02.10.1997

Democratic centralism and the LRCI

Richard Brenner, a delegate to the League for a Revolutionary Communist International’s fourth congress in July, replies to Don Preston of the Weekly Worker

In response to a report of the LRCI’s fourth congress in the September issue of Workers Power, Don Preston of the Weekly Worker (September 11) accuses the League for a Revolutionary Communist International and Workers Power (Britain) of bureaucratic centralism, crude inevitabilist optimism, and a dishonest refusal to account for changes in our theory and analysis of the Stalinist states.

Every charge is false. Worse, in his polemic Preston tries to mislead his readers through the time-dishonoured methods of falsification: quote-doctoring, distortion and plain slander.

The LRCI’s congress is accused of being a bureaucratic affair. However, in the process, Preston reveals certain facts that run contrary to this claim. He observes that at the congress a previous position of the organisation (the question of the state form in the Stalinist states) was changed. It follows from this that minorities have the possibility of becoming majorities through the process of democratic debate, and through a democratic voting procedure. Similarly he notes that at the national conference of Workers Power (Britain) last year, we changed our position on the Scottish Assembly after a vote and printed the resolution that was passed. Nevertheless, this completely democratic procedure was described as “bureaucratic”.

Now the LRCI and the CPGB have a difference over the question of whether minority views should be restricted to internal debate or not. But it is completely unconvincing to insinuate that our internal democracy is non-existent or restricted. Your own article inadvertently reveals the opposite to be the case.

What nobody would have gleaned from Preston’s article is the extent of democracy within the LRCI. He asks in exasperation: “... where were the discussion documents, articles and polemic before the fourth congress took place?” Answer: in five international internal bulletins (sent to all members, which every member can contribute to), in numerous internal bulletins of the national sections (sent to all members, which every member can contribute to), in four delegates’ packs (sent to all delegates to the congress, as elected by aggregate conferences of every section of the LRCI). In addition, at each of the sections’ aggregates there was extensive debate and discussion of resolutions and amendments submitted to the congress.

We can throw this accusation back at the CPGB. Do you have an annual conference? (Our sections all do and our statutory international congress takes place every three years at the most). Are the delegates always elected or is it true, as alleged in writing by two people who split from your organisation, that delegates to your conferences have in the past been appointed by your leading body? Do you have internal bulletins or are the differences among CPGB members really as limited as your paper suggests (which would make your internal discussions curiously apolitical)? In short, what evidence is there that your organisation has anything like the democratic procedures and debate that exists in the LRCI?

Finally on this, Preston claims that “to judge by past history if any sceptic in WP wants to retain their membership, it would be very advisable to keep quiet”. This is a slur. Can you name a single example of anyone, ever, being expelled from any LRCI section for expressing disagreement within the organisation with any policy, theory, perspective ... or anything at all?

If by “past history” you are referring to the expulsion of José Villa in 1995, as you know he was expelled for publicly denouncing the LRCI at a public meeting on ‘Socialism and black liberation’ in Brixton for supposedly ‘supporting imperialism’ in the Balkans. I think even the CPGB would regard such ‘openness’ as a gross violation of party discipline. But why let that stand in the way of a cheap slander?

The Weekly Worker persistently claims that it is ‘bureaucratism’ to subordinate minority political viewpoints and oblige members to uphold the majority view of their organisation. This is nonsense, as long as minorities have every right to express their views in the organisation and to fight to become the majority.

In the history of the RSDLP, of the Bolshevik faction and of the Bolshevik Party after 1912, for example, it is just not true that minorities were always entitled to express publicly their differences with the majority. As Paul le Blanc proved conclusively in his book, Lenin and the revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks’ attitude changed according to the circumstances of the time and the requirements of the defence of the revolutionary programme.

The LRCI’s sections are not yet revolutionary parties representing a substantial part of the working class; nor do they claim to be. They are fighting propaganda groups. Our members have come together voluntarily to take forward the fight, within the class struggle and the working class movement, against reformism, Stalinism and centrism, and for a re-elaborated communist programme.

Our members have rights and responsibilities. Among their rights is to participate fully in the democratic procedures of the organisation. Among their responsibilities is to campaign for the ideas that the majority of our members support and determine. The members themselves decide which differences we wish to debate publicly and which not. Everyone is made aware of their rights and responsibilities before they join. Unless otherwise agreed by the League, no member, including the leaders of the organisation, may publicly campaign against majority positions.

There is nothing bureaucratic about this. As Lenin often explained, democracy means the subordination of the minority to the majority. Nor is it legitimate, as you suggest, to erect a Chinese Wall between action and propaganda, or “ideology”, as you ignorantly describe it. For an organisation like our own (and yours if you were to admit it), the principal activity of the organisation is to campaign in a disciplined manner for our politics and programme. Members who publicly campaign for something else thereby disrupt the activity of the organisation and violate the democratic rights of the majority of the membership to decide on the course of the action and propaganda of the organisation.

As Lenin also often pointed out, it is rarely workers who object to party discipline, understanding it as they do from experience as a necessity of any struggle. Petty-bourgeois intellectuals however, steeped as they are in individualism, find such violations of their ‘rights’ intolerable. If so, they need not join a revolutionary working class organisation. That is their ‘right’.

