11.03.1999

Revolutionary openness

Marcus Larsen replies to Australia’s Democratic Socialist Party (see pp4-5)

Dear comrades

We are disappointed you could not agree to our attendance at your 18th national conference held in January. Communist Party of Great Britain welcomes the opportunity to take up the issues you raise, as the errors you repeat, fundamentally around the party question, are not your failing alone, but are common to many on the revolutionary left worldwide.

In essence, you claim that the Democratic Socialist Party upholds the model of party-building adopted by the “mature”, post-1914 Lenin as opposed to the immature, pre-1914, Kautskyite Lenin. You claim our organisation upholds the latter over the former. It is this issue we wish to mainly address in this reply.

Before we move on, some loose ends. You say that we have ignored your reasons for declining our request to attend the conference. You claim: “We have had no indication from you that you wish to develop collaborative relations with our party.” While it is true we have never written to the DSP saying, ‘Dear DSP, can we open collaborative relations with you?”, there have been occasions when our members have offered to work with your organisation. In the past you have correctly assumed that this has been with the approval of our Provisional Central Committee. While it seems that the term “collaborative relations” holds some important technical-level definition for the DSP, it holds no such place in our lexicon. ‘Collaborate’, according to the dictionary, means to work with another.

As the Indonesian revolution broke out in May 1998, Marcus Larsen - who you knew was a member of the CPGB - e-mailed one of your national executive members, Doug Lorimer:

“I have been asked by the convenor of the London Socialist Alliance [LSA] to contact you regarding the intended visit of a PRD [Indonesia’s Peoples Democratic Party] comrade to the UK ... We would like to organise public meeting(s) with the London Socialist Alliance ... with a PRD comrade and John Pilger on the Indonesian Revolution ... What do you suggest as the correct channels in order to send an invitation and request?” (May 19 1998).

At the initiation of the CPGB, the London Socialist Alliance went on to hold a picket at the Indonesian embassy at the height of the movement in Indonesia in the summer of 1998.

In the context of an unsuccessful attempt to form a group around the LSA in solidarity with the Indonesian revolution, a CPGB comrade wrote to the national secretary of the DSP, John Percy, on June 1, 1998:

“We are currently in discussions regarding establishing an Indonesian solidarity group ... To this end ... I have already e-mailed the PRD in Europe with no reply. Would you be able to drop [comrade N] a note regarding our legitimacy? Thanks. I will be in Australia in December-January. Depending on the situation there, my organisation would be interested in me visiting Indonesia on route ... What do you think the possibility and advisability of this is?”

Such correspondence hardly matches with your preposterous claim that our

“purpose in writing the November 19 article [in the Weekly Worker] (and the others you have carried on Indonesia) was not to build solidarity in Britain with the mass struggle for democracy in Indonesia, but to ‘engage with the politics of the DSP’.”

In fact, our letter said: “We have attempted to critically engage with the politics of your organisation in order to help clarify a number of issues - not least of which is the unfolding revolution in Indonesia.” Our starting point in covering the Indonesian revolution, was - amazingly enough - the Indonesian revolution itself. Our secondary engagement with your organisation was done to assist clarification on “the unfolding revolution in Indonesia”, not the other way round, as you claim.

The e-mail correspondence above also shows up the impracticability - if nothing else - of raising our differences only in private - the ‘principle’ with which you repeatedly berate us. During 1998 our organisation wrote to the PRD three times concerning solidarity work in the UK - to no avail. Do you really think it likely the comrades would have responded to an opening salvo regarding their programme and tactics if they did not respond to correspondence regarding the building of an organisation in solidarity with the Indonesian revolution?

But there is further evidence of our organisation wanting to work with the DSP. On September 16 1998, Marcus Larsen e-mailed your national secretary offering to distribute election material for the DSP at the polling station at Australia House in London for the October 3 Australian federal election. There was no reply. If an offer to hand out another organisation’s propaganda - the contents of which we do not fully agree with - is not an offer to conduct joint work then we do not know what is.

However, all this is mere detail. It is clear that the real reason for declining our request to attend your conference has nothing to do with a failure on our behalf to attempt to work with your organisation. It appears that the real reason is more connected with our criticisms which to your chagrin we actually publish in our paper. So the truth must be concealed from the working class for fear of breaching some set of diplomatic niceties. According to you we made “public criticisms based on misrepresentations of [your] views”. It seems apposite to ask: if we had been misrepresenting your views throughout 1998 and earlier, then, to quote you own words, “why didn’t you simply send us a letter” regarding our errors? Any missive on your behalf would have been welcome, for, unlike your publication, the Weekly Worker has a reputation for openness - we would have published your clarification.

