11.07.2013
SWP leadership: Laughable history produces laughable results
Jack Conrad argues that the pre-1917 Bolshevik model of organisation should be properly studied and properly understood
Due to the unresolved crisis in the Socialist Workers Party, democratic centralism has become the subject of much polemic and counter-polemic. And not only among the ‘usual suspects’. Every domesticated leftist, every has-been, every renegade, every poseur seems to have put their oar in. Eg, Laurie Penny, Andy Newman, Mark Perryman, Owen Jones, Brendon O’Neil, Nick Cohen, Ian Bone and John Palmer, to name just a few.
True to form, in reply to critics internal and external, SWP loyalists have excused the botched handling of the Delta rape case, the exoneration by his disputes committee mates,1 the rigging of the March special conference, the existence of an almost Prussian regime of crude censorship2 and even lurid threats to unleash “lynch mobs”3 by invoking the organisational theory and practice of Bolshevism. A theory and practice codified for the SWP by Tony Cliff in his four-volume Lenin biography (1975-79) and subsequently “developed” into a defining orthodoxy.
Recently Alex Callinicos - the founder-leader’s disciple, amanuensis and effective successor - has written two Socialist Review articles to this effect.4 Both were published as part of an “ongoing” series of debates on the “role of Leninism today”. In an attempt to demonstrate commitment to open debate the SWP leadership gave space to Ian Birchall’s ‘What does it mean to be a Leninist?’ reply.5 Meanwhile, however, after ominous warnings in Party Notes and Charlie Kimber’s decision to call an emergency national committee meeting, the tyrannical face of the SWP leadership was revealed.
The launch of the unofficial Revolutionary Socialism “discussion-piece website” was condemned as “unacceptable” and instructions were issued demanding its immediate closure.6 There followed, as even Guardian readers will now know, a 26 to six national committee vote to suspend four comrades from membership. Thankfully much protest ensued and the suspensions were hastily lifted. The opposition showed commendable courage and this is to be welcomed. However, another debilitating split/purge could still be on the cards.
Bogus
The main purpose of this article is to challenge the claims that comrade Callinicos and the SWP leadership make about democratic centralism. I want to show that his account of the organisational theory and practice of Bolshevism is almost entirely bogus. That, far from guaranteeing unity and success, the SWP’s “Leninist model of organisation” guarantees disunity and failure. Indeed the fact that the SWP advertises itself as the Bolshevik party of today only serves to drive substantial numbers of young activists away from authentic Marxism and into the essentially futile politics of horizontalism.
Comrade Callinicos begins his defence of the SWP leadership by recalling how back in 1968 the International Socialists, as the Cliffites were then known, decided to “adopt a Leninist model of organisation”. Clearly, the “development” of this “model” proceeded not according to some preconceived blueprint, but through a series of damaging splits, bruising faction fights and unplanned adaptations. Having suffered too many internal disputes, having expelled the Right Faction and then Sean Matgamna and Workers Fight, having lost his former Socialist Worker editor and national secretary with the IS Faction, Tony Cliff decided enough was enough. He clamped down on debate, restricted minority rights and created a self-perpetuating full-time apparatus (ie, people who were dependent on the organisation for obtaining their living).
Naturally, given his 1968 swapping of ‘Luxemburgism’ for ‘Leninism’, this package of measures was justified by maintaining that he modelled them on, took inspiration from, located its origins in “the way the Bolsheviks organised under Lenin’s leadership in the years leading up to the October revolution”.7
As an aside, comrade Callinicos appears to be under severe psychological pressure. Showing worrying signs of ultra-defensive pedantry, he takes issue with Ian Birchall, insisting that the Bolsheviks served not as a “model”, but a “reference point”.8 Of course, the word ‘model’ peppers both his contributions. Eg, “When we rallied to Leninism in the late 1960s we were trying to apply this original [Bolshevik - JC] model.” And it has to be admitted that “reference point” fails to adequately describe how Callinicos tells the story of the Bolsheviks as if it were the SWP’s own story. The Bolsheviks are not treated as a mere historical location used to establish one’s bearings.