In case anyone is still inclined to take the Weekly Worker’s word for anything without checking the facts, let’s examine Preston’s charge of crude optimism. He claims that the LRCI believes that the class struggle is somehow inevitably progressing towards victory and that no defeats lie ahead for the working class. He writes of our fourth congress:

“We also get the usual blend of inevitablism and ‘official optimism’ - so resonant of ‘official communism’ before it - that we expect from the Trotskyist school. They know - somehow - that working class defeats ‘do not lie ahead’; they have ‘already been experienced in the previous period’.”

Now because the LRCI has made a point of fighting against the inevitablism, processism and official optimism of the degenerate fragments of the Fourth International, this attack made me return to the article in WP to see what on earth it had said. I needn’t have worried. I will quote the passage from WP in full, to show how Preston has deliberately misrepresented what the LRCI is saying.

“The inability of the workers’ movements to resist the restoration of capitalism is a long-term consequence of those earlier defeats at the hands of the Stalinists. On the whole, the counterrevolutionary effects of those defeats on the labour movement have already been experienced in the previous period and do not lie ahead.

“Indeed, despite the reactionary effects of restoration, the congress recognised that what we are actually witnessing now is the recomposition of working class movements. It is a slow process, too slow in most cases to prevent the catastrophe of restoration, but it is taking place in a manner which makes the creation of stable, expanding, capitalist states with strong anti-working class regimes the least likely outcome.”

Now Don Preston has every right to challenge this analysis - but not to quote selectively from it to suggest that we are saying something different. Preston however extracts two clauses from these paragraphs to make it look as if the LRCI has written off the possibility of any working class defeats in the coming period, that any reverses and setbacks - which in the class struggle inevitably occur - “do not lie ahead”.

The passage cited argues that the reason for the weak resistance to the restoration process lies in the decades-long atomisation of the working class movement under the repressive dictatorship of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The contradiction identified by the LRCI is that the social catastrophe of restoration has nevertheless inaugurated a period in eastern Europe in which the working class movement is beginning slowly to recover.

Whilst the restoration of capitalism is a historic defeat for the working class, it is unlike, for example, the defeat of the German workers in 1933, in which the working class movement itself was smashed to smithereens. The smashing of the independent working class movement in eastern Europe was experienced in the previous period at the hands of the Stalinists.

It is not really surprising that Preston should leave out the real essence of what the LRCI is saying about the working class movement in the former Stalinist states. After all, the Weekly Worker, and The Leninist before it, has always scoffed at the LRCI’s analysis of the creation of the Stalinist states in Eastern Europe, in particular our stress on the fact that alongside revolutionary measures for the liquidation of capitalism, the bureaucracy carried through counterrevolutionary measures against the working class movement. Do you still reject this notion? Perhaps some uncertainty on your part underlies Don Preston’s refusal to deal with the real argument here, and his preference for setting up a straw man, which I am sure he found far easier to knock down.

Preston’s article goes on to accuse the LRCI of putting “a positive spin on events”, in our statement that: “Despite the desertion of the Bolivian section and half of the New Zealand section in 1995, the LRCI has more than recovered its numbers and is larger now than it was before the splits” (emphasis added).

In his first article Preston does not actually try to contest the truth of the statement. We have more members in the LRCI now than before the splits: this is simply true. In addition, we have built a new section in Australia. Should our international congress not have drawn a balance sheet of the size of our organisation? If the balance is positive, this to Preston is “spin”. This is just jaundiced.

From a weak stab, Preston later tried to make a more substantial point ... and so returns to distortion and misrepresentation. In the September 18 issue of the Weekly Worker, Preston relies again on the assumed ignorance of his reader: “The League for a Revolutionary Communist International thinks that by losing its entire Bolivian section and half its New Zealand section it has made a massive step forward ...” (emphasis added).  Well! The second quote says the opposite of the first. “Despite” and “by” mean different things. It would indeed be “delusion” to claim that these losses themselves represented “a massive step forward”. That is why we did not say it. We said that “despite” the losses, we have more than recovered our numbers since the 1995 splits.

Despite his commitment to “openness”, I doubt Preston will be big enough to admit that he is guilty of a bad polemic here. But perhaps we can look forward to an honest accounting by the ‘CPGB’ as to whether it has recorded overall growth in the same period? Don’t hold your breath.

And finally ... Preston says it is “outrageous” that our congress report promises that our change of analysis on the Stalinist states “will be set out in an article in the forthcoming issue of Trotskyist International”. The reason? The article is not in the present issue. As we said, it will be in the, er, forthcoming - ie, the next - issue.

The congress took place at the end of July. The latest TI came out at the beginning of July. The article on our debate on the state will be in the next issue, as promised. Lesson: check your facts before you raise idiotic criticisms, and never take anything you read in the Weekly Worker as good coin.

The real reason, I suspect, that Preston is prepared to go to such lengths to make out that the LRCI’s international democratic centralism is bogus is to distract attention from the CPGB’s greatest weakness. The highest level of proletarian political organisation is not, as you repeat ad nauseam, the revolutionary party. It is the revolutionary international, the world party. Though the LRCI does not claim to be a world party, it is setting out on the path of constructing one. It is living proof that democratic centralism is possible and necessary on an international scale.

The CPGB’s level of internationalism can be judged from the fact that the best advice you could give your Australian co-thinkers was not to develop an international tendency, but to advise them to move en bloc to Britain. Fine internationalism, especially when the Australian class struggle is so obviously on the rise!

National socialist groupings (if you’ll pardon the phrase) like the CPGB can only mock and slander the possibility of international democratic centralism. But the LRCI and its fourth congress are, as our maligned report pointed out, “a living expression” of just that.