From the archives two decades ago: On Trotskyism, and why I am not a 'Trostskyist'

[The post below is something I wrote two decades ago in reference to a long-forgotten conference dealing with the legacy of Trotskyism. It was written for the Marxism email list, maintained to this day by Unrepentant Marxist Louis Proyect, who together with this writer and many other on that list in those days, had come out of the wreckage of what had been until the 1980s the main Trotskyist group in the United States, the Socialist Workers Party.

[I had been a prominent leader of the SWP for several years before leaving the group in 1985. A few months earlier in the year 2000 I'd become embroiled in a controversy with the SWP over the case of Cuban 6-year-old Elián González, which earned me a two-page centerfold spread denunciation in the May 22, 2000, edition of the paper, which was a gratifying confirmation that the criticism I'd leveled against the SWP cult for denouncing the raid that freed Elián and returned him to his father had struck home.

[Recently there's been a lot of discussion in the DSA around various issues that led me to seek out and re-read this old post. That led me to think it was worth resurrecting although I do not have the time to explain why apart from saying that the underlying issues of the relationship between the actual social movement of working people, political organizations, and ideology or "theory" are present in both cases.

[Unfortunately I also don't have the time to try to make this post more understandable to those who did not live through those times as part of those circles. But I wanted to make it accessible as I started to write an article about current concerns where I wound up making reference to this post.]

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Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2000 00:07:19 -0700

I've read with some interest the reports on the conference and related matters.

It seems to me the question that deserves the most thought is the legacy of Trotsky, of Trotskyism, and of the Trotskyist movement. They are not the same thing.

To start with the Trotskyist movement. It seems to me the current of Bolshevik-Leninists that arose in the USSR to fight against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union was entirely progressive and historically necessary. It was most of all a fight to rescue and preserve genuine Marxism. I believe Trotsky will be long remembered for this. And his analysis and understanding of the degeneration of the Soviet Union is now part of the ABC's of Marxism.

I think [Argentine socialist] Nestor [Gorojovsky] is right to place the Russian Revolution in the context of the great sweep of revolutions called forth by the development of capitalism in Europe, and the events now going on in Belgrade as quite likely their closing chapter.

I do not believe the Belgrade events close the book on the Trotskyist movement, however, no more than the 1989-1991 capitalist restorationist counterrevolution in  the USSR and Central and Eastern Europe did. I believe the book was closed on the specifically Trotskyist movement as "the" revolutionary movement by the Second World War and its immediate result, the anticolonial revolution, and this was shown in practice in China in 1949, and confirmed again in the 50s in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Algeria.

The case of Cuba is particularly definitive because there was no question there but that these were fresh revolutionary currents, totally outside the by-then "traditional" tendencies in the workers and communist movement. There were undoubtedly many individuals who came out of the Trotskyist tradition or who were influenced by it who simply became part of the Cuban revolutionary movement. But those who chose to remain specifically and distinctively Trotskyist became, inevitably and irremediably, a sect.

In fact, the Trotskyist movement had been in a certain sense a sect all along, since the 1930s. I do not mean by this that they were sectarian (though many were) but that they were a strictly ideological formation, with a fully worked out theory and program, and the boundaries of the group were set overwhelmingly by this ideological frontier. A few times various Trotskyist groups began to go beyond being a mere sect formation in the direction of being an expression of the actual movement of social forces, but these remained in all cases, as far as I know, extremely limited and partial developments. In the one case I know best, that of the SWP in the mid-70s, the development was totally unconscious, a byproduct of its "intervention" in the mass movements of those days, and no one in the SWP except perhaps Peter Camejo even had an inkling of what was going on, what it really meant. Even incipient as Peter's tendency towards de-sectification may have been, he was instinctively rejected and pushed outside the party as a foreign organism.

I don't say this lightly, and it may seem to contradict what I said before about the importance of the fight waged by Trotsky and his comrades to preserve genuine revolutionary Marxism. But it was inevitable under the circumstances given the nature of the fight, an ideological one, that it had to be waged precisely by sect-like formations. Engels once said, I think in reference to the American SLP, that even sects can play a positive role during periods of downturn, because they keep alive socialist ideas.  Or to put it in American terms, without DeLeon, there would have been no Debs.

Marx and Engels's Communist League was a very similar formation to the Trotskyist movement, a purely ideological group, a group that largely played a role in the fight over ideas, creating a clear, Marxist pole of attraction in the inchoate communist rebelliousness of the mid-1840s. But it was a consciously anti-sect "sect," a group whose central ideological leaders understood that, at bottom, communism was not a doctrine but a movement, that the role of communists was not to teach the proletariat how to fight but to learn, to draw lessons and generalize them, bring to consciousness the actual existing social tendencies, motion and struggle. That's why in 1848, with the ink on the Manifesto barely dry, the Communists disbanded the Communist League, and Marx, Engels and some of their closest friends set up a daily newspaper instead.

The Communist League was briefly reborn following the defeat of the revolutions of 1848, when it was unclear whether the defeat was for an entire period of merely a momentary setback. When the actual reactionary nature of the new period, based on a vigorous capitalist expansion became clear, Marx, Engels and their closest friends made the conscious decision to wind up the organization. This was the logical, practical result of what they wrote in the Manifesto that the Communists did not have a set of their own sectarian principles by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement. Marx and Engels turned instead to strictly literary and theoretical work.

Similarly, throughout the 1930s and into the 40s, while the largely ideological battle against the Stalinist perversion of Marxism was paramount, the existence of these new "Communist Leagues" seems to me quite justified. But with the emergence of the anticolonial revolution, the right decision, whatever its forms, would have been to do something like what Marx and Engels did when the revolution in Germany broke out in 1848. China proved the Fourth International was not in fact the world party of socialist revolution, and to maintain those structures and groups could only lead to one's isolation from the real movement.

The Cuban Revolution unleashed a powerful wave of radicalization among young people throughout the continent. The emergence of this new generation of fighters posed very sharply and in real life the issue of whether the Trotskyists would become part of the renewed movement or would instead opt to become the church of LDT. Varying currents of the Trotskyist movement were well represented in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, and despite lip service and even World Congress resolutions about becoming integrated into the historic current represented by OLAS, no Trotskyist current saw its way clear to doing what Marx and Engels did almost by instinct in 1848, which is to dissolve into the general revolutionary movement.

The reason for this is that large wings of the communist movement have abandoned the viewpoint of the Manifesto on an essential question, the relationship of the communists to the proletariat, the proletarian movement and to other proletarian parties. Lenin is usually blamed for this, although usually it is thought of as "credited" with this and as far as I can tell whether for good or ill, it is a bum rap.

This arose in the 1920s in the Comintern, and has been deepened and hardened since. And it is not even so much a question as to whether what the Comintern did in the first congress or the second congress was the right thing at that time. It is the idea that these are the right things for all times, places and circumstances, that there is some "ideal" form of party organization and mass movement form. This is not Marxism but Platonism, and I think it is totally alien to how Marx and Engels, and, yes, Lenin, approached these questions.

Whether Trotsky would have had the same approach of discarding old, worn-out organizational forms is an interesting question. The comment Nestor quoted about how if W.W.II came out the way it actually did, all the books would have to be rewritten, is certainly suggestive.

This idea of "the Leninist strategy of party building" as the sure-fire formula for revolutionary success, the turning of the Russian experience into a "model," is a mistake. It is an understandable mistake, and one that the new generation of fighters that came up in Latin America in the 60s ALSO made vis-a-vis the Cuban model, but which the Cuban leadership itself eventually came to recognize as a mistake. The reason that Cuban communists do not run guns to guerrilla groups in Latin America today is not that they have abandoned their sympathy, solidarity and support for revolutionary movements throughout the hemisphere, but because they do not believe this is helpful, you can't repeat the Cuban experience, history has proved that, you have to create your own revolutionary tactics and strategy in each country based on the history, the psychological makeup and concrete circumstances of each people.

What was wrong with those Trotskyist currents who tried to become part of the general "Cuba-inspired" movement while retaining their own identity? It was a totally ideological differentiation, not a political one. Communism is a movement, not a doctrine, and if there was to have been a differentiation, it should have been along political lines of cleavage on what was to be done, on the ground, in specific circumstances in a specific country, not ideological ones about who was right in Soviet Russia in 1927.

This insistence on maintaining the Church of Saint Leon led inevitably to countless political mistakes, such as the US SWP's insanely sectarian articles about the "Stalinism" of the Vietnamese comrades and its quite ignorant and arrogant criticisms of the Vietnamese line on the Paris Peace Accords. Similar things can be said about its stance towards Chile, the Allende government and the coup, and if more similar examples are wanted, go to the Militant's web site and look up their articles on Hugo Chávez.

For to maintain a group around the lessons of China in the 1920s and Spain in the 1930s at its core can only makes sense if the issues now are posed in exactly the same way then, so that you could take Trotsky's articles, change a few names, dates and places, and publish it as your analysis of something happening today.

This is why I am not a Trotskyist, and it has, really, nothing to do with how much of what Trotsky wrote I agree with or how important I think his legacy may be. It has to do with Marx and Engels's idea that Communism is not a doctrine, it is a movement. 

That's why when people press me on what sort of Marxist I am, I'm much more likely to say that I'm a fidelista rather than a trotskista, although I agree with Fidel that it's better not to "personalize" these things. But I said fidelismo because fidelismo is the communist movement we've got in the here and now --and, of course, I believe to the marrow of my bones it is genuine 100% real communism, not some fake or perversion. 

If I had lived in Russia in 1917 I hope I would have been a Leninist, or if in the 20s and 30s, a Trotskyist, but as I see things, beginning in the late 1940s, "Trotskyism" as a separate distinct current and organization should have begun to melt into and simply become part of the past of the revolutionary movement, and certainly by the early 60s this was an urgent, pressing, overriding political necessity.

