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 is the DSA so white? Does working for Bernie make it harder to change this?

My friend and comrade, the chair of our Atlanta DSA chapter, just caused a shitstorm on twitter with by saying that the DSA focusing on the Bernie campaign is not good for a lot of chapters, especially in the South, where it gets in the way of important work we needed to be doing to change the group's composition.

I'm not sure I agree with saying that it is getting in the way but I absolutely agree that it does not get us one flea-hop closer to changing the DSA's composition.

And a big part of the reason I don't think it gets in the way is that I don't think the Bernie work is making us look like a Bernie organization. It is a confirmation that we are in fact a Bernie organization. Our saving grace is that we are not just a Bernie organization.

The reality is that the DSA’s composition is disproportionately white, male, millennial and college-educated. Therefore, both comrades and critics say, we must be doing something grievously wrong and must extirpate the toxic white supremacist and patriarchal atmosphere that has led to this result. 

But the DSA’s spectacular growth over the past three years should give us new insight. We say we “recruited” tens of thousands of people, but that’s not true. They joined, and they joined through no fault or merit of our own. 

Their joining had nothing to do with the tenor and culture of the DSA Local in their area. And they are precisely disproportionately college educated white male millennials. That is the composition that social processes much broader than our own internal culture imposed on us.

You might say that makes perfect sense. Bernie is white, male, conforms to gender norms and so we get Bernie Boys. But last June a young Puerto Rican woman, a member of the DSA, pulled the biggest political upset in many a season. A thousand people joined the DSA the next day. Another 9,000 in the month after her victory. Was it a flood from the Latinx community? Not in Atlanta.

Since then the face of democratic socialism has also been the one that graced the cover of TIME magazine a few weeks ago. She has higher name recognition than most of the Democratic presidential candidates. I don’t believe that in recent decades, there has been a political figure from our Latino community that is as well known and popular as she is among us.

Has that made a difference in the composition of those joining?  I think if it were so, we would have certainly heard.

The starting point of our discussion has to be the fact that the composition of the DSA is about American society, not just the DSA.

You might go “Pfew, that’s a relief!” But you shouldn’t.

The problem is exactly the same as if it were completely about the DSA. Only now we know two things.

Thing one: It is mostly not our "fault" because of what we do or don't do. It is much worse than that. We are much more a reflection of our white supremacist, patriarchal, and class-exploitative society than we think. Our current composition has been imposed on us from the outside by powerful social forces over which we have no control.

Thing two: we have to overcome this just the same. Otherwise there is no point to the DSA. And I believe it will be much harder and more painful than we think.

My all-time favorite post: Ghosts of the SWP past -- Llover sobre mojado (1999)

At the end of the last century, as I was just shy of 50, I viewed my adult life as divided into two parts: There were the 15 years I'd spent as a member of the Socialist Workers Party, and an almost equal time since I had left, the first three spent in Nicaragua, then settling down in Atlanta with an English woman I had met in Nicaragua just after I left the SWP. 

In Atlanta I had wound up at CNN, despite having made a decision to abandon journalism. I was free-lancing as a translator and in June of 1989 was offered three weeks of work as a vacation replacement writer at CNN's Spanish-language division. They liked me and so I stayed. 

The events recounted here took place a decade after I first started at CNN, when my previous life as a Trotskyist had long receded into the past and I had made a new life as a parent and television producer. And on a Saturday in August of 1999, my previous life came back to haunt me.

I posted this on the Marxism mailing list that had a lot of former SWP members, or people familiar with the group, as subscribers. I apologize that now people and things I name will seem obscure, but explaining them would only get in the way.

So there I am, outside CNN Center on a very slow Saturday smoking a cigarette when I see a familiar, smiling face.

"Nancy? Nancy Ronsenstock?"

I struggle to recall the name from a life long past.

"José," she says, smiling brightly. She's wearing a badge that says, SWP Trade Union Conference.

We start to catch up. "Your pamphlet is still a best seller," she says, meaning one in support of Puerto Rican independence I wrote a quarter of a century ago. She's quite at ease, friendly as ever.

