On Christmas day, Joonas Laine, a Marxmail subscriber from Finland, raised some interesting issues through a comment on my response to Alex Callinicos:

I’ve been reading Louis’ writings with interest for several years (since 2004 or so), also the ones on the Marxmail list about DSP etc. As I don’t really know so much about the parties that he’s discussing, I can’t know how spot-on his analyses are in this respect, but I find the general organisational questions very interesting, also re what I’m involved with at the moment.

However, having much less experience with being involved in organisations (apart from volunteer based and rather loose NGOs or various kinds, plus some ineffective communist organisations), I think Louis is discussing only one side of the issue. I guess that’s called bending the stick, but to a person with less experience, it would be interesting to read also about the other side, i.e. what is it that is valid in “organisation building” or whatever you want to call it..? To me Louis seems to emphasise first and foremost what SHOULDN’T be done (and a lot of that I find persuading), but I can’t be sure just what he takes for granted in “organisation building” so that it doesn’t need to be mentioned.

In particular I’m thinking, when the organisation has developed so that it has physical assets like buildings and business activities to raise money for political activities, surely there has to be some principles to defend these resources from takeover etc. Who can be trusted with control over these resources etc., surely political questions have to play a part there too. Also I’m not sure how Louis sees the issue of “professional revolutionaries”, i.e. people getting paid by the organisation to do political work for the cause.

While I will try to answer the specific concerns raised in the last paragraph, I also want to try to deal with the broader question of what kind of organizational approach I advocate. So instead of the usual Zinoviev-bashing, I am going to focus more on what needs to be done.

I am not exactly sure if this is what Joonas was driving at, but it reminded me very much over the fight for assets in the aftermath of a  CPUSA split:

The Communist Party, U.S.A. is celebrating its 75th anniversary at a time when its public profile seems to have hit a new low, with the Soviet variety of Communism that the party has long venerated now repudiated at home and abroad.

But now the party has been decimated by a new spate of defections. It is at war with former comrades over money and property it says they stole, and over the direction of what remains of the American far left.

Many of the party’s best-known members have quit to form a new organization, the Committees of Correspondence, which says it is looking for a new path to socialism.

The party is suing some of those defectors, charging they have absconded with its property — holdings in San Francisco that the party values at more than $1 million and money it says had been willed to it.

Quite honestly, I don’t have any answers to this except what might sound like a platitude, namely the need to have accountability to the ranks and democratic control over the organization. When you build a party, there will always be assets like a printing press, buildings, etc. that will be up for grabs in a split. Unlike a divorce, there is no provision for joint custody. Just as is the case in the business world, winner takes all.

Beyond the question of democracy, there is also the matter of what type of infrastructure is appropriate for the 21^st century. Keep in mind that Lenin sought to build a party that was in sync with the latest developments in capitalist industry. By 1905 Russian factories were among the most modern on the planet despite the overall backwardness of the economy. Lenin believed that the Bolshevik party needed to reflect the division of labor, etc. that typified the latest industrial techniques. Hence the concept of professional revolutionaries, a kind of changeable part that could be replaced when a comrade was hauled off to prison. He saw the Economist trend as reflecting earlier phases of the Russian economy that were based in the handicrafts. Their refusal to adopt a nationwide and fully accountable structure based on democratic centralism reflected outmoded thinking that was connected to a more backward mode of production.

Within in this context, isn’t it about time that we thought in the same terms about how our movement broadly speaking fits in with the latest changes in the capitalist mode of production? Aren’t the printing press and the party headquarters a kind of throwback to smokestack industries? Inevitably, when a new aspiring “vanguard” party is established, the very first thing on the minds of the leadership is how long it will take them to launch a weekly newspaper, a full-time staff, and a headquarters-elements of which constituted a kind of sine qua non for Marxist-Leninist parties of the 20^th century.

In keeping with the discussion now taking place on Marxmail over the appropriateness of Marxist print journals with their expensive subscription rates, I want to suggest that the Internet is the appropriate medium for newspapers as well. In the late 1990s, I met with Barry Cohen of the Committees of Correspondence (and formerly the editor of the CPUSA newspaper before the split) to raise the idea of a weekly to replace the Guardian newspaper that had been the de facto voice of the radical movement in the U.S. until it had gone under just a year or two earlier. Barry was cool to the idea and stated that economic factors militated against print publishing, either bourgeois or radical. Looking at the recent bankruptcy of the Tribune company and the nosediving of Rupert Murdoch’s stock, it is clear that Barry was quite prescient. Essentially, the Internet is undermining print, especially when it comes to classified advertising-the lifeblood of newspapers.