To try to maintain a separate, distinct "Trotskyist"  (or "Maoist" or "Stalinist" or "Leninist" or even, depending on the circumstances, a "Fidelista" or "Marxist" current) cannot but push you in an incorrect political direction, because it puts you in a false position on the relationship between the communist movement and communist theory, and on the relationship between the communists and the working class movement. 

The DSA's AFROSOC Caucus channels Stalin

The official Afro-Socialist and People of Color caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America succeeded in forcing the cancellation of an online forum co-sponsored by the Lower Manhattan and Philadelphia units of the organization because it didn't like what the speaker was going to say.

That speaker was to be Adolph Reed, a Black Academic, holding forth on "Dangers of Disparity Ideology," which, as best as I understand it, is that the questions of the race (and unstated but implicit, ethnicity/nationality) of Covid-19 victims should be ignored so at to not to obscure the issue of class.

If I can be forgiven for being so old, Reed's theses is the sort of idiocy I've been hearing since I was in high school and sneaking into Students for a Democratic Society meetings at the University of Miami in 1969 where adherents of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party's "Workers-Student Alliance" Caucus sang the praises of the strategy, "Black and white, unite and fight," i.e., putting aside issues of race.

But the truth is that this idea --and especially grey versions of it, not quite so starkly Black-and-white as I painted it above-- have a huge amount of currency in the new socialist movement that has arisen in the United States in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and Sanders 2016 and 2020.

Yet the statement put out by AFROSOC demanding Reed's scheduled webinar be turned into a debate (with whom? we were never told!) says quite clearly that all the comrades who are inclined to agree with him should be driven out of the DSA: "It is a reactionary and class reductionist form of politics that should have no place in DSA."

Read it again: "should have no place in the DSA." In this way, the statement makes clear no debate was wanted or intended.

Inside the AFROSOC/POC Caucus, the trick that was used to impose this Stalinist notion was to present for a vote two options: demand that the event be cancelled or that it be turned into a debate.

The point was to make it seem like demanding the debate was something other than censoring Reed and preventing him from having his say.

But "demanding a debate" --especially under current Covid-19 circumstances-- the day before an event is not a serious demand.

The word "debate' was just a way of provoking enough of a ruckus so that the event would be cancelled. And the result was that the lead sponsor, a Lower Manhattan DSA branch committee, did cancel it, supposedly because Reed decided to withdraw, some said, but who knows.

So let's not bullshit each other: the effect was exactly what was intended. Reed's viewpoint is simply verboten, not allowed, beyond the pale: "a reactionary and class reductionist form of politics that should have no place in DSA."

This idealist, moralistic way of posing the question, a "form of politics that should have no place in DSA" brings out sharply what it wrong with it: right now, it does, in fact, have a place within the DSA. That is material reality. The actual truth of the DSA as it exists: not a statement of what I wish would be true, but, on the contrary, simply a statement of the facts on the ground.

Let me repeat: it is a fact the those ideas are in the DSA, shared to a greater or lesser degree by many members.  Hence the importance of a real discussion, and even debate, and thus the attraction of the debate demand. The Caucus rejected demanding that the event be cancelled but through the 11th-hour debate demand, in practice, on the ground, in the real world, it led exactly to that outcome: cancellation. That is what was wanted by the instigators: "should have no place in DSA."

But if you really think you can dictate that people abandon their erroneous opinion, you might want to check how far the Catholic Church got with its campaign against the heretical idea that the earth went around the sun instead of the other way around. You can force someone to recant. But it still moves.

It will take time, discussions, and most of all experience in further struggles for those current DSA members who hold ideas like Reed's to discard them. And some never will. Believe me. Been there. Done that. Despite that some --many-- will be excellent socialist militants, in real life, on the ground.

Yet there may come a time when people with such ideas and those of us who reject them might not be able to coexist in a common organization. But the Afrosoc position paper claims that the moment has already arrived:

Efforts like these have proven to be incapable of building a multiracial working class base for socialist politics. More importantly, events like these undermine the organizing work DSA is doing in Black, Indigenous and people of color communities. DSA already gets smeared for being too white (which it is) as if it’s irredeemably white and that only communicates to BIPOC folks that they shouldn’t join DSA. What do these DSA organizers think they’re saying to their BIPOC comrades by hosting this kind of event? How do they think this event is going to help in our efforts at recruiting a more diverse DSA?

This is preposterous. To think some Black or Latinx activist is going to be held back from joining the Metro Atlanta DSA, my chapter, because in New York a committee from one of a half dozen branches held an online forum that promoted supposedly bad ideas to literally handfuls, if not dozens or even a hundred people, is absurd.

On the contrary, I think a group really grappling with these issues both in theory and its activism would prove immensely attractive to young militants. Those are the sorts of issues that hooked me into getting involved in SDS way back when.

But the same can't be said of a group where you suddenly face peremptory demands coming out of the blue to brand as anathema certain ideas and shut down all discussion of them (and with the supposed moral authority of ALL the "people of color" in the organization, even though fewer than 30 actually voted, out of hundreds or perhaps thousands of POC members).

But the issue of why the DSA has not become a more diverse organization is an immediate and pressing one. And I wish I had a comprehensive formula for solving this, but all I have is a very modest grain of sand.

Delegates to our last DSA convention ratified by an overwhelming margin --the highest of any resolution by far-- a text saying the DSA should orient to Latinx communities beginning with establishing a Spanish-language web site with its own editorial board.

Given the weight that the Afrosoc/POC statement on Reed's forum gives to making sure even a local New York online event "is going to help in our efforts at recruiting a more diverse DSA," one would think a body that is supposed to be the primary expression of oppressed minorities in the DSA in general would have assiduously followed, step by step, the efforts made by the national staff and National Political Committee to implement this convention mandate.

Has the Caucus done that? No it has not. And how do I know that? With apologies to Bernie:

I wrote the damn resolution.

The tremendous concern of those who run this DSA grouping for getting people who are not white anglos to the DSA has been absent in this case even though the resolution specified a goal of 90 days, and we've already tripled that.

And this Caucus has not lifted a finger --nay, not even a toenail-- to push for the implementation of this resolution. Shutting down Adolph Reed from having his say under DSA auspices to literally several if not dozens of comrades who mostly would not agree with him anyways was of overriding importance.

Trying to get the DSA to address the tens of millions of people in this country whose primary language is Spanish ... that can wait. Forever.

What this suggests to me is that this DSA Caucus might be vulnerable to being accused of fraud. Despite the claim that it is representative both of Blacks and other "People of Color," in reality Latinos are officially 18% of the U.S. population, by far the largest nationally oppressed group in the United States, but it does not seem to strike the Caucus leaders that their priorities and actions should conform to that reality.

Which raises the obvious question: if this caucus doesn't work, why not organize a Latine caucus? And the answer is that the DSA has been such a catastrophic failure in attracting Latinx people, and in providing vehicles through which a message like this can reach a large percentage of the membership, that trying would likely be a waste of time.

But if that is so, can the DSA really become the organization so many members want it to be, the political expressions of the multinational/racial U.S. working class?

Why I am withdrawing from the DSA Socialist Majority Caucus

[The Democratic Socialists of America held their national convention in Atlanta August 2-4. I was a delegate and candidate for the DSA National Political Committee. I was also a member of the Socialist Majority Caucus although not on its slate of candidates, in part, I am sure, because other caucus members realized, as I did, that increasingly my views diverged from the approach the steering committee had decided on with the support of active caucus members.

[That approach was to become, in essence, a faction like the other main factions operating prior to the convention, one called Bread and Roses (formerly the Spring Caucus and prior to that Momentum), Build (which curiously claimed not to be a caucus), and the Collective Power Network. 

[There was also a North Star Caucus that operated as an ideological tendency rather than a faction because it did not seek to place a slate of its own members on the National Political Committee. In my view the difference between a tendency and a faction is that the latter seeks to place its own people on leadership bodies, which tends to transform the group into a disciplined fighting organization, a faction.

[Simultaneously with publishing this, I'm also informing the caucus through its internal mailing list that I am withdrawing from the grouping.]

DSA members in the Socialist Majority Caucus and I'm sure others who read carefully  my campaign leaflet for our recent DSA convention cannot possibly have failed to understand that I was criticizing the way this and other caucuses wound up functioning:

    Finally, I am running against factionalism. We need to channel our discussions and collaboration through structures and spaces which are open to everyone in the DSA.
    Members have a right to form caucuses, but caucuses carry a price. Separate discussion lists, private zoom calls, by-invitation-only conventions, “whipping the votes” through one-sided phone conversations, these practices undermine the cohesion of the DSA and can even compromise the integrity of the organization.

What I wanted and understood to be an aspect of the Socialist Majority project originally was the idea embodied in the "this caucus is not a caucus" proposal for its name, a formation that, yes, favored a range of ideas we have in common, but especially what I thought was a common view on the right way to function in the "big tent," multi-tendency organization we are all for.

And that way is to combat the fragmentation into caucuses for essentially no good reason. And having ongoing caucuses now seems to me to be unjustified at this stage of the organization.

Even for a convention, factions should not be formed on the basis of affinity, agreement with general principles, friendships and associations developed through collaboration on common projects, followers of particular individuals, electioneering for leadership posts, etc., but --if necessary under certain circumstances-- on concrete differences over what the organization should be doing and how it should function.

The difference that justified a caucus in my view was precisely that we should not be functioning with these permanent factions but that they should be dissolved into the general organization, not by some sort of prohibition, but by convincing comrades not to function in this way. In addition, I think I made a mistake in supporting Single Transferable Vote (STV) election for the NPC, a type of proportional representation, which very strongly encourages factional functioning merely for electioneering.

