20.10.2004

Patience and principle

It is no secret that the CPGB's engagement with the Respect coalition has provoked differences in our ranks. Yet, while often based on healthy revolutionary instincts, leftism is a trend that must be combated, argues Mark Fischer. Lenin's Leftwing communism - an infantile disorder can aide us

Many CPGB comrades have quite a strange relationship with Lenin’s seminally important pamphlet, Leftwing communism, an infantile disorder.

Those of us who were around The Leninist - the forerunner of the Weekly Worker and our factional publication in the ‘official’ CPGB during the crucial political battles of the 1980s and early 1990s - recall how the forces we were then up against in the Party would try to use it against us. The pro-Soviet centrists, the Eurocommunists and the right opportunists would attempt to brush off our rather earnest young comrades with the patronising advice that we take a moment or two out of our busy schedule of denunciation to read Leftwing communism - as a corrective to the pop-eyed leftism we were manifesting, presumably.

Of course, if you actually take the trouble to read the work, you will see that this was rather strange advice to offer us. Yes, Lenin is combating ultra-leftism - a tendency that he regarded as akin to anarchism. However, his pamphlet is animated by a profound will to revolution, a determination to seek out and win over the masses that are the agents of that revolution. This determined his attitude to the Labour Party in this country, for instance. Although he advocated that communists pursue a variety of tactics to win the ear of the proletarians still influenced by Labourism, the strategic task was the fight to split and replace Labour as the natural party of the workers. Frankly, that was a vision that would given those tired, deeply pro-Labour revisionists in our Party apoplexy - indeed, it was just the sort of ‘leftism’ they were moronically denouncing us for. So - whether 20 years ago or today - we have never felt any discomfort reading Lenin’s work. I have always wondered whether our opportunist critics ever got past the title page, however …

I am assured that a better translation of the phrase rendered as “infantile disorder” is actually ‘childhood disease’. What Lenin is attempting to do here is address some of the growing pains, the maladies associated with the infant stage of the world communist movement. As such, despite the fact that Lenin characterises the pamphlet as “the hasty notes of a publicist”, it has real profundity. The particular examples of leftism Lenin attacks do not have direct equivalents in our own organisation today - or in the serious left that surrounds us (on the contrary, the more common problem we encounter is a senile rightism). However, the template Lenin describes of a Bolshevik politician is generally applicable.

Leftwing communism was written in April 1920, specifically for delegates to the 2nd Congress of Comintern, scheduled to meet later that year. Lenin underlines that its purpose is to distil what was “universally practicable, significant and relevant” from the history of Bolshevism as a distinct revolutionary trend for these new and soon-to-be-born communist parties in western Europe in particular. One of the main lessons is that Bolshevism is not defined by constant offensive. There are a wider variety of tactics available to communists in the class war - manoeuvre, temporary retreat, alliance, compromise, etc - than simply the order, ‘Charge!’

Clearly, it was a matter of survival that communists learn this, given the political context in which the pamphlet appeared. The post-World War I wave of capitalist crisis and revolutionary challenges that had swept across Europe was receding. There was a temporary but real period of capitalist consolidation. In some countries, there were parallels between what was happening to the indigenous communist parties and workers’ movements and the period of reaction that eventually followed the defeat of the 1905 revolution in Russia. Of course, these political episodes do not repeat themselves in carbon-copy form, but generally you could say that the forward momentum of the revolution had been checked. It was at this time that the Comintern adopted the 21 conditions for affiliation and debated the tactic of the united front.
Overwhelmingly, those conditions were designed to construct a barrier against the right - the success of international communism had attracted some politically dubious elements: in particular centrists who gravitated towards the Communist International. But we must remember that there are also stipulations in those 21 conditions that were clearly directed towards leftist deviations - concretely, the obligation to participate in parliamentary and electoral work; the importance of the trade unions - even the most reactionary ones.

Lenin took up the cudgels against left communists in Germany in particular, but also those in Holland, Great Britain, France and elsewhere. He pointed out their methodological similarity to the leftist currents that appeared at times within Bolshevism and attempted to boil that mistaken methodology down to three so-called ‘principles’.

One, abstention from parliamentary activity. This is premised on the correct idea that, from the vantage point of world history, parliament and parliamentary forms have become “obsolete”.

