07.05.1996

Freedom to criticise

Party notes

Is it possible for a communist organisation to remain communist without a publication, an open journal of some sort?

The Communist Party has been criticised - ironically, by those who dub themselves ‘Bolsheviks’ - because we continue to publish the Weekly Worker. Apparently, to facilitate our work with the Socialist Labour Party, we should liquidate our press. In its place, we should - I presume - rely on internal meetings, private briefings and pub room chats to coordinate our work and fight erroneous ideas.

On one level, it is embarrassing to polemicise against such twaddle. Quite how anyone can put forward this idea and call themselves a ‘Bolshevik’ escapes me. Its consequences are obvious.

Inevitably, in any political formation without the means to struggle and clarify ideas openly, the left is a prisoner of the right. At sharp turns, or qualitative changes in the struggle, scientific Leninist ideas are bound to be in a minority. In contrast to opportunism, they need light and air to grow.

Secondly, fidelity to the revolutionary programme - however it is conceived - will become increasingly formal. Thus, we will see the growing divergence between theory and practice, the methodological basis for opportunism. In this context, the Fourth International Supporters Caucus is a specimen that should be preserved in formaldehyde, they are so archetypal.

Thus, such views tell us more about the ‘Bolsheviks’ that hold them than about forms of communist organisation. The comrades feel no need for open publication because they have no understanding of Party building, Party democracy or centralism.

Their barren world-view accounts for the incomprehension with which they view our open and democratic press. ‘How can you have unity,’ they ask us, ‘when your members are saying different things? Saying is doing. The opinion implies agitation and intervention.’

Unconsciously, our ‘Bolshevik’ critics echo the Mensheviks.

In 1906, with the revolution in retreat, the Menshevik-dominated central committee of the RSDLP issued a declaration. While claiming that all within the Party will have “full freedom” of criticism, it banned “agitation” or any “call for action” at “public meetings” which ran “counter to congress decisions” (Lenin, ‘Freedom to criticise and unity of action’, Collected Works, Vol. l0, p442).

Lenin called such a view “queer”. He goes on:

“Those who drafted the resolution have a totally wrong conception of the relationship between freedom to criticise within the Party and the Party’s unity of action. Criticism within the limits of the principles of the Party programme must be free ... not only at Party meetings, but also at public meetings. Such criticism, or such ‘agitation’ (for criticism is inseparable from agitation) cannot be prohibited. The Party’s political action must be united. No ‘calls’ that violate the unity of definite actions can be tolerated either at public meetings or at Party meetings, or in the Party press ... The principle of democratic centralism ... implies universal and full freedom to criticise,  so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action ...” (Ibid, pp442-443).

Leninist centralism is the centralisation of communist activities, not the views of individual members. Of course, members of a faction may agree tactically to submerge secondary differences in order to raise a unified voice against the mass of Party members or the revolutionary left as a whole. This is perfectly legitimate.

However, if such a struggle of a particular shading in the workers’ movement is not infused with Partyism - what Lenin called Partyinost - then it is little more than sterile sectarianism. There can be no living, practical connection between the present-day work of these comrades and the question of Party. By definition, Party-building can only be conceived of as the replication of themselves in ever bigger versions.

Such a dismal perspective can only continue the present organisational impotence of the revolutionary movement. It is positively harmful and must be routed.

Mark Fischer
national organiser