I now think we simply should have let delegates vote for 16 people and, subject to our gender and people of color demographic requirements, let the raw number of votes for each determine the winners.

I really found extremely off-putting and essentially undemocratic the way caucuses tried to game the STV system by urging delegates not to vote their best judgement, but asking different comrades rank the candidates in various sequences on the basis of some formula or calculation. I think this sort of "tactical" voting undermines individual and collective integrity. We end up voting for a faction and not candidates. If that's the way it is going to be then it should be proposed, honestly, openly and transparently, that voting be for slates.

I realize I have an extremely distinct outlook. I may be the only one in this caucus or among the delegates who in the past was centrally involved in the leadership of a leading socialist organization that I helped destroy through undemocratic practices, trumped-up disciplinary expulsions, and all sorts of underhanded maneuvers and manipulations.

Nothing going on in the DSA today resembles what happened decades ago in the Socialist Workers Party, but at any rate, I think certain lessons are applicable.

Sill, I've decided not to try to start a discussion to convince comrades in this caucus to dissolve now.

I've realized from discussions in my local and at the convention that younger comrades find my views on these issues almost completely inaccessible if not downright incomprehensible. A discussion would be a fruitless exercise.

Better to concentrate on the practical work. And practical collaboration is now the best way to try to get away from the fragmentation of the DSA into rival factions.

On the results of the DSA convention: exhilarating but a little frustrating

This is what the future looks like: a convention of millennials committed to transforming the United States.

Some 1,000 delegates and I'm not sure how many volunteers and other members met in Atlanta August 2-4 for the biannual convention of the Democratic Socialists of America.

On the daily radio show I co-host, I said that as a delegate I found the convention incredibly exhilarating although at times frustrating -- and, ironically, for the same reason.

The DSA has grown explosively over the past few years and is now more than ten times the size it was when the Bernie phenomenon first exploded in the summer of 2015. That growth shaped the convention.

For a life-long socialist who first read the Communist Manifesto in high school more than half a century ago, and after a few years of radical upsurge had to live through decades of retreats, it was just incredible seeing this completely new generation of fighters grappling with how to advance a movement now looked to by literally tens of millions of people in this country.

Especially because this is a totally new generation, overwhelmingly without experience in the socialist or any other movement not weighed down by the mistakes of 20th century socialism. But this freshness also showed in so much time consumed by procedural wrangling, instead of political discussion. Yet the way the DSA is today, that was inevitable.

The main contested issue at the convention as I saw it was between a layer of comrades that wanted to foster greater decentralization by taking financial resources away from the National Office and giving them to local organizations. I think the claim to help especially the smaller Locals is legitimate and many delegates su[ported them. But the main resolutions proposed went beyond that, promoting a dis-empowering of the DSA as a national organization. But a more cautious resolution on the same issue (also by an Atlanta delegate) was approved.

The decentralizers lost by around a 55 to 45 margin on their resolutions, although I did not keep a close tabs on the exact count, and the margin might have been a little bigger. But a more cautious resolution on the same question (by one of our Atlanta delegates, by the way) was approved.

Dues sharing may seem like a strange main issue. But there was overwhelming consensus at the convention on the practical tasks and priorities for the DSA, things like medicare for all, an ecosocialist green new deal, tenant justice, immigrant and refugee rights, and, of course, backing Bernie -- to name just a few causes that DSA'ers are involved with.

On the resolutions I felt most strongly about, the one I wrote on orienting to the Latinx community starting with a Spanish-language web site, received the highest vote (88%) on the "consent agenda," a list of resolutions with so much support in a pre-convention delegate poll that they are voted and ratified as a group at the beginning of the convention.

The second-highest vote on that "consent agenda" was for an immigration resolution calling for open borders, which I also supported even though I would have changed some of the wording.

Another resolution also approved on that list was a resolution I co-authored on immigration work. It said, in part, "The National Immigrant Rights Working Group shall approach immigrant rights organizations ... to help to organize national-scale mobilizations" against Trump's immigration policies, and indeed the steering committee of the working group has already met and started to aggressively implement this provision.

A third resolution from Atlanta approved on the consent agenda was by City of South Fulton councilman khalid, demanding presidential candidates support reparations for Black people.

I did run for the national leadership but was not elected, nor did I expect to be. As the convention drew closer I realized that I wanted to focus on how the way I view things is very different from most other comrades, and on explaining why.

So among other things I wrote extensive comments on the Open Borders resolution, dealing with imperialism and Latino identity even though those were side issues and I supported and voted for the resolution.

I explained my overall priorities for changes in the DSA in a piece I published here and as a campaign leaflet that was distributed at the convention. That stressed the DSA needed to focus on the Latinx and Black communities, not mainly as a question of organizational resources but a political orientation. I also insisted this meant focusing on the South, and the real situation on the ground in these and other Republican-dominated areas needed to be taken into account in our national projects.
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Language justice and the DSA's internal culture in relation to the Latinx community were central topics in a blog post also published on an internal forum. The piece explained why I was refusing to sign a "motherhood and apple pie" transparency pledge that was backed by almost all other NPC candidates. My explanation also had an extensive polemic against the factionalism that was being promoted by the way most caucuses were functioning (and still are).

This may seem like a Quixotic campaign. But my original motivation in running for the NPC was to make sure that the Spanish-language web site and immigration resolutions were implemented if approved.

With the overwhelming support they received and seeing a number of millennial Latinx comrades who are strongly involved in the fight for immigrant rights running, and some were sure to be on the incoming NPC, that was no longer a big issue. So I decided to switch to a propaganda campaign that I hope started to raise some issues I care deeply about and I think will be important for the DSA going forward.

Why I didn't sign the 'transparency pledge' of DSA national leadership candidates

[The Democratic Socialists of America is holding their convention in Atlanta August 1-4. As I've already explained, I am running for the group's National Political Committee. The majority of other NPC candidates have signed a Transparency Pledge, but I refused to sign. Following is what I posted in the internal DSA Discussion Board explaining my decision. I will add that although I raise a number of issues with the pledge, just the first one was more than enough for me to reject it.]

Patronizing tokenization
The pledge commits signers to ensuring that "all text is translated into spanish within a reasonable timeframe." That's bunk: it is not going to happen. I'm a professional translator and interpreter. I guarantee you: the cost is prohibitive and the product is worthless. We have no use for it.

Language justice for Spanish-dominant people is an extremely important, serious matter that the resolution I wrote on orienting to the Latinx communities barely takes the first baby step in broaching. And it is not a question of translation, but of creating spaces where Latinx people --and especially immigrants and the sons and daughters of immigrants -- feel at home.

I can't possibly express my disappointment that concern about the Latino community has been expressed this way, through patronizing tokenization, nor how much I resent having to write something like this once again.

Transcription is not the way to get highly accessible transparency
The translation promise is put in the context of "Ensure that all audio communication is transcribed, and all text is translated into spanish within a reasonable timeframe." Well, everything said in a meeting is "audio communication." Is this serious? A day-long meeting will produce a book-length transcript (+/- 50,000 words).

And does this include translating the transcript of every meeting? Both the transcript and the translation are very expensive undertakings and by far not the best way of guaranteeing transparency.

One thing that could be done instead is to have a good quality video transmission and recording of the meeting. This means multiple mics, an audio board or mixer, multiple cameras (2 or 3) to have a good view of the speaker, and use of a computer program like Vmix that basically gives you the capacity of a small TV control room. It might cost a couple of thousand dollars for the equipment.

And, yes, it is possible and not that hard. We do it every day at Radio Información. You do need trained people, but tons of students are learning this in college.

Wrong-headed or misworded provisions
I disagree with "Ensure final meeting agendas are published no less than 72 hours prior to the meeting." I have no problem with updated agendas going out three days before, but the "final agendas" should be those voted by the NPC itself at the beginning of the meeting. I would refuse to be locked in or censored by whatever the agenda-makers decide is worth discussing.

I also object to "Refrain from holding NPC/SC calls, votes, or other discussions of official business outside of official NPC/SC meeting settings." A National Political Committee has to react to real-world politics, a role the current committee has failed to fulfill. That is going to mean holding meetings on short --even very short-- notice or continuing to abdicate that responsibility. Since the statement doesn't make it clear, I don't know if that falls outside the "settings" the email refers to.

I can't support "Hold office hours remotely for 2 to 4 hours each month, which are scheduled at least two weeks in advance and published to membership" without a lot more being said. We are not officers individually empowered to deal with matters. Our function is as members of a committee. There would need to be strict guidelines, mechanisms and safeguards that all matters that properly belong before the committee are communicated to the entire committee. And let's not be disingenuous: everyone knows that certain NPC members have used their positions to build caucuses and uncaucuses. [We have one internal grouping called "Build" that claims not to be a caucus but has resolutions and candidates before the convention].

And I can't "Commit to the work being done by the membership to improve the grievance process and handle those in a timely manner." without knowing which members are being referred to or what improvements they propose. Otherwise, it is just a blank check.

The elephant in the room: factionalism
I believe the real motive for the pledge is trying to do something about the paralysis and lack of transparency that has resulted from factionalism in the NPC. Other points were added --like the translation point-- in an effort to face up to the blatant failures of the previous NPC.

Transparency measures are very much needed but as I tried to illustrate with the video proposal above, there are other solutions that have not been analyzed. A hastily thrown together pledge drafted by a small number of comrades is likely to be flawed. These things need to be seriously analyzed in a process that is open to the entire membership, in order to develop and refine proposals.

The previous NPC was completely irresponsible in failing to deal with issues like transparency, dues distribution, regionalization, the structure of the national leadership, language justice and many others.