For socialists, there is a more relevant question than revenue and that is the ability of the Internet to act as a kind of universal medium that the printing press represented when Gutenberg introduced it. With the printing press, the masses could spread the word without having to rely on Catholic monks who had in the past been responsible for printing books one at a time in the ultimate labor-intensive profession. The printing press made it possible for people like Tom Paine to V.I. Lenin to put out incendiary tracts as the struggle dictated.

With the Internet, the process of disseminating information and proposals for action is further enhanced. As A.J. Liebling once observed in the course of a critique of the bourgeois press: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” With the Internet, freedom is guaranteed for everybody-at least until the bourgeoisie figures out a way to subvert the medium. Since so much of 21^st century commerce rests on the free access to goods and services, they will be frustrated from this end. That is the ultimate contradiction of electronic communications. It is the ultimate technology for the marketplace as well as its ultimate undoing.

With the Internet playing the same role today as Iskra played in Czarist Russia, there is also an ancillary matter of what kind of “professional staff” is appropriate for today’s world. I would argue that we would be better served by keeping full-timers to a minimum. One of the things that the SWP debate keeps coming back to is the problem of full-timers being unresponsive to the ranks. It reminded me of a serious problem that I took note of as soon as I joined the American SWP in 1967. Adopting Lenin’s concept of a professional revolutionary in a mechanical fashion, the full-timers in the SWP always implicitly thought of themselves as the real party. Somebody who had a day job was never up to their standards. This, of course, was never acknowledged within the party but it was just the way things operated.

I now want to turn to the question of what kind of party we need. To some extent I tried to answer this question with “The Speech that Jack Barnes Should Have Given in 1974“. Here’s an excerpt that should give you a sense of what I have in mind:

One of the things I hope never to hear again in our ranks is the reference to other socialists as our “opponents”. Let’s reflect on what that kind of terminology means. It says two things, both of which are equally harmful. On one hand, it means that they are our enemies on a permanent basis. When you categorize another left group in this fashion, it eliminates the possibility that they can change. This obviously is not Marxist, since no political group–including ourselves–is immune from objective conditions. Groups can shift to the left or to the right, depending on the relationship of class forces. The SWP emerged out of a merger with other left-moving forces during the 1930s and we should be open to that possibility today.

The other thing that this reflects is that somehow the SWP is like a small business that competes for market share with other small businesses, except that we are selling revolution rather than air conditioners or aluminum siding. We have to get that idea out of our heads. We are all struggling for the same goal, which is to change American society. We only disagree on the best way to achieve that.

Unfortunately we have tended to exaggerate our differences with other small groups in such a way as to suggest we had a different product. This goes back for many years as indicated in this quote from a James P. Cannon speech to the SWP convention nearly 25 years ago. “We are monopolists in the field of politics. We can’t stand any competition. We can tolerate no rivals. The working class, to make the revolution can do it only through one party and one program. This is the lesson of the Russian Revolution. That is the lesson of all history since the October Revolution. Isn’t that a fact? This is why we are out to destroy every single party in the field that makes any pretense of being a working-class revolutionary party. Ours is the only correct program that can lead to revolution. Everything else is deception, treachery We are monopolists in politics and we operate like monopolists.”

Comrades, we have to conduct an open and sharp struggle against this kind of attitude. The differences between the SWP and many other left groups is not that great and we have to figure out ways to work with them on a much more cooperative basis. For example, La Raza Unida Party in Texas shares many of our assumptions about the 2-party system and they are open to socialist ideas, largely through the influence of the left-wing of the party which has been increasingly friendly to the Cuban Revolution. We should think about the possibilities of co-sponsoring meetings with them around the question of Chicano Liberation and socialism. The same thing would be true of the Puerto Rican Independence movement in the United States, which shares with us a positive attitude toward the Cuban revolution. In terms of the Marxist movement per se, we have to find ways to work more closely with the activists around the Guardian newspaper. While many of them continue to have Maoist prejudices, there are others who have been friendly to our work in the antiwar movement. The idea is to open discussion and a sure way to cut discussion off is to regard them as “opponents”. Our only true opponents are in Washington, DC.

Finally, I want to say a few words about a very important development on the left that seems to be in sync with my party-building concepts. It appears that the LCR, the French Trotskyist group that had been the official Mandelista section since the 1960s, has finally decided to break with “Leninist” orthodoxy and move in a fresh, new direction. They are dissolving themselves and joining a new anti-capitalist party that they are helping to found. Unlike the British SWP and the Australian DSP, who both had major disappointments functioning as a “Leninist” vanguard in broader electoral formations, the LCR is ready to try something new.

