25.06.2026

Time is on our side

Quick decision-making is perfectly understandable during civil war conditions. But to create unity, prevent irresponsible splits and to educate the party and the working class, provision must be made for extensive debate. Mike Macnair continues to explore procedural principles

In the first article in this series last week, I laid out what I planned to cover; and began with arguments for the importance of the issue, and why questions of procedures of decision-making should not be regarded as a diversion from ‘real politics’.

This week I turn to issues of time. These are posed both by arguments that democratic decision procedures are time-wasting in general, and by claims that the urgency of the situation, or the need to seize the moment and the initiative, require undemocratic decision procedures.

There will remain to be covered my third general point, which is that we are concerned with principles and guidelines for practice, not with absolute fixed rules like those to be found in Citrine or Roberts’ rules; and the paramount principle - which will reassert itself at all levels of concrete details - that people who are prepared to participate in the decision process should be able to take real decisions.

Within the framework of this principle, it will then be possible to approach the conduct of decision-making meetings: they need chairs (not ‘facilitators’, which is a managerialist concept); how the chair should work (to draw out and promote clarifying disagreements); how to handle proposals for amendments; dealing with proposals that are counterposed to each other; and so on.

Decision-making on a larger scale involves specific considerations. The easiest example is national organisation, but the same issues would apply in a local or sectoral organisation that got big enough. Sub-division into local groups - cells, branches, and so on - is indispensable; and a large part of discussion can and must take place in these, before any larger conference. But even so, large numbers imply too many choices available, and it remains necessary to narrow the range of possible choices beyond the procedural forms discussed for meetings in general. Part of this role can be played by factional groups and caucussing at conferences; but arrangements such as commissions (as used in the early Comintern) and compositing negotiations (as used in the Labour Party before the recent past) are necessary.

The same issue - too many choices available - poses in a different way the question of leading committees. These are as much needed by large local organisations as by national ones. Here the choice between collective leading committees and the cults of individual leaders (and the direct election of individual officers) is a choice between democracy and Bonapartism.

Question time

On the question of time, I will begin with a quotation from Trotsky and his immediate co-thinkers, from 1933, from the document, ‘The international left opposition, its tasks and methods’:

The frequent practical objections, based on the ‘loss of time’ in abiding by democratic methods, amount to shortsighted opportunism. The education and consolidation of the organisation is a most important task. Neither time nor effort should be spared for its fulfilment. Moreover, party democracy, as the only conceivable guarantee against unprincipled conflicts and unmotivated splits, in the last analysis does not increase the overhead costs of development, but reduces them. Only through constant and conscientious adherence to the methods of democracy can the leadership undertake important steps on its own responsibility in truly emergency cases without provoking disorganisation or dissatisfaction.¹

A little earlier but less general (and making doubtful historical claims), but still posing the issue of the leadership allowing time to be ‘lost’ sending issues to the membership, is Trotsky on ‘The crisis in the German left opposition’:

We must not forget that even if we are centralists, we are democratic centralists who employ centralism only for the revolutionary cause and not in the name of the ‘prestige’ of the officials. Whoever is acquainted with the history of the Bolshevik Party knows what a broad autonomy the local organisations always enjoyed; they issued their own papers, in which they openly and sharply, whenever they found it necessary, criticised the actions of the central committee … Naturally, as soon as it became necessary, the Bolshevik central committee could give orders. But subordination to the committee was possible only because the absolute loyalty of the central committee toward every member of the party was well known, as well as the constant readiness of the leadership to hand over every serious dispute for consideration by the party …²

I do not quote these passages in order to assert that, because they are Trotsky, they must be true. I already made the point last week that Trotsky’s arguments about the “party regime” are inconsistent; and if we push further back we can find a Trotsky advocating the militarisation of labour in 1919-20, a Trotsky for whom constitutional issues are unimportant in 1915, a Trotsky who is a critic of Lenin’s supposed ‘bureaucratic centralism’ in 1903-04 …³

The point, rather, is that the argument that democratic methods involve ‘loss of time’ was already around in 1933; and that so were the counter-arguments (routinely rejected by modern Trotskyists) that democratic methods are both essential to party education, and vital to avoid “unprincipled conflicts and unmotivated splits”.