Serious proposals for a convention in 2020
In my opinion, except for amendment 15 enlarging the size of the NPC, ALL of the resolutions on structure, dues, etc., should be tabled to the incoming NPC with a mandate to form open, broad-based commissions to draw together ideas and create one or more proposals in each area for a convention a year from now to consider.

We will clearly need a convention then anyways to decide what to do about the fall election, and if we decide to actively intervene, to organize and mobilize for that effort.

I make an exception for amendment 15 to enlarge the NPC. It may not be ideal but it is the most direct, immediate measure we have available in an attempt to prevent factionalism from dominating the incoming NPC the way it has the past one, and to make it more representative.

The pledge I want: dissolve the factions
The pledge I would have liked to have supported is one demanding that all the factions --including Build-- dissolve. I call them factions because that is what they are: highly structured membership organizations seeking to put their people in the leadership and thereby impose their politics as the politics of the national organization.

You might say that doesn't happen in the DSA but I contend there is no other explanation for the failure of national DSA to deal adequately with what Trump has made the top ongoing political issue in the country, immigration, and the failure of our national organization to reach out to Latinos, the largest oppressed minority. It is a reflection of the narrow, economist, class-reductionist politics of the leading faction in the NPC.

I think comrades who want to advocate a particular point of view should function instead as an ideological current, putting forward their ideas through a web site or blog, maybe with an editorial board but without an elected leaderships that serves as a board or executive committee for the group, membership requirements, bylaws, polls and elections and all the rest of it.

The organized factions and their paralyzing squabbling are alienating big sections of the membership: it needs to stop or we are going to pay a very heavy price, and possibly destroy the DSA as it exists now.

Why I am running for the DSA's NPC

[The Democratic Socialists of America are holding their national convention in Atlanta August 2-4. I am a candidate in the elections for the DSA National Political Committee. This is a leaflet I wrote for the convention to explain why I am running.]

• Make immigrant and refugee rights a national priority
• Publish a Spanish website and orient to Latinx communities
• Focus on smaller cities, the South and Southwest
• Oppose U.S. wars and military bases abroad
• Transparent, participatory and democratic functioning
• Create an inclusive socialist movement for the 21st Century

José G. Pérez, NPC candidate

I am running for the NPC in support of two resolutions, one on making defense of immigrant and refugees a national priority and the other on orienting to the Latinx communities beginning with creating a website in Spanish.

The DSA needs to focus on working with people of color and their organizations, understanding that our role is to support, not supplant, the struggles of oppressed peoples themselves.

This also implies orienting to the South and Southwest where the majority of people of color live. It means taking conditions there into account in our national policies. The electoral policy, for example, says nothing about giving non-socialist candidates critical support. It ignores important battles, like for control of state legislatures ahead of reapportionment in 2021. The policy works for heavily Democratic cities, but not for smaller cities, rural areas or the South.

Yet the South and Southwest are essential to transformative change in the United States: the reactionaries have to be fought and defeated where they are strongest.

And a focus on the South means the global South also. International solidarity should be a hallmark of our organization. We must demand lifting the blockade on Cuba, independence for Puerto Rico, an end to the economic attacks on Venezuela, immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and dismantling of the network of U.S. military bases that have spread across the globe like a cancer.

The NPC should function as a political leadership, not just an administrative body. We need to defend and expand our place in national politics. The NPC should encourage chapters to take initiatives in fights like the defense of the “squad” of four righteous Congresswomen of color against Trump’s diatribes by protesting at Republican headquarters or confronting Congressional Republicans at town halls during the August recess.

But consolidating the DSA also requires participation, transparency and democracy. Issues like dues sharing, creating regional structures, electoral tactics and national priorities should all have been handled by creating wide-open ways for members to take part in thinking them through together to come up with one or more options for the convention to consider.

The outgoing NPC’s inaction has led to an unwieldy set of resolutions that have neither been tested by, nor benefited from, a multifaceted discussion.

Finally, I am running against factionalism. We need to channel our discussions and collaboration through structures and spaces which are open to everyone in the DSA.

Members have a right to form caucuses, but caucuses carry a price. Separate discussion lists, private zoom calls, by-invitation-only conventions, “whipping the votes” through one-sided phone conversations, these practices undermine the cohesion of the DSA and can even compromise the integrity of the organization.

And we should remember we are not a consolidated organization. We did not find most of the people who joined in the last three years: they found us. And like them, there are tens of thousands more who just haven’t paid dues yet.

We have to bring together all those comrades to create the socialist movement of the 21st century, and we need everybody's participation to achieve it.

About José G. Pérez
I am an immigrant from Cuba and a life-long socialist, but a relatively new member of the DSA. I am the Treasurer of the Atlanta Chapter and a member of the National Immigrant Rights Working Group Steering Committee. 

Throughout my life I have been involved most of all with Latinx communities. Since 2002, I have been associated with the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR), and currently I produce and co-host "Hablemos con Teodoro," a daily 2-hour news, analysis and call-in show on Radio Información, a streaming station founded by people from GLAHR.
I have worked as a journalist both inside and outside the movement. Until the mid-1980s, when I moved to Nicaragua for several years during the Sandinista Revolution, I was editor of the Spanish-language socialist magazine Perspectiva Mundial. Before helping to launch Radio Información in 2012, I worked at CNN en Español for two decades. I am also an accredited translator and interpreter.
Hatuey's Ashes is my blog. You can check out “Hablemos con Teodoro,” at facebook.com/RadioInformacion.

A discussion on a proposed 'Open Borders' resolution for the DSA convention

[Today I received the link to a "Resolution on Open Borders" posted on Medium that is being proposed for the DSA Convention. As I explain in the comment below that I posted to Medium, while I share the sentiment behind the proposal, I think presenting open borders as a demand, rather than as an aspiration, is a mistake.

[It should not be demanded of countries that are victims of imperialism because abolition of their border controls and defenses would facilitate attacks against them, primarily from the United States. Yet viewed solely as a demand on the U.S. government, it not only would  be impractical but also lead to victimization of refugees and other immigrants in Europe who likely would be expelled and deported to the United States. And in the fight for immigrant and refugee rights, it would take the focus away from the fight for legalization of the undocumented and accepting Central American refugees.]

I very much agree with the sentiment and much of what this resolution says, but I think it suffers from a one-sidedness and lack of precision that would be very unfortunate for the organization to apply -- even though, again, I completely agree with the sentiment.

What do I mean by "one-sidedness?" I think this captures it:

Whereas border and immigration enforcement are tools of white supremacy, capitalism and imperialism

What is wrong with that?

• Well, are Cuba's borders a tool of "imperialism" or rather a barrier to imperialism? 
• Should Venezuela not have enforced its borders against the "aid caravan" that Washington was pushing to legitimize "President" Juan Guaidó? 
• Are we really for Iran not defending its borders against American Imperialism's Fifth Fleet and CentCom troops? 
• Do we think Yemen would really be better off if the savagely barbarous medieval family dictatorship of the Sauds were allowed to invade and take over the country?

I know the comrades will answer, "that's not what we meant." Of course not. But it's what the text says:

Be it resolved that DSA supports the demand for open borders
Be it resolved that DSA supports the the uninhibited transnational free movement of people....
Be it resolved that DSA recognizes and reflects our support for open borders in our evaluations and endorsement of political campaigns.

Some comrades will respond, "C'mon José, we're in the United States, nobody will think we're talking about some other country's borders."

But if that what was meant, that is what should have been said, if for no other reason that to avoid distracting polemics. (And even then, applied only to the United States, I don't think it is right, as I will explain further down).

But first, as to what "nobody will think," that's strictly from the perspective of an "American" (i.e., someone who indentifies solely as being "United Statesian," to use what would be the English equivalent of the Spanish word "estadounidense.")

But there are tens of millions of us born in or descended from Latin America who have a very different set of lenses through which we look at the world.

As Latinos in the United States we demand we be treated as "Americans," that our undiminished human, civil and political rights as members of U.S. society be respected.

Yet at the same time many of us identify with the sentiments expressed by Malcolm X in his famous 1964 speech, "The ballot or the bullet."

No, I'm not an American. I'm one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I'm not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver -- no, not I. I'm speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare. 

And then, as in this clip from the 2015 Latin Grammy Awards, we all sing together the song by Los Tigres del Norte, "And if we look at the centuries, we are more American than the children of the Anglo-Saxons."

So Latinos --especially immigrants-- will look at this demand very differently than most Anglos would.

But there is also a more immediate reason. This is not a demand raised by the immigrant rights movement, not even the Latino immigrant-based left wing of the movement. And it takes the focus away from where it should be, which is on the most immediate victims of U.S. policy: the undocumented already in the country and their families, as well as the refugees at our southern border.

Another immediate reason not to adopt the wording in this resolution is the election campaign. Obviously, given what I've said, I'm not for injecting this demand into electoral politics.

Although I think the way he has argued for his position is narrow and even reactionary, I agree with Bernie Sanders in not calling for open borders.

The U.S. unilaterally abolishing all immigration restrictions would simply be an invitation to the European imperialist countries to forcibly deport to the United States all refugees and even non-immigrants their Trumpites don't want, i.e., facilitate a generalized "ethnic cleansing" that, without a vastly broader transformation of U.S. society, would be impossible to handle and further victimize those expelled from Europe.

You might say, well, we won't accept people who are being forced to come to the United States but that implies border controls, not open borders.

And more practically, it is simply not a demand that American working people, including most of the tens of millions who view themselves as sympathetic to socialist ideas, can possibly understand. Trump uses this to demagogically claim that his critics want to flood the country with cartel hit men, human traffickers and drug dealers, and the way to counter that is to point to the thousands of refugees, minors and families, who are in fact arriving at the border.

While I agree with the sentiment of "open borders," I think it is better expressed as a desire for no borders, as in "for a world without borders."

