50 Years Ago: Bert Ramelson buries Lenin (2026)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

What happened when the BBC’s ‘Newsday’ interviewed the industrial organiser of the Communist Party would have been more suitable for the Goon Show, or Monty Python. Bert Ramelson, keeping a perfectly straight face, point-blank denied everything that the Communist Party was founded on and peddled for over thirty years!

True it is, as he said in the interview, that he only joined the CP in 1936; whereas some of us knew it intimately since 1920. However, that should not prevent him (or anybody else) knowing the facts. The interviewer did not know a great deal about the subject, and questioned from a prepared brief.

But even the political department of the BBC had heard that the Communist Parties were founded on ‘Leninism’. That is, seizure of power by an intrepid, resolute minority of ‘professional revolutionists’, leading the working class — who would then lead the ‘toiling masses’ (meaning peasants) to socialist victory. For thirty years a vast mass of pamphlets, books and newspapers flogged the Leninist dogma of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, meaning minority action.

Many able writers waded patiently through Marx’s work to show that, from The Communist Manifesto onward, Marx never used this then-popular French slogan to mean anything else than majority democratic methods. For instance, Lucien Laurat, who in Marxism and Democracy quotes The Communist Manifesto:

‘The first stage in the working class revolution is the constitution of the proletariats as the ruling class, the conquest of democracy.’

No use! For thirty years CP writers and speakers denounced democracy and exhorted the workers to follow ‘Marx’s best disciple’ Nikolai Lenin. Parliament was a useless ‘gasworks’, elections a waste of time (although they regularly took part in them, but ‘only for propaganda, comrade’). The state would be smashed and ‘bourgeois’ parliaments replaced by Soviets, ‘the workers’ democracy’ (…)

Understandably, the interviewer politely raised the question of the CP’s present policy, and its past. ‘Was it not the case that the CP had advocated ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the past?’

‘Not any more’, replied Bert. Not any more! And do you know why, dear reader? Let Bert tell you. Because there has been ‘so much misunderstanding of what Marx really meant’. He actually said this. ‘Marx meant the action of the vast overwhelming majority’, said Bert; the CP has not used the phrase in any document since 1950, to avoid any more misunderstanding.

[From article by Horatio, Socialist Standard, March 1976]

 

 

Blogger's Note: 

Regular readers of the blog will know that 'Horatio' was the pen name of the late Harry Young. Harry Young was especially placed to comment on the early history of the CPGB as he was a founder of member of that organisation, serving for a period on its Executive Committee as a representative of the Young Communist League.  In an article in the February 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard, entitled 'Why I joined the SPGB', he goes into greater detail. It's worth a read.

Letter: Two questions (1989)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two questions

Dear Editors.

I have recently read a copy of the Socialist Standard and I am heartened to see that there are still people who are prepared to stand by real socialist principles, without getting caught up by bureaucracies or being prepared to sell-out their class for the £ sign.

I would like to know, what is the Socialist Party of Great Britain's view of ‘Democratic Centralism'' and what do the SPGB think of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament?

Neil Duncan,

Peterborough

Reply:

We are opposed to so-called ‘democratic'' centralism, which was an organisational form advocated by Lenin under which there is strict control from the centre. In theory the centre — or leadership, as it is permissible to describe it in this context — is only carrying out the democratic will of the organisation as decided at its congress. In practice, however, the leadership is normally easily able to manipulate the congress to back its line and re-elect its nominees to the leadership posts. As a result, all Leninist organisations, such as the Communist Party, the SWP and the Militant Tendency, are undemocratic, leadership organisations controlled from the top down: when the central committee says turn right then the ordinary members must turn right, when it says turn left then they must turn left.

Our conception of the principles of socialist organisation is somewhat different, as outlined in our recently-published New Members Handbook:

The Socialist Party of Great Britain (usually known these days as the Socialist Party) was established in June 1904 — mainly by workers who were expelled or resigned from the Social Democratic Federation. The SDF was dominated by a leadership. The new party was determined to be fully democratic — having no leader, no central committee with powers over the membership, and no intolerance of open internal discussion. The first organisational principle of the Socialist Party is that all members are politically equal. Some members will have developed greater abilities in certain fields than others, and experience of membership is bound to deserve some respect. But, when it comes to making decisions, all members carry an equal vote. If a majority of members decide that something is to be done, no member or committee can override that, although minorities are always at liberty to argue against majority decisions. The organisational principle which follows from this is that the Party as a whole can make decisions which all Branches and members must implement, and Branches locally can make decisions for themselves, as long as these do not conflict with agreed Party policy.

We are for a world without, not just nuclear weapons but any other kind of weapons either, be they chemical, bacteriological or so-called conventional. But we know that this is not possible without abolishing capitalism since it is the very nature of capitalism that leads to wars, the permanent threat of war and to the need for states to be armed with the most destructive weapons they can afford.

Under capitalism — which exists all over the world including in a state form in countries such as Russia and China — capitalist firms and states are in permanent competition over markets, raw material sources, investment outlets, trade routes and strategic places to protect these. War is essentially the continuation of economic policies by military means. This does not mean that competing capitalist states resort to war at the drop of a hat. but it does mean that they always have to be prepared for it; not only to be able to win should one break out (as over the Falkland Islands in 1982) but also to be taken more seriously — and so obtain better results— in the bargaining and diplomatic jockeying for position that goes on all the time against capitalism's background of economic conflict. As one Labour leader argued in 1959, pleading against those who wanted to commit the Labour Party to unilateral nuclear disarmament, "when I'm Foreign Secretary, I don't want to have to go naked into the Conference chamber'. He never did become Foreign Secretary himself, but he needn't have worried: none of the Foreign Secretaries in the various Labour governments under Wilson and Callaghan in the 60s and 70s ever had to go into any conference chamber unclothed with nuclear weapons. And. we are prepared to bet, nor would any future Labour Foreign Secretary under Kinnock or his successor.

This understanding that capitalism and armaments are indissolubly linked leads us to concentrate on working for the establishment of socialism as the only way to achieve universal and lasting disarmament, conventional as well as nuclear. It is also why we do not support organisations like CND which futilely seek to remove the effect (nuclear arms) while leaving the cause (capitalism) untouched. CND also has other defects, like being heavily infiltrated by people sympathetic to the state capitalist regime in Russia.

But even if nuclear weapons were abolished under capitalism (which we don't believe for one moment could happen). the knowledge of how to make them would remain. So should war break out in a non-nuclear capitalist world, then nuclear weapons would soon come back. As Thatcher, who knows a thing or two about how capitalism works, has reportedly said, “any war in a non-nuclear world would simply be reduced to a race for the first nation to build a bomb" (Independent, 10 February 1988). For once she's right. The only way to rid the world of nuclear weapons for ever is not nuclear disarmament under capitalism but the abolition of capitalism with its built-in drive to war.

Editors.

Marxism and Leninism in Myanmar (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sympathiser sets out the history of ‘socialism’ in Myanmar.

Myanmar is a ‘Global South’ country with long borders shared with India and China. Before its independence, it was ruled by the colonial British as a province of British India. It was also known as Burma.

The earliest record of Marxism in Myanmar is 1923, long after the death of Marx and Engels. The Second International had already been replaced by the Third International. Most of the writers who represented orthodox Marxism were no longer alive or active. It was a time when most of the most talented scholars of Marxism had lost their influence and Marxism was being dictated by Stalin under the name ‘Marxism-Leninism’. Leon Trotsky also started the left opposition to the Bolshevik government in that year.