Leftists of the 2020s should be all too easily able to recognise “unprincipled conflicts and unmotivated splits”. On the other hand, the extent to which undemocratic methods are anti-educational, and thus have tended to dumb down the left, is parallel to hypoxia, preventing the person affected being aware that they are becoming hypoxic: being dumbed down by the anti-educational methods of undemocratic decision-making, the left can no longer recognise what they have lost.⁴

It is best, I think, to start on the ‘time’ issue with social decision-making, before moving to the specific arguments that party decision-making needs to avoid ‘loss of time’ in democratic procedures. It is worth flagging the point that the “democratic methods” Trotsky refers to are ‘deliberative’ - in the sense that they entail discussion before a decision is reached. (They are not ‘deliberative’ in the commonly used sense of substituting discussion/deliberation for any actual decision process; this approach entails an external decision process, and is thus anti-democratic.)⁵ It is the need for discussion and decision processes involving everyone who is willing to participate that is ‘time-consuming’.

As I said in summarising the argument in the first article, there are some decisions for which democratic decision-making has to be recognised as inappropriate because of urgency. I gave the examples of decision-making in active military operations, or in emergency management (fire, flood, etc). The point is that these contexts require that some decision should be made very rapidly. In such contexts failure to decide is worse than getting it wrong. Moreover, if the decision does turn out to be wrong, it will usually become obvious very quickly.

(It might be thought that under socialism we will not need military operations. But this is only true of global socialism. Reshaping the party for the needs of civil war in 1919-21 is at the core of the degeneration of the Russian Communist Party. And, on the other hand, we will certainly still need to have emergency management for fires, floods, earthquakes, epidemics, and so on.)

At the other extreme, there are some issues that are so non-urgent that - though we should discuss them in educational events - we should not take binding votes on them. An infamous example: it was legitimate for the USSR to spend some public money experimenting with Trofim Lysenko’s arguments for inheritance of acquired characteristics in biology; to adopt these views as a state-imposed dogma was a disaster. The same is true of the UK Supreme Court’s decision to overrule the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and give the force of law to Genesis 1:27: “male and female created he them”.⁶

Turning to the level of the party, building the British Socialist Workers Party round the idea that Tony Cliff’s version of the theory that the USSR was ‘state capitalist’ allowed the preservation of ‘revolutionary politics’ has proved to be as poisonous as Lysenkoism, albeit on a massively smaller scale. Equally, though less immediately poisonous, making Ted Grant’s view on physics in the book Reason in revolt a party position is undesirable.⁷

At the same end of the spectrum (but this time as a negative) is the abuse of demands for additional discussion to prevent any decision: filibustering, demands for more and yet more ‘consultation’ before a decision is reached, ‘Maxwellisation’, scorched-earth litigation tactics, and so on. The common tag is that “justice delayed is justice denied”;⁸ it is equally true that democratic decision-making delayed may be democratic decision-making denied. Capitalist constitutions are designed to facilitate blocking decisions by delay. The reason is that they suppose the default decision rule is that owners are entitled to decide; hence, there is a presumption against collective action,⁹ and democratic decision-making is to be blocked where owners (bribe-payers) want it blocked, including by delays.

The pattern is reproduced in the trade unions and the Labour Party, where the leadership organises to kick a decision into the long grass by endlessly deferring it or referring it from conference to the leadership itself, rather than openly debating its merits.

This is not a dialectic of democratic and non-democratic as interpenetrated, mutually necessary negations. It is a spectrum of the urgency of decision-making and of the extent to which the world, or the context, provides immediate testing of decisions. The problem is not, therefore, one to be aufgehoben by an imagined ‘dialectical method’.

But, while the actual time needs of decision-making for collective action is a spectrum, not a dialectic, the ideologies about this produced under capitalism are a dialectic. Capitalism is the contradictory unity of the market, with its freedom and equality, and the factory (starting with the sailing ship and the docks), with its sharply hierarchical authority; and this throws up liberal and patriarchal-nationalist political ideologies.

Specifically for our present concerns, the institutions of corruption in liberalism, producing the blocking of actions through delay, throw up as their negation the ideology of ‘strongman’ government: the decisive individual who, by cutting through the procedures, will “get things done”. What we actually get from strongmen is visible in Boris Johnson’s government and Donald Trump’s administration (leave aside any number of dictators): overt corruption, cronyism and arbitrary and irrational decisions.