I think it was a weakness of my resolution that it did not deal with the issue, and have actually drafted an addition to it but have not added it yet because I had already circulated the resolution for signatures without it. I am hoping after the June 2 deadline for submitting resolutions and verifying the signatures there will be some guidance on whether you can refine your own resolution and how.

That addition would be a new point IV under "Therefore be it resolved" and would say:

The Democratic Socialists of America reaffirm that the aspiration of the socialist movement is a world without borders, while recognizing that slogans that point to this ideal, such as “Open Borders,” are not current demands of the immigrant rights movement.

It might seem very modest but I actually think it is important to add it, because I very much agree with the idea in the "open  borders" resolution that

DSA develops political education resources to be shared with chapters across the country to deepen and broaden the understanding of the demand for open borders and how to fight for it. 

Finally, I want to express my gratitude to the comrades who worked on this resolution because I think it is very important to have an open but comradely discussion on these sorts of issues and I believe that the end result in this and many other cases will be converging towards a more balanced and nuanced position, and even if not, a better understanding of the differing points of view in the organization.

For the DSA convention: Resolution on orienting to Latinx communities

[I drafted the following resolution for submission to the convention of the Democratic Socialists of America to be held in Atlanta Aug. 2-4. DSA convention rules require 50 signatures from members  for the resolution to be considered, so I urge DSA members who agree with it to sign it. The links to the signature form can be found here on the DSA's members-only discussion board.]  

Whereas: The Latinx community is now the largest oppressed minority in the country, with 18% of the country’s population, some 60 million people, and concentrated among young people. One in five millennials is classified as “Hispanic” by the census bureau; among post-millennials, one in four.

Whereas: The United States has the second largest number of Spanish-speaking people in the world after Mexico, some 55 million people over the age of five. Some 41 million are considered native speakers as that is the main language used in their homes, a number comparable to native speakers in Colombia, Argentina and Spain  itself.

Whereas: Due to a common oppression and modern communications and media, as well as language and common cultural elements, this community has developed a common identity as shown by the immigrant rights protests in the spring of 2006. It was the most massive wave of sustained protests ever, anywhere.

Whereas: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a millennial Puerto Rican woman and democratic socialist, has become by far the single most prominent Latinx political figure in the community and media, which presents extraordinary opportunities to increase the presence and influence of our movement in that community.

Whereas: Addressing the Latinx community in the language most people of Latin American origin or descent use at home is not  just a needed practical measure, but a political statement of utmost importance given the size of the DSA and its presence in national politics.

Whereas: A socialist transformation of the United States is impossible without the massive, militant participation of Latinx working people.

Therefore be it resolved:

1. The incoming National Political Committee is instructed to devote all necessary resources and attention to guaranteeing that a Spanish-language web site of our organization is launched within 90 days after the close of this convention.
2. The web site will have both translations and material directly generated for it under the leadership of an editorial board.
3. The incoming National Political Committee is instructed to initiate the organization of this editorial board.
4. The board should include not just Latinx comrades, but as diverse a group as possible of other comrades, especially those who have a working command of the language, even if not fluency, but not precluding the inclusion of others.
5. In collaboration with the National Political Committee, this editorial board shall also have the additional responsibilities of promoting the development of our work with Latinx communities, establishing relations with organizations based in the community, and promoting collaboration and the exchange of information between Locals involved in this work. 
6. These additional responsibilities are not permanent but a transitional step to the creation by the NPC of a working group or other body focused  on work in the Latinx communities and its issues, or some other modality for promoting and coordinating this activity. 

For the DSA convention: Resolution on immigrant and refugee rights

[I drafted the following resolution for submission to the convention of the Democratic Socialists of America to be held in Atlanta Aug. 2-4. DSA convention rules require 50 signatures from members  for the resolution to be considered, so I urge DSA members who agree with it to sign it. The links to the signature form can be found here on the DSA's members-only discussion board.]  

Whereas: The status of undocumented immigrants has been reduced to that of an inferior caste that faces official, legalized discrimination much as Blacks did during the era of Jim Crow.

Whereas: The goal of these laws and the deportation machine is not to remove those the ruling class denigrates as “illegal aliens,” but to keep the big majority here but “illegal” -- bereft of rights so they can more easily be superexploited and used to attack the rights and drive down the wages and standard of living of all working people.

Whereas: Donald Trump has made attacks on immigrants the centerpiece of his electoral messages, administration policies and efforts to develop a nativist and white supremacist movement.

Whereas: Excluding immigrants from programs like Medicare for All or free tuition to public colleges will undermine the programs themselves and turn them into tools for discrimination.

Whereas: The super-exploitation of poor countries by rich countries, especially by the United States, has created crisis throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, leading to wars and failed states. Together with the impact of climate change, this is forcing millions of people to become refugees.

Therefore be it resolved:

The Democratic Socialists of America will make defense of immigrant and refugee rights a top national priority of the organization.

The Democratic Socialists of America commit to internal education on the history and political economy of immigration, and how to argue against right-wing positions and respond to provocations.

The Democratic Socialists of America reaffirm our position that no human being is illegal and that all working and oppressed people are welcome in our organization on an equal basis regardless of immigration or citizenship status.

The Democratic Socialists of America stand for full human and civil rights for all immigrants. We demand:

• The immediate abolition of ICE and an end to the persecution, jailing  and deportation of immigrants.
• Legalization of the undocumented as permanent residents,  the same status other immigrants have, including the right to become citizens if they wish.
• Abolition of all anti-immigrant discriminatory laws including those denying equal access to education and social services.
• An end to the militarization of the U.S. border with México, including tearing down the walls, fences and barriers built under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations as well as those that may be built under Trump.
• Respect for the rights of refugees, especially the principle of non-refoulement, that is, not returning people to places that they are fleeing from.
• An end to the Muslim Ban or other discrimination in the issuance of visas on the basis of the dominant religion, race or ideology of its government.

The Democratic Socialists of America support:

• The struggle of immigrant communities, including around partial, tactical demands such as restoring DACA for “Dreamers” (people brought here when they were minors), as well as against other aspects of their oppression, such as language discrimination.
• The right of immigrants and their communities to lead this struggle and determine its tactics, including in choosing to focus on individual cases, partial demands or specific concessions.
• Diverse initiatives and a multiplicity of tactics, such as moral and material solidarity with refugees on the border, visits to immigration prisoners and help for their families, work in coalitions, as well as militant, direct-action protests and other types of demonstrations.
• Putting pressure on all candidates claiming to oppose Trumpism, especially those who say they speak for working people, to take a firm and unequivocal stance in favor of immigrants, refugees and their communities.

Lenin was not a 'Leninist': Critical Comments on Democratic Centralism

This article dates from 2005. It is a polemic against just a few sentences of a document put out by a current in the socialist organization Solidarity that I had been part of. But it was the result of three and a half decades of experience, including 15 years when I was a member of a  "democratic-centralist" group, the Socialist Workers Party. For almost all of that time I functioned as part of the national offices of that movement, and for a majority of the time as part of its national leadership,  including several years as the editor of its Spanish-language magazine. 

I am republishing the article because I believe the issues it addresses are relevant to the upcoming convention in August of the Democratic Socialists of America, and in particular to the functioning of a grouping called the Spring Caucus. Some of its leaders recently announced its formal dissolution, but in fact, it seems to have split more than dissolved. 

I am more convinced than ever of the political conclusions of this article even though in some details it is inaccurate. In particular I refer repeatedly to a "Bolshevik Party." I think the writings of Lars T. Lih have shown very convincingly that Lenin and his friends never considered themselves to be a separate party, but rather a wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. This, however, only strengthen my argument. 

The article originally appeared under the pen-name "Joaquín Bustelo" in Solidarity's discussion bulletin and the Marxism email list moderated by "The Unrepentant Marxist" Louis Proyect. I have added in 2019 a few comments to clarify or correct the original text, always [in brackets]. In addition, I have supplied links to the writings I refer to where available. 

There are several things that I disagree with in the “Draft Call for Refounding Solidarity'” platform that has been presented by 21 comrades. For the moment, however, I want to focus on just one aspect of their document, their organizational proposal, and in reality, only a few sentences, their general motivation.

And I am going to draw this out quite a bit because I think it is a very important subject that has been a focus of much informal discussion in Solidarity as long as I’ve been a member and it deserves a thorough airing.

My thesis is, quite simply, that Lenin wasn’t a “Leninist.” The pre-1917 Bolsheviks were not, as far as he understood things “a party of a new type” in the sense-that this phrase has been used on the left for decades.

Instead, the “Leninist Party” model arose after the revolution and had two main drivers, the first, trying to spread the revolution by copying the Russians, and the second being the need of the emerging Soviet bureaucracy to silence criticism and shut down independent political organization. The end result was a harmful cult of the organization that Lenin never shared.

I have held views roughly similar to what I outline here since the mid-1980s, when I resigned from the SWP. Many years later with the Internet I became acquainted with others who held similar or parallel views, and undoubtedly that influenced what I say about these questions today.

I would recommend two articles especially, “The Myth of Lenin’s ‘Concept of the Party,’” by Hal Draper and Peter Camejo’s "Return to Materialism.” Both can be found by Googling the names, and in Draper’s case, it is useful to also read his earlier writings on sects, which are in the same archives as the article I mention above. [I've now provided the links.]

The comrades write in their “Draft Call for Refounding Solidarity”:

The Solidarity Founding Statement correctly affirms the need to build an organization that is democratic both in making and in implementing decisions. In the tradition of the communist and Trotskyist movements from which Solidarity derives, democratically making and implementing decisions is called democratic-centralism. Many Solidarity comrades, put off by caricatures of democratic-centralism they experienced, saw or heard about, now reject the term. What matters is not the term but the concept: a collective commitment to carrying out the decisions that we make as a group.