In an interview conducted by Jim Jepps that can be read in Links, an online publication published by the DSP, John Mullen, the editor of the British SWP affiliated Socialisme International, explains what the LCR is doing differently. It should be obvious from Mullen’s reply that he doesn’t quite understand what the goal of the new party should be and approaches it in the same petty-minded fashion as the SWP approached Respect.

Jepps asks: “What’s the position of the LCR, as the most significant organised current in the NPA, on this tricky balancing act between retaining distinct organisation within the NPA and submerging their efforts into it?”

Mullen replies: “To emphasise that the aim of the LCR is not to control the NPA, the LCR is officially dissolving itself just before the foundation of the NPA, and there is no plan to maintain an LCR current inside the NPA. I think it likely that the different currents that were in the LCR will end up setting up three or four currents in the NPA, which seems fine to me. As Socialisme International, our tiny group of comrades, along with a couple of dozen others will certainly set up openly a current based on IS ideas (close to British Socialist Workers Party’s theories).”

I would say that the LCR understands that the way to build a true vanguard today is to begin with dissolving a false one. As a key component of the Fourth International, let’s hope that their example will inspire other sections around the world, as well as some groups that maintain friendly ties-most especially the DSP’ers who have learned from bitter experience how futile the approach of “tiny groups” can be.

This response to Lindsey German’s article is the fifth and concluding entry in a series of posts that is less about the specifics of the strategic and tactical differences between the SWP’ers and more of an attempt to take a step back and put the fight into a broader context. (I should add that I have a postscript planned that will present my own ideas about how to build a revolutionary party. Mostly they boil down to ideas I absorbed from Peter Camejo in the early 1980s and have since embellished with my own.)

In my view, the SWP’ers are simply reaping the fruits of a sectarian party-building methodology that will defeat the efforts of any Marxist to build a party like Lenin’s. Ironically, the Leninist party that they have in mind when they go about their tasks is not like the historical Bolshevik party but a schematic attempt to create a cookie cutter version of Bolshevism good for all countries and all times.

The man most responsible for this flawed methodology was Gregory Zinoviev, who made the same kinds of mistakes found in Regis Debray’s  “Revolution in the Revolution”. Just as Debray sought to mechanically apply a rural guerrilla warfare strategy throughout Latin America that was based on a one-sided understanding of the Cuban revolution, so did Zinoviev seek to impose a one-size-fits-all version of the Russian party on the rest of the world. While it took about ten years for Latin American Marxists to figure out that the Debrayist conception was in error, the Zinovievist model persists until this day-75 years after it was conceived. Perhaps if Lenin had lived, another approach would have been taken. Even before Zinoviev came up with his party-building concepts, Lenin felt instinctively that something was wrong as this comment made in 1922 about attempts to codify a “Bolshevik model” would indicate:

At the third congress in 1921 we adopted a resolution on the structure of communist parties and the methods and content of their activities. It is an excellent resolution, but it is almost entirely Russian, that is to say, everything in it is taken from Russian conditions. That is its good side, but it is also its bad side, bad because scarcely a single foreigner–I am convinced of this, and I have just re-read it-can read it. Firstly, it is too long, fifty paragraphs or more. Foreigners cannot usually read items of that length. Secondly, if they do read it, they cannot understand it, precisely because it is too Russian…it is permeated and imbued with a Russian spirit. Thirdly, if there is by chance a foreigner who can understand it, he cannot apply it…My impression is that we have committed a gross error in passing that resolution, blocking our own road to further progress. As I said, the resolution is excellent, and I subscribe to every one of the fifty paragraphs. But I must say that we have not yet discovered the form in which to present our Russian experience to foreigners, and for that reason the resolution has remained a dead letter. If we do not discover it, we shall not go forward.

Lindsey German, who is John Rees’s partner, was a co-leader alongside him in Respect and her article is similar to his in trying to put the best possible spin on the Respect fiasco. She writes:

We were right to do it: it is hard to remember now how much enthusiasm there was for an electoral alternative to Labour in the aftermath of the Iraq war. It was palpable and could have organised tens of thousands.

But Respect faced problems from the very beginning, principally that no Labour MP other than Galloway broke from Labour, and that we didn’t win significant trade union or other left forces. That was to do with the enduring, if decaying, hold of Labour, and the refusal of especially the CPB to join us.

The result was that the project at a national level revolved around an agreement between George Galloway, Salma Yaqoob and the SWP. There was a tension from the beginning in the sense that both our main allies refused to accept an overtly socialist name and that Salma always tended to follow her own agenda (including rewriting the agreed founding statement when she got back to Birmingham and pressurising the rest of us to accept the changes).