The very first localised literature of Marxism in Myanmar was Das Kapital in a misleading translation inspired by nationalism. Since then, ‘Bolsheviks’ and ‘communism’ were the kind of keywords that could be seen in some of the publicity released. In 1930, Dr Thein Maung brought back some left-wing books from London to Myanmar. Those were the first books the radical youths in Myanmar encountered about Western communism. They influenced Thakin Nu, who later became the Prime Minister of Burma, and Thakin Soe, who founded both the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) and the Red Flag Communist Party; together they founded the ‘Nagani book club’ for distributing left-wing books and articles. Dagon Taya, later a renowned writer, was one of the chairmen of the Rangoon University Student Union and once wrote a slogan on a wall claiming ‘Long Live Soviet Myanmar’ while he was travelling in 1939.

In 1939, a new chapter was opened for ‘Communism’ (‘Marxism-Leninism’) in Myanmar. Aung San (the ‘father of the nation’), Thakin Soe, a handful of Chittagong radicals and some other leftists together founded the Communist Party of Burma. The CPB managed to link with the Third International as soon as it was founded because of the link between the Chittagonian Bengali founders such as H. N. Goshal and the Indian Communist Party. At that time in 1939, the Third International had already become a tool of Russian foreign policy, under the leadership of Stalin, and had successfully sabotaged strikes under the Popular Front government in France and the social struggles of the CNT-FAI in Spain. The CPB was thus also bound to adopt disastrous tactics, including a series of mistakes that even orthodox Bolshevik leaders like Lenin and Trotsky had described as ‘ultra-left’, ie, the CPB chose not to take part in elections, but instead to wage war against the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League which was the acting government at that time. Later, the CPB didn’t stop with Stalinism; it went further to Maoism which had rejected the class struggle and advocated the alliance of four nationalist classes. It ended up killing its own founders like H. N. Goshal in 1967 during the cultural revolution era.

One Party Rule

On 2 March 1962, a coup d’état took place which heralded the commencement of one-party rule in Myanmar and the army’s political supremacy. The military who attempted the coup called themselves the Union Revolutionary Council (URC) and introduced a programme called ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’. The CPB denied the ‘socialist’ credentials of URC, however, the URC shared a lot of similar characteristics with Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Tito’s Yugoslavia. The first of these was one-party rule with strong state power and hostility towards opposition. As Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas mentioned in his The New Class, ‘modern Communism is a modern despotism which cannot help but aspire towards totalitarianism’. In terms of Marxism, such one-party totalitarianism has nothing to do with the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote once, ‘Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only of the members of one party, however numerous they may be, is no freedom at all’. Equating one-party totalitarianism with the dictatorship of the proletariat shows a lack of understanding of Marxism. Marx and Engels identified the act of ‘raising the proletariat to a ruling class’ as ‘the conquest of democracy’.

The second characteristic was the act of strengthening the state, which confirms the claim of Milovan Djilas which states: ‘there is no doubt that a national communist bureaucracy aspires to more complete authority for itself’. Thirdly, Ne Win, chairman of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) was anti-union just like Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Tito. The BSPP faced much opposition from every side including student unions, workers’ unions, political armed groups, and the government-in-exile.

Student Uprising

The best example of this was the ‘7th July Student Uprising’ which was a series of marches, rallies, and protests against stricter campus regulations and the policies of General Ne Win’s BSPP regime. The BSPP responded to the uprising by violently attacking the students, shooting them with machine guns and using explosives to blow up the whole student union building in University of Yangon, resulting in the deaths of more than a hundred, and the arrest of more than 6,000 students. The BSPP accused the students of being counter-revolutionary and reactionary because they were protesting against the ‘socialist’ state in the BSPP’s view. After that incident, the BSPP attacked the very existence of the unions.

Furthermore, the BSPP implemented a programme like the ‘war-communism’ of Lenin’s time. The BSPP-led Socialist Economy Construction Committee introduced an economic policy aimed at nationalising all businesses across the board, similar to what Milovan Djilas had described the self-styled Communists (Marxist-Leninists) as doing. According to Djilas, the communists wanted to ban strikes because in their view the working class was already in power and owned the means of production via the state. So if there was a strike of workers or students, it meant workers were striking against themselves. Through this tyrannical self-delusion the BSPP, along with all the communist regimes who claimed to follow Marxism-Leninism, responded violently to workers’ strikes. A few international examples would include the Kronstadt rebellion against the Bolshevik government and the Georgian Mensheviks’ soviet rebellion against the Bolshevik government. The CPB argued that the BSPP didn’t represent the legacy of Marxism-Leninism, yet ironically the CPB claimed to follow Maoism while Mao Zedong himself was on excellent terms with Ne Win and his regime. The role of the CPB was ended by a series of battles with the military as well as internal coups resulting from their own inefficient revolutionary strategies and tactics.

Ultra-nationalism

After 1988, a lot of regimes had come and gone, and Myanmar was on the way back to globalisation from ‘socialism’. From 1988 to 2010, Myanmar was governed by purely repressive regimes with no ideological background. However, after the 2007 Saffron revolution, the military regime had to acknowledge the revolutionary potential of the Buddhist monks, students, workers, and the public. So they tried to create an ideological fantasy based on ultra-nationalism, Buddhist supremacy and crony capitalism. From 2010 to 2021 most of the public were under the illusion of living in a democratic nation while minority ethnic groups were being bombed and killed. The oligarchs managed to accumulate capital which was more than enough for three to five successive generations while working-class people struggled to make ends meet. That was when the public enjoyed the illusion of liberal democracy and was the least revolutionary period, until some students chose to protest with an agenda for educational reforms in 2014. During that decade, the military had successfully radicalised the majority of the Buddhist monks with their self-serving ultra-nationalism and Buddhist supremacy. As Myanmar has a unique culture of monks being important (too important) when it comes to social values, a fraction of the working class also chose to give support to the successors of the military regime, bolstered by irrational fear of minority groups and other religions. Such a political agenda recalls Daniel De Leon’s remark that ‘the capitalist class is interested in keeping the working men divided among themselves’.

The National League for Democracy (NLD) was founded by ex-communists, ex-military officers and left-leaning social democrats in 1988. Aung San Suu Kyi, the ‘democracy idol’ of Myanmar, forged a de facto alliance with the military to attain governmental status. Since then, not only did the NLD not achieve its goal of kicking the military out of politics but they also failed to protect minority ethnic groups like the Rohingya from genocide. Under the leadership of ‘the lady’ Suu Kyi, the NLD changed its political ideology from social democracy to liberalism. This was not apparent at first, but as soon as they were elected as an acting government, they failed to implement all the social democratic policies. The NLD lost their social democratic connections with the interests of the working class and with the national self-determinism of ethnic groups. Such reactionary behaviour resulted in some far-left and centre-left youths losing their trust in the NLD, and searching for a third alternative either in some social democratic reformist party or a revolutionary socialist party.

Another military coup

In February 2021, the military decided to stage another coup to restore their former golden days and to protect family members who had become oligarchs and cronies. The public at first was hesitant to react with strikes and protests. But the coup sparked enormous protests and dissent which were brutally suppressed by the military, with about 1,500 people dead, either shot in the streets, tortured and murdered in detention, or just disappeared. Even though the military managed to seize power and arrest some influential political leaders like Suu Kyi and Mya Aye, some of the NLD members escaped and formed a National Unity Government (NUG) in exile, in alliance with some ethnic leaders and other small political groups taking the role of consultative council. Even today, the NUG fails to grasp the opportunity to radicalise the public, even for reformist social democratic values. The NUG still acts like a parallel government. Yet third-party alternatives such as the Maoist CPB, Trotskyist organisations and social democratic reformists also failed to radicalise the public for a socialist revolution.