Anyway, as oppositionist Pat Stack has argued, what comrade Cliff bequeathed the SWP has become an ossified regime which now equates democratic centralism with a self-serving four-part formula:
1. A three-month pre-conference discussion period, during which officially sanctioned factions were to be permitted.
2. A central committee elected by a slate drawn up by the previous central committee.
3. A ban on permanent factions.
4. After a majority vote, no matter how slim, has been gained at the annual conference, any matter of dispute will be deemed to be resolved.
Hence the SWP’s plans, priorities and tactics are supposed to be fixed - unless decided otherwise by the CC. The SWP’s democratic centralism therefore amounts to three months of highly restricted “democracy” and nine months of “centralism”.9 In other words, the democratic centralism of the SWP is bureaucratic centralism.
The CC in effect constituted itself a permanent faction and kept any differences which arose within its ranks … within its ranks. Political debate that was in the 1950s and 60s fairly creative had to wither and eventually die. CC members came to regard the organisation as akin to their private property. And, as with any board of directors, they needed junior managers and a vertical chain of command. Inevitably, district organisers were turned into minions of the chief executive officer. They were appointed by and made accountable to the CC. Not elected and recallable by the membership (as they had been in the International Socialists). From what I understand, district organisers are now widely despised in the branches. As for the grunts on the ground, if they have differences they are expected to either keep quiet in public or parrot the leadership line. No wonder so many retreat into total passivity. Most ‘members’ do not even pay the basic monthly dues.
Of course, as any half-decent student of the Russian Revolution will tell you, the Bolsheviks had a very different regime compared to that of the SWP. True, Lenin is now famous for his 1902-03 advocacy of centralism in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Under conditions of tsarist autocracy there was no other effective way of organising. Okhrana spies were everywhere. Siberian exile was the fate of far too many fine revolutionaries. Therefore the RSDLP could not play with democracy and the regular election of office-holders.
Instead Lenin proposed the publication of Iskra from the safety of abroad and the appointment of trusted agents who would distribute the paper inside Russia. Thereby the foundations of the party were to be laid. But, as Lars T Lih shows in his magnificent study of Lenin’s What is to be done?, the aim was not to establish a tightly-knit party consisting of professional revolutionaries.10 No, far from it. Lenin wanted a Russian version of the German Social Democratic Party. That is, a mass workers’ party based on a Marxist minimum-maximum programme with elected officers and a fully accountable leadership. Lih describes Lenin as a “passionate Erfurtian” (after the 1891 Erfurt congress of the SPD, which adopted the new programme explained and elaborated in Karl Kautsky’s The class struggle).11
Of course, there is the parallel idea: that Lenin feared that workers could never grasp Marxist theory and that therefore the RSDLP would have to be an elitist party run by intellectuals. A cold-war myth peddled by rightwing academics and repeated, albeit with various ifs and buts, by the SWP’s Tony Cliff and John Molyneux. Of course, where the cold-war right paints Lenin as the devil, comrades Cliff and Molyneux paint him as an angel. Actually though, Lenin, the undemocratic leader who supposedly worried about the workers because of their so-called “natural” reformist inclinations, admirably suited both sides. The cold-war right wanted to show that the undemocratic Lenin inevitably led to Stalin, while Cliff and co wanted to show that undemocratic Lenin led to the bureaucratic-centralist regime they put in place over the years 1968-75.
Democracy
Following the Menshevik conference of August 1905 - it met, I think, under the deliberately obscure title of ‘Southern Constituent Conference’ - the Bolsheviks too adopted the term ‘democratic centralism.’ This was agreed by the ‘Majority’ conference held in the Finnish town of Tammerfors (Tampere) during December 1905. The centralism necessary to survive against tsarist oppression had to be enriched and given far greater scope with democracy. Because of the revolutionary situation that began with the great January demonstrations in St Petersburg, there was a massive influx into political activity. There were countless strikes, street meetings and the establishment of hundreds of local organisations. Put on the back foot, tsarism had to concede a degree of political freedom. Lenin seized the moment. The working class wanted to do away with tsarism and Lenin wanted to do everything he could to organise the working class towards that end.