I think the comrades are creating confusion with this. “Democratic centralism” as it has been understood and practiced on the left for nearly 90 years should be rejected. I understand this would be unacceptable to the paleo-Trotskyist component of this grouping, and of Solidarity as a whole, but nevertheless, it is the important to reject it and say so openly.

Peter Camejo

It is true that Solidarity “derives” “from” “the tradition of the communist and Trotskyist movements,” but it does so in a specific way. It is a break from that tradition, a negation of significant aspects of it, especially on the organization question.

I disagree with the comrades in trying to differentiate between “caricatures of democratic-centralism” and the democratic centralism “of the communist and Trotskyist movements from which Solidarity derives,” the former being bad, the latter good.

I do not think it is possible to just cleave off democratic centralism from this tradition as an organizational mechanism (and in reality a whole series of organization concepts that have to do with a group’s concept of its relationship to other groups, mass movements and its class) and not bring with it its bosom buddy, the “Leninist” party.

I hold that the entire tradition that starts with the Comintern is off-base. And especially as it applies to advanced capitalist countries today, the central concept of “building a Leninist Party” is wrong. It is wrong because it starts off on the wrong foot, viewing the party as the embodiment of an idea instead of as an expression of the actual movement of a class. In our case, we do not have now and have not had the requisite conscious class movement on a mass scale for many, many decades. [That was in 2005. I believe that now a genuine class movement is emerging.]

Cominternist party building was an attempt to replicate the experience of the Russian Revolution just as the countless guerrilla groups in Latin America in the 1960’s were an attempt to replicate the Cuban Revolution. Both were undertaken with very immediate, short term expectations of results. Both attempts failed, both in the years immediately following the Russian and Cuban revolution and on a larger time scale.

By now, after nearly nine decades, we must draw the conclusion that if it were possible to make a revolution by following any variant of the “classic” Russian model, it would have happened. This has been a nearly century-long experiment, a test of practice under all conceivable conditions and with thousands of attempts and more variations on the theme than even a Mozart could compose.

We should not be afraid to draw the conclusions. If The Cubans could conclude after a decade or less of experience that guerrilla warfare as a strategy or “method” (as Che called it) had proved wrong, then we should also have the courage to state the plain conclusion that has been demonstrated by nearly a century of experience: the Zinovievist strategy of building “democratic-centralist” “Leninist parties” has also shown itself to be wrong.

To those who would say “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” I would respond this isn’t a baby. There’s no such thing as an 80-some-year-old baby. This is a corpse. It is time to bury it.

To keep on doing the same tiling in the expectation of getting a different result, I read somewhere once, is a definition of insanity.

It may be objected that the Leninism the comrades want (or the “democratic centralism”) is the one originally practiced by Lenin and his friends, and not the one that came afterwards with Zinoviev and the Comintern.

But during the entire time he was building the Bolshevik current and then party, Lenin never once claimed he was doing anything particularly significant or different or innovative on the organizational front. And for most of that time he identified with the “left” (in reality, as it turned out, centrist) wing of German social democracy led by Kautsky. And even as late as 1915 or 1916 he was defending the “centralism” (his word) of the German Social Democracy, and whether and to what degree he later differentiated Bolshevik centralism from reformist and Kautskyite German Social Democratic centralism is unclear to me.

At any rate, what is clear from this record is that Lenin did not view himself as having a separate, distinctive, counterpoised “theory of organization” from the rest of the European socialist movement and specifically its flagship party. This was true for the entire period before the Bolshevik party was in power, or at the very least, for the big majority of that period, until well into World War I.

[Actually, he never changed his mind. See Chapter IV of his last major work, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, where he says:

History, incidentally, has now confirmed on a vast and world-wide scale the opinion we have always advocated, namely, that German revolutionary Social-Democracy ... came closest to being the party the revolutionary proletariat needs in order to achieve victory. Today, in 1920, after all the ignominious failures and crises of the war period and the early post-war years, it can be plainly seen that, of all the Western parties, the German revolutionary Social-Democrats produced the finest leaders, and recovered and gained new strength more rapidly than the others did.] 

Even his famous dispute with the other Russian current closest to Bolshevism, the (pre-1917) Trotskyists, focused not on the organizational norms or functioning of the party, but on whether a common workers party could be built together with the Mensheviks. And, to bring that sort of differentiation to our days, it would be the same as a dispute on whether we could build a common organization with those, like the CPUSA, who have a strategic orientation to reforming the Democratic Party or organizing within it. [Given the experience of Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign and subsequent ones, while I continue to reject strategies like "reforming the Democratic Party," I think experience shows that "organizing within it" is a different matter, and worth pursuing.]

There have been efforts to depict this Lenin-Trotsky pre-1917 dispute about being in essence a dispute on the party, that Trotsky didn’t “get” Lenin’s concept of what kind of party to build. I think this is wrong.

It was about the politics, specifically, political independence from the bourgeoisie. Trotsky was mushy-soft on this being a core principle of the party, a line of demarcation between those who fit and those who didn’t.

The “principle” of “Democratic Centralism” is easy enough to define: democracy in decision making, unity in action. The difficulty lies in defining just what “unity in action” consists of for microscopic propaganda groups that are not really organically rooted in the working class, i.e. are not composed of the leaders or advanced elements that have emerged out of the actual class and social movements.

Typically, an attempt to “apply” democratic centralism to propaganda groups leads to everyone being forced to defend the common line “in public,” because in reality propaganda is the “action” that such groups engage in, mostly. Even the “actions” of their members inside unions and so on have mostly a propagandist’s significance at this stage. They seek to model a different approach to union leadership and activism.

For a mass workers party such as the RSDLP and later the Bolsheviks, democratic centralism means something quite different. For one thing, it has real feedback from its organic relationship to its class. A propaganda league and a mass party are qualitatively different kinds of organizations.

And if you read the actual debates and polemics where the issue of democracy and centralism in party functioning come up, you will see they have little applicability to our situation. The RSDLP was a mass parry from its foundation, a party recognized by a broad advanced layer of its class as its political expression. Many of the disputes have to do with election tactics and Lenin’s insistence that the RSDLP and later the Bolsheviks act as one force in the electoral arena, that to allow organizing and agitation by party members against the chosen tactic would completely undercut the effectiveness of the party among the masses that it sought to win over.

We don’t have those kinds of problems. We don’t have an advanced layer of working class fighters because we have no conscious class movement from which such a layer would arise. We are not a party, we are at best partly a propaganda league partly, partly an association of circles of activists, and the idea that we can obviate the distinction and function as if we were a party is wrong. Scale does matter, quantity does change into quality, an embryo of a few hundred cells looks nothing like a fully grown human being. And if it did look like a human at that stage, what would emerge in nine months would be a monster, not anything recognizably human at all.

One can, of course, say that “democratic centralism,” or at least the centralism part of it, is a necessary part of the functioning of any voluntary group, and to the degree the group is democratic, then it is “democratic centralist.” For example, union members vote on a contract and if the majority approves, then the contract is accepted, and it applies to all. A girl scout troop sells cookies and if the majority votes to use the money to travel to some event, rather than buy new uniforms, that’s the way it is.

But if this is all that is involved in what is being put to us by the “Refounding Solidarity” comrades, then it is bizarre to appeal to the Communist and Trotskyist tradition.

That tradition has associated with it a plethora of intellectual strait-jackets, gag rules, norms about when freedom of speech is in order (for a couple of months even’ couple of years, at least in theory!) and not in order (the rest of the time), and demonstrated inability to contain even minor differences within an organization.

The specifically Trotskyist side of it has been plagued by splits, expulsions and the multiplication of sects, things which have degenerated more than once into spying on comrades, using other police-state tactics, goon squads and in the case of the Stalinists even murder.

And there is no basis for separating the specifically Trotskyist tradition from the rest of it. History has shown that there is as little room even in the “healthiest” Trotskyist Leninist Party for a diversity of views as there is among the pro-Moscow Stalinists or Maoists, or as close to as makes no serious difference.

I always remember one recurring type of incident from my days in the SWP leadership that symbolizes for me one of the biggest problems with what’s come to be called Leninism. And that is when some big development would take place, and younger comrades —and disproportionately women comrades— would ask me what “we” thought of it. It happened time and again, around the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the overthrow of the Grenadian revolutionary government by the Coard faction (yes, in the name of “democratic centralism”) the Peruvian embassy “crisis” in Cuba and the subsequent Mariel boatlift, the Iranian Revolution. What do “we” think of it. That was the question. Acceptance of whatever truth was about to be revealed was assumed, automatic, unquestioned.

Moreover, left groups —especially, it seems, from the Trotskyist tradition, but not just— seem to have analyzed just about every conceivable political and social phenomenon save one: the marked tendency of “Leninism” as it has been handed down to us to produce splinters, sects and cults which rival even the most bizarre religions in their outlandishness.

Where does this come from? I believe it comes from the cult of the organization, of “The Leninist Party,” which is not just a question of how a group describes itself but of its social and political practice, how it relates to the political environment around it.

Even organizations that specifically and consciously disclaim being “the vanguard” and so on display in their interactions with other groups on the left and social/mass movement organizations, as well as through their obsessive self-absorption and in-groupishness, that they are infected with the vanguardist virus. Theirs is a Copernican system with —oh happy coincidence— their particular group as the sun at the center of it. And it becomes especially comical when you hear the comrades maintain that theirs is a really good group because they don’t have vanguardist pretensions.

However, the reality is that they may have recognized, in theory, that they’re not “the” vanguard but their practice continues to be infused with a vanguardist spirit, and especially in their relations to social movement-type organizations.

That these relationships are in fact hierarchical, conceived of as between “higher” or “more advanced” forms or levels of organization and the rest, rather than horizontal, can be easily demonstrated.