Theo Maung, who describes himself as a libertarian socialist and one of the founders of the Burmese Atheists Association, said that he was expecting a more progressive and secular society from the revolt against the coup. He was confident that people were turning away from authoritarianism and racial and religious discrimination as a result of their struggles against the junta. He pointed out that the CPB managed to recover again after the coup but that the new generation of leftists like him didn’t accept the authoritarian communists. He also said that if there was to be another communist party in Myanmar, he expected a more libertarian-leaning one with little influence from Marxism-Leninism and Maoism. Yoe Thit Aung, an anarchist, also had a view on the revolution: ‘I personally don’t see the revolution as a class struggle but rather a transformation of crony capitalism into corporate capitalism. Traditionally the NLD is a populist and conservative party. NUG is trying their best for more progressive reforms, but they will never go for radical ends’. He thinks that the old bourgeois crony class will be useful as a national bourgeois class in the post-revolutionary period.

To sum up, Myanmar has a lot of experience of Marxism-Leninism (so-called communism) and military dictatorships. It’s unfortunate that Myanmar was never influenced by the internationalist and revolutionary socialism (Marxist) tradition of Georgi Plekhanov, Julius Martov, Rosa Luxemburg and others, which represents the Marxism of Marx and Engels in seeking the democratic emancipation of the working class.

Hein Htet Kyaw

What they are saying (1957)

From the July 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

We Told You So

“We in the Labour movement feel it is time we had a look at what we have set up. When the coal industry was nationalised we felt that we were setting up Socialism in this industry, but we now discover that what we have introduced is simply state capitalism.”—Mr. G. Moir (Paisley) at the Co-operative Party conference, reported in the Manchester Guardian of 23/4/57.

A Child Communist's Guide to Democratic Centralism

“In this struggle has evolved the principle of democratic centralism, which combines democracy and centralism, both essential in our organisation.

“Democratic centralism is centralism on the basis of democracy, and democracy with centralised guidance.” —Mr. John Mahon, at the Communist Party Congress, reported in the Daily Worker of 22/4/57.

The People’s Flag is Deepest Red, White and Blue

“If we have been too uncritical of the Soviet Union in the past, it does not alter the fact that we are the most British Party in politics today.”—Mr. John Gollan, at the Communist Party Congress, reported in the Daily Worker of 22/4/57.

Capitalism and Human Needs—1957 

Food Shortages every year 

American help for India

“Every year there is a famine in India somewhere, and some people go without enough cereals to fill half a handful, and are reduced to digging the ground for tubers and scratching trees for bark . . ."

Too Much Wheat in Australia 

Cannot find market

“The Australian wheat industry faces the worst, marketing trouble since the depression of the 1930s, the chairman of the Australian Wheat Board, Sr John Teasdale, said today (April 24). .

[Beginning of two adjoining articles in the Manchester Guardian of 25/4/57.]

Bourgeois Political Economy in Shambles (2010)

Pamphlet Review from the April 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bourgeois Political Economy in Shambles. By Stefan Engel. Verlag Neuer Weg, 2009

This is an English translation of a pamphlet originally published in Germany, with the subtitle “Some additions to the Marxist-Leninist crisis theory.” ‘Marxism-Leninism’ was the official political theory of the former Soviet Union and was enforced throughout most of the former Eastern European satellite governments of the twentieth century. ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is often synonymous with Stalinism.

Engel gives a reasonable account of the current global crisis of capitalism, which began in September 2008.  Crises are inevitable under capitalism because, as Karl Marx pointed out, “a rift must continually ensue between the limited dimensions of consumption under capitalism and a production which forever tends to exceed this immanent barrier” (Capital, Vol. III). German chancellor Merkel, like politicians everywhere, blamed the “financial excesses with no sense of social responsibility, the abandonment of moderation and the middle course by a number of bankers and executives” which “steered the world into this crisis”. As Engel rightly says, this way of arguing “turns attention to the – undeniable – subjective failings of bankers and executives, and distracts attention from the essentials, from the laws of the capitalist mode of production. These laws compel every capitalist, whether factory owner or manager of a stock corporation, whether privately owned or state-owned company, to act, under penalty of ruin”.

But it is the ‘Marxism-Leninist’ understanding of the state, among other things, where it falls down. Engel quotes Engels on the state:

“The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers – proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head” (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm).

This should have made Engels (and Marx’s) position abundantly clear, but Lenin stood this argument on its head and claimed that capitalism and the state could be made democratic and that this is what socialism means. Engel cites a passage from a pamphlet written by Lenin in 1917:

“… socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased be capitalist monopoly” (original emphasis, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm).

However, the whole thrust of Marx and Engels’s critique is that capitalism and the state, whatever form they take, can never be made to serve the interests of the whole people. For the same reason, the idea of a “socialist state” is a nonsensical contradiction in terms. Lenin was never clear about the need for a “socialist state” as he knew it flouted the basics of Marxism, though it is implicit in some of his writings. Leninists have no such qualms and here we read of the need for a “socialist state of genuine democracy”. But  Leninist states have an abysmal record on democracy, preferring instead a dictatorship over the proletariat as they grapple with the contradictions of managing capitalism. In theory and in practice, ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is a shambles.

Lew Higgins

Trotsky on Lenin (1972)

Book Review from the January 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Lenin. By L. Trotsky. (Harrap £1.75.)

These notes were collected and published in an English translation in 1925. With the increased interest in Marxist thought the works have now been retranslated and issued. They cover the first period in London in 1902, the October seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917, and the last stage to the New Economic Policy and Lenin’s demise. The book is well worth perusal as an expression of the time.

Some illuminating admissions are made by the author. Writing of the spring of 1918, Trotsky says:

  It was only in Petersburgh and Moscow that the revolution had been really carried through. In the majority of the provincial cities the October Revolution was carried over the telegraph poles.

In other words, most of the Russian population did not really know what was happening.

Trotsky also quotes from Lenin’s Thesis on Peace of January 1918: “For its success, Socialism in Russia needs at best a few months." Was this not a slip of the pen? asks Trotsky and answers No! Lenin repeatedly in speeches to the Council of Peoples Commissars in 1918 said that in half a year we will have Socialism and would become one of the most powerful states.

No wonder the poor ill-fated Zinoviev, Lenin's whipping boy at the Comintern, ran round prophesying the doom of Capitalism throughout Europe before the year was out.

Trotsky’s polemic against H. G. Wells (who interviewed Lenin in Moscow in 1921) is included. Undoubtedly Lenin was right. Wells was an unspeakable petty-bourgeois philistine, but, in his criticism of Lenin, he had a definite point. Wells insisted to Lenin that for the success of Socialism it is necessary to change the mentality of a whole people.

In his panegyrics on Lenin's birthday and at his death, Trotsky contributed as much as Stalin, or anyone else, to building up the Lenin leadership legend, necessitated by the backwardness of the Russian masses.

Trotsky’s fulsome adulation of Lenin’s ruthless physical extermination of political opponents culminated with a Stalinist terrorist ice-pick in our author’s brain.

Horatio

Bad Marx – See Me! (2020)

From the February 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

I must begin with a mea culpa. For around four decades I was a ‘Marxist Leninist’, sometimes actively, often more passively. What I thus demonstrated to myself is an individual’s capacity for self-delusion.

The ideology associated with Lenin continues to be presented, by adherents and foes alike, as the realisation of Marxism, the actuality of communism when put into practice. The subsequent abject failure of the Soviet Union and its bloc confirming the inherent impracticality of socialism.