There is no need for me to recapitulate my take on the Respect affair and would only refer you to my post of November 2007.  However, something needs to be said about German’s griping over the refusal of Galloway and Yaqoob to accept “an overtly socialist name”. This to me encapsulates the sectarian and idealist framework of the Marxist-Leninist left today. If your main goal is to construct a leftwing alternative to Labour, why insist on naming it socialist? Doesn’t it occur to German that many people, who had not fully developed a socialist consciousness but were angry over the “war on terror” and attacks on Muslim people, were ready to join a leftist but not explicitly socialist party? In the end there must have been some kind of compromise since the “s” in Respect stands for socialism. (RESPECT = Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environmentalism, Community, and Trade Unionism.)

In 1981, when I hooked up with Peter Camejo in order to help build a new, non-sectarian left in the U.S., he told me that he chose the name North Star Network in order to break with a sectarian past in which every new group had to have the words socialist, communist, proletarian or workers in its name. He chose “North Star” because that was the name of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper and a symbol of our own struggle rather than that of the Russians. He was inspired to a large extent by the example of the Nicaraguan revolution which also decided to use a Nicaraguan icon (Sandino) rather than a hammer and sickle.

German also blurts out what might have been in the back of the minds of many SWP’ers when they began to complain about the presence of Muslim “notables” in Respect:

Accident also played a role: if I had been elected to the London Assembly in 2004 (as I very nearly was) then the balance of forces in Respect would have been very different. If white socialists had been elected in 2006 in Newham and Tower Hamlets (as they very nearly were) then the balance of forces and level of politics in those areas would have been raised. If Gordon Brown had not flirted with calling an election in autumn 2007 then maybe Galloway would not have attacked so rapidly.

While I have no problem understanding how German would have liked to have seen more “white socialists” elected in 2006, I simply cannot understand how she would have allowed herself to put such a racist formulation in print. If anybody wrote something along these lines on Marxmail, they would be unsubbed immediately.

Near the end of her article, German refers to Neil Davidson’s attempt to rethink the “organization” question:

An even more serious development it seems to me is coming not from the CC itself but in some documents, especially that by Neil Davidson, which appear to involve a whole rethinking of the methods of organisation we have followed since 1968 and which have got us to where we are.

There is a kind of revisionism going on which appears to be challenging the whole way in which Cliff built the party. Neil argues that a sign of the maturity of the party will be when it can have a more objective assessment of Cliff’s weaknesses as well as his strengths.

For those interested in Tony Cliff’s ideas about how to build a revolutionary party, the Marxism Internet Archive has a lot of material including his 2-volume book on Lenin. While I am much more familiar with Cliff’s writings on “state capitalism”, I took a look this time at what he had to say about party building questions. In “Lenin: His Ideas are the Future” (an article I nearly refused to read just for the ponderous title), Cliff has the good sense to include this quotation from Lenin:

A political party’s attitude towards its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest ways of judging how earnest the party is and how it fulfills in practice its obligations towards its class, and the working people. Frankly acknowledging a mistake, ascertaining the reasons for it, analysing the conditions that have led up to it, and thrashing out the means of its rectification – that is the hallmark of a serious party; that is how it should perform its duties, and how it should educate and train its class, and then the masses.

I couldn’t agree more. It is too bad that today’s “Marxist-Leninist” organizations have proven utterly incapable of acknowledging a mistake, especially the SWP’ers when it comes to the matter of the Respect fiasco.

Back in the early 1980s, around the time I was getting involved with CISPES and working with Peter Camejo to get the North Star Network off the ground, I bought a copy of Playboy for the interview they had conducted with Sandinista leaders. (Trust me, I would never waste $5 to look at Playboy models.) When Playboy asked them about the problems with the Miskito Indians on the Atlantic Coast, Tomás Borge replied along these lines if I may paraphrase him:

Yes, we made a serious mistake. We sent inexperienced and arrogant party members to the Atlantic Coast who made terrible errors that turned the Indians against the revolution. We are doing everything in our power now to rectify these mistakes and hopefully will see peace on the Atlantic Coast in a year or two.

Borge was correct on both scores. The FSLN made mistakes and peace came to the Atlantic Coast before long. While I find next to nothing worth emulating from today’s FSLN, the party of the early 1980s still represented a kind of breakthrough. In my final post, I will try to explain how a revolution in a desperately impoverished country like Nicaragua can help us figure out as Lindsey German puts it in the final section of her article: Where do we go from here?

