The revolutionary party: moving forward and standing pat

As a long-time observer of the Democratic Socialist Perspective (it used to be Party rather than Perspective) in Australia, I was very pleased to see them departing from conventional “Leninist” thinking and announce what amounts to an entirely different approach to the Socialist Alliance, a formation they have been leading for a number of years. Their inspiration is the NPA in France, a broad anti-capitalist formation that was initiated by the LCR, the official section of the Fourth International that has dissolved itself into the NPA.

The DSP lays out its new relationship to the SA in a document approved by their National Committee on June 7^th. There is much to appreciate in this document, especially this:

Small socialist organisations operating in relative isolation in the working class movements, or sometimes substantially outside these movements because they are composed almost totally of small groups of “socialist intellectuals” are chronically plagued with what might be called “Marxist” identity politics. That is they are more concerned about “proving” to themselves that they are “real Marxists” than actually applying what Marx, Engels and Lenin taught which is to build real socialist leadership in the working class. In fact, the further away such groups are from that objective, the more loudly they assert their “Marxist” identity. What passes as politics in “the left” as we have it in this country can degenerate to little more than a ridiculous I’m-more-Marxist-than-you pissing competition. We’ve all seen this time and again with various little sects. And we’ve also seen this tendency in our own organisation.

Much of the document takes the side of the NPA in a polemical exchange between NPA leader Francois Sabado and IST/SWP leader Alex Callinicos who while not quite hostile to the NPA’s new approach to party-building is clearly uncomfortable with it. I have commented on the Sabado-Callinicos exchange here.

It should be stressed that the DSP has not yet decided to dissolve itself into the Socialist Alliance, as was the case with the LCR/NPA in France. Given the years of operating on precepts learned from American Trotskyism, it is understandable why they may be moving a bit slower than the LCR which never found James P. Cannon’s ideas that compelling. But the little distance they put between themselves and Cannon’s party building “orthodoxy” was enough to precipitate a faction fight with an “old guard” in the party that was uneasy with the new direction. The comrades in the old guard were able to capitalize on the failure of the Socialist Alliance to live up to its early promise, but I strongly suspect that this failure was attributable to perceptions that it was nothing but a maneuver on the part of the DSP to build its own ranks at the expense of the rest of the left. In other words, the approach was in keeping with the “French turn” mentality of 1930s Trotskyism that always viewed broader formations such as the SP’s as obstacles to revolution, even if they were momentarily part of them. My guess is that if the new approach to the SA incorporates transparency and guilelessness, it could become an important part of the Australian left.

The ambivalence of the British SWP toward the NPA continues. In the latest issue of International Socialism, their quarterly journal, there’s an article by a French co-thinker named Denis Godard that is filled with positive characterizations of the NPA that unfortunately are not matched by an understanding of exactly what the NPA is trying to do.  For Callinicos and Godard, the key distinction is between “revolution” and “reform” and they fret over whether the NPA is sacrificing the revolutionary purity of the LCR in favor—implicitly—of an opportunist desire to grow indiscriminately.  Godard writes:

To read Callinicos is without doubt to see that grasping the nature of reformism—that is, understanding the contradictions that run through class consciousness and understanding the dynamics of its evolution—is for him the most important factor in arming the political revival and defining appropriate strategies and tactics. I share his preoccupation.

I come at things from a different angle. I think that the biggest obstacle facing the left today, at least the revolutionary left, is sectarianism. Callinicos seems to worry that if the NPA is not careful, it will go the same route as the SP’s and the CP’s. Fundamentally, I consider this to be a rather idealistic approach to politics. Reformism is not a function of the ideas in peoples’ heads but rather material forces operating in history, including the privileges enjoyed by parliamentarians and trade union bureaucrats. In other words, the Second International degenerated not because of Bernstein’s ideas but because its leaders had become corrupted by their place in society, which made it natural for them to begin thinking like the class enemy. Material reality determines ideas and not the other way around.