Not that ‘Marxism-Leninism’ has gone away. There remains ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, more accurately, burgeoning capitalism protected by an authoritarian one-party state. Cross the border into North Korea and the only ‘socialism’ to be found is akin to ‘National Socialism’.

Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela et al make various socialistic claims and can boast some successes with enlightened social policies. However, the working class in each still stands in the same relationship to capital as in avowedly capitalist countries, with the common tendency to authoritarianism.

Stated boldly, the working class may have acquired limited influence in the ruling bodies of capitalist states, but without assuming control, or anything approaching it, anywhere. Those states that developed state capitalism as the dominant mode as opposed to the ‘free’ market, often adopt, or are ascribed, ‘Communist’ or ‘Socialist’ as labels of convenience.

Socialism, in Marxist terms, is synonymous with communism, it is not an interim state of unspecified length, with communism promoted as the distant, very, very distant, Promised Land, while the state far from ‘withering away’ actually becomes much stronger and entrenched and then gradually moribund.

Nonetheless, mention socialism or communism to many (perhaps most) folk and it’s Leninism that is conjured up. Indeed, whatever fleeting contact people have with socialism it is usually in the form of a ‘Communist‘ Party, of which there are quite a few, or a ‘Socialist’ party/group styling themselves Trotskyist, of which there are more.

Despite their virulent antipathy to each other, they share a common feature. Each is the vanguard of an exclusive, and self-serving, interpretation of Marxism by which the working class will be led along the socialist road to communism. And yet, in the unlikely circumstances of actually being in a position to do so, all would actually establish state capitalism.

What defines socialism in Marxist terms is the relationship of the producers to the means of wealth creation: do they have full control over those means being held democratically in common? If producers are employed by the state, paid wages by the state, with the state controlling the means of wealth creation and surplus value, then they do not. That is still capitalism.

The attraction of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is the sense that unless it is led by those who understand the grander scheme, workers will at best develop what Lenin referred to as ‘trade union consciousness’, going no further than making bargains with capitalism.

Indeed, the working class has, so far, singularly failed to lift its eyes from the politics of the here and now, to the grander vision of what is actually possible. The temptation is to take people by the political scruff and drag them to their destination. Unfortunately, that destination is always the state claiming to act on their behalf.

However, unless the working class acts for itself by consciously pursuing its own interests, socialism cannot come about. To be blunt, if the working class cannot be inspired and educated to vote for socialism where it is able to do so, then it certainly cannot be compelled to be socialist.

Of course, socialism is not a simple matter of an overwhelming electoral or parliamentary majority. However, that would be an indication that the working class was pursuing a new society on its own behalf. There would be no need for a Lenin, living or embalmed.

Until Leninism has been decoupled from Marxism it will continue to serve as an ideological bulwark containing working class potential. It is the militant counterpoint to the reformism of social democracy. Both act, in their own ways, as distractions from confronting the actualities of capitalism and the need for the working class to actively engage with transcending it.

I was afflicted by elective political blindness, but once my vision cleared I saw there are no short cuts. It is also became clear that defending the indefensible – Leninism and its derivatives Stalinism and Trotskyism – is, in the tragic terms of the Soviet purges, a crime against the people.

David Alton

Russia: The Myth of Socialism (2011)

From the October 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

  On the 21st August this year, the 20th anniversary of the failed coup against Gorbachev by Leninist-Stalinist hardliners in the USSR, Tony Brenton, former ambassador to Russia, wrote an article in the Times headed, “The siren voices calling for a revival of Marxism ignore the tragic lessons of its past”.  We explain that what happened in Russia between 1917 and 1991 had nothing to do with Marx or with socialism or communism.

Karl Marx was not simply volunteering his name to a way of life that would exist in post-capitalist society.  Throughout his years of intensively investigating capitalism, his main purpose was to expose that system as the final form of class exploitation while demonstrating that it had created the economic potential for the establishment of universal freedom.

Both Marx and his co-worker, Frederick Engels, referred to that universal freedom as socialism or communism (two terms they used interchangeably). Marx did not attempt to draw a detailed picture of socialism.  At the time he was writing, capitalism was still a rapidly developing system, so when the working class came to abolish it, the particular level of development it had by that time achieved would have an obvious bearing on the structure of the new society. What he did show, repeatedly and with clarity, was the part played by commodity production, wage labour and money in capitalism’s process of exploitation and, thus, their necessary extirpation from life in socialism.

Mid-nineteenth-century capitalism, though a burgeoning economic system, had not economically matured to the point where Marx’s vision of a classless society where free access to needs would be the mode of distribution could be realised. Against the possibility that working class political demands might exceed the economic capacity of the system to deliver, Marx and Engels envisaged a period of working-class hegemony over the processes of production that would allow for the speedy development of production to the point where free access to need was possible.

It was a reasonable thesis in the circumstances of the time but, given its political distortion by Lenin it was to prove seriously damaging to the Marxian concept of socialism. Ironically when Lenin used this argument in 1917, the historical circumstances that had led Marx and Engels to their view no longer existed. Capitalism’s rapid development had created conditions where a majority of the working class were capable of undertaking the conscious, democratic and political action to bring about a revolutionary change in the base of society, and made the question irrelevant.

Both the economic and political basis for a revolutionary change were absent in Russia in 1917. The Russian proletariat was a small fraction of the mainly peasant population. The Bolshevik slogan was ’Peace, Land and Bread’, hardly a sophisticated slogan of socialist revolutionaries. Lenin might well have thought of Engels’s admonition that a leader gaining power in circumstances that do not permit the implementation of his principles necessarily comes into conflict with those principles. Socialism was not on the political agenda in Russia alone nor did the Bolshevik coup provoke the hoped-for social revolutions elsewhere in Western Europe.

Josef Stalin, who by an ironic inversion of the ‘Great Man’ theory of history subsequently became the Lucifer of the Left and the architect of evil in the Russian empire, wrote a pamphlet called Socialism or Anarchism in 1905 in which he correctly summed up the Marxian view of socialism:

   “Future society will be socialist society. This means, primarily, that there will be no classes in that society… [this] also means that with the ending of exploitation, commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished…” 

Obviously material conditions in Russia in 1917 could not accommodate the establishment of socialism, so Lenin moved the goalposts, changing the Marxian objective to suit the realities existing in the country. Capital development through state monopoly was the only option open to him and the Bolshevik Party, but in a monumental act of political dishonesty that would bear heavily on the world-wide working class into the future he proclaimed that socialism was state-capitalism and a mere stage on the way to communism

So the State became the national capitalist and the Bolshevik Party the ruthless state boss enforcing a dictatorship over the workers in a frenetic effort of capital accumulation. Not only was Russia in the rigid control of a dictatorship but Lenin and the Bolshevik Party were clearly not opposed to the emergence of a single dictator; thus in a speech on the 31 March 1920 to the Ninth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, Lenin declared:

  “We are thus reiterating what was approved two years ago in an official resolution of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee! (. . .) namely, that Soviet socialist democracy and individual management and dictatorship are in no way contradictory, and that the will of a class may sometimes be carried out by a dictator, who sometimes does more alone and is frequently more necessary.” 

Many contemporary exponents of Leninism ascribe the awful saga of totalitarian rule that emerged from this sort of thinking to Stalin. Yes, Stalin did head the list of political gangsters that terrorised Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution, but it was the elitist nonsense promoted by Lenin, as evidenced above, and the undemocratic political structures established by the Bolshevik Party that created the pathway to the massive evils of Stalinism.