Old, secretive methods of work had to be immediately superseded by the politics of mass agitation, mass education and mass initiative. In other words, a Russian version of the German SPD. Lenin, it hardly needs adding, did not have to junk his What is to be done? outlook. John Molyneux mistakenly writes of Lenin freeing himself from the “elitist foundations” of What is to be done?12 No, the plan outlined in What is to be done? had been vindicated, fulfilled and now was the time to move on to better, bigger and more audacious things.
I am not sure exactly where or how democratic centralism originated. But there are good reasons to believe that the source was German. Maybe it was Wilhelm Liebknecht, maybe it was August Bebel, maybe it was some other SPD leader who should be credited with inventing the concept. I would be interested if any reader knows. However, there can be no doubt that the “model” for Lenin was the SPD. Hence, the Bolsheviks’ democratic centralism was a deliberate translation of German organisational norms into the new, heightened conditions 1905 had created in Russia.
Here is the agreed Tammerfors resolution:
Recognising as indisputable the principle of democratic centralism, the conference considers the broad implementation of the elective principle necessary; and, while granting elected centres full powers in matters of ideological and practical leadership, they are at the same time subject to recall, their actions are to be given broad publicity [glasnost], and they are to be strictly accountable for these activities …The conference orders all party organisations quickly and energetically to reorganise their local organisations on the basis of the elective principle; while it is not necessary for the moment to seek complete uniformity of all systems for electing institutions, departures (two-stage elections, etc) from fully democratic procedures are permitted only in the event of insurmountable practical obstacles.13
There is another series of facts that needs emphasising. From the birth of the Bolsheviks in 1903 there was a never-ending stream of polemics - and not only against opponents such as the Cadets, Popular Socialists and Socialist Revolutionaries. The Bolshevik press was full of criticism of other groups in or around the RSDLP: the Bundists, Mensheviks, Trotskyites, Gorkyites, liquidators, etc, etc.
More than that. The Bolshevik press featured intra-Bolshevik debate. Lenin argued with Bukharin and Bukharin argued with Lenin. Eg, over national self-determination in 1916 and revolutionary war versus the grossly unequal Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with imperial Germany in 1918. The same went for Lenin and Bogdanov, Kamenev, Lunacharsky, etc. Sometimes oppositional factions were formed. Sometimes they had their own publications. Eg, the ‘left’ communists produced a daily paper, Kommunist, under the name of the St Petersburg committee and the St Petersburg area committee of the RSDLP in March 1918. Eleven issues appeared. There was certainly no three-month limit on the right to form factions.
Regular conferences and congresses were held on an annual basis. They heard reports from leading comrades, registered the changing factional balances and agreed particular lines of action. But they did not close debate. Indeed, though the Bolsheviks elected their CC using various methods, it is worth noting that delegates were in general elected according to a proportional principle. Not ‘the winner takes all’, as used by the SWP for its gerrymandered special conference in March 2013. Lenin’s tried and tested approach of cementing unity through actually winning the argument, not merely the vote, also applied to central committee elections. So, when in March 1918 Bukharin refused to accept his seat on the central committee, he was accused of evading his party responsibilities and jeopardising unity. There was no thought or suggestion that the central committee should be monolithic. Nor was there any idea that being a member of the central committee was to commit oneself to some vow of collective responsibility and therefore silence about political disputes and factional alignments.
Factions were “temporarily” banned in March 1921 at the 10th Congress under conditions of working class disintegration, imperialist encirclement, renewed war threats, Kronstadt and peasant uprisings. Despite that, open criticism of shortcomings was deemed “absolutely necessary”. There were also reassurances that inner-party democracy would soon be restored and that after the emergency situation had passed there could once again be election by platform. Of course, it never happened. Stalin saw to that.