When you read Alex Callinicos’s reply to John Rees on the Socialist Unity blog, the first thing you note is the well-placed reproaches. As somebody striving to hold high the banner of proletarian discourse, Callinicos is disappointed that Rees “has had to engage in quite a lot of inflation, distortion, and innuendo.” Unlike Rees, Callinicos assures his readers that he’ll “try to stay on the high ground.”

Whenever I read this sort of nonsense in a Marxist polemic, I cannot help but think of Seth Pecksniff, one of Charles Dickens’s most memorable characters who inspired the term Pecksniffian, which Webster’s defines as unctuously hypocritical. I couldn’t describe it better, especially when you keep in mind that Callinicos was the hatchet-man responsible for booting the American ISO out of their international movement.

Callinicos in fact directs a spitball at the ISO in the course of answering Rees’s charge that the SWP was dragging its feet in its response to the financial crisis:

In the first place, I completely reject the claim that the present leadership has been slow to face up to the impact of the crisis. As a theoretical tendency we have consistently defended an analysis of the prolonged period of crises and slow growth that capitalism entered at the end of the 1960s as a result of a pronounced fall in the general rate of profit against bourgeois boosters of globalization, sundry reformists and academic leftists, and even some of our sister organizations (this analysis was an issue in the debates with the International Socialist Organization in the United States at the end of the 1990s).

Now it is not exactly clear whether Callinicos is making an amalgam between the ISO and “bourgeois boosters” et al, or just stating that they have the same theoretical weaknesses on this particular question. More to the point, the real issue was not theoretical but the ISO’s refusal to bend to the will of the SWP’s Central Committee. After they built the largest group on the left in the U.S., why should they allow themselves to be bossed around, even if they relied initially on the support of the SWP?

For all of their knowledge of revolutionary history, it is too bad that the SWP leaders have learned nothing from it. Indeed the complaints of the ISO leadership sounds exactly like that of the German Communist Party in the early 1920s with respect to the Comintern:

The politics and organization of international socialism have suffered a severe blow. The tragedy is not the alleged hopeless sectarianism of the ISO, but the fact that the SWP failed to provide the leadership necessary for the tendency to grow in the 1990s. This is not a crime. The crime is to cover up that failure and then search for scapegoats abroad. In spite of our expulsion, we remain proud adherents to the traditions and politics of the international socialist tendency, and will continue to work with any organizations who are willing to have open, fraternal relations with us, whatever our disagreements may be.

There is no precedent for expelling an organization wholesale from the tendency in this manner-and we intend to answer the slanders about us, defend our organization and urge others to join us in fighting the bureaucratic degeneration of the tendency’s leading group.

The SWP leadership has now been involved in six splits in as many years in IS Tendency groups internationally. Whatever the immediate cause of each split, these splits point to a method that the SWP has applied throughout the tendency. For all the talk of nonsectarianism and of new methods of work, our expulsion has been conducted along the lines of the worst traditions of the sectarian left.

Judging by the sharp tone of Callinicos’s reply to Rees, one might expect a seventh to be in the works.

On the question of whether or not the SWP reacted to the financial crisis in a timely fashion, it would of course be inappropriate for me to render an opinion. Much of the discussion taking place between the SWP leaders involves difficult issues of strategy and tactics that would remain challenging even if they dumped their sectarian framework. My only interest in the fight in the SWP, of course, is to highlight the sectarian misconceptions in the hope that some of their members who read my blog will be in a position to influence things in the right direction.

For Callinicos, and every other SWP leader involved in the debate, the problem is fundamentally one of growth. They are agonizing over the fact that they are stuck in a kind of rut. For Davidson, the failure to grow is a function of misguided strategy. Obviously, for people in a position of authority like Callinicos, the fault must be displaced outside of the Central Committee. He explains the low growth rate as a function of a benign intention to make the party more immersed in the mass movement. Rather than having the party being based on branches, the SWP simply assigned its members to organizations in the mass movement like Respect or the antiwar coalition. Callinicos states:

But the collapse of the branches meant that all sorts of other party activities were undermined. The distribution and sale of party publications was, for example, badly weakened. In his effort to throw everything but the kitchen sink at the present CC majority, John complains about the chronic difficulties of party finances. This is surprising since these difficulties date back at least a decade, and John has, like the rest of us, taken part in many discussions about how to overcome our financial problems.