Unfortunately today a common rejection of socialism is based not only on the Russian experience but also on the tyranny that Leninist thinking and political strategy enforced elsewhere as ‘socialism’.

Richard Montague

Citizen Smith in focus (2019)

Book Review from the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Violent Extremist Tactics and the Ideology of the Sectarian Far Left. Daniel Allington, Siobhan McAndrew and David Hirsh. 2019.

Lovers of 1970s TV will remember Citizen Smith, he of the mythical Tooting Popular Front, exhorting his comrades to ‘smash the state’. Dave Spart still does the same in Private Eye, forever hitting out at the ‘running-dog lackeys of US imperialism’.

With the resurgence of terrorism inspired by fundamentalist religion and also the far right, three academics have now decided to take a look at those on the far left and their attitudes to terrorism and violence. Their research project was funded by a grant from the UK Commission for Countering Extremism, set up by Theresa May’s government in 2017 in the wake of the Manchester bombing.

Their primary data generation took place with help from polling company YouGov’s online panel of respondents – with those who self-identified as ‘very left-wing’ being of particular interest. They found that while people who self-identify as being very left-wing are more likely to be sympathetic to violent extremism in some shape or form than the general population, it was still only a view held by a minority (29 percent as opposed to 9 percent more generally). Most of the other results of the research are perhaps not generally surprising, including the estimate that an elderly woman in the very left-wing category is far less likely to show sympathy for any of the types of political violence listed than a young man in the same category (9 percent as opposed to 56 percent).

One of the more interesting questions they looked at was what respondents said when asked to identify the countries they think are the ‘greatest threat to world peace’. In the general population sample, Russia was top followed by North Korea and the United States. In the very left-wing sample, the US was top, followed by Russia and then Israel. The placement of Russia in the top three was clearly less expected by the researchers as it doesn’t slot as neatly into the traditional left-wing pantheon of ‘imperialist’ states, and presumably features largely because it is both authoritarian and aggressive about this in ways that would not find favour on the left (including attitudes to women, gay rights, etc).

In carrying out this research, the writers needed a good understanding of what might be termed the ideological components of the far left, in particular Leninism. Indeed, the first chapter is a deconstruction of Leninist theory that is very accurate in the main, including its identification of why Leninists of various stripes historically take ‘anti-imperialist’ positions that end up leading them towards either open or tacit support for terrorist organisations like the Provisional IRA, Hamas, etc.

There is one minor caveat to this though, in that given the current media coverage of anti-semitism and anti-zionism on the left, the writers seem keen to integrate this into their analysis – and perhaps a little too keen. There can be little doubt that the rise of the internet and the conspiracy theories promulgated there has led the far right and the far left to borrow ideas and ‘tropes’ from one another, often with some of their perhaps less sophisticated and more naive advocates not always realising their origin. Nevertheless, it is historically accurate to say that anti-semitism emanates from the political far right as it is a theory of racial supremacy, whereas anti-zionism emanates from the far left as part of its ‘anti-imperialist’ perspective, with Israel effectively being seen as the aircraft-carrier in the Middle East for the world’s dominant imperialist power (the US).

This paper does not make the distinction between the two clear enough and seems to imply that Leninists are often anti-semites without actually realising they are, simply because of the association they make between imperialism and ‘finance capital’, with the connotations the latter sometimes has with supposed Jewish cabals. But to be fair, we could add that what is often forgotten is that so many founders of Leninism were themselves of Jewish origin (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc) that the Bolshevik revolution was denounced by countless numbers – including Churchill – as a Jewish plot of some sort. In the UK since, many of the leading figures in the Communist Party of Great Britain have been Jewish, as were the leaders of what became the SWP, Tony Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein) and Militant, Ted Grant (Isaac Blanc), among a great many others.

Irrespective of this issue, though, we would contend that their illogical belief as Leninists that an enemy of an enemy must be a friend as well as their inherent authoritarianism make them unfit enough to be genuine advocates of ‘power to the people’.

Dave Perrin

The SWP: An Undemocratic, Leninist Organisation (2013)

Via Soviet Goon Boy blog.

From the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In view of the undemocratic nature of the SWP, which has recently been exposed, we reproduce below part of an education document we produced about them in 1995.

At the beginning of 1968 the IS (International Socialists) group was organised on relatively democratic lines. There were branches; there was an annual conference of branch delegates which debated and voted on motions proposed by branches; there was an executive committee elected by the branches and responsible for the week-to-week administration of the group’s affairs and for the implementation of conference decisions.

Within the framework of the group’s overall political position, branches were free to choose which line of activity to engage in; some chose to concentrate on the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign; others on tenants’ associations; others on combating racism; others on students, and so on. In the light of the various momentous events of 1968, which had led to a tripling of the size of his organisation, Cliff decided that this was not good enough and inaugurated a campaign to rein in branch autonomy. He proposed a more centralised structure which would allow the group’s interventions in the various struggles that were going on at any time to be organised in a more co-ordinated way; the body that would co-ordinate and to a certain extent direct the activities of the branches was to be the executive committee.

Since some degree of centralism is compatible with democracy, indeed is necessary to make it effective, this seemed a reasonable proposal and it was eventually accepted. In Cliff’s mind, however, this change was not seen as a move to make democracy function more effectively but as a step towards changing the IS group into an organisation based on Leninist ‘democratic centralist’ lines in which the executive committee would become a policy-making leadership.

IS entered the 70s with a constitution which was still recognisably democratic, similar in fact to the rulebook of a typical trade union. The annual conference remained the body which made the major policy decisions; its purpose remained to discuss the report of the executive committee and to debate and vote on motions proposed by branches. A given number of weeks before the conference branches were invited to submit motions; these were included in a provisional agenda that was sent to branches to allow them to submit amendments, which were then circulated in the form of a finished agenda for branches to vote and mandate their Conference delegates on. To take account of the increase in membership a new body was established between the Conference and the EC – the National Committee. The members of this large committee (of some 40 members) were elected by the conference from nominations made by branches and in turn they elected the EC from amongst their number; they met on a regular basis in between conferences to hear reports from the EC.

Cliff, however, was still not satisfied with this structure. The main problem for him was that it didn’t give the EC as the leadership a free enough hand since, at least on paper, it was still subject to some degree of control by the National Committee which elected it. Various ways were found round this: the composition of the EC was changed; its members were all made full-time officials; the EC arrogated to itself greater powers. In the end, however, the group’s constitution was changed to end the EC’s formal status as an emanation of the National Committee. In l975 the EC was given the more Leninist-sounding name of ‘central committee’ and was to be elected by the Conference rather than the National Committee; this latter was reduced to the role of a purely advisory body to the new Central Committee.

It was with this structure that the IS became the SWP at the beginning of 1977. But, as the experience of all trade unions (and, according to the partisans of the so-called ‘iron law of oligarchy’, of all large organisations) shows, there is a difference between an organisation’s formal constitution and the way it actually functions. On paper, the SWP’s statutes still allow some degree of democratic control by the membership: the branches could still decide policy and could still control the Central Committee through electing to it only those who carried out their will as decided at the annual Conference; the National Committee could check in between Conferences that the Central Committee was implementing Conference decisions. But this is not the way the SWP works in practice; nor is it the way it is supposed to work since such control from below, by the membership, has no place in the theory of ‘democratic centralism’ as laid down by Lenin.