True, the 3rd Congress of the Communist International in July 1921 agreed the ‘Organisational structure of communist parties, the method and content of their work’. It demanded that affiliated parties “as a whole must become a military organisation fighting for revolution”.14 This went hand in hand with stipulations that would basically impose military levels of discipline. Members were expected to obey orders and keep criticisms of higher bodies strictly private: “to weaken or break the unity of the common front is the worst breach of discipline and the worst mistake that can be made in the revolutionary struggle.”15 Granted, there is a conventional introductory statement stressing that there is “no absolute form of organisation which is correct for all communist parties at all times”.16 Nevertheless, the eclipse of democracy by centralism is unmistakable. Obviously Comintern was convinced that the decisive struggle for power was imminent and that communists had to be made ready for revolutionary war on an international scale.
Here, perhaps, we find the real model, the real point of reference for the SWP’s version of democratic centralism. Recognising this, oppositionist critics have attempted to turn the tables on comrade Callinicos and his faux orthodoxy. The then SWP opposition's rejoinder to ‘Is Leninism finished?’ was unflatteringly entitled ‘Is Zinovievism finished?’17
Grigory Zinoviev is, of course, remembered by many on the left not as Lenin’s closest lieutenant during his years of exile and joint leader of the United Opposition, alongside Trotsky and Kamenev, in the mid-1920s. No, he is remembered as the president of Comintern who oversaw the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the communist parties; an example being the ‘Organisational structure of communist parties, the method and content of their work’ theses quoted above. It has to be admitted, however, that Lenin and Trotsky undoubtedly approved of the 1921 theses. Nevertheless, there is a truth in the charge that the organisational model copied and developed by Tony Cliff, John Rees, Martin Smith, Alex Callinicos and Charlie Kimber owes rather more to the democratic centralism of the early 1920s than the democratic centralism of 1905-08 and 1917-18.
A further point. The SWP is a tiny organisation compared with even the smallest Communist Party of the 1920s. And it is not just a matter of crude numbers, but living roots in the working class. Moreover, the SWP has never operated in conditions of illegality or even semi-legality. Nor do we stand on the threshold of global revolution and international revolutionary war. What was excusable before 1905 in Russia, what had to be reimposed in the 1908-12 period of tsarist reaction, what was understandable with the early 1920s Comintern, has no place in the life of a propaganda group operating in early 21st century Britain. But, of course, the explanation of the SWP’s bureaucratic centralism lies not in objective conditions. It lies in the narrow needs of its CC apparatus.
Projecting
Alex Callinicos shores up what is a very weak argument by projecting the SWP back into history. The Bolsheviks thereby come to resemble the SWP in his account. We are told that the Bolsheviks “represented for most of their existence before October 1917 a small minority of the Russian working class”.18
Before the 1905 revolution the Bolsheviks were the majority faction of a proto-party. Marcel Liebman gives a figure of 8,400 for the membership of the Bolshevik faction in January 1905.19 But tsarist terror and oppression had till then prevented the working class from organising. Nevertheless the RSDLP was viewed with sympathy and hope by swathes of militant workers throughout the Russian empire (there were Polish, Lettish, etc sections).
Once the tsarist state wobbled and had to stage a forced retreat, the two main factions of the RSDLP grew in leaps and bounds. Soviets were formed in late 1905 and their debates, votes and elections show that both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks competed for the loyalty of the working class. Eg, the Bolsheviks took the lead in Moscow, while the Mensheviks held back St Petersburg. A widespread demand, especially after the defeat of the December uprising in Moscow, was for the unity of the two big factions. This happened in 1906. By the time of the 5th Congress in May 1907 the RSDLP had a membership of nearly 150,000. Suffice to say, unlike the 4th (Stockholm) Congress, the 5th (London) Congress agreed Bolshevik resolutions and gave them a central committee majority.
It must also be understood that both the main factions remained mass in character despite the severe reaction imposed by tsarism during 1908-12 and despite the arrests, bans and hysteria that followed the declaration of war in August 1914. Eg, the Bolshevik paper Pravda succeeding in getting 5,600 worker groups collecting money for it. An impressive figure that showed that the Pravdaists represented four-fifths of the politically active workers in Russia. The results of elections to the tsarist fourth duma in 1912 confirmed their growing strength. Out of the nine deputies elected from the workers’ curia, six were Bolsheviks. A short while later, the Bolsheviks secured trade union majorities in the two capitals of St Petersburg and Moscow.
