23.10.1997

Sect or Party?

Mark Fischer replies to Richard Brenner’s polemic against the Communist Party. First, the question of democratic centralism ...

It is always pleasant to read Richard Brenner of the Workers Power group. He has a certain muscular style to his writing and a pugnacious intelligence, even when he is forced into defending the most manifestly absurd of positions.

Readers are therefore well advised to study the comrade’s contribution to a debate on democratic centralism (Weekly Worker October 2), a piece prompted by a report of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International’s fourth congress by Don Preston in the September 11 issue of this paper. Comrade Preston can defend himself against some of the more specific charges of mis-reporting that Richard makes against him; this brief reply will concentrate on what I see as the substantive theme of our opponent’s piece - a defence of Workers Power’s barren sectarianism.

First, there is the small issue of WP’s general theoretical method, so characteristic of a sect. Take, for example, this change in line on the nature of the state form in the former ‘Stalinist states’. This - obviously - is not a trivial issue. It has implications for our understanding of the nature of the epoch, of revolution and of socialism itself. I would say that these issues have wider impute that the organisational concerns of WP.

But no, apparently not. WP simply informs its readership (Workers Power September) that at the LRCI fourth congress, “the former minority position [on the nature of eastern Europe and the USSR] secured a narrow majority”.

Actually, this minority position has long existed in WP. Essentially it has argued a position midway between the state capitalism of Cliff and orthodox Trotskyism. According to this theory, the ‘degenerate workers’ states’ consisted of proletarian property forms in contradiction with a bourgeois state represented by the ‘Stalinist’ dictatorship.

Now this position was defeated at the third congress of the organisation in 1981. Since that time however, it has clearly accumulated support, as WP has adapted pragmatically to the unfolding of capitalist restoration in the ‘degenerate workers’ states’. So much for Richard’s posturing on the thriving democracy of WP that allows minority positions to become majorities. Clearly what has driven WP’s line change has been a dishonest attempt to ‘square the circle’, to cover the gaping holes in its theory that events in the former ‘workers’ states’ have mercilessly exposed.

Commenting on the then minority position in 1995, the ‘Proletarian Faction’ of the LRCI pointed out its potential usefulness in this context:

“If adopted, this position would allow the League to explain the relatively peaceful transformation of the state without ‘winding the film of reformism back’. If it was already a bourgeois state, it need change only in its personnel and not its class nature. [Thus it is] empirically very neat in accounting for the apparently peaceful transfer of power from bureaucrat to bourgeoisie ...” (From ‘Platform of the Proletarian Faction, New Zealand’ in Why we broke with the LRCI/Workers Power - Britain leadership, undated).

Thus, we have the unedifying sight of a small group viewing the lessons of history as simply its own property. The social overturns in eastern Europe post-1945 are approached through the prism of the narrow concern to preserve the neat sect integrity of the Workers Power group and its “fight” for what it regards as “a re-elaborated communist programme” today. The fact that for the whole of its preceding existence, WP en bloc has been guilty, it now admits, of propagating incorrect views on this key question - of spreading confusion in the movement and thus theoretically disarming it - is entirely secondary to Richard and his ilk.

The workers’ movement and its need for scientific truth is thus subordinated to the narrow sectional interests of Brenner’s organisation. What other definition of sectarianism is there?

At another level, Richard exemplifies his thorough misunderstanding of what actually constitutes a ‘programmatic question’. The notion that a precise understanding of the nature of the USSR and eastern Europe should be included in the programme of a revolutionary organisation is simply foolish. Within the broad parameters of a programme - the crystalisation of the Party’s principles and statement of its strategic approach to the problem of conquering state power - there must be room for a variety of different interpretations of historical phenomena such as the USSR.

Workers Power has none of this Leninist understanding of programme. In my ‘Party notes’ column of January 16, I reported two incidents which exposed WP’s crass understanding of this question. First, one Colin Lloyd writes in the organisation’s paper of December of last year that it is a Leninist principle that members “agree” with the programme - a stupid, anti-Leninist formulation, which effectively rules out programmatic re-elaboration and development.

Second, I cited a meeting where leading WPer Paul Mason identified programme as what was written in the paper and what the cadre said and did on all occasions.

Thus, Brenner casually admits the existence of two alternative ‘programmatic’ poles in WP for much of its existence as an organisation. Now the erstwhile majority has been subordinated to “the requirements of the defence of [a] revolutionary programme” which contained within itself a key flaw that WP now breezily admits.