Strongman government then throws up as its negation the ideologies of ‘separation of powers’ and ‘braking mechanisms’ to slow down decision-making; which at the end of the day lead to blocking decisions, leaving decision-making power in the hands of private owners.

This capitalist political dialectic repeats itself in the left. The bureaucratic centralism of the old ‘official communist’ and Maoist parties and of the large majority of the Trotskyists throws up as its negation opponent ex-members and ex-minorities who promote a variety of ‘separation of powers’ schemes - and of the rejection of any real decision-making capability through ‘networks’ and so on.

The other side of the capitalist dialectic - delay as a form of minority rule, throwing up the cult of the strongman - can perhaps be seen in the western communist parties’ adoption of bureaucratic centralism in the 1920s ‘Bolshevisation’ in the wake of the dilatory/blocking operations by the right wing of the French and Italian Socialist Parties, the German Independent Social Democratic Party, and so on, in 1919-21. It can also perhaps be seen in the ‘Leninist party turn’ of the British International Socialists - the SWP in the 1970s.

Wartime

I have just characterised the left as affected by a dialectic of political ideologies - liberalism and strongmanism - thrown up by capitalism. There are, however, specific left arguments for bureaucratic centralism based on the tasks of the party as such requiring urgent decision-making.

The more general argument that the party is as such a military organisation - an organisation all along designed for civil war. The idea is expressed in the formula, ‘Leninist combat party’ (which appears from quick googling to be an American phrase particularly associated with the US SWP and its splinters). It is, however, not dependent on this. The Russian Communist Party’s eighth party congress in March 1919, ninth party conference in September 1920 and 10th party congress in March 1921 radically reshaped the party organisation in the direction of bureaucratic centralism, starting from the needs of civil war.¹⁰

It was in this reshaped form that the 1921 third congress of Comintern addressed organisational norms of the western communist parties as an alternative to the pro-capitalist constitutionalism of the socialist ‘centrists’.¹¹ Lenin remarked at the 1922 Fourth Congress that the Third Congress resolution was “too Russian” - though this was still framed within the inevitability of short-term civil war, since he went on to say that “The fascists in Italy may, for example, render us a great service by showing the Italians that they are not yet sufficiently enlightened and that their country is not yet ensured against the Black Hundreds.”¹²

The specific arguments behind these decisions are long since lost to the left; as Lenin put it in the speech just quoted, the western communists were “hanging [the third congress resolution] in a corner like an icon and praying to it.” A good example is Alex Callinicos’s 2013 article, ‘Is Leninism finished?’, in which the organisational forms posed in the 1920s for civil war are said to be essential to mobilising street actions and ‘united fronts’.¹³

It has to be said, in addition, that the “Russian experience” the western communists were to assimilate was that of the civil war. The Bolshevik leadership retrospectively reinterpreted their past - since the time of Lenin’s 1902 polemic What is to be done? - in the light of the centralist decisions of 1919-21. Already by 1920 it was visible to the RCP that the combination of the pressures of war work, plus the 1919 military-centralist turn, was destroying the collective life of the local organisations (trade union fractions and related subject groupings were abolished in March 1919, but reconstituted in December).¹⁴ The reality was that, if Bolshevism had from 1902 been like the military-centralist organisational conception developed in 1919-21, it would never have won the mass working class support that allowed the Bolsheviks to take power in 1917.

Flood time

The second line of argument for the need for urgency in the decisions of a revolutionary party is the centrality of timing, of seizing the initiative in order to make a revolution. Steve Bloom, for example, has argued against my book on strategy that it fails to grasp the need for the party to seize the “tide in the affairs of men”: that is, the state of mass mobilisation:

As Mike correctly notes, a general strike is not a permanent state of mobilisation. It is, by its very nature, fleeting. And yet it is at this fleeting moment of general strike when the majority sentiment that can produce revolutionary change is at its height, and when the active mobilisation of that majority sentiment, which is essential for smashing the old state (more on this in a moment), is also at its height. This is “the tide in the affairs of men” that we must take at the flood “or lose our ventures”.