Two, the withdrawal from class collaborationist or reactionary trade unions. In some countries - Germany would be a good example - the leftists advocated the creation of ideologically ‘clean’, and in some cases explicitly communist, workers’ unions.

And, three, the idea, as expressed by the British communist, Sylvia Pankhurst, in her vividly written Workers’ Dreadnought, that the tactics, the forward march of the Communist Party, entailed no compromise with other forces, no deals with other parties. There must be an undeviatingly straight line from here to the revolution and the notion of compromise must be treated with contempt.

These are the three profoundly mistaken notions that Lenin addressed in this pamphlet. Now, there is no one in the CPGB who believes anything so silly, I am sure. So why has the leadership of the CPGB recommended study of this book? Why do we think it has lessons in the context of our ongoing intervention in Respect and the breakaway by a majority of our former Red Platform who are now, after an unseemly short space of time, the Red ‘Party’? Basically, because we believes that they exhibited definite signs of leftism.

Yet I have no doubt that these comrades - and the comrades still counted in the ranks of CPGB partisans that have struck leftist poses over the recent past - would happily accept Lenin’s critique as orthodoxy. None of them would say in principle we cannot stand for parliament, or we should leave reactionary trade unions. In fact, the political currents in Britain who consciously identify with this ‘classic’ model of left communism are confined to the far fringe - odd groups such as the International Communist Current.

But we see the relevance if we approach the pamphlet not as Talmudic truth, but dynamically, as a historically specific work with vital general lessons. Lenin himself makes the important (cautionary) point that leftism is a repeat offender. It mutates and reappears in different forms. Of course, it has characteristic patterns whenever it appears. For instance, its tendency to moralism, as opposed to communist realism. Likewise, a propensity to regard communist tactics as something that must be kept unsullied and ‘pure’ - somehow we will inevitably become ‘infected’ by contact with non-proletarian or politically opportunist trends.

Writing about Germany, Lenin mentioned a characteristic feature leftist trends often borrow from anarchism - an impatience with and morbid opposition to elected leaderships and to majority rule in the party. Lenin comments that very frequently the Bolsheviks had to brush aside unfounded accusations from leftists of arbitrary dictatorship. He says this displays something about the mindset, the brittle emotional state, of this trend. It is petty bourgeois, it lacks resolve, seriousness and stamina. It is marked by the absence of perseverance, of the ability to organise with proletarian staunchness. I do not think it is too hard to think of elements that have casually flopped out of our ranks in recent times that look like the political photofit of the leftists Lenin described.

These are common features of leftism, despite the variety of forms it can take. Therefore, precisely because it mutates and resurfaces, it is vital that we arm ourselves against petty bourgeois leftism - we should expect to see it reappear in other manifestations in the current period. Why? Simply because of the dramatic lurches to the right by what is currently the main component of the revolutionary left in Britain - the Socialist Workers Party. This sect is in programmatic meltdown: it is in the process of explicitly reconstituting itself a conduit for petty bourgeois influences into the workers’ movement. We should hardly be surprised if some respond with a sterile leftist posturing as a type of impotent ‘revenge’ on this rightism.

Let us return to Lenin’s argument in 1920. He stressed that a particular stage of the struggle had now passed. The tactics that he outlined in relation to parliament and the unions were designed to win a hearing for revolutionary politics with a mass that is not moving towards communism through its own forward momentum. He takes it as read that the proletarian vanguard - ie, a strategically significant section of advanced workers - has already been won ideologically to Bolshevism. And that, he says, “is the main thing. Without this we cannot take even the first step towards victory.” So, to put it a little crudely and schematically, he is saying that the Iskra period of party-building has been successfully completed; next comes the Pravda stage of winning the mass. And to win the mass, propaganda methods alone are not appropriate.

A false impression could be drawn from this - that at the stage of propaganda, the stage of cohering the vanguard, what Lenin calls “pure communism”, or an abstract approach to these questions, is forgivable. Discussing this, Lenin maintains that it is perfectly correct to state the theoretical case for the idea that bourgeois parliament is “obsolete” from the point of view of world history. But even at this - more abstract - propagandist stage, to leave it at that is not acceptable. Leftism in propaganda must be fought as much as leftism in agitational forms of party work: it is something that we have to root out at every stage of the development of the organisation.