I will have much more to say about this question in my final post, but at this point must simply point out once again that the concept of “recruitment” which remains at the heart of self-described Leninist organizations today guarantees that they will never reach mass proportions. When people decide to join the SWP, it is with the understanding that they will be expected to defend the party line in public, including all the shibboleths of “state capitalism”. In their desire to create an ideologically homogeneous “vanguard party”, the SWP fails to understand exactly how the Bolshevik party emerged out of a mass movement. In the early 1900s there was widespread sympathy for socialist ideas in Czarist Russia and Lenin sought to build a nation-wide organization that united socialists in action. There is no evidence that Lenin had a “program” of the sort that defines all of the Marxist-Leninist groups today. As Peter Camejo once told me, a program only emerges through a dialectical interaction of theory and activity. To build a party on the basis of a pre-existing “program” that includes all of Tony Cliff’s sacred texts is nothing but idealism and an obstacle to the kind of massive growth that these SWP comrades so desperately seek to achieve.

Like John Rees, SWP leader Chris Harman feels the need to respond to an article by Neil Davidson that I dealt with in part one of this series. As always, we are grateful to Socialist Unity for making Harman’s article available.

Harman is troubled by Davidson’s claim that there is more democracy in the trade unions than in the SWP:

First, it is simply not true that party members have fewer rights than members of unions. We do not have the mass purges and intimidation of dissidents that characterises UNISON at the moment. Any comrade or group of comrades can raise matters directly at party councils.-a far more direct route than in any union. We actually have a disputes committee whose reports most years are characterised by the fact that they involve no expulsions-and the committee is chaired by a comrade who was outspoken in defending certain positions opposed to the CC just three years ago. There has never been any restriction on what people write for the preconference bulletins.

I am afraid that comrade Harman misses the point entirely. Unlike the more obvious bureaucratic practices of the Stalinist movement, the Trotskyist movement maintains orthodoxy through peer pressure rather than trials and expulsions. Here is how it works.

The leadership of these self-declared vanguards is based on the notion of “revolutionary continuity”, a term that was bandied about incessantly in the American SWP. Basically, it is closely related to the notion that the current leader or leaders of the “vanguard” grouping are descendants of Marx-not genetically but programmatically. You also have a preoccupation with “grooming”. For example, much was made in the American SWP about how Jack Barnes was “groomed” by Farrell Dobbs, who was in turn groomed by James P. Cannon, who was in turn groomed by Leon Trotsky. Instead of a race horse getting brushed down, you have a profound thinker at party headquarters channeling the essence of Marx-thought. When you decide to write a sharply critical article for a convention, your fear is not that you will be expelled but shunned because you had the temerity to question the disciple of Karl Marx.

This leads to self-censorship of the most extreme form. When, for example, I became convinced in 1977 that the “turn toward industry” was based on a hallucination, I would not dare write a document making this point. So instead I got up at a New York meeting of the SWP and made an idiotic speech about how the workers were waiting for our comrades’ leadership with bated breath. It was like a scene out of Costa-Gravas’s “The Confession”.

It is only after a deep political crisis sets in that you find factions forming in such groups, as they have in the DSP and now in the SWP. Eventually, the factions vie with each other as to who is best able to provide “revolutionary continuity” and don the crimson robes handed down from past Jeddi masters of the class struggle. Needless to say, there was no peer pressure like this in the Bolshevik Party before 1917. After 1917, the Kremlin became something like the Vatican and a culture of toadyism alien to the workers movement set in. The toadyism was enforced in the Stalinist movement by threats of expulsion and sometimes loss of life. In the Trotskyist movement it was enforced by peer pressure. Both forms of compulsion have to disappear in order for our movement to grow and flourish.

In trying to demonstrate to Neil Davidson that it is not easy to come up with organizational solutions, Harman appeals to the example of German Communism in the 1920s:

I suspect that whatever new structures we adopt may well need to be further reshaped in the light of practical experience. Neil points to the structures of the German Communist Party in 1922. He will be aware that it is a far from perfect example for us. The party had only the year before lost up to half its members and expelled one of its leading figures, Paul Levi. And it was plagued by a fight between two factions, one led by Heinrich Brandler, with years of exemplary practical experience, rooted in a strong working class district; the other led by the young intellectuals with ultra left tendencies, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow. When Germany entered a new phase of very intense economic, social and political crisis in 1923, neither grouping was able to provide the leadership needed. The ultra lefts saw a revolutionary situation where none existed in the first months of the year, while Brandler did not have the confidence to follow his own instincts and fight for a decisive shift to the left required when the situation changed in June. The result was a party which certainly was not “considerably more flexible and open” than us, as Neil seems to believe.