Turns out the SWP is having some sort of national trade union fraction meeting at the complex where CNN center is located. They're on lunch break.

I walk back into the huge central courtyard at CNN Center, occupied by tables, sort of a large mall food court, and there they are, two at one table, four at another: the ghosts of Trotskyism past. Standing Fast. Eating lunch.

I was overcome by a wave of nostalgia. There was Cappy, looking quite the prole with his neatly trimmed, salt-and-pepper beard, who'd been kind enough to visit me in Sarasota (he was in Tampa) when I was just an itsy-bitsy trot neonate, having joined the YSA as an at-larger at the end of 1970. With him I went to my first national SMC conference, in 1971, which was what really drew me into the YSA. And there was John Staggs, looking barely a couple of years older than last time I saw him. What was he doing at a trade union fraction meeting, shouldn't he be in the print shop?

And Connie, who used to set all the type for Perspectiva, slim as ever, her blonde hair all gray but coiffed as ever in a style I associate with Junior High and American Bandstand. Jerry F., who had been my colleague in the YSA National Office and his diminutive long-time companion Patty. Susan, who'd been my prize Spanish Student at the second session of the SWP leadership school in 1980. And Peter and Nancy and many --well in reality, not so many -- faces from the past I'd hardly expected to have seen together in one place.

Warmest in her greeting was Olga, giving me a big embrace with her warm Chicana heart. Coldest, Doug Jenness, for many years my editor on  The Militant, who expressed --was it alarm?-- to see me in Atlanta. "I'd heard you were in Miami," he said quite pointedly. Where gusanos like me belonged, I thought. "No, I've been working here on Mr. Turner's farm for 10 years." It's safe Doug. This is just coincidence.

I talked to as many of the comrades as seemed inclined to chatting. Some were in a hurry. Late for the meeting, time to reconvene. Others --most-- were happy to take a moment for an old-timer.

"Do you still read the Militant," several asked. Must be time for the fall sub drive, I though.

"Yes, every week, I see it on the internet." Well, only a slight exaggeration. I do visit the gopher once or twice a month, usually. "Oh, I didn't realize we were on the internet," one said. She doesn't have a computer. I had a vision of her lighting a Coleman lantern as the sun set. "You know, Joe, we really might look into getting electricity put in. Even many of the comrades have it."

Things are going great, they all said. I smile appropriately as they recount some of their recent accomplishments, selling the Militant at this strike and that plant gate.

"That's great ... that's wonderful ... that's fantastic," I respond.

But no one has any stories to tell about their fresh batch of new recruits.

It was heartbreaking. I recalled the names of half the people with the white, stick-on badges, recognized the faces of virtually all the rest. There were three, perhaps five too young for me to have known them fifteen years ago. A paunchy, balding. graying crew -- though, or so it seemed, the years had been kinder to most of them than they had to me.

Going back to work, I imagined, looking down on the seating area of the food court from the second floor balcony, that I was some comrade who'd left in 1950, reappearing again in 1965. At this sort of meeting they would have seen, yes, the forty or fifty old timers. But sprinkled among them would be a baby-faced Jack Barnes and Mary Alice and Betsey Stone and the Britton brothers and Doug, Peter and Barry from Boston, Dan Styron before he killed himself, and so many others.

These are the last of the "Bolshevik-Leninists," I thought, looking down at them. The last of the Trotskyists. Heirs to the glorious October, keepers of the flame in the dark night of betrayal.

Then I thought better. The last of the Bolshevik Leninists died in a concentration camp decades ago. These, I reminded myself, had been a new generation of radicals, born of the post World War II prosperity, and now here because they are stuck with a decision made a quarter century ago to become something they were not, "worker Bolsheviks." When what they were, --American rebels-- seemed not quite enough to achieve their dreams.

It reminded me of seeing in a college labor history class a documentary about the Wobblies, including filmed interviews with some of the old timers. The last scene was of them at their Chicago headquarters, putting a new edition of their newspaper, the Industrial Worker to bed.