You cannot understand Bolshevism simply through examining it when it was ‘prettified’ by the influx of 350,000 workers - when it was “de-Bolshevised” in Trotsky’s unfortunate and profoundly mistaken phrase. You have to understand Bolshevism as a distinctive revolutionary trend within the workers’ movement, from its appearance in 1903 - even prior to that, actually, in terms of its antecedents.
Bolshevism, Lenin emphasises, had a very compressed history, an extremely rich experience gained in a short space of time. It saw military forms of struggle, parliamentary work, legality and illegality, underground and open mass action, and so on. Within Bolshevism from 1903 to 1917, we see a complex diversity of forms of struggle unmatched anywhere else.

The lesson we need to draw from this is that the Bolsheviks that organised, arms in hand, on the streets in 1905, the Bolsheviks that endured the subsequent 1908-12 period of reaction, the Bolsheviks that made the 1917 revolution - all could be traced back to their embryonic form in the polemical press of 1903-05. Thus it is absolutely vital, in a propaganda period when we are competing, not for the allegiance of the mass of the working class, but for the partisan identification of advanced workers, that we sow healthy seeds. Leftist ideas are never acceptable: they always embody a danger and must be vigorously combated, even when we are dealing with still tiny forces.

Of course, Lenin is clear that the principal enemy of the workers’ movement is right opportunism - particularly social chauvinism, as it emerged in 1914. Nevertheless, he is absolutely convinced that, despite his sympathy for the revolutionism that fires left communism, it is also a secondary enemy that must be opposed.

Concretely, two leftist Bolshevik trends are examined in Lenin’s work. The first, around 1908, was the tendency of Bogdanov and other leading comrades who stood against participation in the tsarist duma - a tendency that would have effectively liquidated the party’s mass work, had it been successful. Secondly, in 1918, the current that agitated against the appalling terms forced on the young Bolshevik regime by the German high command in the form of the Brest-Litovsk peace and proposed instead an abstract ‘revolutionary war’.

Lenin deploys an important argument in both cases (and, remember, both leftist trends at times probably commanded a majority amongst the Bolsheviks). He underlines that particular slogans or tactics, artificially transplanted from one period to a very different one without reference to what is new, without a concrete analysis of what has changed, can lead the Party into disaster. Obviously the boycott of the duma in 1905 was brilliantly successful for the Bolsheviks; but they made a mistake later, in 1906, with the second boycott. But then to systematise boycottism into an overarching schema - an attitude to participation in parliament in general - does the greatest harm to the Party and the revolution. What is characteristic of Lenin at every stage is his concreteness - his striving to discern not only the latent tendencies within each new situation, but also what was to be done by working class politicians in concrete political circumstances as they present themselves. The essence of Lenin’s politics is his aversion to applying ready-made schemas, based on the tactics of the past, to changed political circumstances.

Leftwing communism examines the particular situation in various countries, but Germany is of particular interest. There, left communist ideas had a strong hold in the early Communist Party. The leftists were actually able to defeat outstanding figures such as Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Radek on, for example, participation in parliament. Under the leadership of Paul Levy, after the murder of Luxemburg and other central leaders of the party, the left was actually expelled and formed the Communist Workers Party, which was about 38,000-strong. Indeed, until the fusion of what remained of the Communist Party with the USDP in December 1920, the leftists were actually the more dynamic. (This also can be a feature of leftism. The angularity of its approach to political problems - eg, ‘the Labour Party is the enemy of the working class, therefore no vote to it is permissible’ - can actually lend its organisations a vitality that more orthodox parties may lack during particular periods. The leftist Revolutionary Communist Party of the 1980s had a vibrant sect élan that was missing from many of the other groups, for example).
Of course, the German leftists were to shrink to insignificance. Their morbid, semi-anarchist mistrust of leadership prompted them to organise on a federalist basis, against what they dubbed the overbearing centralism in the approach of Luxembourg and Liebknecht. It ended up destroying them as an effective fighting force.
Interestingly, the refusal of the German leftists to participate in reactionary trade unions and their championing of communist unions was not simply a moralistic huff: it had a certain objective justification. In particular, in 1914 there had been a huge upsurge of rank and file, communistic, revolutionary-minded workers’ organisations in factories and a sweeping out of the old, corrupted trade union apparatus. And that is what left communists were basing themselves on. However, Lenin ridiculed the notion that the official trade unions were dead when the mass of the organised working class was still to be found in their ranks. He noted the irony of the fact that the left communists in Germany were playing with the slogan, ‘To the masses’, just as they were walking out of the trade unions, the very working class arenas where the masses could actually be found. They were boycotting their own politics, in effect.