Godard appears to be something of a Gramscian and his discussion of the NPA is couched in terms of a hegemonic struggle, but mixed with Callinicos’s wrongheaded ideas about “united front” electoral initiatives such as the disastrous Respect Party intervention. He is preoccupied with the “communist” struggle to win the workers away from the reformists in a battle for hegemony that must precede the even bigger battle with the capitalist class:

It is in the light of this that we must clarify our conception of the NPA. The issue now for class struggle in France is to rebuild the workers’ movement and enable it to pull behind it “all the oppressed sectors”—to build what some call a “counter-hegemony”. At a time when the developing process of struggle has already begun to see potential leaderships emerge on many battlefronts against the system, the NPA must aim to regroup, coordinate and provide them with a strategy for confronting the ruling class. If it does so, and relies on the dynamic of the struggle to take things forward, it will not only help these new leaderships to overcome the paralysis due to the current domination by the traditional leaderships and their politics, but will also be key to rebuilding the workers’ movement.

It is hard to argue with such a formulation since it is so abstract.

The most worrisome aspect of Godard’s article is its emphasis on the need for “revolutionaries” to keep the NPA honest like a rudder on a boat:

Here we return, as far as revolutionaries in the NPA are concerned, to the role Marx attributed to communists: they are the most resolute when it comes to elaborating and developing an anti-capitalist strategy for the NPA and the most class conscious when it comes to understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of this strategy…

The aim of Marxists revolutionaries must be to work out a strategy among themselves and debate and try to get their strategy accepted within the NPA. They must test it not only against other positions but also in relation to the experience accumulated within the framework of the NPA.

In other words, Godard and his comrades see themselves and anybody else as advanced in their thinking as they are as laying out the “line of march”. They are like the philosopher kings in Plato’s Republic who have seen true reality outside of the cave and assign to themselves the awesome responsibility of communicating that reality to the uninitiated. This, in a nutshell, is the entire basis for sectarianism in left politics, which Trotskyism in its various permutations has perfected into an art form.

The Socialist Workers Party’s Open Letter to the left

In an open letter that appears in the Socialist Workers Party newspaper (the British group, of course, not to be mistaken with the tiny and peculiar American ultraleftist cult), there is a call to unite on the electoral front in response to the election of the fascist BNP’s winning two seats in the European Parliament:

Labour’s vote collapsed to a historic low in last week’s elections as the right made gains. The Tories under David Cameron are now set to win the next general election.

The British National Party (BNP) secured two seats in the European parliament. Never before have fascists achieved such a success in Britain.

The result has sent a shockwave across the labour and anti-fascist movements, and the left.

The meltdown of the Labour vote and the civil war engulfing the party poses a question – where do we go from here?

After discussing the victory of the BNP in terms of the bankruptcy of New Labour, a party that is the class equivalent of the Democratic Party in the U.S. despite its origins in the trade union movement, the SWP issues a challenge to the far left:

Those who campaigned against the BNP in the elections know that when they said to people, “Don’t vote Nazi” they were often then asked who people should vote for.

The fact that there is no single, united left alternative to Labour means there was no clear answer available.

The European election results demonstrate that the left of Labour vote was small, fragmented and dispersed.

The Greens did not make significant gains either. The mass of Labour voters simply did not vote. We cannot afford a repeat of that.

The SWP is all too aware of the differences and difficulties involved in constructing such an alternative.

We do not believe we have all the answers or a perfect prescription for a left wing alternative.

But we do believe we have to urgently start a debate and begin planning to come together to offer such an alternative at the next election, with the awareness that Gordon Brown might not survive his full term.

One simple step would be to convene a conference of all those committed to presenting candidates representing working class interests at the next election.

The SWP is prepared to help initiate such a gathering and to commit its forces to such a project.

We look forward to your response.

Although I am not a British citizen, I would like to offer my response. Far be it from me to issue Leon Trotsky-like pronunciamentos from afar, I have followed the SWP closely enough to offer the comrades some free advice.

To start with, I think it is a step forward to hear things like “We do not believe we have all the answers or a perfect prescription for a left wing alternative.” This is the beginning of wisdom for such groups and bodes well for the future, at least on the verbal level.

In an accompanying article titled “Time to fight back together”, the SWP is even more forthright on the need for unity:

There is a desperate need for an alternative. The absence of a credible left group to vote for means that people remain without a choice when it comes to elections.