The (in this case) supposedly “non vanguardist” democratic-centralist group accesses in an unrestricted way the internal affairs of other organizations. For the “democratic centralist” group, every intimate detail of the life and discussions of other organizations is an open book to it, but any inquiry, sometimes even for the most trivial detail of the life of the democratic centralist group will be rebuffed. That is what I mean by a hierarchical relationship and that is at the heart of the Comintern-Zinovievist “democratic centralist” tradition, that is what makes it different from the “democratic centralism” of, for example, a chess club.

(I want to point out that obviously this has a relation with my idea posted to the NC list a few months back for an open preconvention discussion, and report, that I’ve sent the convention planning committee a proposal along these lines, and will send it or whatever variant emerges from the process to the whole NC at least a couple of weeks before our upcoming meeting so comrades have a chance to think about it before possibly being asked to vote on it.)

One of the surprising and pleasant discoveries I’ve made about Solidarity in the few years that I have been a member is that it respects the autonomy and organizational integrity of the other groups its members participate in. In the year I was assigned to the Political Committee, not once did we receive a report from Chris K. about the internal affairs of a publication he works with, nor David F. about discussions or divisions in the ATC editorial Board, nor from (in the months she was on the PC with me), from Theresa on the board meetings of an antiracist network she helps to organize.

I say I was surprised not because I had any conscious expectation in this regard when I joined Solidarity, I’m pretty sure I hadn’t focused on it on that level of organization functioning. But it is an important thing to keep in mind, for it is the antitheses of the specifically Zinovievist or Cominternist “democratic centralism,” what the “Refounding Solidarity” group calls “the tradition of the communist and Trotskyist movements.”

As some comrades can probably tell, the “refounding solidarity” grouping is essentially the “Twenty is Enough” caucus that came together around the time of the last convention and whose members started functioning as an organized caucus in the NC and perhaps other places (the summer school planning?) following that, convention.

I withdrew from it when it turned out that I had a sharply different idea of how the caucus should function in relation to Solidarity as a whole in terms of openness and transparency than the other comrades did. And I believe this question of Zinovievist “democratic centralism” and the hierarchy of relations implicit in it was part of that differentiation.

I call it “Zinovievist” because Zinoviev was the Bolshevik leader most identified with codifying it and spreading the model on the “party of a new type” around the world as head of the Communist International, and also because it is baby-simple to demonstrate that, whatever it is that made the Bolsheviks a distinctive or unique party, it was not that it was built with a conscious model of a party of a new type in mind and in this sense Lenin’s party wasn’t a “Leninist” party.

As an experiment, I googled “party of a new type” (the catch phrase is often attributed to Lenin) on marxists.org to try to find when he had said it and how-he used it. I found dozens of references, especially in the prefaces and footnotes to Lenin’s Collected Works, asserting that this or that passage was an example of Lenin explaining his original contribution of a “party of a new type” and also among a wide array of latter-day “Leninists,” (in the U.S., for example, encompassing a spectrum from James P. Cannon to Carl Davidson.)

Yet Google found only one place where Lenin himself used the expression, in a letter to Alexandra Kollontai from mid-March 1917 as she was about to return to Russia. The main body of the letter is an outline of some of the main ideas of the April Theses, and a request that she acquaint several comrades with a draft of a set of theses about the political situation in Russia (which I assume was a draft of the April theses). The phrase occurs in a PS, which I quote in full:

P.S. I am afraid that there will now be an epidemic in Petersburg “simply” of excitement, without systematic work on a party of a new type. It must not be a la ‘”Second International”. Wider! Raise up new elements! Awaken a new initiative, new organisations in all sections, and prove to them that peace will be brought only by an armed Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, if it takes power.

Lenin is talking about the situation in Russia a few days after the victory of the February Revolution and the removal of the monarchy. What is striking here is that the main things we associate with “a party of a new type” simply aren’t part of Lenin’s use of the phrase, his only use of it that I could find. Here clearly the contrast is with the party of the “old” type, and the text suggests to me what he means is one based on a narrow aristocracy of labor, an issue which Lenin had written on in previous months (see, for example, his article on “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” written in October of 1916). He wanted the Bolsheviks to go out and organize and draw into the organization much broader layers of working people than previously. That’s how I read it.

In the Collected Works preface to “What is to be done?” the phrase “party of a new type” appears in quotation marks, as if it had been drawn from the text that follows. But it isn’t there in Lenin’s text. To make extra sure that some typo or trivial word change hadn’t kept me from finding the reference, I downloaded and searched the PDF version from marxists.org for the phrases “new type” “new kind” and a couple of other variants. Still nothing, but it did lead me to read what the introduction says, which is that Lenin’s spiel about a “party of a new type” in WITBD “is the origin of Lenin’s famous theory of the Party as ‘vanguard of the proletariat.'” So I searched the PDF for that phrase. Yep, you guessed it. Despite the use of quotation marks by the authors of the introduction, I couldn’t find that phrase or any similar one with the word “vanguard” in it in the pamphlet.

Googling “vanguard of the proletariat” on Marxists.org produced strikingly different results. There are a number of references by Lenin to the RSDLP or social democrats as the vanguard of the proletariat. As there are by Luxembourg, Kautskv, and others, from around the same time (1904-1908 in the references I saw, but I checked only a small fraction, only enough to satisfy myself that I could reliably and factually report that the idea that the revolutionary workers party is the “vanguard of the proletariat” was not at all an original one of Lenin’s).

And actually I knew this would be the result before doing the search, because I know where Lenin got it, which is the same place where Kautsky and everyone else found it, and that is in the second chapter of the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

The Communists … are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The idea of this special role of the communists in the broader working class movement comes, not from Lenin originally, but from Marx and Engels, and they were only modifying and updating concepts that were current among revolutionaries of their time and before them. But I must confess that my most favorite way of expressing the idea is the “from below” way that Marx and Engels chose — “that section which pushes forward all others.”

It is simply not true that Lenin set out with some plan for a “party of a new type,” just as it is not true that Fidel in 1956 carried out the Granma expedition based on the idea that a guerrilla foco would gradually change subjective conditions in Cuba to make revolution possible, which is the theses Regis Debray presents in Revolution in the Revolution. The development of the Bolshevik Party and the July 26 Movement and their roles in the political lives of the two countries were very complex, multidimensional processes which were later reduced to two-dimensional caricatures.

I engage in this historical digression for a reason. And that is to demonstrate how little foundation there is for the claim that Lenin set about building a “party of a new type” after realizing there was a need for a “vanguard of the proletariat.” Lenin’s idea was pretty much for a standard-issue Social Democratic party adapted to Russian conditions, which, like social democratic parties everywhere, would draw together the most advanced and conscious layers of the proletariat.

Now one very important thing to note about Marx and Engel’s conception of the Communist Party as a leading force in the working class struggle is that this did not in the slightest cause them to hesitate in dissolving the organized expression of that party, the Communist League, only a few weeks after having written those lines in the Manifesto, when a revolution broke out in Germany.

Engels explains it very straightforwardly in his article “On the History of the Communist League,” simply as a function of political tasks. The old propaganda league was not suitable for the new conditions of Germany in revolution, a newspaper was a much better political instrument, so they wound up the underground League and founded the daily Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Let me repeat the central concept again, because this “Leninist Party” and “democratic centralism” thing has become a religious fetish: organizational forms flow from concrete political tasks; they are not something that can be derived from first principles or adapted from some ideal model. That is the materialist, Marxist way to approach the question. That is the way Marx and Engels approached it and Lenin, too, despite everything that was written after 1917.

And if you look at “What is to be Done” and other writings of Lenin around that time on the organization question, you will see that rather than an almost-impenetrable exposition of a “party of a new type” which he never makes explicit, what you find there is a very straightforward discussion of how to organize as a function of political tasks. Organization as a function of concrete tasks, and not as the embodiment of some ideal form, is precisely how Lenin approached the question.

Many of us among the older generations of Soli members were part of “Leninist” organizations previously. I’m sure I’m not the only one who read What Is To Be Done and other writings trying to decipher just what the essence of “the Leninist Strategy of Party Building” consisted of and being befuddled and somewhat chagrined that I could not understand or really see what all these other comrades said was in these writings by Lenin, the master plan for the perfect party.

As for Lenin’s “democratic centralism” as it was actually understood and practiced, remember that Zinoviev and Kamenev on the eve of October published an article opposing the insurrectionary course the Bolsheviks were on, and in fact breaking discipline outrageously by “outing” a Central Committee resolution winch had not been published, the resolution to prepare and carry out an insurrection. Lenin denounced them as scabs, and demanded that they be expelled, especially because they had done this in the non-party press.

Lenin’s arguments are striking because he doesn’t motivate the expulsion on the basis that a higher or special or different or “new type” of discipline is required in a revolutionary workers party: quite the contrary, his basic argument is that this is a violation of the discipline required in any workers organization, and rests his case almost exclusively on an analogy with a union that decides to prepare for a strike but keeps the exact nature of the action and its timing secret for tactical reasons.

He says a member of the union leadership who then “outs” the confidential decision by criticizing it in the bourgeois press is a scab, and that Zinoviev and Kamenev should be expelled for scabbing. It wasn’t the special discipline of a “party of a new type” but the quite ordinary discipline of a workers organization preparing a surprise blow against the bosses that Lenin insisted was applicable.

But also notable is this: Lenin couldn’t get a single other member of the Central Committee to support him on this, as far as I can determine. So ingrained was the individual freedom of comrades to write and say what they thought that Lenin simply had to drop it, stop referring to “Mr. Zinoviev” and “Mr. Kamenev” as ex-comrades, and resume normal party and leadership collaboration with them.

