29.08.1996

Party norm?

Party notes

I am pleased to see in last week’s paper that comrade Bruce Wallace of Dundee Scottish Militant Labour responded to this column on the thorny question of democratic centralism and the heritage of Trotsky and Trotskyism. He defends his position energetically and I hope that other comrades on both sides of the debate take up the cudgels.

Bruce takes issue with my assertion that the Trotskyist conception of the Party and its democracy is inimical to Leninism. In particular, I highlighted the book The struggle for a proletarian party by James Cannon - a work highly praised by Trotsky himself and today touted by almost all Trotskyists as a “handbook” of Party building - describing it as a work “motivated from the first page to the last by a sect-like understanding of the Party question” (Weekly Worker August 1).

Comrade Wallace has two key arguments. First that the 1900 quote from Lenin I cite - calling for “open polemics, conducted in view of all Russian social democrats and class conscious workers” (Collected Works Vol 4, p320) - came from the “embryonic stages” (Bruce’s words) of Russian Marxism. It did not represent the mature Bolshevik position on party democracy.

Second, that Lenin was obviously not “always in favour” of the right to factions, as he took a lead in having them banned at the 10th Party congress in 1921.

Party comrades should study Bruce’s reasoning closely. It illustrates a type of argument that we have previously encountered from Open Polemic most explicitly, but also put forward by comrades from very different political backgrounds. Essentially, it is being implied that prior to 1921, the Bolshevik recognition of the right to open factions represented the infancy of Bolshevism, its playpen stage. The 1921 ban on factional activity therefore was Bolshevism on a higher level, the day it put away childish things.

I am sure Bruce would protest against my bending of the stick in this way. Yet there are certainly dangerous implications in what he says.

First, comrade, I can give you a very long and very comprehensive lists of quotes to show Lenin’s advocacy of the right to open factions after 1900. Then there was the formation of the Bolsheviks, who were of course themselves an open faction of a party formally united until 1912. We are not talking about some “obscure polemics” as you put it from the primeval swamp of Russian communism at the turn of the century, but the entire practice of the Lenin and the Bolsheviks up to 1921.

Second, what about 1921 itself? As Bruce himself admits, the ban on factions at this fraught Party congress was considered an emergency measure - “Comrades,” Lenin pleaded, “let’s not have an opposition just now!” (Collected Works Vol 32, p200 - my emphasis). Yet Bruce clumsily goes on to attempt to use the ’21 decision against my call for the right to open factions and free polemical exchange between different shades within the revolutionary Party, a practice that the Bolsheviks palpably followed up to 1921.

Are you against factions per se, or just their right to open expression? If - as I suspect - what you challenge is the right to the open publication of arguments, debates and polemics between Party members and factions, then the ’21 decision is hardly relevant to your argument.

The decision to ban factions in ’21 was entered into hesitatingly by the Bolsheviks, with many trepidations. It was accompanied by ringing - and sincere, I’m sure - promises about the restoration of Party democracy in the near future. The content of this Party democracy had already been illustrated by the practice of the Bolsheviks - ie, the right (not an “immutable” or invariable law, but nevertheless the Party norm, comrade Wallace) to the open expression of divergent opinions in front of “all Russian social democrats and class conscious workers”.

We have ample experience from the history of our movement that without the right to open expression of political differences, genuine Party unity cannot be built. Truncated discussions are like dammed up rivers; they will eventually burst their banks and find expression somehow. Like in the pages of The Guardian, for instance.

I look forward to further exchanges with comrade Wallace and his co-thinkers on this important question.

Mark Fischer
national organiser