Many people wonder why the left can’t unite together to provide a stronger, more credible alternative to the pro-war and neoliberal policies of the major parties.

There is real potential for a united left group to make a real impact—not just by winning votes but also in helping to pull people together to build resistance on the ground.

But here is the problem. The SWP just went through a wrenching experience in building a broad left political party called RESPECT. The resulting split cost it members, influence and the drawing of factional lines in their party. Unless the comrades are willing to reject the methodology that led to this fiasco, I am afraid that they will simply repeat past mistakes.

In order for a united left group party to succeed, it cannot be a “united front” as conceived in the past by party leader Alex Callinicos. I have tried to explain why in articles titled “The SWP, Respect and the united front”  and “The Crisis in Respect”.

Just to recapitulate briefly, a united front was conceived by Lenin as a kind of ad hoc agreement between Communists and social democrats to march together against a common foe, particularly the fascists. In fact, there will be more and more of a need to forge such alliances in light of the success of the BNP.

But Lenin never thought of the united front as an electoral mechanism. He did propose votes for social democratic parties, but that was only a way to get a hearing among rank-and-file members. His main hope was to expose the reformist leaders of such parties, including the Labour Party of the 1920s, in order to win the ranks to Communism.

The SWP never really thought through what this tactic meant when it came to working in a common framework with people like George Galloway who they describe as a reformist. It would also pose problems with how to relate to people in RESPECT, who while not having a background in the admittedly reformist Labour Party like Galloway, had not reached revolutionary socialist conclusions about changing British society. How does one describe them? Revolutionary? Reformist? Or does it really matter?

The point is that such terminology means very little in the current stage of British politics because despite the election of BNP’ers the question of power is not being posed. When someone like George Galloway decides to bolt from Labour, it is the equivalent of Ralph Nader breaking with the Democrats. Leaving aside Nader’s ideology, his act in challenging the two-party system is much more objectively revolutionary than a thousand May Day leaflets from the sectarian universe.

I raise these questions because I see clinging to old habits in the Irish SWP, a group that obviously reflects the thinking of its sister party. In hailing the election to the European parliament of Socialist Party member Joe Higgins (a part of the Ted Grant-spawned Committee for a Workers International, not to be confused with their bitter rivals in the Grantite International Marxist Tendency), the Irish SWP defined its role in relationship to Higgins and the radical movement in somewhat uninspired terms:

The radical left must now enter discussions to form either an alliance or broad radical left party, where different tendencies can co-exist. Previous arguments that such a development might be ‘premature’ make little sense today.

The Socialist Workers Party is already working productively within the People Before Profit Alliance, promoting its own distinctively revolutionary socialist views while working with others on the 90 percent we also agree on. There is absolutely no reason why an alliance of this sort cannot be expanded.

Seemingly unable to break with old habits, the Irish SWP states explicitly what I fear looms implicitly in its sister party’s open letter. When you see a reference to a “broad radical left party, where different tendencies can co-exist”, you get the sinking feeling that they hope for a “united front” of left parties that worked so poorly in RESPECT and elsewhere. Perhaps it is high time that this thinking in terms of “tendencies” (an awful word that reminds me of a psychiatrist’s handbook) is relegated to the dustbin of history especially when the comrades follow up with their desire to promote “their own distinctively revolutionary socialist views”. Unfortunately, this desire to promote such views is depressingly reminiscent of the corporate world’s reliance on special ingredients that make one laxative better than another. For in the final analysis, such “distinctively revolutionary socialist views” more often than not boil down to defining when the USSR became state capitalist or remained a workers state. This is not the proper subject for Marxists today and should be relegated to the back pages of a theoretical quarterly.

What the SWP should consider is a total break with their modus operandi and moving toward the approach of the NPA in France. Initiated by the Trotskyist LCR, the New Anticapitalist Party decided to put aside questions of “distinctively revolutionary socialist views” and emphasize the real questions facing the left in 2009. Hopefully, since the SWP seems to have a good grasp on these questions, they can begin to take the next step and evolve toward a more transparent and open political framework that has the possibility of truly uniting the left. In other words, they should return to the road of V.I. Lenin, the 20^th century’s greatest exponent of left unity based on the evidence of 1917.

