a small number of SLL members and the ultra-left sectarian Spartacist League voted against accepting the meagre wage increases allowed in the terms of the Accord, because, like everybody, they favour a 25 per cent wage rise. Their dissenting vote on the 5.5 per cent seems to indicate they want 25 per cent or nothing.
One of the reasons the ICFI/SLL and Workers News continue to make such a fetish of What Is to Be Done? is in order to find a cover for their refusal to adopt Lenin’s preferred principle of ‘democratic centralism’ which gives the membership control over the leadership – a concept which was an anathema to Healy and his proteges. Yet it is fundamental to Bolshevism.
The history of Bolshevism, along with the Transitional Programme of the Trotskyist movement, were corrupted by the ICFI and those like Longstaff who continue in this corrupt tradition of denying the history, the struggle and the living development of Marxism through all the refinements that followed from the gains of the 1903 period.
Anyone who sees What Is to Be Done? as superceded by Lenin and Trotsky’s life work and by the history of the Bolshevik party (which did not even exist at the time Lenin wrote What Is to Be Done?) is termed, as Longstaff does Smith, a revisionist, a bourgeois sceptic, a renegade from Marxism, and someone directly serving the interests of imperialism.
And yet it is they, by deciding to separate out a single pamphlet to use as a gospel, who defile the Bolshevik tradition contained in the Transitional Programme, which states: “Without inner democracy – no revolutionary education. Without discipline – no revolutionary action. The inner structure of the Fourth International is based on the principles of democratic centralism: full freedom in discussion; complete unity in action”.
One point. If Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? is his “guide to building the revolutionary party” and is of such “universal relevance”, why did Trotsky and the Left Opposition not cite it as an authority?
In the struggle of the Left Opposition to oppose the destruction of the Communist International and the Russian Communist Party, and in the struggle to establish the Fourth International as the continuation of Lenin’s Bolshevism, the guide is not referred to except by Trotsky who considered Stalin’s citing of it in 1905 as “dishonest” because Lenin regarded aspects of the work as “erroneous”.
It can be established that the ICFI certainly had to “bend the stick” in the face of explicit tendencies for liquidating the Fourth International, but their line is now so bent it can no longer establish its credentials in the working class.
The ICFI/SLL has claim to be the sole defender of Bolshevism, but stating it does not make it so.
After decades of political domination of the ICFI by G. Healy, now thoroughly exposed, as they have to admit, as a charlatan, a subjective idealist and a brutal destroyer of cadre, they continue to support his perversion of What Is to Be Done? against the counsel of both Lenin and Trotsky.
The reason for this is rooted in their shared pathetic obsession with establishing their own importance and “authority” without any objective claim to it.
If we accept Nick Beams’ argument that they were just following orders when the SLL carried out a class betrayal or, as his comrade Tenenbaum put it in a conference, “we were still in short pants politically speaking” (curious positions for a party which states that its internal squabbles are the highest point of the class struggle) – then we can take the Healyisms in Longstaff’s article as a declaration that they intend to stay in primary school.
Assistant national secretary Cheryl Crisp’s expressed position that “political authority is the one thing you just cannot question” is quaint, for a party that has just expelled its political mentor of 30 years standing. She obviously refers to the authority of G. Healy, which for her has survived his expulsion.
To realise the relevance of the old Iskra struggle for us today it must be assessed in its historical context.
By the time What Is to Be Done? was written the organised Economists in the RSDLP were no longer dominant. (Rabocheye Dyelo, their paper, ceased publication in February 1902).
“The Economists were finally smashed at the beginning of the 1900s: by around 1902, their song was sung. But between 1898 and 1901 their ideas were predominant to some extent. At the time the workers’ movement was, thanks to them, placed in the greatest danger, as the slogans of the Economists were outwardly very alluring for little experienced workers for whom it was easy to fall for this bait. And if in this period Lenin, Plekhanov, and then the actual practice of the Russian revolutionary movement had not given battle all along the line within the workers’ movement, then who knows for how many years it might have been sidetracked up the path of Economism, that is, opportunism?”[10]
This picture, drawn by Zinoviev, of an Economism soundly defeated even before Lenin came to write his summary of that struggle in What Is to Be Done? is perhaps a little too rosy. Lenin wrote his summary to draw the lessons of that struggle in order to combat the influence of their ideas on a new generation.
The promise of the founding conference of the RSDLP was, to a certain extent, unrealised. Nearly all of the nine delegates were arrested soon after it closed, and the fragmented and autonomous study circles which Lenin was fighting to unite into a centralised party continued as before.
A secret meeting in Minsk in 1900 (with Lenin, Martov and Potresov in attendance) decided to establish an all-Russian paper in order to build an all-Russian party.
Lenin and Potresov went abroad to implement this decision and the first issue was published in Germany in December 1900.