David Lane has provided an objective and neutral description of what Lenin meant by this term:

‘By ‘democratic’ Lenin understood that decisions should be resolved according to majority vote of the central committee (of the executive) of the Party and that all Party members had the right to participate in general Party policy-making. The Party Congress was to be supreme over policy. There were to be periodic elections of the leading officers of the Party (. . .). By ‘centralism’, Lenin meant that once general policy was agreed, the day-to-day operation of the Party had to be decided centrally, where all information and the Party leadership are located, and the decisions of central bodies were absolutely binding on lower bodies. In Lenin’s view, democratic centralism was a synthesis between democracy and central control: it gave members the right to participation and it gave a creative role for the leadership’ (Leninism: A Sociological Interpretation, 1981, p 48).

Such a structure institutionalises the principle of leadership. Most existing political parties and trade unions do operate on this basis, where those at the top make all the keys decisions and generally control the organisation. Normally, however, this is not how these organisations are supposed to function; they are supposed to be controlled by their members. In this sense the practice of leadership is a departure from their formal constitutions and rulebooks. Leninism makes a virtue of this by not accepting that it is desirable that a political organisation of the sort they want should be organised on the basis of democratic control, and maximum participation in decision-making, by the membership. They are not afraid of the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. They like it and want to facilitate its operation, indeed to institutionalise it.

The SWP is unashamedly a leadership organisation, not just in the sense that it seeks to lead the working class but also in the sense that it is organised internally on a leadership basis; in fact on a hierarchical basis where each layer of leadership has power over the levels below it, with the party’s national leadership – the members of its central committee – at the top.

The national leadership decides everything important and then seeks to get the membership to follow their lead. This is not necessarily a difficult task since the membership, who also believe in the organisational principle of ‘democratic centralism’, accept the leading role of the leadership and are generally prepared to follow. So Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’ places an enormous power in the hands of the leaders and in practice reduces the rank-and-file members to a mere consultative role.

Conference procedure

In Lenin’s scheme, as described by Lane, the supreme policy-making body is the Party Congress; this decides the general line which the Central Committee has to follow until the next Congress. This is the theory; the practice is that the Central Committee completely dominates the Congress (or Conference, as in one concession to the more normal usage in Britain, the SWP’s Congress is called).

The main item on the agenda is a report by the Central Committee on the political ‘perspectives’ which is usually a document of pamphlet-length. The Central Committee also submits other reports – on work in special areas of activity (industry, students, women), internal organisation, finance – for the Conference to discuss. In the SWP, branches still have the formal right to submit motions, but they are strongly discouraged from doing so. As an explanatory note intended for new members, accompanying documents submitted for the party’s 1983 Conference put it:

‘Branches can submit resolutions if they wish and these may [sic] be voted on. But in recent years the practice of sending resolutions to conference has virtually ceased’ (Socialist Review, September 1983).

What this means is that it is the Central Committee – the leadership – which quite literally sets the agenda for the Conference. The branch delegates meet, therefore, to discuss only what is put before them by the Central Committee. Not that the delegates are delegates in the proper sense of the term as instructed representatives of the branches sending them:

‘Delegates should not be mandated . . . Mandating is a trade union practice, with no place in a revolutionary party.’

Since voting on motions submitted by branches is dismissed as a ‘trade union practice’, another procedure, more open to manipulation by the leadership, is operated:

‘At the end of each session of conference commissions are elected to draw up a report on the session detailing the points made. In the event of disagreement two or more commissions can be elected by the opposing delegates. The reports are submitted to conference and delegates then vote in favour of one of the commissions. The advantage of this procedure is that conference does not have to proceed by resolution like a trade union conference.’

No branch motions, no mandated delegates, what else? No ballots of the entire membership either. In the first volume of his political biography of Lenin, Cliff records in shocked terms that ‘in January 1907 Lenin went so far as to argue for the institution of a referendum of all party members on the issues facing the party’, commenting ‘certainly a suggestion which ran counter to the whole idea of democratic centralism’ (Lenin, Building the Party, p. 280).

In fact no official of the SWP above branch level is directly elected by a vote of the members. One power that the branches do retain is the right to nominate members for election, by the Conference delegates, to the National Committee, but, as over presenting motions, they are discouraged from nominating people who do not accept the “perspectives” espoused by the Central Committee. So elections do take place to the National Committee but on the basis of personalities rather than politics. However, it is the way that the Central Committee is elected that is really novel: the nominations for election to new central committee are proposed not by branches but . . . by the outgoing central committee! Once again, in theory, branches can present other names but they never do.

It is easy to see how this means that the central committee – the supreme leadership of the organisation – is a self-perpetuating body renewed in effect only by co-optation. This is justified on the grounds of continuity and efficiency – it takes time to gain the experience necessary to become a good leader, so that it would be a waste of the experience gained if some leader were to be voted off by the vagaries of a democratic vote. Choosing the leadership by a competitive vote is evidently something else ‘with no place in a revolutionary party’ any more than in an army.

The full education document can be found here: 

 How the SWP Central Committee is selected

The CC consists of members elected by Conference according to the following procedure:

  The outgoing Central Committee selects and circulates a provisional slate for the new CC at the beginning of the period of pre-Conference discussion. This is then discussed at the district aggregates where comrades can propose alternative slates.
  At the Conference the outgoing CC proposes a final slate (which may have been changed as a result of the pre-Conference discussion). This slate, along with any other that is supported by a minimum of five delegates, is discussed and voted on by Conference. ((Rule 5 SWP Constitution)

How Should Socialists Organise? (2013)

Julius Martov

From the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

We were anti-Leninist from the start.

In recent months the idea or concept of ‘Leninism’ has been placed under the microscope with the revelations of the undemocratic activities of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. In March the Socialist Standard republished its 1995 education document as The SWP: an undemocratic Leninist organisation which identifies the undemocratic nature of the ‘Leninist’ concept of ‘democratic centralism’ in the SWP. The origins of ‘Leninism’ lie at the beginning of the twentieth century when Lenin distorted the original message of Marx and Engels, but even in this period there were criticisms of ‘Leninism’ and ‘Bolshevism’ by such revolutionary thinkers as Rosa Luxemburg and Julius Martov.

Lenin’s pamphlet What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement was published in 1902 when Lenin, Martov and Plekhanov with the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) were in political exile from Tsarist Russia. The pamphlet detailed the organisational structure Lenin believed necessary for a revolutionary political party in an autocratic state like that of Tsarist Russia. This organisational structure of a disciplined centralised party of committed activists is the seedbed for the later authoritarianism and dictatorship in the Bolshevik regime in Russia. Lenin argued that the working class would not achieve political class consciousness simply by fighting the ‘economic’ battles between capital and labour over wages and working hours, and that Marxists needed to form a political party, a ‘vanguard’ of dedicated revolutionaries to bring socialist consciousness to the working class.

Lenin wrote that:

‘Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships (of all classes and strata) to the state and government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes.’

Lenin had little if any belief in the working class as agents of change, believing ‘that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness’, and that socialist ideas came from ‘the educated representatives of the propertied classes’ or ‘revolutionary socialist intellectuals.’

At the second congress of the exiled RSDLP on Charlotte Street in London in 1903, there was a split between Lenin on one side and Martov and Plekhanov on the other. The opposing factions became known as ‘Bolshevik’ and ‘Menshevik’ respectively. The split centred on definitions of party membership. The Martov ‘Menshevik’ faction favoured a loose (in comparison to Lenin’s views) interpretation of party membership as ‘one who accepts the Party’s programme, supports the Party financially, and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organisations.’ In contrast Lenin and the ‘Bolshevik’ faction wanted a restricted membership of a fully committed cadre; ‘one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party’s organisations.’

The ideas of Lenin in What Is To Be Done? are in contrast to what Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848 where they described the proletarian movement as ‘the self conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority.’ Marx drafted the general rules of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864 which began categorically with the line ‘that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.’ In 1879 Marx and Engels felt the need to distribute a circular where they stated: ‘when the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle cry; the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, cooperate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois.’