The Communist Party versus Liza Featherstone

Liza Featherstone speaking about Walmart at Boston College

I usually don’t pay much attention to the Communist Party USA, but a reference made by Doug Henwood (Mr. Featherstone) on his LBO-Talk mailing list to an attack by the Communist Party on the excellent journalist and human being Liza Featherstone prompted me to say a word or two, especially since the CPUSA still has a significant presence on the American left.

The article, written by John Wojcik, appears in the People’s Daily World dated 5/26 under the title “Rumor of card check’s ‘death’ is greatly exaggerated”.

Wojcik is upset with all the reports of EFCA (Employee Free Choice Act) going by the wayside under an increasingly obvious pro-corporate Obama administration and decides to attack a highly respected journalist of the left than the Obama administration itself. Wojcik writes:

One story by Liza Featherstone published May 24 on Slate’s “The Big Money” blog claims that President Obama himself has pronounced “card check” dead and said the Employee Free Choice Act didn’t have the votes to pass but that a “compromise” could work.

By compromise, the article claims, the president meant a version of the bill without card check, the provision obliging employers to recognize unions after a majority of workers have signed cards.

Featherstone claims, “On the same day, Sen. Arlen Specter, a key swing vote, said that he, too, would support a ‘compromise’ on EFCA: card-check-free, of course.”

President Obama never said anything about “card check” being “dead.” He merely indicated that work is being done on developing a compromise. The same is true of Sen. Specter.

As past masters of double-speak, the CP tries once again to obfuscate the issue by referring to a “compromise”. In essence, this “compromise” is regarded by labor officials, and the majority of opinion in the mass media, as anything but. By gutting EFCA, namely the right of workers to form a union by simply turning in a sufficient number of cards indicating that determination, the legislation falls short of what was expected.

In fact, if Wojcik had simply quoted the opening paragraph of Liza’s article, the reader would have noticed that she had accepted that a “compromise” was in the offing and properly put square quotes around the word, as it deserved:

Last Thursday, President Obama pronounced “card check” dead, saying that the current Employee Free Choice Act didn’t have the votes to pass but that a “compromise” could work. By compromise, the president meant a version of the bill without card check, the provision obliging employers to recognize unions after a majority of workers have signed cards, rather than after an election. On the same day, Sen. Arlen Specter, newly “D”-Pa., a key swing vote, said that he, too, would support a “compromise” on EFCA: card-check-free, of course.

Wojcik faults Featherstone for failing to point out that at least one Senator is still fighting the good fight. She “didn’t interview Sen. Tom Harkin, the Democratic leader who has been working to develop a compromise that keeps the bill fundamentally intact.” Once again, we are dealing with that finely honed talent for double-speak that characterizes Communist journalism in the U.S. since a May 7^th Wall Street Journal article indicates that Harkin is also ready to dump the card check feature overboard:

Compromise talks are being led by Sen. Tom Harkin (D., Iowa), the bill’s lead sponsor in the Senate. Kate Cyrul, a spokeswoman for Mr. Harkin, declined to comment on details of the compromise being discussed. But she said the senator “remains confident that we can address these issues without compromising the core provisions of the bill.”

Among the changes being discussed are dropping the card-signing provision and setting a 21-day deadline for an election to be held — about the half the median of 40 days that union elections currently take, according to people familiar with the talks. An aide for Mr. Specter said the senator is “generally supportive” of the idea that an election must be held within 21 days if the employer wants a secret ballot.

Wojcik attributes Liza’s failure to get the EFCA story right as a function of a deeper failure to appreciate the dynamism of the American labor movement:

The labor movement, for the last three or more years, has marched, picketed, sat in, demonstrated, petitioned and engaged in major strikes from one end of the country to the other. It mobilized for the 2006 and 2008 elections on all levels, reshaped the face of Capitol Hill, changed the Congress, changed the Senate and was critical in the election of perhaps the most pro-labor administration in U.S. history.

This prompted LBO-Talk luminary Dennis Perrin to quip:

Wow. All this actually happened? Clearly, I’ve been in a drug haze. Starting next month, or the one after that, I’m quitting acid and mushrooms for a whole week and committing myself to the New Reality. Or whatever passes for it.