The first editorial of Iskra, “The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement”[11], was penned by Lenin and approved of by the editorial board. It stressed, and in no way contradicted, what Lenin wrote in What Is to Be Done? over two years later, “the danger of a weakening connection between the Russian working-class movement and Russian Social Democracy, the vanguard in the struggle for political liberty. The most urgent task is to strengthen this connection”. He goes on:
“Social Democracy is the combination of the working class movement and socialism. Its task is not to serve the working class movement passively at each of its separate stages, but to represent the interests of the movement as a whole, to point out to this movement its ultimate aim and its political tasks, and to safeguard its political and ideological independence. Isolated from Social Democracy, the working class movement becomes petty and inevitably becomes bourgeois. In waging only the economic struggle, the working class loses its political independence; it becomes the tail of the other parties and betrays the great principle: “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”. In every country there has been a period in which the working class movement existed apart from socialism, each going its own way; and in every country this isolation has weakened both socialism and the working class movement. Only the fusion of socialism with the working class movement has in all countries created a durable basis for both. But in every country this combination of socialism and the working class movement has evolved historically, in unique ways, in accordance with the prevailing conditions of time and place. In Russia the necessity for combining socialism and the working class movement was long ago proclaimed, but it is only now being carried into practice. It is a very difficult process and there is, therefore, nothing surprising in the fact that is accompanied by vacillations and doubts”. (My emphasis, TP)[12]
“The task”, Iskra tells us, “is to imbue the masses of the proletariat with the ideas of socialism and political consciousness, and to organise a revolutionary party inseparably connected with the spontaneous movement”.
This is Lenin. He never exhorted his followers to “oppose the spontaneous movement” as generations of Healyites were trained to do.
Smith’s statement that “Marxism is an organic growth, a living relationship between the Marxist party and the international working class”, echoes Lenin but comes under attack from the hopeless sectarianism of Longstaff.
You cannot do away with that living relationship, as Longstaff and his former mentor attempt to do, and still have any connection with the development of socialism.
By 1901, despite the hard-won political authority of Iskra in the RSDLP, the question of developing a politically responsible and stable cadre who could withstand the rigours of underground work and the isolation it imposed was by no means achieved by the smashing of Economism.
Problems abounded. One stronghold of Iskra supporters who withstood the police offensive against Iskra began printing for a rival local organ Vperyod who had lost their press. From Munich, Lenin castigated the culprits in southern Russia for supporting a rival paper which threatened Iskra’s all-Russian perspective.
Immediately following this, a further wave of arrests destroyed much of Iskra’s illegal networks and two secret presses were seized.
Faced with re-establishing Iskra agents in many working class centres and mindful of the experiences of the preceding period which saw some cadre revert to local work, Lenin wrote his “Summary of Iskra and Iskra organisation”, in order to strengthen and equip this new layer of “professional revolutionaries”.
It was for this reason that much of What Is to Be Done? is given to establishing the theoretical and political arguments for a strong, centralised party in ruthless opposition to primitivism.
The book had an immediate impact. Christian Rakovsky tells us “it soon became the main topic of discussion” in the clandestine world of Marxism in the St. Petersburg of 1902.
Another leading Iskra agent wrote: “Iskra prevailed in St. Petersburg, in Moscow and in other centres of the revolutionary movement only because the Iskra agitators had in their hands What Is to Be Done?”
Zinoviev, cited by Longstaff, also establishes the landmark that What Is to Be Done? is in the history of Marxist propaganda:
“This was not merely a book: it was a book marking an era. It drew up a two-year account of the work of Iskra. At the same time it was a handbook, a gospel for all revolutionary Marxists of the time”.[13]
This is not in dispute, but given the Healyite practice of reading what they want into Marxist classics, perhaps they take Zinoviev too literally: the preacher gives the gospel “universal relevance” and then uses the text for self-justification.
Longstaff is clearly into faith. He and I share a common past with regards long-standing ICFI membership but after the revelations of how the ICFI functions, I think doubt should be the natural reaction.
Not Longstaff. He cites as one of Cyril Smith’s crimes his alleged design to “implant doubts”. Lenin, as quoted above, says we should not be surprised that complex questions are accompanied by doubt. Science (including the scientific world outlook of Marxism) has a healthy respect, never a fear, of doubt.
Trotsky certainly never accorded the book any enduring universality. In his biography of Stalin he remarked:
“In August 1905 Stalin takes over for his own purposes the chapter in What Is to Be Done? where Lenin strives to determine the relationship between the spontaneous workers’ movement and socialist consciousness. According to Lenin, the workers’ movement, left to itself, inevitably embarks on the path of opportunism, revolutionary consciousness is brought into it from the outside by Marxist intellectuals. This is not the moment to begin a criticism of this conception which belongs to the biography of Lenin and not that of Stalin. The author of What Is to Be Done? himself recognised the one-sided, and thereby erroneous, nature of this theory, the sharpness of which he aimed at a particular moment against “economism” which was all too respectful towards the spontaneous movement”.
It would be facile to suggest that Trotsky is saying here that Lenin came to believe that revolutionary consciousness (Marxism) could be developed by the working class spontaneously, i.e. out of the struggle it is forced into because of the class relations under capitalism. That is a position never held by any Marxist.