Of course, all this is very much connected with the divergent approaches adopted by our organisation to the question of party-building. Here lies the gist of the question. Your letter of December 11 devotes considerable space to elucidating your interpretation of the Leninist concept of the revolutionary party. Your view is not unique. In fact, it displays the hallmarks of the Trotskyism you claim to have left behind when your organisation, then called the Socialist Workers Party, left the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in the early 1980s.

We maintain that the Cannonite theory of the party, which you call “mature” Leninism, is in fact a method for building an organisation with sectional interests above those of the general interests of the working class. That is, it is a method for building a political sect, not a combat organisation of the most advanced part of the working class. Your approach to party membership, which is shared by many on the revolutionary left, is based on the necessity for agreement with the party programme. Considering how verbose and overly-detailed most programmatic documents are, that can be quite a lot to agree with.

Such a method leads to the bizarre situation where the precondition for unity in a Communist Party is agreement with a particular detailed interpretation of history. The DSP’s programme - a book of over 150 pages - contains a multitude of contestable nuanced theoretical interpretations of history. The programme of the Communist Party should in fact not be based on this or that ideological system invented, or discovered, by the leaders of this or that group. Neither can it be constructed through a series of anodyne formulations. The programme should concisely lay down the broad strategy of how the workers can be formed into a class and how they can conquer political power from the bourgeoisie.

Acceptance of - not agreement with - the party programme is the minimum a party can ask of its members if it is to unify the advanced sections of the working class and not form itself as a sect around a particular narrow ideological system. Genuine unanimity is something to be fought for, won and rewon in an ever-changing world. It cannot be declared.

Leninism is not a fixed category nor a set of fixed formulae. The fight for a revolutionary party is a process. To grab hold of any one aspect of Lenin’s struggle to build the party - whether his ‘softest’ or his ‘hardest’, his most ‘open’ or his most ‘monolithic’ - is to mistake the part for the whole, is to turn a specific concrete application of a general method into a dry, lifeless and timeless dogma. This is the error of Cannonite Trotskyism and of the countless Trotskyite fragments in general. It is profoundly anti-party. This method allows any revolutionary group to look at the concrete practice of the Bolsheviks at any given time and elevate this to an absolute, to a fixed category, in order to defend their practice.

Your idea - shared by most Trotskyites - that the Bolsheviks constituted themselves as a separate party organisation from the Mensheviks in January 1912 and then banned their members from public discussion of party matters is a myth. What this myth serves - quite starkly in the case of the SWP, SPEW, Workers Power, etc, in Britain - is a method for building a mono-idea sect. It can only serve to cower internal opposition and hide debates from the advanced layers of the class. Even in the most democratic of such organisations, differences are only to be debated by the enlightened and ordained who then must deliver the discovered truth, unadulterated, on fear of expulsion, to the unenlightened masses.

For instance, a recent article in the Green Left Weekly (January 27) announced that the DSP has discovered that China is now a capitalist state and has been so since September 1992. This discovery was decided by a majority of delegates attending the DSP’s 18th conference on January 5-10 this year. Up until January 4 1999, according to the second edition of your party’s programme, the DSP maintained that China was, alternatively a “workers’ state” (p126) or a “socialist state” (p146).

Logically following your approach to party, we can assume that public pronouncements by DSP members which claimed that China was not some form of workers’ or socialist state up to January 4 this year were breaches of discipline. From January 11, it presumably became a breach of discipline to argue outside the DSP that China remained some form of workers’ state.

With regards to your 14-month discussion on the class character of the Chinese state, non-party members were out of the loop. Advanced workers outside your small ranks could garner no insights into the debate, but have merely been dished up with the end product, the new ‘truth’.

It is precisely this method which treats political differences within and between parties as something to be hidden or treated as a diplomatic question, which leads to splits. Unity based on such a method can never last. If party members must agree with the programme, as soon as a member or a group of members discover they no longer agree, the only possibility for comrades convinced of the error of the ‘party line’ is to part company in order to be able to address the question publicly without breaching party discipline. The scattered debris of post-Trotsky Trotskyism is a sad epitaph to this method.

There are some assertions in your letter that we do not contest. You write: “Lenin never advocated that the paper of a revolutionary organisation should print every ill-informed ‘opinion’ held by any and every member of such an organisation.” We agree. But this does not mean that open publication of differences within the RSDLP, within the Bolsheviks and within the post-1917 party could not occur. They could and they did. It was a normal part of party life. Open ideological struggle ran as a red thread through Bolshevism till the tragic ‘temporary’ banning of factions in 1921.