I remembered feeling a tremendous sadness as the announcer highlighted the surprising youth and vigor of these retirees. "But there are no young Wobblies," he said. "These are the last of the fellow workers.  Their kind we will see no more." I was determined that it not be so, wrote to Chicago, and was a member for a few months. But it was just a sentimental gesture. Their day was past. Their work was done.

I went back to my work, putting into Spanish a documentary series on the Cold War. I'm at the very end, Gorby has signed over the nuclear trigger to Yeltsin, a few mournful bars of the Internationale play over the lowering of the hammer and sickle over the Kremlin for the last time. It is time for Fidel --presented more or less as the last of the Communists-- to say his piece.

I had seen the whole interview with Fidel, not just the excerpts, and knew what had been left out, not just what had been put in. Asked by his American interviewer who had won the Cold War, he answered without hesitation. "You did. The United States did." It had been brought to mind by one of the comrades, who talked to me about some book by Jack Barnes, "U.S. Imperialism lost the Cold War."

That, I thought, would be a much better world to live in. I played the tape, with the excerpt from Fidel's interview that was in the documentary. Despite everything, he was sure of ultimate victory.

"Why believe that the ideals of socialism, which are so generous and appeal so much to solidarity and fraternity, will one day disappear? What would prevail -- selfishness, individualism, personal ambitions? That will not save the world; of that I am absolutely convinced."

I finished what I was doing, ejected the tape from the machine.

"De eso estoy absolutamente convencido," of that I am absolutely convinced. Fidel's words stayed with me. It is a stock phrase he uses when he speaks of his innermost convictions.

I remembered the first time I had ever seen Fidel in person, 20 years ago, at the inauguration of a theme park for the pioneers, Cuba's children. He had just told them it would be named for Ernesto Guevara, and the pioneers responded with their slogan, "Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che!"

"And you will be," Fidel responded, "of that I am absolutely convinced."

I walked out of the editing suite where I had been working to the shelves where I keep the tapes and put them away. It was time to go home. I walked out of the facility onto the balcony and looked down. The comrades were now on their dinner break.

These may be the last generation of SWPers, I thought, but not the last of their kind, just as the new generations of American rebels did not call themselves wobblies, but were heirs to the best of that tradition, just the same. The new generation of rebels isn't down here, but it is out there, or will be.

I went down to talk to the comrades. There would be no social at this conference, all Saturday night was taken up by meetings. To everyone I saw I smiled warmly, wished them the best. No hypocrisy there. If dedication to a cause is worth something, these had surely earned the best of luck by it. Soon enough it was time for them to reconvene.

I'd though they'd all gone, when someone came up from behind, and said, "Hello, stranger." I did not know why I hadn't spotted her before, she and I had been lovers, once, briefly, when she had been very young and I only a little older, just enough to make it seem, in her eyes, that I knew everything. Later we were fast friends, until I left the party, when we lost touch.

We talked for quite a while, she told me of her life for 15 years, I, of mine. She'd never understood why I'd left the party, I explained as gently as I could, too gently. She told me of all the exiting strikes and Militant sales, as if I were still a member, just a bit down in morale, or perhaps one considering rejoining.

"Things are really looking up--" and then she added, totally changing her tone,  "I really used to look up to you." She said it lightly, flippantly almost succeeding in hiding her feelings of abandonment and betrayal.

The conversation drifted to what I was doing now. I told her about the cold war series, the flag coming down above the Kremlin, followed by the excerpt of Fidel's interview expressing his faith that, some day, socialism will triumph.

"I hope some kid in Venezuela hears it, and it means something to him."

"Why Venezuela?" she asked.

Really, because it had been on my mind. The day before the bourgeois legislature had tried to reassert itself against the popularly-backed constituent assembly. There had been a very nasty clash outside parliament. I'd noticed the American papers --and CNN in English-- paid it to no attention, but CNN en Español had broadcast a lot of it live, as well as much of a speech by President Chávez defending the Assembly and denouncing the old corrupt political system. But I did not tell her this. I did not want to get into a political discussion of what people should be doing, and why. Least of all with her. I had been her mentor, once. Look where it had led her.

"Just to name a country," I said. "It could have been any of them."