However, he was warning against adopting as a special principle, or raising to a “programmatic level”, the one-sided polemic that Lenin waged against the economists who were saying loud and clear that workers would come to Marxism in their own time and out of their own experiences.
Time and again, Lenin had to argue against the readers of the pamphlet treating it during his lifetime as the ICFI/SLL do today.
Sectarianism and opportunism in the SLL
When Lenin published What Is to Be Done? in 1902 he was summarising the tactics and policies which had guided the Iskra editorial board and their supporters in a very bitter struggle to purge the ranks of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP) of those who were opposed to putting a revolutionary programme before the Russian working class.
In rebuilding the Fourth International we are faced with the task of developing a programme which will win workers’ support and take the class forward in the struggle to resolve the crisis of working class leadership.
It is only in undertaking this programmatic task that the theory of organisation developed by Lenin has any relevance.
The ICFI continues to regard the theoretical questions addressed by Lenin ahistorically and adopts the centralism advocated by Lenin in 1902 as an organisational model. This unscientific approach is fundamental to their sectarianism.
Trotsky bitterly opposed Lenin on organisational questions and it took him years to grasp the theoretical and political positions which gave rise to Lenin’s super-centralism.
Today we cannot strengthen our links with the working class and develop a programme without developing Lenin’s organisational theory.
The relation of party to class and the development of that relation takes concrete expression in a party’s programme.
The ICFI’s claim to be the World Party of Socialist Revolution is a high point in their sectarianism because it abandons the task of winning the leadership of the class in favour of declaring it won. It childishly reduces the struggle to win the vanguard of the working class to the struggle to self-proclaim it twice a week.
Lenin spent a lifetime developing a theory of organisation in opposition to such nonsense. It was on the basis of the theoretical development that the Bolshevik organisation was built and the Russian revolution made successful.
It is now over twelve months since the split and readers of Workers News have waited in vain for a serious and principled correction of the gross errors committed by that paper.
The ICFI and SLL are incapable of self-criticism, which Marx described as “a method of strengthening the proletarian revolution”. But as Trotsky remarked about Stalin, they are “unable to understand that there do not exist such forces or means as could prevent Marxist criticism from triumphing in the ranks of the international proletarian vanguard”.[14] Nor will the ICFI rise to any height, because “one unexposed and uncondemned error always leads to another, or prepares the ground for it”.[15]
Their fear of the truth is connected to their fear of the working class movement growing. Lenin was speaking of a very different type of party to the SLL/ICFI when he wrote:
“The Russian Social Democrats are already steeled enough in battle not to be perturbed by these pinpricks, and to continue, in spite of them, their work of self-criticism and ruthless exposure of their own shortcomings, which will unquestionably and inevitably be overcome as the working class movement grows”.[16] (My emphasis, TP).
Lenin had no such fear of the spontaneity of the working class movement growing. It is of course a pre-condition for socialist revolution, rather than a danger to it. Yet this is exactly how G. Healy (whom Longstaff paraphrases) sees it: “Spontaneity has long ago become a real danger to the future of the working class”.[17]
This position is not new to the ICFI. In the course of a polemic against Joseph Hansen of the Socialist Workers Party (US), the NEC of the British IC section, then the SLL, stated in June 1961: “Indeed the greatest deterrent to further progress of the socialist revolution can be briefly characterised. It is: dependence on spontaneity”.[18] (Their emphasis).
Nowhere in Lenin’s works will you find such a crude separation of party from class. Lenin was very careful not to confuse the struggle against the spontaneous consciousness of the working class with its spontaneous movement.
We could ask Healy and his co-thinkers: was the miners’ strike in Britain “a real danger to the future of the working class”, or the “greatest deterrent to the further progress of the socialist revolution”, or should we proceed as Lenin advised:
“… to bring definite socialist ideals to the spontaneous working class movement, to connect this movement with socialist convictions that should attain the level of contemporary science, to connect it with the regular political struggle for democracy as a means of achieving socialism – in a word, to fuse this spontaneous movement into one indestructible whole with the activity of the revolutionary party”.[19] (Lenin’s emphasis).
Lenin says in What Is to Be Done? that revolutionaries are not engaged in something that isolates them from the masses.
“… in actuality they are engaged exclusively in all sided and all-embracing political agitation, i.e. precisely in work that brings closer, merges in to a single whole the elemental destructive force of the masses and the conscious destructive force of the organisation of revolutionaries”.[20] (Lenin’s emphasis).
In a contradictory way, the British miners’ strike, a spontaneous movement, utterly exposed the WRP and ICFI and was an impetus for the destruction of Healy within the WRP. Similarly the SEQEB [South East Queensland Electricity Board] dispute thoroughly created the conditions for the exposure of the SLL’s ultra-sectarianism, and has left them cowering in the corner. After over twelve months of “political leadership” at SEQEB – ‘call the General Strike, bring down Hawke, bring down Bjelke, Bjelke is the same as Wran, for soviets, for a workers’ government‘ etc. etc. – the SLL now offers no political lead or analysis: it merely reports on the betrayal with empty promises of support and calls to telegraph Labor leaders. Politically the SLL reached a dead end.