In response to Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? Rosa Luxemburg wrote Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy (1904) which later became known as Leninism or Marxism? where she criticised his concept of revolutionary organisation and identified Lenin as a ‘Blanquist’ socialist revolutionist.

Luxemburg wrote that:

‘Blanquism did not count on the direct action of the working class. It, therefore, did not need to organise the people for the revolution. The people were expected to play their part only at the moment of revolution. Preparation for the revolution concerned only the little group of revolutionists armed for the coup.’

This is the Bolshevik strategy in its essence, both then and now.

Luxemburg identified ‘the two principles on which Lenin’s centralism rests are precisely these: the blind subordination, in the smallest detail, of all party organs to the party centre which alone thinks, guides, and decides for all. The rigorous separation of the organised nucleus of revolutionaries from its social-revolutionary surroundings.’ This is Blanquist organisation, although Lenin himself ‘defined his ‘revolutionary Social Democrat’ as the ‘Jacobin indissolubly connected with the organisation of the class-conscious proletariat.’

Lenin’s former comrade-in-arms Julius Martov wrote a critique of ‘Leninism’ and ‘Bolshevism’ in his 1919 work 'The Ideology of ‘Sovietism’ identifying the ‘Jacobin and Blanquist idea of a minority dictatorship.’ Martov reiterated the point made by Engels ‘that the epoch of revolutions effected by conscious minorities heading unknowing masses had closed for ever. From then on, he [Engels] said, revolution would be prepared by long years of political propaganda, organisation, education, and would be realised directly and consciously by the interested masses themselves.’

Martov also quoted the Swiss Social Democrat Charles Naine’s observation on ‘Bolshevism’ as ‘the minority possessing the knowledge of the truth of scientific socialism has the right to impose it on the mass.’ Later Martov looks at Blanqui as a major influence (‘a dictatorial power whose mission it will be to direct the revolutionary movement’).

Lenin’s own words in a speech on Economic Construction in 1920 were also revealing when he said:

‘the Soviet Socialist Democracy is in no way inconsistent with the rule and dictatorship of one person; that the will of a class is at times best realised by a dictator, who sometimes will accomplish more by himself and is frequently more needed. At any rate, the principal relation toward one person rule was not only explained a long time ago but was also decided by the Central Executive Committee.’

Marx in his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach had written that ‘The materialist doctrine that men are the products of conditions and education, different men therefore the products of other conditions and changed education, forgets that circumstances may be altered by men and that the educator has himself to be educated. This doctrine leads inevitably to the ideas of a society composed of two distinct portions, one of which is elevated above society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.’

Martov correctly pointed out that if this thesis is applied

  ‘. . . to the class struggle of the propertyless, this means the following. Impelled by the same ‘circumstances’ of capitalist society that determine their character as an enslaved class, the workers enter into a struggle against the society that enslaves them. The process of this struggle modifies the social ‘circumstances.’ It modifies the environment in which the working class moves. This way the working class modifies its own character. From a class reflecting passively the mental servitude to which they are subjected, the propertyless become a class which frees itself actively from all enslavement, including that of the mind.’

In conclusion Martov saw ‘the proletarian class considered as a whole is the only possible builder of the new society.’

A year after the RSDLP congress in London at which the Bolshevik/Menshevik split took place 142 former members of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) met to found the Socialist Party of Great Britain on quite different organisational principles to those proposed by Lenin. The SDF was riddled with ‘reformist’ policies, undemocratic party organisation, authoritarianism and dictatorial methods used by its leadership. The rules of the newly established party gave the party membership complete control of the organisation, all meetings at branch, executive committee and conference were open to the public; there were no leaders, just an annually elected executive committee with power only to run week-to-week affairs and carry out membership decisions. The declaration of principles of the new party stated that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be work of the working class itself.’ We were therefore ‘anti-Leninist’ in principle and practice before ‘Leninism’ and the Bolshevik revolution that was its political outcome.

Steve Clayton

Officers Looking for Infantry (1968)

From the November 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many political groups fancy themselves as “vanguards” of the working-class. We do not. We say that workers should spurn these would-be elites and organise for Socialism democratically, without leaders.

By fostering wrong theories about what Socialism is and how it can be achieved the “vanguard” organisations are delaying the socialist revolution. It may help to clear away confusion if we list a number of doctrines held by most of these groups, and then state why we disagree with them :

1. State ownership is Socialism, or a step on the way to Socialism.

2. Russia (China, Cuba) is socialist, or on the way.

3. Socialism will arrive by violent insurrection.

4. Socialism will come out of a gigantic slump.

5. Workers cannot understand Socialism, so they must be given bait in the form of “transitional demands.”

6. Workers must be led by an elite, a “vanguard”.

7. There is a middle class in modern society.

It is easy to see that these beliefs interlock and support each other. If, for example, workers are so feeble-minded that they cannot understand Socialism then they need to be led. Socialism will therefore come about without mass understanding, by a disciplined minority seizing power. Minorities are best able to seize power during crises, a fact which renders attractive the notion that capitalism will “collapse”— terminate for purely mechanistic reasons without the necessity for widespread socialist education. Since workers must have some incentive to follow the vanguard, “transitional demands” in the form of reformist promises are necessary, and since these tactics were successful in carrying to power the Russian Bolsheviks, it is assumed that Russia must be on the road to Socialism. The basic dogma on which all this is founded is that the mass of the workers cannot understand Socialism (or at least, not without the constant tutelage of the vanguard) which implies that the vanguard must be recruited from outside the working-class. Therefore, the vanguard groups reject the Marxist contention that there are only two classes in advanced capitalism.

Vanguardists may protest at this summary; they may insist that they are very much concerned with working-class consciousness, and do not assert that workers cannot understand Socialism. But an examination of their propaganda shows that “consciousness” means merely following the right leaders. When it is suggested that the majority of the population must attain a clear desire for the abolition of the wages system, and the introduction of a worldwide moneyless community, the vanguardists reply that this is “too abstract”, or (if they are students) “too academic.”

Indeed, they themselves do not strive for such a socialist system. None of the vanguard groups advocates a world without wages, with production democratically planned to meet people’s needs. Some of them say, when pushed, that they look forward to such a world “ultimately,” but since this “ultimate” aim has no effect on their actions it can only be interpreted as an empty platitude.

Far from specifying Socialism as their aim, they are reticent and muddled about even the capitalist reforms they will introduce if they get power. These also are apparently too “academic” to stipulate. Ironically, Bernstein’s dictum “The movement is everything, the goal nothing” sums up the vanguard outlook very well, as a glance at the Newsletter or Socialist Worker will confirm. It seems fair to conclude, however, that the vanguardists’ ideal is the brutal capitalist regime of Lenin, a fact which causes us socialists some concern, as it means we would be liquidated (a fate which would undoubtedly have befallen us under the Bolshevik tyranny).

The belief that Socialism or something akin to it exists in Russia is common to most vanguard groups. This is to expected: the vanguard strategy has been put into practice many times, and should surely have succeeded once or twice. Russia furnishes fresh proof every day that it is typically capitalist, but all its obviously anti-working-class features are dismissed as the results of “degeneration”. Some look to China or Cuba as less degenerate systems, which sets a useful precedent. By the time the faithful have to write off these nations, other state capitalist paragons will have arisen in Africa or Latin America to replace them.