This thread goes right back to the dispute at the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, and the distinction between the Menshevik loose concept of a party member and Lenin’s definition of a party member as one who is under the direction of their party committee and those committees above. This disciplined unity in action - combined with freedom to debate, discuss and disagree with the majority - underpins all future developments of Bolshevism.

Our ‘Theses on revolutionary openness’ passed by an aggregate of CPGB members in December 1997, restates “the right to open factions, even those highly critical of the majority”. Yet with rights come duties. We regard the principle of revolutionary openness as a weapon: “This principle is subordinate to the fight for world revolution. It is not an absolute.” The document also states: “There is a trend of thought within our ranks [that seems to believe] it is correct to publish practically anything. This stance has more in common with petty-bourgeois liberalism and anarchism than with communism.” This is backed up with the formulation that “there can be no absolute right of publication for any viewpoint in the open party press”.

We therefore agree with your statement: “Whether or not internal political disagreements on any given issue within a Bolshevik-type party should be publicly discussed [if by that you mean in the Party press] by individual members is a matter for the party, not individual members, to decide.” Yet, for the DSP, public debate is the exception and almost certainly signals a pre-split situation. For us open debate which does not breach party security or attempt to disrupt party actions is the norm. We also agree with Comintern that issues should be cleared up through discussion wherever possible. Our theses on openness state that a moral course of action in “raising criticisms of our organisation and its leadership is to first raise the question with party comrades and committees”. Petty issues should be kept out of the press. But real political debates should be open and thorough.

For Lenin this was democratic centralism: “We were all agreed on the principle of democratic centralism, on guarantees for the rights of all minorities and for all loyal opposition, on the autonomy of every party organisation, on recognising that all party functionaries must be elected, accountable to the party and subject to recall. We see the observance in practice of these principles of organisation, their sincere and consistent application, as a guarantee against splits, a guarantee that the ideological struggle in the party can and must prove fully consistent with strict organisational unity with the submission of all to the decisions of the congress” (VI Lenin CW Vol 10, Moscow 1977, p314). This strict unity in action must be combined with open ideological struggle. “There must be wide and free discussion of party questions, free comradely criticism and assessment of events in party life” (ibid). It was indeed a norm in the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP that differences were thrashed out in the party’s press.

For the DSP and most Trotskyites, this all changed in January 1912. The CPGB begs to differ. However, we are no fools. There was clearly a development of Leninist organisation in 1912 and again in 1914. The basis of these developments will be explored below. The causes aside, did these developments lead to the end of open debate on programmatic matters? Did they lead to the end of an open and vibrant party press? Did they lead to an end to the right of factions? Did they end access to the party’s press for factions or minority views? Clearly not.

You claim that in 1912 the Bolsheviks “adopted precisely the rules you falsely attribute to being an innovation of Jim Cannon”. We totally disagree. The DSP interprets the supposedly new 1912 position on pronouncements which disrupt party actions and the suggestion of a party discussion bulletin as equivalent to the banning of debate in the public press, except in extreme and pre-split circumstances, and for minority factions and minority views to have no public profile.

In an organisation which aims to unite the most advanced layers of the working class, the judgement of what constitutes disruption of party actions, including the conduct of debate in the party’s press, is a concrete political question. It cannot be a general gagging order.

So what of party debates after Lenin’s supposed conversion?

The debate around the rights of nations to self-determination continued throughout Lenin’s political career and divided the Bolsheviks into two, almost equal, camps. In 1907 Rosa Luxemburg published a far-ranging article in Kautsky’s Neue Zeit coming out against the rights of nations to self-determination. She found a real layer of support in Russia. Lenin ferociously defended the principle and later assisted Stalin with his famous treatise on ‘The national question and social democracy’ which was published in 1913. Also in 1913, the central committee of RSDLP - now purged of liquidators - passed a resolution on the question which opposed the still substantial Luxemburg-Bukharin position. This resolution was passed in parallel with Lenin’s ‘definitive’ response to Luxemburg, which was published in 1914.

However, the matter did no rest there. The Zimmerwald conference of anti-war social democrats held in September 1915 recognised the rights of nations to self-determination. This provoked an angry response from Karl Radek, who denounced as “illusory” the “struggle for a non-existent right”. In April 1916, this debate was carried in the journal of the Zimmerwald Left Vorbote with two sets of theses for and against self-determination, the one by Lenin, the other by Radek. A few weeks later, in another journal, Radek condemned the Dublin uprising of 1916 as a “putsch”, which earned Lenin’s stinging rejoinder, ‘Results of the discussion about self-determination’.