Taken at the flood, the mass sentiment for social change reflected in the general strike can succeed in smashing the old state, establishing extreme democracy and achieving all the rest. Allowed to ebb - because the potential of the mass strike movement was not taken at the flood - and the inevitable result is demoralisation (or at least demobilisation) that begins to set in, as the old order re-establishes itself to fill the vacuum of power. The majority sentiment demonstrated by the strike begins to be transformed into its opposite. Such a process of transformation can be completed in a relatively brief time.

This was the danger Lenin noted in 1917, when he objected to Trotsky’s plan to wait until the Congress of Soviets to give the Bolsheviks a clear democratic mandate for the insurrection. Lenin feared that even a delay of weeks might result in an ebb in the mass sentiment for revolution, making insurrection more difficult or even impossible. Lenin’s fears turned out to be unfounded. But they were based on a proper understanding of how revolutionary situations unfold - in particular how they come upon us and then disappear in a matter of weeks or months, if we fail to take advantage, in a timely way, of the majority sentiment in favour of revolution that has developed, while some tangible form of mass mobilisation is ascendant.¹⁵

This is personalised as ‘Lenin versus Trotsky’.¹⁶ It is actually Lenin versus the Bolshevik leadership majority (which sided with Trotsky on the issue). Here, the leadership majority were clearly correct. October could not have succeeded without the alliance between the Bolsheviks, probably representing a majority of the urban proletariat (which was, however, a small minority of the country) and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, probably representing a majority of the peasantry (which was the large majority class). That alliance was possible because the Petrograd Military-Revolutionary Committee, which overthrew the provisional government, acted in the name of the Congress of Soviets that was about to meet.

A ‘Bolshevik-only’ insurrectionary general strike without that political alliance and its constitutional legitimacy would have met the fate of the Berlin radicals’ attempted forcible resistance of January 1919, or the 1921 ‘March Action’: that is, decisive and demoralising defeat. It is the democratic political commitments of the Bolsheviks, and their commitment to the worker-peasant alliance, which allowed the Bolshevik leadership to reach the right decision here.

We can, in fact, go further. Rosa Luxemburg argued in The mass strike:

To give the cue for, and the direction to, the fight; to so regulate the tactics of the political struggle in its every phase and at its every moment that the entire sum of the available power of the proletariat which is already released and active, will find expression in the battle array of the party; to see that the tactics of the social democrats are decided according to their resoluteness and acuteness and that they never fall below the level demanded by the actual relations of forces, but rather rise above it - that is the most important task of the directing body in a period of mass strikes. And this direction changes of itself, to a certain extent, into technical direction. A consistent, resolute, progressive tactic on the part of the social democrats produces in the masses a feeling of security, self-confidence and desire for struggle; a vacillating, weak tactic, based on an underestimation of the proletariat, has a crippling and confusing effect upon the masses.¹⁷

And in her ‘The next step’ (1910) we find:

For the expressions of the masses’ will in the political struggle cannot be held at one and the same level artificially or for any length of time, nor can they be encapsulated in one and the same form. They must be intensified, concentrated and must take on new and more effective forms. Once unleashed, the mass action must go forward. And if at the acknowledged moment the leading party lacks the resolve to provide the masses with the necessary watchwords, then they are inevitably overcome by a certain disillusionment, their courage vanishes and the action collapses of itself.¹⁸

A German left that had been trained up with arguments like these (and those of Anton Pannekoek - for example, in his 1912 ‘Marxist theory and revolutionary tactics’, part of the same debate¹⁹) would inevitably be unable to hold radicalised local mass movements back from minority adventurism in order to allow the ‘rearguard’ to catch up, as the Bolsheviks did in the ‘July Days’ in 1917. And so it proved in 1919 (the ‘Berlin uprising’) and 1921 (the ‘March action’).

Initiative time

The significance of timing is not unique to conditions of revolutionary crisis. On the one hand, if George Galloway had walked out of the Labour Party and called for a new party on the day British troops went into Iraq on March 20 2003, as opposed to hanging on until the Labour Party expelled him on October 23, it is likely that the resulting movement would have been more powerful than Respect (founded January 2004). On the other hand, the role of the SWP in Respect was possible because of its role in Stop the War Coalition. And its role in the StWC was possible because the SWP seized the initiative in creating the coalition in 2001 to campaign against the war on Afghanistan.