A meeting to celebrate the 1000th issue of Workers News held recently in Brisbane did not even mention the historic struggle, according to the report in Workers News.
No doubt the SLL believes it can shamefully abstain politically in Queensland whilst it develops revolutionary theory to take into the working class. Engels described this position, when he wrote of political parties:
“… who have contrived to reduce the Marxist theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy, which the workers are not to reach as a result of their class consciousness, but which like an article of faith, is to be forced down their throats at once and without development. That is why they remain mere sects and, as Hegel says, come from nothing through nothing to nothing”.[21]
Nor would Engels have been surprised at 1000 issues:
“Each sect is necessarily fanatic and through this fanaticism obtains particularly in areas where it is new . . . much greater momentary successes then does the party which simply represents the real movement, without any sectarian oddities. But on the other hand, fanaticism does not last long” (as SEQEB has shown).
S. Longstaff was enraged by Cyril Smith’s reference to Lenin’s position on how the discipline of a revolutionary party is maintained by, among other things, “its ability to link up, maintain contact with, and – if you wish – merge with the broadest masses of the working people …”[22] According to Longstaff, “Lenin’s call to “merge with the broadest masses of toilers” has nothing to do with tailing behind the working class movement. (No-one said it did – TP). It had but one purpose: to lead the working class in the struggle for power”.
The SLL’s ruthless determination to oppose spontaneity, and as Longstaff says, to merge with the working class for “but one purpose”, is their compliance with Marx’s explanation of what a sect is:
“You yourself have experienced the contradiction between the movement of a sect and the movement of a class. The sect sees its raison d’etre and its point of honour not what it has in common with the class movement but in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from the movement”.[23]
Marx could well have been describing the SLL when he says “you actually demand of the class movement that it should subordinate itself to the movement of a sect”.
Compare ICFI/SLL practices with the resolution on the methods of Communist work passed at the third congress of the Communist International in 1921:
“Only by leading the working masses in their day-to-day struggle against the attacks of capitalism can the Communist Party become the vanguard of the working class, learning in practice how to lead the proletariat and prepare for the final overthrow of the bourgeoisie”.[24]
Engels pointed out that:
“Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first of the class directly suffering under it, the working class”. This conflict is “the conflict between productive forces and modes of production … it exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on”.[25]
The spontaneous movement, the proletarian struggle, is driven forward by the economic condition of the working class: it is compelled to fight, but such a struggle is on the basis of capitalist relations and it therefore cannot pose the necessity to destroy those capitalist relations which gave rise to it. According to Lenin there are two aspects to the spontaneous working class movement, it “comprises the economic struggle (struggle against individual capitalists or against individual groups of capitalists for the improvement of workers’ conditions) and the political struggle (struggle against the government for the broadening of the people’s rights, i.e. for democracy, and for the broadening of the political power of the proletariat)”.[26] Marx and Engels, said Lenin, “substituted science for dreams”.
To grasp the role of Marxist revolutionaries, we must not forget that “the workers have no need for socialists in their struggle to improve their condition, if that is their only struggle. In all countries there are workers who wage the struggle for the improvement of their condition, but know nothing of socialism or are even hostile to it”.[27] What Is to Be Done? establishes that whilst that is so, this does not at all mean that purely out of their experiences in this class struggle workers can possibly become “conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system”,[28] that is to develop revolutionary consciousness. “… Socialism will become a force only when it becomes the aim of the political struggle of the working class”.[29]
Lenin showed that consciousness had to be brought to the working class from without:
“The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e. the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour laws etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status, the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia”.[30]
He went on to warn against:
“… the adherents of the “labour movement pure and simple”, worshippers of the closest “organic” contacts with the proletarian struggle, opponents of any non-worker intelligentsia (even a socialist intelligentsia)”, who “are compelled, in order to defend their positions, to resort to the arguments of bourgeois “pure trade unionists”… this shows … that all worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of “the conscious element” of the role of Social Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers”.[31]
Further on:
“there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement.* The only choice is either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course . . . Hence to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois Ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology . . . for the spontaneous working class movement is trades unionism . . . and trades unions means the enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence our task is . . . to combat spontaneity, to divert the working class movement from this trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Socialist Democracy”.[32]
(Lenin’s footnote to the above (*) begins:
“This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. They take part, however, not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians …“).
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels posed their rhetorical question: “In what relation do the communists stand to the proletariat as a whole?” In their struggle to establish Iskra and defeat its opponents in the Russian workers’ movement the Iskra editorial board made a profound theoretical contribution to this most basic of questions. What Is To Be Done? summarised the lessons of that fight and provided an answer.
The SLL in its history has never got close to approximating the answer. Whatever contribution it may have made theoretically it has always been in a hopeless confusion with regard to clarifying for its membership or readership what its relationship with the class was or should be. Its failure to establish the relation between strategy and tactics makes it difficult to establish an instance from its whole history where a correct slogan or tactic was adopted and fought for with any consistency.