Of course, comrade Callinicos wants to kid himself that in the months from February to October 1917 the Bolsheviks trampolined from marginality to hundreds of thousands and a clear majority in the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets. Why? Because the SWP has always been nothing, today is nothing … but, given some kind of sharp upturn in the class struggle (Callinicos cites the period 1968-74 and the 1984-85 miners’ Great Strike), he expects his organisation to mushroom into a “small mass party” capable of leading the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. He surely needs the myth of the Bolsheviks representing “a small minority of the Russian working class” for most of their existence “before October 1917” to give himself hope for what is a hopeless perspective.
Eviscerating
Of course, here the ‘International Socialist tradition’ is far from alone on the revolutionary left. The Workers Revolutionary Party, Militant Tendency, International Marxist Group, Workers Power, International Spartacist Tendency, etc all proclaimed themselves to be the unique contemporary embodiment of the Bolsheviks and their model of democratic centralism. And like the SWP, they too have suffered one eviscerating split after another. All that remains of the ‘Fourth International tradition’ is ineffective remnants, fragments and sects of one.
There is a bigger picture too. At its peak the ‘international Stalinite tradition’ boasted a membership counted in serried millions, proudly ruled states which included within their borders a third of humanity, provided inspiration for tricontinental national liberation movements and in the form of the Soviet Union claimed to be on the verge of American levels of material wealth. In the authorised mythology the credit for this supposed “decisive tilt in the world balance of forces”20 was traced back to Lenin’s What is to be done? and the establishment of a “party of a new type” based on democratic centralism and “absolute unity of action.”21
Now, it hardly needs saying, the ‘international Stalinite tradition’ is a mere husk of its former self. Vestiges such as the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain pathetically linger on. Other, bigger, relics have morphed into left and not so left parties of neoliberal capitalism: eg, in Bulgaria, Italy, Poland and South Africa. Then, of course, there is China. A weird social amalgam characteristic of a declining capitalism that cannot yet be killed and a communism that cannot yet be born. China is a Dengist police state whose state-capitalist industries are dedicated to exporting cheap consumer goods to the west. Moreover, a range of top economists credit China with being the great hope for rescuing the US, EU, Japan, etc from stagnation. Testimony, surely, of the poverty of bourgeois thought.
Vacuum
The collapse of the Soviet empire, the general crisis of ‘official communism’, the abandonment of reforms by reformism and a string of working class defeats inevitably produced a hubristic capitalist triumphalism. The writings of Robert Kagan, Francis Fukuyama, Irving Kristol and the Project for the New American Century being the ‘highest’ examples. In that same triumphalist spirit Margaret Thatcher coined the dour phrase, ‘There is no alternative’.
But just like nature, politics too abhors a vacuum. Sections of the revolutionary left have attempted to provide an alternative to capitalism by promoting ‘broad parties’. Without exception these ‘broad parties’ are programmatically determined by the largely phantom right wing: eg, trade union bureaucrats, old Labourites and even liberal Islamists. Therefore the programmatic alternative to neoliberal capitalism amounts to little more than a nostalgic looking back to welfare capitalism, Keynesianism and the post-World War II social democratic settlement. Not surprisingly, like the SWP, such ‘broad parties’ discourage serious debate and are therefore prone to shatter once faced with any kind of political test. In Britain we have seen the Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Alliance, Scottish Socialist Party, Respect and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. Suffice to say, none gained social weight.