This ‘seizing the initiative’ is precisely the problem. In the first place, each grouplet is determined to have the initiative, and hence creates its own front, which it hopes will be the one that ‘takes off’ (as the StWC ‘took off’). Equally, groups walk out if they lose the majority (and thus initiative control) - thus the Socialist Party in England and Wales in the Socialist Alliance in 2001, and thus the SWP in Respect in 2007. Or they create competing initiatives to prevent their rivals’ operations ‘taking off’ (as the three main French far-left groups have done against each other, repeatedly since the 1970s).

The problem is that if the fundamental task of the party is to catch the moment, to take the tide at the flood, to be “a political party that is capable of taking power, precisely at that moment when the mass strike poses this as a social necessity”, the arguments quoted above for democratic methods must be wrong: the loss of time “wasted talking to ourselves”, as advocates of bureaucratic centralism of various sorts put it, is fatal to the party.

Hence, in reality, the driver for the endless splittism of the far left: comrades are reluctant to “waste time talking to ourselves” and hence either minorities walk out of organisations in search of fresh fields and pastures new, or majorities invent factitious excuses of one sort or another to drive minorities out. The advocates of the mass-strike policy before 1914 were already driven towards bureaucratic-centralist sect-making in Luxemburg’s and Leo Jogiches’ Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, and in the US and British De Leonist Socialist Labour Parties. The reason being that the mass strike policy logically implied party control over the trade unions, and logically implied that internal dissent is time-wasting.

Back to Bolshevism and October. Their strategic orientation to political democracy, and the worker-peasant alliance, enabled the Bolsheviks to grow into a large-minority party with a mass-circulation paper in 1912; enabled the Bolsheviks to pursue a policy of patient explanation, with a view to winning the majority during 1917; and enabled them to make the practical alliance with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries that actually took power.

In reality, all this was the inheritance of August Bebel’s and Wilhelm Liebknecht’s strategic conception, which was the foundation of the revolutionary social democracy of pre-1914. And this in turn was the legacy of Marx’s and Engels’ arguments against the Bakuninists, for a workers’ party that attempted, not to lead the strike movement, but to create a political voice for the class in high politics.

Positive time

The fundamental positive conclusion is that militarised centralism and pre-emptive decision-making by governments, or by central committees (or politburos, or general secretaries) is to be restricted to the contexts where it is appropriate: that is, military and emergency decision-making.

Conversely, there is a right to actually take decisions, and mechanisms for preventing decisions being taken, like filibustering and other forms of ‘talking out’ agenda items have to be recognised and rejected.

Let me turn to party norms about the time problem, because we are not right now making decisions about a new constitution. First, sufficient time should be allowed for effective discussions among the membership. There are a series of consequences that follow. First, there do need to be regular annual conferences. Here the SWP, which actually holds annual conferences, does better than the Mandelites, who for all their (partial) acceptance of factions, tend to hold conferences with prolonged gaps between them to suit the convenience of the apparatus (as the Soviet regime and Comintern did).

Second, there needs to be sufficiently early publication of documents and draft motions, and sufficient time and space for a literary discussion to develop, counter-proposals and proposals for amendments to be drafted, and so on, before a conference. Here the SWP’s three months would not be bad - were it not for the fact that the ban on ‘permanent factions’ and the limitation to three (internal) discussion bulletins effectively stifles initiative from outside the apparatus. The various broad-front left projects (Respect, Left Unity, Your Party …) have been far worse, producing leadership proposals late and providing little or no space for effective discussion before voting. Even where it is not openly plebiscitary Bonapartism (as in Your Party), this stifles membership initiative and the educative effect of discussion.

Third, overcrowded agendas have the same effect of reducing what appears to be a conference to a combination of rally plus plebiscite. There are two aspects to this. The first is that conferences need to meet for more than a single day (let alone, as is common on the left, a single day that starts late). It follows that even quite small organisations (say, of a couple of hundred members) need to have delegate conferences, so that those attending can so far as necessary book leave from work. The positive side of this coin is that the matters on the conference agenda need to be discussed in the pre-conference period in the local organisations (branches, cells) and sectoral ones (union, etc, fractions). This, of course, means that a democratic organisation has to have such organisations.