This confusion led the SLL to swing between left and right. For slavish adoration of spontaneity, Mike Head’s claim, in a Workers News article headed “Libya: the True Story”, that “no other country in the world can rival the transformation carried out by the Libyan people since the Al Fateh revolution led by Colonel Muammar Gaddaffi on September 1st, 1969” would take some beating.
Perhaps if Jackson Brown had been dripping with Libyan gold comrade Mike would have supported him too. Brown, a sacked SEQEB worker, stood in a Queensland by-election to further the struggle for re-instatement. Head opposed his standing and Workers News called for a Labor vote.
The SLL called in 1984-5 for the establishment of soviets to bring down the Labor government. As we know Workers News has never explained how the SLL, which it calls “the decisive leadership of the Australian working class”, could involve itself in such semi-anarchism for twelve months. Recently the SLL and Workers News called for a 25 per cent wage rise campaign and at other times contented themselves with a call to “oppose Hawke’s sacrifice”. This inconsistency is the product of profound theoretical error.
The sect decides who represents the advanced layer of the working class by seeing who accepts their latest ultimatum. The objective movement of the class is treated with disdain as it is filled with bourgeois content, according to SLL “ideologists”. Lenin taught otherwise:
“The ideologist is worthy of the name only when he precedes the spontaneous movement, points out the road, and is able ahead of all others to solve all the theoretical, political, tactical and organisational questions which the “material elements” of the movement spontaneously encounter . . . one must be able to point out the dangers and defects of spontaneity and elevate it to the level of consciousness”.
The SLL sect pays no attention to the concrete situation existing outside their bunker-style headquarters, and this is understandable if you believe as they do that the high point of the class struggle is fought out at 8.30 am sharp, five days a week, in a small leadership meeting before morning tea. The provocative call for a nationwide building industry strike, to be led by the BLF, following their deregistration, is a case in point. You could count the BLs who voted for it on one hand – rather than reveal their precedence it shows their political destitution. Readers and financial support lost on the building sites will be picked up elsewhere, even if they have to go to Broken Hill! A small opportunist party in a big working class.
The universal rejection of the SLL’s position by BLF stewards and delegates revealed something about the advanced layer of the working class that the SLL will probably never accept. That is that the actual leadership of the class at the workplace, advanced workers, often reject the most militant-sounding stance not because they are ‘close to the bureaucracy’ but because they are close to their fellow-workers and do not share illusions in their strength and combativity with some on the sidelines. They also do not necessarily share illusions in the strength of the bosses with the bureaucracy.
Again compare current SLL tactics with the advice of the Third Congress of the Communist International, this time on “Single Issue Struggles and Single Issue Demands”:
“The Communists’ main aim is to destroy the capitalist system. But in order to achieve their aim the Communist Parties must put forward demands expressing the immediate needs of the working class. The Communists must organise mass campaigns to fight for these demands regardless of whether they are compatible with the continuation of the capitalist system”.[33]
Indeed Lenin gauged the level of theoretical development by the development of the spontaneous movement and in 1902 found theory decidedly lacking.
“Revolutionaries, however, lagged behind this upsurge, both in their “theories” and in their activity; they failed to establish a constant and continuous organisation capable of leading the whole movement”.[34]
In establishing its programme the Communist League must take forward Lenin’s fight and avoid the pitfalls of sectarianism.
The revolutionary party and the Australian labour movement
We have quoted Lenin saying that “the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness …” – and the history of the Australian workers’ movement certainly confirms this. Whilst the emergence of political demands and the Labor Party in the Australian working class was an enormous progress it still represented “nothing more than consciousness in an embryonic form”.
The founding of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) soon revealed its “striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie”. Apologists for the Labor Party have claimed that in his remarks on the subject Lenin did not realise how the ALP was a product of the big class battles and strikes of the Australian working class. But Lenin’s position on spontaneous class movements was already very clear: in 1900 he wrote that when isolated from Marxism they become:
“petty and inevitably becomes bourgeois. In waging only the economic struggle, the working class loses its independence; it becomes the tail of other parties and betrays the great principle: “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves””.[35]
Lenin, whilst he fought for the closest organic contact between party and class, never softened his position on the role of consciousness.
The June 13th, 1913 issue of Pravda carried an article headed “In Australia”. Written by Lenin it made the following observations against “those liberals in Europe and in Russia who try to “teach” the people that class struggle is unnecessary by citing the example of Australia”.
“What sort of peculiar capitalist country is this, in which the workers’ representatives, predominate in the Upper house and, till recently, did so in the Lower House as well, and yet the capitalist system is in no danger . . . The Australian Labour Party does not even claim to be a socialist party. Actually it is a liberal-bourgeois party . . . in Australia the Labour Party is the unalloyed representative of the non-socialist workers’ trade unions”.