I think Lenin’s argument on the “obsolete” nature of bourgeois parliaments has a particular interest for us, in some ways. Clearly, this observation is true in the propaganda sense, he says. But in real political practice day to day, that insight becomes an untruth if you draw the conclusion that this historically superseded institution must be boycotted in principle. He makes the simple - and profound - point that something could be dead from the point of view of history, but still very much alive in terms of the subjectivity of masses of people.

If they still participate in the parliamentary sham, if they still vote in elections, if they still have illusions in the various parliamentary parties, then it is not politically obsolete. It lingers on after its time, in fact. Communists are then faced with a choice. Either political engagement to win mass consciousness or simply project our conclusions onto the masses themselves. Stand for parliament to expose parliamentarianism, or watch with arms folded and a superior smirk on our faces while the masses stream past us on their way to the polls - what sounds like the correct communist tactic?

Now, without wishing to squeeze Lenin’s argument into our own reality, I do think we can draw a certain analogy. It is a pretty commonplace observation in our ranks that the particular conditions that fostered sects and sectarianism in the 20th century have gone. The age of the sect is dead - the delabourisation of Labour, the unfreezing of politics in the aftermath of the collapse of bureaucratic socialism, etc create a space for partyism. Yet we are still surrounded by sects on the British left - indeed, sectarianism has scored a temporary victory over partyism with the strangling of the Socialist Alliance - primarily by the SWP, although others were implicated in the infanticide.

So, in order to overcome the continued domination of sectism - a deformation that should be consigned to the history books - we must expend huge amounts of our energy in engagement with the sects. It is clearly not enough to dismiss them with a goodbye phrase along the lines of ‘Your time is up, you are finished, you should no longer exist’. After all, they have a killer riposte - they do exist and that’s that. As Lenin said in relation to parliament, until we are strong enough to disperse it, until we have the numbers, social weight and political hegemony to do otherwise, we must work in it and through it. It is obligatory.
Similarly, until we are able to turn sectism into its opposite, we are bound into a political process of ‘unity and conflict’ with the sects. Distasteful and frustrating though this often is, there is no way round it unless the class itself moves.

Lenin identifies two sources of left communism. The first I have already mentioned - a form of retribution on the movement for its rightist errors (Lenin mentions elsewhere how the anarchists played this role in respect to the Second International). Secondly, he identifies a certain immaturity, a lack of experience, particularly in preparatory periods for mass struggle, where leftist ideas gain currency. They represent a form of impatience, in other words; a desire - heartfelt and admirable in a way - to leap over the unpleasant realties of the struggle in the here and now with its frustratingly slow pace of development.
He uses what I think is a good analogy to describe building the party and making the revolution. How do you climb a mountain, he asks? The notion that you can do so by going directly from A to B - without zigzagging, without retracing your steps, without conducting massive detours around obstacles in your way - is not sane in either mountaineering or political terms. In both instances, it is suicide.

Thus, on the question of compromises, Lenin points out that the notion that compromise with non-proletarian parties or trends is something that by definition sullies the revolutionary integrity of the party and its programme is foolish. Our leftist critics, in contradiction to Lenin, tell us that it is apparently a crime against what some of them dub ‘proletarian independence’. In contrast, Lenin says that actually, if you look at the whole history of Bolshevism before and after the October Revolution, it is full of compromises with other parties, bourgeois parties included. In truth, proletarian independence, both programmatically and organisationally, is built in the struggle with contending forces: it is not simply declared as a shibboleth.

Here is a quote from Left communism: “Before the downfall of tsarism the Russian revolutionary social democrats [ie, communists] repeatedly utilised the services of the bourgeois liberals - ie, concluded numerous practical compromises with them. In 1901 or 1902, prior to the rise of Bolshevism the old editorial board of Iskra concluded - not for very long, it is true - a formal political alliance with Struve, the political leader of bourgeois liberalism, while it was able at the same time to carry on an unceasing and merciless ideological and political struggle against bourgeois liberalism and against the slightest manifestation of its influence in the working class movement.

