14.03.1996

Build Leninism

Communist press

The weekly Economic and Philosophic Science Review usually ends with the words, ‘Build Leninism’. If only it were that simple. The unpalatable reality in Britain today is that there are dozens of organisations each professing to be ‘building Leninism’. Each castigates the others for being part of the ‘fake left’ and they insist that they and they alone are the true ‘Leninist builders’. Here’s a taster:

“The ending of the ceasefire a week ago left all, and bogus ‘Marxism’, embarrassingly exposed as understanding nothing of the national liberation struggle in Ireland or anything about the international crisis of the imperialist system either ... But the sectarianism of the middle-class fake ‘left’ in Britain never ceases to astonish ... Under a superficial headline appearance of cheering on the national liberation struggle to new defiance ... the ‘Leninist’ rump who captured the CPGB title (Communist Party of Great Britain, now defunct) have really only told IRA/Sinn Fein not to bother, thus emphasising their inability to understand the international class struggle in all its complexities, and the cosmetic shallowness of their ultra-left sloganising, much like the Sparts.”

It continues unabated:

“These Trot CPGB anti-communists only ever lived inside the Eurocommunist swamp for so long without suffocating because their feigned ‘pro-Soviet’ and ‘pro-Leninist’ protestations were as phoney as Trotskyism’s always been throughout its existence.”

“These petty-bourgeois posturers loathe and despise the historical reality of the dictatorship of the proletariat as much as any armchair socialist ‘intellectual’ philistines have ever done.”

Now some readers may be a sight closer to the ILWP world view than to that of the Leninist faction, but that is hardly the point. The ILWP insists that we ‘build Leninism’ by agreeing with every dot and comma of their particular interpretation of world events. Anything else is ‘fake Marxist, petty-bourgeois Trotskyist posturing’.

There is another conception of building Leninism which requires constructing a democratic centralist Communist Party - a democratic centralism which allows the Party to strike as a single fist, while at the same time allowing for a permanent interplay of contending ideas: ie, Lenin’s insistence on freedom of criticism, unity in action.

Readers ought to be aware of these two very different conceptions of ‘building Leninism’ and opt for one or the other.

Julian Jake