“The leaders of the Australian Labour Party are trade union officials, everywhere the most moderate and “capital serving” element, and in Australia, altogether peaceful, purely liberal … The Labour Party has done what in other countries was done by the Liberals …“[36]
The “Fighting Platform” of the Labor Party in 1905 revealed its character. “1. Maintenance of a White Australia; 2. Compulsory Arbitration; 3. Old Age Pensions; 4. Nationalisation of Monopolies; 5. Citizen Defence Force; 6. Restriction of Public Borrowing; 7. Navigation Laws”. This programme and the history of the ALP certainly establish the great limitations of spontaneity when it lacks a conscious leadership, no matter how widespread and determined it may be in its battles against the ruling class.
The racist call for a “White Australia”, a call to ban Asiatic immigration to protect the standard of living of Australian working men, was a form of protection which though an anathema to the internationalism of socialism was a watchword of Australian labour. The call to enact compulsory arbitration was an attempt to avoid a recurrence of the big class battles just past. Its aim was to tie the working class to the capitalist state through Wages Boards and Arbitration Courts.
There was real opposition to the Arbitration Act in the class but the “capital serving” trade union leaders accepted even though at congresses it came under attack and was often rejected. The New South Wales Trades Union Congress, for example, at a 1900 congress, whilst it did not pass a call to reject the act, resolved that “the strike method must be maintained as the only means of bringing about the correct and reasonable conditions which parliament has refused to grant workers”. It stated that it was opposed to the Act on principle. The motion passed considered the Act “as directed against the working class, preventing them from obtaining improvement in their wage levels and working conditions during an upward market tendency, and at the same time directed towards assisting the general lowering of wages in the market trend should decline”.
The corporatist accord and protectionist policies of reformism in Australia are nothing new. The call for the “nationalisation of the monopolies” was not a call for the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It was a purely reformist demand for “collective ownership of monopolies and the extension of the industrial and economic functions of the state and municipality”.
It was not until the early twenties that the ALP introduced a “socialist objective” and this was an attempt to counter the influence and prestige of the newly-formed Communist Party following the Russian revolution. The early ALP declared as its objective, in 1905: the cultivation of an Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity, and the development in Australia of an enlightened self-reliant community. A far cry from “workers of the world unite”.
The ALP did not, as the leaders of the Second International did, abandon the road of revolutionary struggle. It never traversed it. The struggle against opportunism and social patriotism requires the winning of the working class to the banner of the Fourth International so that under a revolutionary leadership the working class, the strongest and the progressive class, can seize state power.
The founding document of the Fourth International, the Transitional Programme of 1938 stated unequivocally:
“The Fourth International has already arisen out of great events: the greatest defeats of the proletariat in history. The cause of these defeats is to be found in the degeneration and perfidy of the old leadership. The class struggle does not tolerate an interruption. The Third International, following the Second, is dead for purposes of revolution. Long Live the Fourth International!”
“But has the time yet arrived to proclaim its creation? … the sceptics are not quieted down. The Fourth International, we answer, has no need to be “proclaimed”. It exists and it fights. Is it weak? Yes, its ranks are not numerous because it is still young. They are as yet chiefly cadres. But these cadres are pledges for the future. Outside of these cadres there does not exist a single revolutionary current on this planet really meriting the name. If our International be still weak in numbers, it is strong in doctrine, programme, tradition, in the incomparable tempering of its cadres. Who does not perceive this today, let him in the meantime stand aside. Tomorrow it will become more evident”.
The ICFI has taken to quoting this as if its restatement gives it the authority of the Fourth International by virtue of its recital. In its theory and practice the ICFI degenerated to the point that Trotskyist debate was first stifled within its ranks and then cadres driven out. Now both ICFI factions have built up a pathetic schema of lies to try and cover the fact that whilst Trotsky and the Left Opposition had offered a spotless banner the degeneration of the ICFI has reached such a level that the banner is no longer in their hands. Whilst Trotsky could point to the strength of the young International “in doctrine, programme, tradition, in the incomparable tempering of its cadres”, no tendency claiming to represent Trotskyism can make that claim today. This is the crisis of revolutionary leadership today. Those, like the remaining ICFI cadres, who refuse to face this crisis cut themselves off from its resolution.
The Transitional Programme described sectarian groups and cliques “nourished on accidental crumbs from the table of the Fourth International … with great pretentions but without the least chance of success”. In facing this crisis which grips Trotskyism we must take the counsel of the founders of our International:
“To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s programme on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives – these are the rules of the Fourth International”.
The ICFI has made clear it does not have the courage or principle to abide by those “rules”.
In 1979 the SLL publicly supported the execution of militant members of the Iraqi Communist Party by the bourgeois Iraqi government. Nick Beams, then Workers News editor and now SLL national secretary, in defending this position, wrote and published a particularly obscene series of articles which went so far as to label an SWP leader, Allen Myers, a “scab” because he “fingered” Workers News for supporting the massacre. No principled correction of this has or will appear in Workers News.
The reason Beams and his party do not regard themselves accountable to the working class is not only their cowardice, it is also rooted in their sect nature. Their inestimable arrogance and contempt for principle is likewise rooted in their mental separation of party from class. As far as the SLL is concerned when it is not about “its one purpose, to lead the working class in the struggle for power”, its actual practice in the class, in particular its shortcomings, are not up for scrutiny and are best forgotten.