Entirely missing from this brief analysis is any consideration of the role of the Comintern. As is customary in Trotskyist literature on the problems of German Communism, the blame is put entirely on the failure of the Germans to build a “vanguard” up to the high level of Lenin’s party. My reading of this history reveals something else entirely. The Germans would have been better off if they ignored the Comintern entirely, including one of its foremost leaders Leon Trotsky. In an article I wrote some time back, I questioned their heavy-handed intervention as follows:

When Brandler got to Moscow, the Bolshevik leaders cornered him and pressured him into accepting their call for a revolutionary showdown. What was key in their calculations was the likelihood that a bold action by the Communist Party would inevitably galvanize the rest of the working class into action. Once again, an element of Blanquism had colored the thinking of the Bolshevik leaders. They assumed that the scenario that had occurred in Russia in 1917 would also occur in Germany. This was an unwarranted assumption that was fed by a combination of romanticism and despair. Romanticism about the prospects of a quick victory and despair over the USSR’s deepening isolation…

The Bolshevik leaders finally wore Brandler down and he agreed to their plans, which involved the following:

1) The Communists would join Zeigner’s government in Saxony as coalition partners and arm the workers. The state of Saxony would then provide a base for a military and political offensive in the rest of Germany.

2) A date would be set for the seizure of power. Trotsky was the main advocate of setting a date. Over the objections of Brandler, Trotsky insisted that the date be November 9th. This was meant to coincide closely with the Bolshevik revolution of November 7th, 1917. Trotsky said, “Let us take our own October Revolution as an example…From the moment that the Bolsheviks were in the majority in the Petrograd Soviet…our party was faced with the question–not of the struggle for power in general, but of preparing for the seizure of power according to a definite plan, and at a fixed date. The chosen day, as it is well known, was the day upon which the All-Russian Congress of the Soviets was to convene…” Trotsky simply could not perceive that Russian revolutionaries setting a date for themselves is much different than setting a date for revolutionaries in another country. This distinction would have been lost on Trotsky who had gotten in the habit of laying down tactics for other Communist Parties in his capacity as Comintern official. He had the audacity to tell the French Communist Party, for example, what should go on the front page of their newspaper L’Humanite.

What does any of this have to do with the SWP? Let me give you some hints: International Socialist Organization; Seattle.

The remainder of Chris Harman’s article is a defense of the appropriateness of calling Respect a “united front” and not worth a reply since this defense has been so obviously refuted by real world events.

This is a reply to John Rees’s article “Where We Stand” that appeared on the Socialist Unity blog.

As many of you know, Rees was in the eye of the storm over Respect. The SWP assigned him to work in the party, where he became National Secretary. He also ran as a Respect candidate in the 2004 elections.

One of the main theoretical documents that underpinned the SWP’s intervention in Respect was written by Rees. Titled “The broad party, the revolutionary party and the united front“, it is deeply flawed by confusion over what Lenin and Trotsky meant by a united front. They never applied this tactic to electoral politics, but to specific actions that united socialists, communists and other left formations on a temporary basis. Since Respect did grow out of the genuine united front against the war in Iraq that involved George Galloway as a leading figure, it is understandable how Rees would make such a mistake. However, the British anti-war coalition was understood by its participants to be a bloc of parties who agreed on little else except the need to fight against the war. Turning that alliance into the more homogenous political culture required to build an electoral party is another story altogether as the ultimate breakup of Respect would indicate. Divided loyalties between the SWP and Respect would be the undoing of the SWP.

It is not surprising that Rees repeats the talking points of the SWP in his article, starting off with the proposal that Respect was a “coalition”:

Respect was always a coalition involving forces that came together in the antiwar movement. Much of the left including the Communist Party of Britain abstained from the beginning, as did other left Labour MPs. So we were left with George Galloway, a talented and high profile anti-war campaigner but one whose record historically was not on the hard left of Labour; radicalised Muslims; a number of other activists radicalised by the war and disenchanted with Labour, and the far left, predominantly ourselves.

Missing from this calculation is any understanding of the potential minefield represented by a disciplined “Leninist” party working in a party with people whose main loyalty was to Respect and not the SWP. When those “radicalized Muslims” had tried to persuade John Rees of the wisdom of this or that motion at a supposedly democratic decision-making meeting of Respect, they surely expected that he took their ideas more seriously than those of his comrades on the SWP Central Committee. When they began to figure out that the decisions had been worked out in advance at the CC meeting and presented to Respect as a fait accompli, no wonder they might have felt alienated.

These dimensions of the problem are of absolutely no interest to the SWP, which sees the fight in Respect in Manichean terms. They are the forces of Light fighting for trade union and woman’s liberation demands, while the “radicalized Muslims” come across as horse traders from a Mideast bazaar with little interest in politics.