Under these unpromising conditions, it has been ephemeral anti-capitalist protest movements that have captured the attention of the media. The ‘teamsters to turtles’ demonstration in Seattle coinciding with the November 1999 World Trade Organisation talks is often cited as the starting point. Many empty pronouncements about texting, emailing and tweeting being the new form of making revolution followed. However, there is nothing new about the dominant ideology of the anti-capitalist protest movement. It is anarchistic and libertarian. Nor is there anything new about its dominant method of organisation. Despite the Guy Fawkes masks, the tents and tweeting, horizontalism and action by consensus goes back some years.22
Reacting to the dehumanising bureaucracy of mainstream bourgeois society and its reproduction by ‘official communism’, the labour movement and the revolutionary sects, there is an understandable prejudice against establishing any kind of hierarchical organisation, enrolling dues-paying members, electing office-holders, building an apparatus, etc. This type of politics is seen as part of the problem. Not the solution. So “there is no desire to take over the state or to create a new party”.23 Inevitably, however, even Occupy and the ‘activist community’ find the insistence on unanimity frustrating and debilitating. Such movements have therefore been good at mobilising all manner of people around a whole array of grievances. But, when asked what they positively favour, they display a hapless vagueness or descend into embarrassed silence. The anti-capitalist alternative to capitalism turns out to be just anti … and nothing comes from nothing.
And, of course, behind the backs of rank-and-file participants decisions are made. They have to be, even with such limited actions as staging a demonstration. Small groups of individuals elevate themselves, negotiate, try to provide direction, agree speakers, talk to the media, etc. In 1970 the feminist, Jo Freeman, famously wrote The tyranny of structurelessness. Reflecting on her first-hand experience of the women’s liberation movement, she skilfully locates the essential problem with all such horizontal organisations. The real vertical structures remain hidden from view and the informal leaders are self-appointed and unaccountable. Hence, though there is much “motion”, there are few “results”.24
As for consensus, it too is a form of debilitating tyranny. This time not of the self-perpetuating central committee, but of the atomised ego. In theory any crank, scab or paid agent can assert their will over an entire group by blocking decision-making. Consensus is therefore a recipe for paralysis, lowest-common-denominator politics and people angrily stomping off to do their own thing. Bad when it comes to a single-issue campaign, a strike or a workplace occupation. Impossible when it comes to organising anything complex.
And - make no mistake - overthrowing capitalism and building a new society is a highly complex task that will require the formation of millions of workers into a political party. A political party that must be as centralised as necessary and as democratic as possible.
Notes
1. See, for example, ‘Comrades in the SWP, rebel!’ Weekly Worker January 10 2013.
2. Oppositionist Mike Gonzalez had his article, ‘Who will teach the teachers’, rejected by the editors of Socialist Review. It was deemed “too internal” - see www.scribd.com/doc/141977026/Who-Will-Teach-the-Teachers-2?secret_password=2ecnhcy9zk0z2fgp8x8s.
3. www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/online-only/callinicos-threatens-lynch-mobs.
4. A Callinicos, ‘Is Leninism finished?’ Socialist Review February 2013; and ‘What sort of party do we need?’ Socialist Review July 2013.
5. Socialist Review June 2013.
7. Socialist Review February 2013.
8. Socialist Review July 2013.
9. www.scribd.com/doc/152158848/Pat-Stack-The-evolution-of-democratic-centralism-in-the-SWP.
10. LT Lih Lenin rediscovered Chicago 2008.
12. J Molyneux Marxism and the party London 1978, p60.
13. Quoted by LT Lih in ‘Democratic centralism: fortunes of a formula’ Weekly Worker April 11 2013.
14. A Alder (ed) Theses, resolution and manifestos of the first four congress of the Third International London 1980, p259.
17. http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/is-zinovievism-finished-reply-to-alex.html.
18. Socialist Review February 2013.
19. M Liebman Leninism under Lenin London 1980, p47.
20. The British road to socialism London 1978, p12.
21. JV Stalin Foundations of Leninism New York 1939, p120.
22. “The term ‘horizontalism,’ from the Spanish horizontalidad, was first used in Argentina after the 2001 popular rebellion there” - see www.dissentmagazine.org/article/horizontalism-and-the-occupy-movements. As for consensus, this became common in the 1970s women’s liberation movement. However, the “most notable of early western consensus practitioners are the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, who adopted the technique as early as the 17th century” - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making#Historical_examples.
23. www.dissentmagazine.org/article/horizontalism-and-the-occupy-movements.