“The Bolsheviks always adhered to this policy. From 1905 onwards they systematically defended the alliance between the working class and the peasantry against the liberal bourgeoisie and tsarism, never, however, refusing to support the bourgeoisie against tsarism - for instance, during the second stage of the elections ... and never ceasing their relentless ideological and political struggle against the bourgeois revolutionary peasant party, the Socialist Revolutionaries.”

What you see illustrated in this passage is an interesting idea that the much-maligned Zinoviev talks about in his History of the Bolshevik Party. He describes how a proletarian party emerges and points to precisely this sort of process. Particular trends, which at later stages become component, even core, elements of non-working class political movements and parties that are opposed to proletarian rule, at times find themselves within the ranks of the embryonic workers’ party. A process of merger and split, of constant political differentiation, of struggle between contending political forces for clarity and cohesion, characterises the process of party-building, the struggle for genuine proletarian independence.

There are two points our opponents could raise. One, it could be conceded that this messy process has a particular relevance for Russia, where you had a new working class that was actually emerging from the countryside, that is actually in the process of being born. You would anticipate the survival of certain pre-working class political trends, such as peasant anarchism, since the working class was being freshly made of that raw material. Plus, the bourgeoisie itself was an oppressed, politically disenfranchised class under tsarism - thus, you might expect its political representatives to pitch up in all manner of different places. You could say that this tactic might be applicable only to backward countries, where the differentiation is sociological - that is, it also reflects the objective process of the formation of the working class.

But I would argue it is not at all specific to such countries and the historical experience of Russia. We should anticipate that in this country we will be in unity and contradiction with trends that represent bourgeois influences on our working class - what is Labourism, after all? The notion that at some stage a mass workers’ party can emerge in this country without an extremely close, intimate engagement with Labourism and the Labour Party is plainly wrong. Could we not be in the same party as Labourites? Of course - we have been in the past; some of us are today.

The second point I want to note is that what marks a compromise, temporary alliance or conditional support for other political forces as principled is what Lenin dubs the merciless, unabated political struggle that goes on for clarification, for programme, for the freedom to conduct that political struggle. If in the course of a compromise or a temporary alliance you agree to mute criticisms, or explicitly deny an aspect of your programme in order to facilitate unity with the opportunists, then you have strayed into opportunism yourself.

In that context, I think of comrades who have told us that we were wrong to vote for Ken Livingstone or for Respect. This stance has a strong element of leftist moralism about it. For these comrades, ‘programme’ metamorphoses from a guide to revolutionary action - in whatever forum communists are obliged to work in - into an excuse for non-engagement in real politics as they present themselves to us. In many ways, this phobia is understandable. It speaks of impatience, but what prompts it is a healthy instinct - if we are to be generous (and why not?). We all want a mass Bolshevik party in this country. Unfortunately, the way we are going to get it, I have to tell our leftist comrades, is a complex process - it is called politics.

To conclude, leftwing communism - ultra-leftism - is a trend that Lenin describes as an opposite, but not equal reaction to right opportunism. Ironically, it has thus often presented itself as genuine Bolshevism. (The German lefts honestly expected Lenin to intervene on their side. They did not think that they were actually deviating from what they understood Bolshevism to be).

I do not think that the recent manifestation of leftism in and around our organisation is some kind of payback for the rightist sins of the Provisional Central Committee. No, it is a ‘revenge’ for the rightist sins of the SWP and its flight from principle - open borders, a republic, workers’ representatives on an average skilled worker’s wage, abortion, etc. In our attempt to combat this, it is absolutely vital for our organisation collectively - all of us - to learn something from the approach that Lenin exemplifies in his consistently brilliant pamphlet. Those comrades who display an immature attitude at various times are still communists. They are making errors that can cause real harm, but nevertheless they are communists and thus their impatient mood has a positive aspect to it - if it is not persisted with and built into a theoretical system, of course.

In the concrete circumstances of today, it is absolutely vital for us as a collective to have patience: patience with the interventions we will be forced to undertake; with our inevitable failings initially; with our organisational puniness and the yawning gap we perceive between the vitality and explanatory power of our ideas and our painfully limited ability to affect the material reality around us.

This is the lesson we should draw both from Lenin’s Leftwing communism and our own, sometimes fraught, experience over the recent period.