In 1984-85 Workers News announced that workers were engaged in the struggle for power; it declared itself to be leading the struggle to bring down the Hawke government and establish a workers’ revolutionary government based on soviets. This perspective failed because nobody except the SLL took it very seriously. Inside the sect members who opposed this semi-anarchist practice were driven out. “We will do this with you or without you”, declared the assistant national secretary Crisp in her own inimicable and inimical style.
No responsible party would not print an analysis of where and why it went wrong and how it was correcting its line. Workers News feels no such responsibility – it toys and dabbles with the political struggle of the class. It is a sect organ. As a West Australian BLF steward said recently, speaking from his own experience and that of SEQEB workers: “They call us out on the grass and then walk away”.
A recent example of this behaviour was seen at the Wellcome picket line in the Sydney industrial suburb of Rosebery. Workers News had campaigned for support for the picket, given it prominent coverage and raised money for the picket, one striker even spoke at the public meeting to celebrate 1000 issues; after the dispute had gone 16 weeks. Workers News suddenly relegated it to a few column inches on the back page. This, at the very moment when police stepped up intimidation to the extent of arresting and locking up pickets overnight without charges being laid.
The SLL position is this: all Marxists reside in the SLL; “workers are trapped in the mental prison of spontaneity”; so we will take care of the politics; the highest point of the class struggle takes place in our ranks anyway, you just continue to support us and our “authority”, and we will merge with you for “one purpose only” to lead you in the struggle for power. If your dispute doesn’t give rise to such a struggle, see you later. The SLL is a crude parody of a vanguard party.
Trotsky describes his experiences with sects thus:
“Psychology, ideas, and customs usually lag behind the developments of objective relations in society and in the class; even in the revolutionary organisations the dead lay their hands upon the living. The preparatory period of propaganda has given us the cadres without which we could not make one step forward, but the same period has, as a heritage, permitted the expression within the organisation of extremely abstract concepts of the construction of a new party and a new International. In their chemically pure form these conceptions are expressed in the most complete manner by the dead sect of Bordigists, who hope that the proletarian vanguard will convince itself, by means of a hardly readable literature, of the correctness of their position and sooner or later will correctly gather around their sect. Often these sectarians add that revolutionary events inevitably push the working class towards us. This passive expectancy, under a cover of idealistic messianism, has nothing in common with Marxism. Revolutionary events always and inevitably pass over the heads of every sect. By means of propagandistic literature, if it is good, one can educate the first cadres, but one cannot rally the proletarian vanguard which lives neither in a circle nor in a school room but in a class society, in a factory, in the organisations of the masses, a vanguard to whom one must know how to speak in the language of its experiences. The best prepared propagandist cadres must inevitably disintegrate if they do not find contact with the daily struggle of the masses. The expectation of the Bordigists that revolutionary events will of themselves push the masses to them as a reward for their “correct” ideas represents the crudest of illusions. During revolutionary events the masses do not inquire for the address of this or that sect, but leap over it. To grow more rapidly during the period of flux, during the preparatory period, one must know how to find points of contact in the consciousness of wide circles of workers. It is necessary to establish proper relations with the mass organisations. It is necessary to find the correct point of departure corresponding to the concrete conditions of the proletarian vanguard in the person of its various groupings. And for this it is necessary to see oneself not as a makeshift for the new party, but only as an instrument for its creation. In other words, while preserving in its totality an intransigence on principle, it is necessary to free oneself radically from sectarian hangovers which subsist as a heritage from a purely propagandist period”.[37]
Trotsky goes on to say:
“To free ourselves from sectarian hangovers of the propagandist period does not mean to us the renunciation of Marxist criteria, but on the contrary to learn to carry them over into a wider field, that is to say, to wed them with the struggle of even larger sections of the working class”. (My emphasis, TP).
We see now why sectarians such as Longstaff take such exception to Smith saying: “ … Lenin himself did not think that Bolshevism could be identified with the ideas of What Is To Be Done? … Bolshevism was not a doctrine but a process of struggle”.[38] Longstaff is formally correct when he says, “the revolutionary party was the necessary vehicle to bring Marxism into the working class”. But in a very real way the experience of the international working class reveals it has taken it into the working class.
Just as the working class cannot spontaneously develop Marxism, nor can Marxism be developed as a science outside the laboratory of the class struggle.
“Only the fusion of socialism with the working class has in all countries created a durable basis for both”,[39] said Lenin.
Like many in the workers’ movement, the SLL completely misrepresent Lenin’s pivotal Marxist polemic. Whilst the Economists and other of Lenin’s opponents misconstrued Lenin and called for his rejection, the ICFI has called for the adoption not of Leninism but of their own opportunistic misconstruction of Lenin’s positions. Both these tendencies are well to the right of Lenin and share their opportunism, which they justify not by a scientific method but by eclecticism. As Lenin stated in State and Revolution:
“In falsifying Marxism in an opportunist fashion, the substitution of eclecticism for dialectics is the easiest way of deceiving the people. It gives an illusory satisfaction, it seems to take into account all sides of the process, all the trends of development, all the conflicting influences, and so forth, whereas in reality it provides no integral and revolutionary conception of the process of social development at all”.[40]
The history of the workers’ movement shows that sects can exist inside the workers’ movement but that they cannot develop the scientific world outlook of Marxism. This has certainly been the experience of the working class in Australia with regard to the pathetic little bunch of handraisers misnomered the Socialist Labour League. The Communist League emerged from their ranks because Trotskyism can only be taken forward outside their ranks.