The second aspect of the ‘crowded agendas’ issue is that agendas need to be restricted: to try to cover everything is to cover nothing democratically. That means it is necessary to have decision mechanisms for what will go on the agenda, operating at an early stage, and themselves sufficiently politically transparent that there can be argument about the agenda before actually arriving at conference. The share of the agenda that is given to inspiring greetings from international co-thinkers or from militants in struggle needs to be reduced relative to recent British left practice: the conference is a decision mechanism, and turning it into a rally is anti-democratic.

I have posed these issues in relation to national organisations. They are even more obviously posed to international organisations. But, as soon as a local organisation gets above a certain size, they are posed to it too. Thinking about the logic of making time for discussion and decisions is a fundamental question for the workers’ movement and the left.

W Reisner (ed) Documents of the Fourth International: the formative years (1933-40) New York NY 1973, p29. For the date of the document, which is a bit more complicated, see p13.↩︎
G Breitman and S Lovell (eds) Writings of Leon Trotsky (1930-31) New York NY 1973, p155.↩︎
On the militarisation of labour, see, for example, www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/military/ch02.htm; and, more generally, www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/military/index.htm. The context and literature is conveniently assembled in S Louw, ‘In the shadow of the pharaohs: the militarization of labour debate and classical Marxist theory’ Economy and Society Vol 29 (2000), pp239-63, though Louw’s actual argument is schematic anti-Enlightenment stuff. More of the opposition to the militarisation idea appears in M Brinton The Bolsheviks and workers’ control chapter 5 (www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/05.htm). On 1915: “revolution is first and foremost a problem of power - not of the political form (Constituent Assembly, republic, European federation), but of the social content of power” (‘The struggle for power’ Nashe Slovo October 17 1915 in 1905: see www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1907/1905/ch26.htm. And on 1903-04, Report of the Siberian delegation (www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1903/xx/siberian.htm) and Our political tasks part IV (www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1904/tasks/ch04.htm).↩︎
See, for example, www.boldmethod.com/learn-to-fly/aeromedical-factors/hypoxia: “One of the most dangerous things about hypoxia is the fact that it’s impairing your judgement before you even know it’s there.” It is possible to make similar comments about intoxication; but the modern left’s problem is not that they are ingesting poisons, but that they are depriving themselves of the necessary oxygen of discussion.↩︎
On ‘deliberative democracy’ there is now a large literature. Wikipedia gives a summary: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_democracy. Some useful critiques of ‘shortcuts’ (like lottocracy) appear in in C Lafont Democracy without shortcuts: a participatory conception of deliberative democracy Oxford 2019.↩︎
See M Macnair, ‘Case of judicial usurpation’ Weekly Worker April 24 2025 for more detail on the UKSC’s action (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1535/case-of-judicial-usurpation).↩︎
See M Macnair, ‘Same old same old’ Weekly Worker April 4 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1485/same-old-same-old).↩︎
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_delayed_is_justice_denied provides various sources.↩︎
One line of argument is the liberal economists’ ‘collective action problem’ concept, starting with M Olson The logic of collective action Cambridge MA 1965.↩︎
R Gregor (ed) Resolutions and decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Vol 2: The early Soviet period 1917-1929 Toronto 1974, pp83-89, 90-98, 107-14, 119-24.↩︎
www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/3rd-congress/party-theses.htm (more detail at www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/3rd-congress/organisation/index.htm). There is a useful but uncritical Spartacist introduction at www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/3rd-congress/organisation/introduction.htm.↩︎
J Riddell (editor and translator) Toward the united front: proceedings of the fourth congress of the Communist International, 1922 Leiden 2012, pp304-05.↩︎
socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/leninism-finished. ‘United fronts’ in quote marks because the sort of single-issue protest campaigns the SWP promotes date in their origins to before there was a workers’ independent political movement (let alone one split between socialists and communists) and are not united class fronts (contrary to the Comintern proposals of 1922 and after).↩︎
See above in note 10: pp107-10 (1920); p86 (abolition of fractions) and pp97-98 (their reconstitution).↩︎
‘In search of a synthesis’ Weekly Worker August 1 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1502/in-search-of-a-synthesis).↩︎
Part of the cult-of-personality stuff developed from 1924; see LT Lih, ‘100 years is enough’ Weekly Worker supplement, September 18 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1507/a-hundred-years-is-enough).↩︎
www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/ch04.htm.↩︎
www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1910/03/15.htm.↩︎
www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1912/tactics.htm.↩︎