The debate on the national question reached new public heights immediately before and after the Bolsheviks took power. In April 1917 Pyatokov led an attempt to remove national self-determination from the Party’s programme. He was only narrowly defeated. Nevertheless, a year later, the faction around Bukharin, Pyatakov and Radek managed to win a formulation substituting the right of nations to self-determination with the right of the working class in nations to self-determination. Lenin, as we all know, publicly fought back and effectively secured a reversal.

In her pamphlet, The Russian Revolution, Luxemburg attacked the Bolshevik position on nationalities, claiming that it had been ‘forced’ on the party by Lenin and declared that “the Bolsheviks, by their hollow nationalistic phraseology ... have ... supplied the bourgeoisie ... with the finest, most desirable pretext, the very banner of their counterrevolutionary efforts” (quoted in M Liebman Leninism under Lenin London 1975, p274). By Luxemburg’s standards our criticisms of the DSP could not be milder.

While the nationalities debate shows differences of opinions being thrashed out - sometimes in a disciplined manner, sometimes not - by Bolsheviks and those comrades outside Russia with which they had, at least, “collaborative relations”, it is not as clear an exposition of an open party factional debate as that which emerged around Soviet Russia’s treaty with Germany and Austria, negotiated and eventually signed on March 3 1918 at Brest-Litovsk. From this debate emerged the very public, very post-1914 Left Communist faction.

The Left Communists did not just agitate around the issue of Brest-Litovsk. They developed an alternative platform around a number of issues, including workers’ democracy, the trade unions, industrialisation and the national question. The faction produced a daily paper, Kommunist, in Petrograd at the height of the dispute. The Left Communists also made their views known through the pages of Pravda, the party’s central organ (ibid p296).

After the 7th Party Congress in March 1918, which ratified the treaty, the Lefts continued to organise, securing control of the Moscow Party committee in April 1918. Again, they published a factional paper in the city.

At the Congress, the party majority voted to allow the Left Communists to be represented on the central committee. It was standard Bolshevik practice to proportionally include minority groupings and views on leading committees. The Left Communists refused to take their positions in the leadership. Highlighting the constant motif of disciplined unity in action alongside freedom of criticism, Lenin moved a motion at the Congress accusing them of a “completely disloyal and impermissible violation of party discipline” (ibid p293). This serious charge was not made because of their political positions, but because they refused to take their seats on the central committee.

There are numerous other examples which prove that a culture of open political debate was the norm.

I will cite only one more. The last major debate before the banning of factions at the 10th Party Congress took place at the beginning of 1921 around the role of the trade unions in Soviet society. Three main positions emerged. The Trotsky-Bukharin position was for the ‘militarisation’ of the trade unions and their effective merger with state production. The Workers’ Opposition around Kollantai effectively championed a syndicalist view. The ‘group of 10’ central committee members including Lenin carved out a middle ground, opposing the extremes of militarisation and syndicalism.

EH Carr underlines the broad and public nature of the debate in a lengthy footnote. Here is a small excerpt: “To give an impression of the unparalleled extent of the debate a few of its principle landmarks may be recorded: On 24 December 1920 Trotsky addressed a monster meeting of trade unionists and delegates to the eighth All-Russian Congress of Soviets - his speech was published the following day as a pamphlet ... Throughout January 1921, Pravda carried almost daily articles by the supporters of one or other platform” (EH Carr The Bolshevik revolution Vol 2, Harmondsworth 1966, p224n). Clearly, leading party members were agitating for their factional position among non-party members.

We have conclusively debunked the myth that the Leninist approach to unity in action with freedom of criticism and open ideological struggle was overthrown either in January 1912 or August 1914. Development there no doubt was, but adherence to revolutionary openness before the working class remained a core strength of Leninism.

Yet behind the falsification of Leninist organisational practice which Cannon and a hundred and one Trotskyite fragments perpetuate there lies an historical error.

In January 1912 the RSDLP convened a congress in Prague. As we have noted, bright in the mythological firmament of Trotskyism is the idea that at this congress the Bolsheviks under Lenin expelled the Mensheviks and constituted their faction as the sole expression of the party.

The reality was far different. With the defeat of the 1905 revolution, a period of reaction swept through Russia. In a series of lectures given in 1921 Zinoviev said that, to all extents and purposes, the party which had been built during the revolution was thrown back to its pre-1905 situation of isolated groups. The party had ceased to exist as a mass organisation.