She really had to go, she was late for her meeting. I hug her goodbye. On the way home, I listen to Silvio Rodríguez, on the cassette player. I'd introduced her to Silvio, some of his songs still remind me of her.

By happenstance, the tape I play is one I'd quoted on this list a few days ago, about how socialism was made by plowing the future with old oxen. I hadn't thought then about the first lines of that verse. Now I did.




Salgo y pregunto por un viejo amigo
de aquellos tiempos duramente humanos
pero nos lo ha podrido el enemigo
degollaron su alma en nuestras manos

absurdo suponer que el paraiso
es solo la igualdad las buenas leyes
el sueño se hace a mano y sin permiso
arando el porvenir con viejos bueyes
viejos bueyes.

Valla forma de saber
que aún quiere llover
sobre mojado

Vaya forma de saber
que aún quiere llover
sobre mojado.

* * *

I go out, and ask about an old friend
From those harshly human days
But the enemy has rotted him
They decapitated his soul in our hands

It's absurd to think that paradise
Is just equality and good laws.
The dream is made by hand and without permission
Plowing the future with good oxen, Good oxen.

What a way to find out
That it's going to rain
On what's already wet.*

What a way to find out
That it's going to rain
On what's already wet.

----------------

* "Quiere llover sobre mojado" is a Cuban dicho, or saying, for which I've fruitlessly searched for even a rough equivalent. It can mean slightly different things, of someone stating the obvious, or something happening again, but mostly it captures a feeling that you've been here before, you've gone beyond it, and now you find yourself back here again.

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

On the now-dissolved Spring Caucus: Latinos, the DSA and intersectionality

This post was written looking forward to the DSA convention. Although finished, I had not made it public, unsure as to whether it would further complicate an unfortunate situation where some caucuses had been formed prematurely, leading others to also form caucuses in response. Now with the just-announced dissolution of the Spring Caucus, the situation has changed.

I joined one of the counter-caucuses to Spring, the Socialist Majority caucus. And a related reason for not posting this article is that Socialist Majority had decided that, as a group, it would limit itself  to presenting our own vision for the DSA as a multi-tendency organization, and not a critique of other viewpoints. 

"The Call" announces the dissolution of the Spring Caucus

So it had not discussed a lot of the ideas presented in this article, and, frankly, I would have been against the caucus or the DSA adopting them as such; at this stage of its development, the DSA should remain open and inclusive of many currents, including those of comrades who disagree with me, such as the authors of the two documents I criticize below.

How to achieve the unity necessary to maintain an organization? Striving to come to agreement on a concrete program of actions against the exploiters of working and oppressed peoples who rule this society. And these actions don't all necessarily have to be cast from the same mold. One of the fallacies of many groups in the 20th Century Left was a tendency to say that theirs was the one "correct" action or tactic in response to a given problem or situation. But on the contrary, I think what history shows is that a multiplicity of tactics is valid, and their impact can be not just additive but compounded. 

In their dissolution statement, "Setbacks and New Beginnings," several former Spring Caucus members say that among the "significant and unresolvable disagreements" among Spring's members was "how best to relate to anti-oppression mobilizations and demands," which was precisely the subject of my commentary. For that reason, I feel it is right to post my criticisms now, even though were I to write the article afresh, it would be different, as I hope it is now just a question of  discussion of strategic visions and not a subject of action by the organization. Below is the post written before this change.

*  *  *

[A Convention of the Democratic Socialists of America will be held in Atlanta at the beginning of August. As part of the lead up to the convention, I will be publishing some articles discussing issues before the convention. This article is in response to a current in the organization previously known as Momentum and Socialist Call and their official statements.]

I. The Latinx people disappear

An experiment: Take Spring’s “Where we Stand” and “Our strategy for 2019.”

Copy-paste those into a word processing program.

Search for “Latin” which will also pick up Latinx, Latino, Latina, latinoamericano. Follow up with Hispanic, Chicano, Spanish, Mexican, or any other term that refers to my community.

No mention: not a single one.

Officially, we are 18% of the U.S. population. We are 21% of the millennials. We are more than 25% of the post-millennials. People from Latinx communities make up 17% of the labor force.