Thus some vanguardists centre their hopes on capitalist revolutions in backward regions. Inside advanced capitalism reformist politics are seen to be sterile and stereotyped. It is consequently no marvel that a generation reared on TV westerns will lift up its eyes to the Third World, where all the romance of Garibaldi is reborn amidst the waste land of the twentieth century, where the beautiful hero, ten times larger than life, still strides about trusting his life to luck “like a tossed coin”. The Third World Utopians fail to notice that the spectacular energy of change in the underdeveloped zones is precisely a. measure of their spectacular backwardness, and of the telescoped development necessary for them to catch up with Europe, North America and Japan. This acceleration of social growth does result in new, bizarre combinations, both in economic organisation and in consciousness—but these cannot produce a leap forward into Socialism ahead of the more advanced countries. A comparison of Mao with Winstanley, or of Pan-Africanism with the Jacobins, would show how even the advances in consciousness in successive capitalist revolutions are severely truncated by economic backwardness.

There are other vanguardists who have come round to the socialist view that Russia is capitalist, but they still cling to the idea that the Bolshevik revolution was socialist—and by implication, that a future socialist revolution will be run on similar lines. After all, an admission that the Russian working-class never held political power, and that Bolshevism was always a capitalist movement, would call into question the entire mythology of the Left. An increasing number of vanguardists are seriously worried by the question: when did “degeneration” start? More clues to the answer will be found with Robespierre, Bakunin and Tkachev than with Stalin.

In one sense it is true that Russia is progressing towards Socialism—in the same way that all capitalist countries are. But the working-class of the Russian Empire will have to overthrow their state capitalist bosses, and they can only do this after they have won the elementary democratic rights which we have. State ownership is not Socialism, but a major feature of all forms of capitalism. However wage-slavery is administered, it cannot be made to run in the interests of the wage-slaves.

The belief that Russia is socialist or a “workers’ state” has been a source of confusion for half a century. Happily, it is now ebbing away—illusions are usually corrected by material conditions sooner or later. But the fact that such a doctrine could catch on so readily shows the hazy conception of Socialism which has always been popular. Disputes about how to get Socialism usually turn out to be disputes about what it is. For instance, it is apparent that if Socialism is to be a democratic society a majority of the population must opt for it before it can come into existence. Any minority which intends to impose what it calls “socialism” on the rest of the population against their wishes or, for that matter, without their express consent, obviously intends to rule undemocratically. A minority which uses violence to get power must use violence to retain power. The means cannot be divorced from the ends.

Vanguardism often emerges in the minds of people who know that there is a lot wrong with society and aim at something radically different. But they avoid facing up to the fact that the great majority of workers do not want a fundamental change: they grumble, and desire palliatives, but oppose the abolition of those institutions which are so dear to their hearts: the police, the armed forces, money, frontiers—even the Queen. It is the refusal to face squarely that the bulk of the working-class wants capitalism which leads to notions of elitism and insurrectionary violence, to the idea that workers must be manipulated by slogan-shouting demagogues brandishing reformist bait. Discussion, the most potent means of changing attitudes, is treated with contempt. “Action” for its own sake is lauded to the skies. We socialists have never tried to forget the obvious fact that the working-class is hostile to Socialism, but we are encouraged by the knowledge that we, as members of the working-class, have reacted to capitalism by opposing it. There is nothing remarkable about us as individuals, so it cannot be a hopeless task to set about changing the ideas of our fellows—especially as they learn from their own experience of capitalism. How much closer we would be to Socialism today if all those who spend their time advocating “transitional demands” were on our side!

Marx’s (and the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s) conception of the working-class as all those who have to sell their labour-power, from road-sweepers to computer programmers, would be inconvenient to members of vanguard groups, who usually believe that they themselves are not members of the working-class, whilst admitting that it is the working-class which must achieve Socialism. The vanguard people need to chase feverishly down every reformist cul-de-sac, a practice known as “developing consciousness through Struggle.” “Struggle” is apparently a sort of metaphysical driving force which is supposed to turn reforms into sparks of revolution. Such mystification is essential to the curious doctrine that the workers will establish Socialism inadvertently, while they are occupied with something else.

“The workers” cannot grasp anything so “abstract” as Socialism, it is claimed. But the exponents of vanguardism do understand it, or so they say. Evidently then, they are not workers: they are the “intelligentsia” or “middle class”. They constitute the officer corps. The workers are the instrument, but they wield the instrument. Socialism is a paper hoop through which the working-class, performing circus animals, must be coaxed to jump. They are the ringmasters. Or, as Trotsky saw it, the masses are the steam, and the leadership is the piston which gives the steam direction.

This notion that they are not members of the working-class explains why these people sometimes say to socialists: “What are you doing to get in among the working-class?” The socialist worker—who is only too chronically and daily aware that he is among the working-class, and unless he is a masochist would jump at the chance of getting out of it— finds such idealism baffling.

Steele

Letters: Timeless Leninism? (2015)

Letters to the Editors from the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Timeless Leninism?

Dear Editors

I think a careful reading of my document and of my biography of Tony Cliff would respond adequately to all your points (‘Where Leadership Leads’, February Socialist Standard). Indeed your author seems to have been rather careless in checking his facts – What is to be Done? was published in 1902 not 1903; much more seriously, your author simply disregards the arguments developed not only by Cliff, but by Hal Draper, Pierre Broué, Lars T Lih and many others about the place of What Is to be Done? in Lenin’s work, and whether it can be considered as a timeless statement of ‘Leninism’. Likewise the IS did not adopt the slate system until 1975, which rather undermines the claim that it is a central tenet of Leninism.  As for ‘what we’ve been saying for over 100 years’, that may well be true, but with what results? It is easy enough to point to the limited achievements of the Leninist left, but since your own achievements are equally thin on the ground, a more modest tone might be called for.

Ian Birchall

Reply:

We are aware that there is a school of historical revisionists who try to argue that Lenin was merely a left-wing Social Democrat. This may well be how he appeared when he participated in discussions within the Second International, but inside Russia he never gave up the idea that the revolution there would have to be led by a vanguard party of full-time revolutionaries organised on the lines he had outlined in his 1902 pamphlet and which had shocked other revolutionaries at the time such as Rosa Luxemburg and even Trotsky.

That he still held this view to the end can be seen from his other notorious pamphlet, Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, that came out in 1920. In chapter II, headed ‘One of the Basic Prerequisites for the Success of the Bolsheviks’, he wrote repeatedly about ‘absolute centralisation’ and ‘iron discipline’ and attributed the Bolsheviks’ success to this. He still clearly thought in terms of a centralised and disciplined vanguard party ‘leading and attracting the backward masses.’ The chapter can be read on the internet here.

There is also the fact that, historically, all parties and groups descended from the Bolshevik Party under Lenin, Trotskyist as well as Stalinist, have been organised as vanguard parties along the lines of his 1902 pamphlet. Frankly, we cannot understand how anyone can seriously argue that Lenin did not advocate a centralised and highly disciplined party of full-time revolutionaries.–Editors.

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More on Syriza

Dear Editors

I agree with the article written on page 10 of February Socialist Standard about Syriza. But Syriza is not simply a coalition of various left and green, etc. There are also various splits from the socialist party (like the Labour in England) and more important inside Syriza the most solid ideologically group are  the one of the ex-eurocommunist party of Greece that gave also to Syriza the ideological guidelines in a eurocommunist way like the 70s. The thinktank of Syriza is called ‘Nikos Poulantzas’. If somebody is sect-maniac I can send you a list of the groups that consist Syriza!

Anyway I think the next thing to be analyzed is why Syriza collaborated with a populist party to rule the country, but this is strictly a Greek peculiarity…

Theodore Desponis, 

Greece