Notes
[1] Workers News is the weekly newspaper of the Socialist Labour League, Australian section of the ICFI [Workers News was the newspaper of the SLL from 1973 to 1998. The SLL changed its name to the Socialist Equality Party in 2010].
[2] Lenin, CW Vol. 13, p.107. [“Preface to the Collection Twelve Years” (September 1907)].
[3] Ibid., p. 101.
[4] G. Healy, Studies in Dialectical Materialism, p.25. [“80 Years On – Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?”, News Line, 6 July 1982].
[5] Lenin, CW Vol. 6, p. 235. [“A Letter to a Comrade on Our Organisational Tasks” (September 1902)].
[6] Trotsky, My Life, p. 162. [Chapter XII: The Party Congress and the Split].
[7] Trotsky, “On Lenin”, p. 53. [See: Trotsky on Lenin, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2017, p. 238].
[8] Lenin. CW Vol. 13, p. 102. [“Preface to the Collection Twelve Years” (September 1907)].
[9] Lenin, CW Vol. 13, p.107. [Ibid.].
[10] Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party, New Park Pubns, p. 59.
[11] Lenin, CW Vol. 4, p.367. [“The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement” (November 1900)].
[12] Lenin, CW Vol. 4, p. 369 [Ibid.]
[13] Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party, p. 77. [New Park Publications, London, 1973].
[14] Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin, New Park Pubns, p. 235. [IV: What Now? (Part 4) Section 9 “The Party Crisis”].
[15] Ibid., p. 134. [III. Summary and Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution: Its Lessons for the Countries of the Orient and for the Whole of the Comintern (Part 1) Section 1 “On the Nature of the Colonial Bourgeoisie”].
[16] Lenin, from the preface of “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”, Collected Works, Vol. 7, p. 206.
[17] G. Healy, ‘Studies in Dialectical Materialism’, p. 27. [“Subjective Idealism Today”, Studies in Dialectical Materialism, A Workers Revolutionary Party Pamphlet, 1982].
[18] Trotskyism versus Revisionism, New Park Pubns. Vol. 3, p. 107. [“Comments on the Socialist Workers Party’s resolution by the NEC of the Socialist Labour League, June 1961”].
[19] Lenin, “Our Immediate Tasks” (1899), CW Vol. 4, p. 217].
[20] Lenin, CW Vol. 5, p. 512. [What Is to Be Done?, Chapter V, “The “Plan” For an All-Russia Political Newspaper”].
[21] F. Engels, “Letter to Sorge”, 12.5.1894. [Marx and Engels on the United States, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1979, p. 334].
[22] Lenin, Left Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder, Chapter 2, quoted by C. Smith, “How We Should Read Lenin”, Workers Press, 15.1.1986.
[23] K. Marx, Letter to Schweitzer, 13.10.1868.
[24] “The Organisational Structure of the Communist Parties: the methods and contents of their work: theses”, passed by the Third Congress of the Communist International. Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the CI, Ink Links, London, p. 242.
[25] F. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Chapter 3, Moscow edn, p. 59. [“Part III: (Historical Materialism)”].
[26] Lenin, “Our Programme” (1899), CW Vol. 4, p. 212.
[27] Lenin, “A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social-Democracy” (1899), CW Vol. 4, p. 275.
[28] Lenin, CW Vol. 5, p. 375. [What Is to Be Done?, Chapter II: “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social-Democrats”].
[29] Lenin, “Frederick Engels” (1895), CW Vol. 2, p. 22.
[30] Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, CW Vol. 5, p. 375. [Chapter II: “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social-Democrats”].
[31] Ibid., p. 382.
[32] Ibid., p. 384.
[33] “On Tactics”, resolution passed by the Third Congress of the CI, Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos, p. 285.
[34] Lenin, CW Vol. 5, pp. 396-7. [Chapter II: “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social-Democrats”].
[35] Lenin, “The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement”, CW Vol. 4, p. 368.
[36] Lenin, “In Australia”, CW Vol. 19, pp 216-7.
[37] L. Trotsky, “The Present Situation in the Labour Movement and the Tasks of the Bolshevik-Leninists”, 1934, Documents of the Fourth International: the Formative Years 1933-40, Pathfinder, pp. 62-63.
[38] C. Smith, “How Should We Read Lenin”. [Workers Press, 15 January 1986].
[39] Lenin, “The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement”, CW Vol. 4, p. 368.
[40] Lenin, State and Revolution, Chapter 4, CW Vol. 25, p, 405.
Marxism and Labor 