After discussing the problems in Respect, Rees airs out the dirty laundry in the SWP, most of which involves money as you would expect. None of this really interests me at all. I did find the next section on “recruitment” to be of much more interest since it gets to the heart of the flawed party-building methodology of the SWP. Here’s how Rees describes the problem:

The first serious division on the CC was not over the crisis in Respect. But immediately  after the Respect split last November there was a discussion on the CC about SWP recruitment. It seemed obvious to us that party recruitment was lower than it should be and that the end of the Respect project and the interregnum in the ‘war on terror’ meant that we could launch full scale a recruitment campaign.

Ask yourself this: did Lenin ever write about “recruitment” to the Bolshevik Party? If you do a search in MIA, you will find virtually nothing except something like this from Lenin’s 1905 “New Tasks and New Forces” :

To sum up, we must reckon with the growing movement, which has increased a hundredfold, with the new tempo of the work, with the freer atmosphere and the wider field of activity. The work must be given an entirely different scope. Methods of training should be refocussed from peaceful instruction to military operations. Young fighters should be recruited more boldly, widely, and rapidly into the ranks of all and every kind of our organisations. Hundreds of new organisations should be set up for the purpose without a moment’s delay.

It is not clear from this whether Lenin is talking about getting people to join the Bolshevik Party or the mass movement instead. Indeed, one of the most striking things about all of Lenin’s writings is the utter inattention to “organizational” issues per se. Despite being regarded as a master organizer, Lenin never wrote anything remotely resembling Rees’s bookkeeper-like concern with membership numbers. This is because the Bolshevik Party was much more loosely organized than any party constituted as a “Leninist” party today. If today’s Leninist parties have to go through periodic purges to make sure that the integrity of the proletarian program remains intact, you have to ask yourself why so few people were ever expelled from Lenin’s party. Except for Bogdanov, I can think of not a single expulsion.

Furthermore, what springs to mind when you talk about recruitment? This is a term that obviously has a connection to the military. Young men and women from all walks of life get recruited to the military and are turned into fighting machines. Ex-members of the nutty American SWP used to be just as obsessed with recruitment as Rees. We assigned people to the mass movement in order to advance its goals (of course) but also to recruit “healthy independents”, in other words those people who had not been tainted by beliefs that were inconsonant with Trotsky’s profound insights. I was the perfect “healthy independent” since I had never read a single Marxist book in my life. After being recruited to the SWP and concluding a new members class, I was just like a young Marine who had graduated from boot camp: molded into a fighting cadre ready to do the party’s bidding.

In genuine mass revolutionary parties, there is no recruitment on this basis. Instead the party is formed out of the mass movement and includes the natural leaders of the working class who have clearly emerged as leaders on the basis of their mastery of class struggle principles, whether or not they have read the 18^th Brumaire. It also will include Marxist intellectuals who have developed their own ideas about “the Russian question” through years of study and are not likely to give up their beliefs to conform to the expectations of a group like the SWP. If the SWP simply dropped the state capitalist ideology, or at least made it a back burner type question relegated to the back pages of their magazine along with discussion of the Brenner thesis et al, it will solve their “recruitment” problems. But that ideology serves to distinguish them the competition on the left just as some special ingredient in a detergent is designed to protect market share.

I should add that Rees’s ideas about recruitment were most likely influenced by the founder of the Trotskyist movement, which included SWP founder Tony Cliff in its earliest stages. In January 1940, Leon Trotsky wrote an open letter to James Burnham which stipulated:

The disintegration of capitalism, which engenders sharp dissatisfaction among the petty bourgeoisie and drives its bottom layers to the left, opens up broad possibilities but it also contains grave dangers. The Fourth International needs only those emigrants from the petty bourgeoisie who have broken completely with their social past and who have come over decisively to the standpoint of the proletariat.

This theoretical and political transit must be accompanied by an actual break with the old environment and the establishment of intimate ties with workers, in particular, by participation in the recruitment and education of proletarians for their party. Emigrants from the petty-bourgeois milieu who prove incapable of settling in the proletarian milieu must after the lapse of a certain period of time be transferred from membership in the party to the status of sympathizers.

God knows that I love Leon Trotsky, but it is this sort of thing that made me realize that the cultification of the SWP could not be blamed solely on Jack Barnes. What does this sound like? It sounds exactly like a Church doing missionary work. When the Trotskyist movement recruits “emigrants from the petty bourgeoisie” who then break completely with their social past, they are then expected to settle in the “proletarian milieu” and begin to recruit and educate proletarians. This is the formula that led to the disastrous “turn toward industry” in the late 1970s.

Trotsky could not be blamed entirely for adopting a party-building methodology that appears to have so much in common with the Mormons. He simply assumed that the Zinovievist version of Bolshevik history was valid for any revolutionary organization, including the Fourth International. As history has demonstrated, it has unfortunately led to nothing but a thousand and one splits.