The old majority has had its views squashed beneath the numerical majority at the recent congress. Brenner distorts Lenin fundamentally when he writes that “democracy means the subordination of the minority to the majority” (original emphasis). Similarly, he writes that “the principal activity of the organisation is to campaign in a disciplined manner for our politics and programme” (my emphasis).

The comrade is playing games. Where does Lenin advocate the “subordination” of the views of the minority to the majority? To “campaign in a disciplined manner” around specific actions is one thing: to politically gag a minority is another. In fact, this is an example of indiscipline and crass bureaucratic centralism. Lenin writes on this that “We have outlined our views on the importance and the meaning of discipline in the workers’ party many times. Unity of action, freedom of discussion and criticisms - this is our definition.” Again, he writes that

“criticism with the limits of the Party programme must be quite free ... not only at Party meetings, but also at public meetings ... 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” (VI Lenin, ‘Freedom to criticise and unity of action’ CW Vol 10, Moscow 1977, pp442-443).

Brenner’s tough posing on discipline is topped with the observation that Lenin pointed out how irksome petty bourgeois intellectuals and individuals found Party discipline, with dire implications for the nature of our organisation, I assume.

The fact that Richard is actually here citing open polemical works of Lenin, directed against members of his own organisation, seems not to have impacted on him. Similarly, he cites the evidence of “two people” who split from our organisation to back up his attempt to “throw this accusation” of bureaucratism back at the Communist Party. He is drawing on material that we - not our puny and unserious opposition, who quickly evaporated into private life - openly published. This exquisite irony also seems to escape him.

If by this publication (J Conrad Problems of communist organisation London 1993), our Party has aided Richard Brenner’s search for truth, all to the good. If he now had anything useful to say on the subject, then the revolutionary movement as a whole would be enriched. The fact that he tries to marshal these ideas to justify a crudely narrow sectarianism is a pity, but perhaps not unexpected.

Richard and others who think like him of course recognise the difficulty of enlisting Lenin on the side of their sect prescriptions. They habitually make two qualifications. First, that there are two Lenins - the first, the pre-1912-14 Lenin was a revolutionary social democrat who had not “[broken] in principle with the Kautskyan doctrine of ‘the party of the whole class’” (Spartacist Lenin and the vanguard party New York 1978, p4). After this defining period, Lenin’s attitude to party democracy underwent a sharp qualitative break, apparently.

Brenner is a little more coy than the Spartacist League, but he defends essentially the same distortion of Leninism. He writes that “after 1912 [and the final break with the Menshevik liquidators - MF] ... it is just not true that minorities were always entitled to express publicly their differences with the majority”.

Of course, we have never suggested that there is some absolute right to open publication at all times for any minority viewpoint in the Party. This would be liberalism, not Leninism. But let us get concrete here. What “definite action” (Lenin) of Workers Power over the last decade would have been disrupted by the open discussion of the state form of eastern Europe? Simply to pose the question underlines the absurdity of Brenner’s stance.

The second, perhaps more substantial, qualification raised to invalidate Lenin’s practice is the ‘Chinese wall’ Richard and others draw between the current “fighting propaganda groups” that litter the British left and a party “representing a substantial part of the working class”. By implication, WP eschews openness while it remains uninfluential amongst broader layers of the class. Until then, its “principal activity ... is to campaign ... for our politics and programme” (when won’t it be? - it might be asked).

Again, this flies in the face of the actual experience of the Bolsheviks and reminds me of those of our critics who tell us that democratic centralism cannot apply in any type of pre-Party formation. In fact, the Bolsheviks were characterised by their defence of open ideological struggle, even under conditions where the Party as a whole had been reduced to tiny, pulverised groups. Writing about the period after 1907 Zinoviev underlines this:

“The years of Stolypin’s counter-revolution were the most critical and most dangerous in the Party’s existence. In retrospect we can say quite unhesitatingly that in those hard times the Party as such did not exist: it had disintegrated into tiny individual circles ...” (History of the Bolshevik Party London 1973, p165).

Despite this fact, “Over the course of several years an intense [and open! - MF] struggle between the Bolsheviks and the liquidators was waged within the framework of a single Party ...” (ibid).

A sect method will never build anything other than a sect. A Party which is genuinely part of the class can be achieved only through an open struggle of ideas.