This is not just about the Latinx community. Do the same sort of search for Blacks and you will come up with one mention in the two documents. Read the documents and you will see that women and other oppressed sectors are treated the same way.

For the Spring Caucus, racial, national and gendered oppression are mostly tricks by the ruling class.

Capitalism stokes racial, national, and gender oppression to keep working people divided and to justify exploitation. And by creating an intense competition for jobs, housing, and decent schools, the capitalist system pits workers against each other and makes prejudiced ideas seem plausible.

This is the most primitive sort of class reductionism. What does that term mean? It means that all other axis of oppression and exploitation are seen as springing from and being at the service of the extraction of surplus value from wage workers.

That is what is behind the caucus’s blindness to the working class as it really exists. The documents instead talk about an imaginary class made up of generic workers stripped of things like race, nationality, gender, age, legal status, etc.

II. Intersectionality

That sort of narrow, workerist vision affected various socialist groups in the 1960s and 1970s.

But against that view a new understanding began to emerge spurred by the actual movements of oppressed peoples and specific struggles: the Black movement as it developed out of and beyond the Civil Rights movement, the feminist movement, and so on.

In 1977, a group of Black feminists that had been working together for several years as the Combahee River Collective published a statement that presented an understanding of exploitation and oppression that today is now referred to as intersectionality.

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.

The Spring Caucus approach is a negation of intersectionality. As a result, they either reject the independent movements of specially oppressed people or consider them unimportant.

As part of our vision of winning a truly free society, socialists are committed to ending all forms of oppression. To reach this goal, we strive to build a united multiracial working-class movement.

This idea --that the instrument that is necessary for change is this "united multiracial working-class movement," is repeated time and again throughout their texts.

In the context of a document that does not even mention the word Latinx or any possible synonym or substitute, the inescapable conclusion is that the “united multiracial working-class movement” is counterpoised to existing Latinx movements and organizations.

III. The Latino Immigrant Rights Movement

One of the most advanced expressions of class (political) struggle in the United States has been the Latinx immigrant rights movement. It has a dual character because it is both a proletarian class movement and a Latinx national (“ethnic” or “racial”) movement. This video shows you at a glance that intersectional character of the movement. [The video has translations if you click the closed captioning button].

The video is from 2011 from a struggle we waged in Georgia against an anti-immigrant law. Five years earlier, in the spring of 2006, a mass movement of Latinos mobilized millions of people in cities all over the country against HB 4437, popularly known as the Sensenbrenner bill after its chief sponsor, which had passed the House and would have made it a felony to be an undocumented immigrant or associate with undocumented immigrants.

The Spring Caucus makes a passing mention of the 2006 protests as part of one of its token lists of causes it supports, oppressions it opposes, and issues it relates to:

The last dozen years, from the giant immigration marches of 2006 to the nationwide protests against police brutality in 2014 and 2015, have shown that hundreds of thousands of people can come together in the streets to fight oppression. These protests have opened Americans’ eyes about citizenship rights and police brutality. DSA should also support campaigns such as defending Roe v. Wade, to convict killer cops, and for immigration rights.

Notice that the protagonists of the immigration marches, the Latinx communities, are simply disappeared through the use of the passive voice. Also gone is an understanding of what the movement is about, substituting instead “citizenship rights” and “immigration rights.” I’ll let other comrades address the “police brutality” issue.

Close examination of these documents confirms that the Spring authors do not seem to understand the immigrant rights movement, because the central demand of the movement, legalization of the undocumented, is completely absent.

But that must be the central demand for a reason: The real policy on the ground of the U.S. Government is not to deport the “illegals” but to keep them here but illegal, bereft of rights, so they can be superexploited and used as a club to undermine the rights and drive down the wages of all workers.

So why the deportations if not to get rid of the “illegals”? To enforce the status of the undocumented as an inferior caste.

IV. The undocumented and classwide demands

The Spring comrades write:

[W]e prioritize the fight for broad classwide demands — such as healthcare, education, jobs, and housing — that benefit all working-class people and that can therefore galvanize the largest numbers of people to fight in their own self-interest. Demands such as Medicare for All would also disproportionately benefit oppressed groups and reduce the competition for resources that gives rise to prejudice among working people. Such demands, when achieved, would curtail the power of oppressors, including abusive bosses, despotic immigration agencies, profit-seeking insurance companies, and racist landlords.