In this period of reaction, there arose within the fragments of the RSDLP a hankering for legalism. Mainly springing from the Mensheviks, this strand of thought argued for the ending of the illegal organisation of the party and a move to concentrate on the legal mass workers’ organisations and participation in duma elections. The Leninist Bolsheviks fought this liquidationism and argued for the maintenance and rebuilding of both legal and illegal party bodies.

As is the case with life, this debate did not divide the party along a neat Bolshevik-Menshevik axis. On the contrary, a division emerged within the Mensheviks. In all of Lenin’s writings of this period, Mensheviks are either described as “pro-Party” or “liquidationist”. Contrary to the belief of the DSP, the Prague conference in 1912 did not expel the Mensheviks. The conference expelled the liquidators - the majority of whom were Mensheviks. Not only were non-Bolsheviks at the conference; it was chaired by a pro-Party Menshevik.

It would have been the simplest thing in the world for the Bolsheviks to just declare themselves the Party. Why bother inviting Plekhanov and other pro-Party Mensheviks, or Trotsky, or the leftists in the party? If it was just a diplomatic nicety, why then elect a pro-Party Menshevik onto the Central Committee?

The actual betrayal of the working class in August 1914 by the Second International necessarily led the Bolsheviks to announce the generalised need to break with opportunism on a worldwide basis. Yet for the DSP and other Trotskyites the two and a half years from January 1912 to August 1914 are concertinaed into the same event. Lenin somehow ‘unconsciously’ breaks with his supposed Kautskyite theory of the party in January 1912 and only realises why he has done it some 31 months later.

The fight against left and right liquidationism in the Russian Party from 1907 to 1912, which culminated in the Prague congress, and Lenin’s call for a new International, were concrete applications of a consistent and developing method.

While clear lessons of principle of a general nature were developed in the period of the collapse of the Second International, while Lenin and his party advanced theoretically through this huge setback, while Lenin saw the need to generalise his method for party-building begun in 1903 to the international scale and not only for Russian conditions, to claim that all former norms of party life were dropped is not sustainable.

Times have moved on considerably. Nowhere does there exist a mass party with a fully developed revolutionary theory and practice. Our parties and, centrally, our International need to be painstakingly reforged in new circumstances. However, this can only be conducted through a ruthless examination of our collective past and our present practice. Only on the basis of revolutionary openness, as against an opportunist submerging of differences ‘in the interests of unity and collaboration’, can we successfully fulfil our tasks. At the end of the day, what can be achieved through conciliation?

Our disagreement on the party question extends to the nature of relations between political organisations in different countries. The DSP maintains that “collaborative relations” at an international scale can only develop if differences remain behind closed doors.

The December 11 letter states that “comradely discussion of differences ... should be aimed at promoting the primary objective of the relationship: ie, developing practical collaboration between the parties on [a] mutually beneficial basis.” You reject our position that open ideological struggle is an obligation and prerequisite for mutual solidarity and comradely discussion. You say that the prerequisite for such solidarity and discussion between proletarian revolutionaries is the “recognition that, despite whatever differences may exist between them, they have the same fundamental objective - a classless society to be achieved through a proletarian revolution”. Comrades, we had assumed this to be the case for the DSP and the CPGB. However, because of the fact of this “recognition” you say that “discussion of ... differences over how to achieve that common objective should be conducted in a manner that does not undermine ... practical collaboration”.

Such an approach smacks of diplomacy. One look at the public disputes between leading members and different parties of the Second and Communist Internationals shows a clear commitment to public and sometimes fierce debate. Did such commitment to open ideological struggle prevent practical collaboration?

Your approach is closer to the conciliationist and opportunist ‘principle’ of ‘non-interference in the internal relations of fraternal parties’ - or ‘diplomatic internationalism’ - espoused by the post-Comintern ‘official’ communist parties.

“Conciliators,” wrote Lenin, seek to

“place in the forefront the ‘reconciliation’ of given groups and institutions. The identity of their views on party work, on the policy of that work, is a matter of secondary importance. Differences of opinion must be hushed up, their causes, their significance, their objective conditions should not be elucidated. The principle thing is to ‘reconcile’ persons and groups. If they do not agree upon the carrying out of a common policy, that policy must be interpreted in such a way as to be acceptable to all. Live and let live” (VI Lenin Selected Works Vol 4, p41).

Comrades, we remain willing to consider any proposals of appropriate joint work. However, we can not accept a diplomatic approach where joint work can only be on the basis of “live and let live”.

Marcus Larsen
for the Provisional Central Committee, Communist Party of Great Britain