All this stuff about a distinctive Bolshevik “discipline” and “centralism” and so on that Lenin supposedly invented, and which all of us of a certain age were taught when we were young, were ex-post-facto attempts to turn the experience of the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution into a template for other parties, just as Che’s and then a little later Debray’s writings on guerrilla warfare as a strategy represented an attempt to do the same sort of thing with the Cuban experience.

That this would happen makes perfect sense. If you see a really successful strike, the first thing the practical trade-union militant is going to say is, “let’s talk to those sisters and brothers to see how they put it together and do the same thing here.” Of course. It is only natural for that to happen.

And all the more so in the situation in Europe as World War I was ending and just afterwards. Germany and other countries were rotten-ripe for revolution. All that was needed as a proletarian party that actually had the courage of its convictions, and Lenin and his friends did everything they could to turn the Comintern into a hothouse to force the maturation of such parties. Of course they did. If they had succeeded our historical discussions about that period today would include how Debs did as chairman of the first U.S. soviet government. They’d have to have been crazy not to try it.

All the comrades in the Russian leadership were involved, but the one most directly engaged wasn’t Lenin, who was a little busy what with the civil war and the situation in Russia, and whose health was not good, but by, ironically, the “scab” Zinoviev.

That’s where the “21 conditions” and all the rest of it come from. They bear roughly the same relation to the Russian Revolution as Regis Debray’s little book, Revolution in the Revolution —which systematically presents the foquista variant of the guerrilla strategy, the one Che tried to apply in Bolivia— did to the Cuban Revolution.

Except that the impact of what the Russians said and did was a thousand times greater, at the very least, than the impact of the Cubans. It was the dawn of the proletarian revolution, the beginning of the final conflict, and the guys who had actually done it were saying this was how to do it. The need for a Leninist Party became as unquestioned an article of faith as the class struggle itself for that generation of revolutionists and most of the succeeding ones.

The one Bolshevik leader who seemed to have a problem with at least the way this was being done was Lenin, In his next to last major public speech, having already suffered one stroke, with his health rapidly declining, he apologized to the delegates for only being able to take up a small part of what he had been assigned and would have wanted to discuss. Nevertheless, he considered the mistaken organizational norms being imposed on the parties of the Communist International important enough to include them in his report to the Fourth Congress in November of 1922, even though they had little relation to the immediate subject, which was “Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World Revolution.”

This is part of what he said:

At the Third Congress, in 1921, we adopted a resolution on the organisational structure of the Communist Parties and on the methods and content of their activities. The resolution is an excellent one, but it is almost entirely Russian, that is to say, everything in it is based on Russian conditions. This is its good point, but it is also its failing. It is its failing because I am sure that no foreigner can read it. I have read it again before saying this. In the first place, it is too long, containing fifty or more points. Foreigners are not usually able to read such things. Secondly, even if they read it, they will not understand it because it is too Russian. Not because it is written in Russian-it has been excellently translated into all languages—but because it is thoroughly imbued with the Russian spirit. And thirdly, if by way of exception some foreigner does understand it, he cannot carry it out. This is its third defect. I have talked with a few of the foreign delegates and hope to discuss matters in detail with a large number of delegates from different countries during the Congress, although I shall not take part in its proceedings, for unfortunately it is impossible for me to do that. I have the impression that we made a big mistake with this resolution….

What exactly Lenin meant and how he intended to follow up on this we will never know, he was silenced before he ever had an opportunity to return to the subject. But the passage is certainly suggestive. And perhaps the most suggestive sentence is that even if the comrades from other countries could understand perfectly what they ought to do under the resolution, actually doing it was impossible.

We also know other things that were central concerns of Lenin in those waning days of his active political life, and may well have been related to his concerns about the Comintern’s national parties.

One was the nationalities policy which was chauvinist, what we would call in U.S. terms ‘”racist.” Another and very much related to it was the state apparatus, which he described in this way in the very last article he ever wrote:

Our state apparatus is so deplorable, not to say wretched, that we must first think very carefully how to combat its defects, bearing in mind that these defects are rooted in the past, which, although it has been overthrown, has not yet been overcome, has not yet reached the stage of a culture, that has receded into the distant past. I say culture deliberately, because in these matters we can only regard as achieved what has become part and parcel of our culture, of our social life, our habits….

Let it be said in parentheses that we have bureaucrats in our Party offices as well as in Soviet offices.

This was not the first time that Lenin had addressed this subject. A few months earlier he had told the 11th party congress:

If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth they are not directing, they are being directed.

This is a factor that is generally not taken into account in considering the political legacy of the early Comintern. We think of it as this institution that was being led by the party of luminaries like Lenin and Trotsky. But it was also a party that at that very moment, according to its central leader, was succumbing to a vastly superior culture, the monstrously backward feudal-bureaucratic culture of tsarism.

That this is precisely what was involved is proved beyond any doubt by the medieval barbarism and obscurantism of this emerging bureaucratic regime once it became fully consolidated. And that this was the very antithesis of Bolshevism is quite materially demonstrated by the bureaucracy’s felt need to murder the entire “old Bolshevik” layer in the mid-1930s.

So that almost from the first, what people like James P. Cannon, Max Schactman and other founding leaders of the specifically Trotskyist movement learned wasn’t the “pure” oversimplification of the Russian experience, but one already corrupted by what was in essence the tendency of the consolidating bureaucratic caste (although in this case it matters little to this argument whether you consider it a caste, class or something else) to shut down all independent political thought, freedom of speech and organization, etc., so that its usurpation would not be challenged.

That is why the appeal to return to the real, good, true “democratic centralism” of the Communist and Trotskyist tradition is mistaken. There is no such from the Comintern forward, in part because it was, from the outset, a two-dimensional caricature of a multidimensional process, and in part because from very early on, and increasingly in the very early 20’s, it was already combined with problems emerging from the growing bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet revolutionary’ process and how these then found expression even within the Bolshevik Party and its leadership.

You can see that clearly enough if you read Lenin’s Testament, dictated a few weeks after the report to the Comintern Congress that I quoted from, and his slamming Trotsky for being arrogant and too concerned with purely administrative matters and Stalin for his rudeness (in separate notes. Lenin also takes up the Georgian’s Great Russian chauvinism).

What this means is you have to go straight back to the source, to the original Bolshevik experience before the seizure of power to find the “pure,” uncontaminated and un-oversimplified “Leninism” and “Democratic Centralism.”

But when you try, you find things like a letter in English by Lenin to the secretary of the U.S. Socialist Propaganda League:

We defend always in our press the democracy in the party. But we never speak against the centralization of the party. We are for the democratic centralism. We say that the centralization of the German Labor movement is not a feeble but a strong and good feature of it. The vice of the present Social-Democratic Party of Germany consists not in the centralization but in the preponderance of the opportunists, which should be excluded from the party especially now after their treacherous conduct in the war.

The LCW says the letter was written no later than November, 1915, but apparently this is a mistake, as the group he addresses had not yet been organized and it is from a year later. No matter. Either way, it shows that at this late date Lenin drew no sharp differentiation (never mind proclaiming a “party of a new type”) between Bolshevism and the parties of the second international on the forms or principles of organization. The differentiation was about the politics.

The idea that the Bolsheviks and the Internationalists should construct parties “of a new type” isn’t just absent, it is inconsistent with what Lenin writes. Lenin did not believe he had a special theory of organization at all before the seizure of power.

Contrast that with what we have been taught, for example, SWP (US) founder James P. Cannon’s article commemorating the 50th anniversary of the October revolution:

The greatest contribution to the arsenal of Marxism since the death of Engels in 1895 was Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party as the organiser and director of the proletarian revolution. That celebrated theory of organisation was not, as some contend, simply a product of the special Russian conditions of his time and restricted to them. It is deep-rooted in two of the weightiest realities of the 20th century: the actuality of the workers’ struggle for the conquest of power, and the necessity of creating a leadership capable of carrying it through to the end.

So unquestioned was it that this is what Lenin did that Cannon doesn’t even try to make this case. He takes it for granted that, in his audience, everyone understands at least this much, that this is really what Lenin was about, and goes from there.

But you would be hard-pressed to find anywhere in Lenin’s writings before October (and perhaps even afterwards) where he makes any such claim or any statements that can reasonably be interpreted to say he had a specific organizational theory that he viewed as new or unique.

The differences between him and the central leaders of German Social Democracy as far as he was concerned were political: he was interested in making a revolution and they were not. There are organizational implications that flow from this, of course, because organization is a function of concrete political tasks.

That is why also it is incorrect to point to the post-1917 Bolsheviks as the “real” Leninist model. The political tasks and demands placed on a party with state power, especially in the midst of a civil war, are very, very far removed from our situation, although in fact this is largely what happened, it was the post-1917 party that Comintern sections were modeled on, not the pre-1917 party.

Thus, for example, the tradition of “internal” discussion bulletins, large central committees with politburos above them. Until 1917 there was no Bolshevik DB, political questions were debated openly in the press (which is why Kamenev and Zinoviev got away with what they did in October 1917), and the central committee varied from a half dozen to a dozen people until shortly before October, with no smaller body delegated its powers.

So, there is no magic bullet, there is no secret sauce, there is no ritual incantation, there is no patented ingredient, there is no special formula from which answers to “the organization question” can be derived. The “Leninist Party” as a distinctive contribution that Lenin made to Marxism is a myth, and the specifically “Leninist” democratic centralism is what caused immense problems and proved wanting in the XXth Century.

What we can say is that how revolutionaries organize themselves is a function of the concrete political tasks and the circumstances that they find themselves in.

And, lest we forget, perhaps the most extraordinarily successful form of revolutionary organization that the world has ever been seen, judging by its impact was not the Bolshevik Party.

It was … a friendship. That between Marx and Engels.

Atlanta, November 7, 2005