But here’s what it would really mean for the undocumented:

Health care? Medicare for All is a great idea. Give them your social security number, get your Medicare card. Except the undocumented don’t have social security numbers, not that are any good, and the law prohibits giving public benefits of any kind to the undocumented. Yes, the principles do say including the undocumented, but that is cold comfort if you get deported because you were driving to the doctor's office without a license.

Free college tuition? Guess what. The undocumented are barred from the top five public universities in Georgia. And in all the rest, they have to pay the exorbitant rates international students are charged. And I don’t think anyone is proposing free tuition for students coming from China, India or Great Britain. So it wouldn't apply to undocumented students either.

We get the right to have a job? Wonderful! Too bad that it’s a crime to hire us.

Housing? OK, but what use is it if you are constantly threatened with arrest and deportation, even just for driving a car, or nothing at all? What good is your house then?

“Class wide demands” don’t have the same meaning for the undocumented nor for the Latinx community as a whole, which is intimately intertwined with its undocumented sector.

If “won” without the legalization of the undocumented first, they would reinforce the status of the undocumented as an inferior caste by broadening the privileges of the “legals,” which in that context are more correctly seen as privileges not “rights” because they are denied to a whole class of people.

V. A caste system of legalized discrimination

But even if each demand has an “including the undocumented” rider, the fundamental problem remains which is the caste system that has now been incorporated into the U.S. white supremacist social, political, economic and legal structure.

It might be true that a movement powerful enough to win these class-wide demands would be powerful enough to win legalization for all. But it will not happen unless the legalization of the undocumented becomes a major demand of the entire movement.

This means directly confronting and defeating racist and xenophobic sentiments in some sectors of the working class. The logic of the Spring Caucus approach seems to be to avoid this fight as much as possible.

"Equal” treatment of communities that have been treated unequally is not equality; it is the continuation of inequality. That’s why affirmative action (the Brits have an even better name for it: positive discrimination), is absolutely essential to really begin reversing inequality.

But in the case of the Latinx community, we don’t yet have even formal equality. And that affects not just the undocumented, because even if you’re “legal,” your wife, children, lover, cousins, parents, coworkers and neighbors might not be.

Especially alarming in the passage I quoted above is the prettification of racism by making excuses like, “the competition for resources … gives rise to prejudice among working people.”

White supremacy is not a “prejudice.” It is a system that creates that reality on the ground. People don’t think Latinos are inferior because we compete for resources. They think so because this white supremacist society in fact keeps Latinos in an inferior position.

“Prejudice among working people” is the ideological reflection of the material facts on the ground and an essential component in enforcing the inferior status of the Latinx communities.

VI. The DSA and the real world

It is unfortunate that the Spring Caucus does not even try to present a cursory analysis of what is going on in the United States. If they had done so, they could not possibly have missed that the issue of immigration and the legalization of the undocumented is a central political issue. It even frequently overshadows all others in the mass media's daily news cycle. And it certainly is so for Trump.

The DSA has to relate to politics and live in the real world.

In that real world, immigration is a topmost political issue and the Latinx community is at the center of it.

The United States has created a new, Jim Crow-like system of legal discrimination and denial of basic human, civil and political rights. It has been mostly implanted over the two decades since Bill Clinton’s “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.” That law, in addition to authorizing what is now often called Trump’s Wall, set up the current legal regime of systematic discrimination and persecution.

Talking about working class unity in the United States is pure fantasy unless that system of legal discrimination is smashed. The Spring Caucus betrays no understanding of this political imperative.

--José G. Pérez

[José G. Pérez @JG_Perez is a long-time activist in the Latinx immigrant rights and socialist movements. His primary focus has been journalism. He is currently producer and co-host of a daily two-hour news, analysis and call-in show on the progressive Atlanta-based, Spanish-language Internet broadcaster Radio Información, and a member of the Atlanta DSA.]