home 
|
| contact
|
| action
|
| weekly worker
|
| european social forum
|
| theory
|
| resources
|
| what we
fight for
|
| programme
|
| join |
| search
|
| communist university
|
| links
|
| our history
|
Enjoy
the
Weekly Worker?
How about
showing us your appreciation? Producing the Weekly Worker costs a substantial
amount of money. Our only source for that financial backing comes from
people like you: readers and supporters of our newspaper. You may not
agree with the CPGB on every dot and comma, but we know that 1000s of
comrades appreciate our open, critical and democratic press
Send cheques, payable to CPGB, BCM Box 928,
London WC1N 3XX or donate online:
Weekly Worker 549 Thursday October 21 2004
Lenin 1870-1924
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
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.
Print this page