For those who are startled to see the Obama administration now working overtime to crush the UAW as “pro-labor” at this point, it is what one might expect from a “Marxist” group that is even more craven in its support for the president than Daily Kos, the Nation Magazine or other soft-left venues.

In an article that might have prompted Dennis Perrin to check into a mental hospital, CPUSA chief honcho Sam Webb announced to PWW readers that Obama was even more of an FDR than FDR himself:

After the first, perhaps over analyzed, hundred days of the Obama administration, it is fair to say that President Obama is a reformer and we are entering an era of reforms, possibly radical reforms.

Some on the left (ignoring the right wing talk shows and their fantastic claims about Obama’s socialist pedigree) mockingly dismiss the new president and his reform inclinations, saying that his main mission is merely to save capitalism. Even if that is true, and there is no reason to doubt it, what does it tell us — that he is neither a politician of the left nor an advocate of socialism? Well, we already knew that.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, had no aspirations to change the foundations of capitalist society. But he realized that in order to preserve capitalism it had to be modified (and, yes, it can be modified), and he had to respond to the anger and yearnings of millions of Americans caught in the web of a seemingly intractable economic depression.

Given the contemporary economic crisis, Obama appears to be of a similar mind, though he comes to the White House with deeper democratic and reform sensibilities than FDR.

So far, Obama’s presidency has not only broken decisively from the right-wing extremist policies of the Bush administration, but has also taken measures domestically and internationally that go in a progressive direction.

No, comrades, this really appears in the CP newspaper and not in the Onion. Although I would not have supported FDR back then, unrepentant Marxist that I am, I think there is ample evidence that Obama resembles the man who preceded FDR rather than FDR himself. This point was made most eloquently by Robert Fitch, who like me is no fan of FDR, at the recent Left Forum in NYC:

Think of Roosevelt as a gardener. He sprays to kill the weeds, not to destroy the lawn. Rexford Tugwell acknowledged that the New Deal consisted almost entirely of programs initiated by Herbert Hoover: the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; fiscal pump priming; steep taxes on the rich; huge infrastructural projects to increase employment. The biggest exception of course was FDR’s campaign against financialization. It’s a judgment that raises an important question. Ignoring foreign policy and big areas of domestic policy, just concentrating on economic stabilization, and recognizing we’re only 100 days into the Obama presidency — to whom does Obama stand closer: Hoover or FDR? On the evidence so far, I would say Hoover. Except that Obama’s political skills are closer to FDR’s than Hoover’s. And, unlike Hoover, Obama would never dream of advocating a 62% marginal tax rate on top income earners.

Another area where Obama stands closer to Hoover than FDR is his approach to the nature of politics. In political ideology, Obama and Hoover are pluralists who articulate a politics of the common good. FDR adopts a conflict perspective. In his first inaugural address, FDR pointed directly to those who were responsible for the great crash: “the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed,” he said, “through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.” “Money changers” is not a term of endearment in Christian populist discourse. It is redolent of William Jennings Bryan’s electrifying demand that Wall Street not crucify mankind. And at the same time, it looked forward to Roosevelt’s 1936 acceptance speech, when he called for the overthrow of the financial oligarchy.

In a way, it is almost academic which Democrat becomes president of the U.S. Whoever it is, the CPUSA will find a way to turn that person into the second coming of FDR. Since the “Popular Front” turn of the late 30s, they have operated basically as the left wing of the Democratic Party, an institution that was born out of the Indian-killing and slave-owning Andrew Jackson presidency.

If and when a genuinely radical party takes shape in the U.S., it will have to confront these yellow-dog Democrats and win people to a perspective of unremitting struggle against both the Democrats and the Republicans. One can and must pay tribute to the heroism and the sacrifices of the Communist Party activists who stood up to Jim Crow and who fought to build the CIO but seen dialectically their presence in the U.S. left today only helps to sustain the policies of the Democratic Party with its more than 150 year old traditions of racism and commitment to big business.

Left Forum 2009 journal (Sunday)

10-12am: Political Economy of Contemporary India

Unfortunately, I am going to have to be a bit sketchy here since I was relying on my Flip video camera recording for my report. At the outset I should state that the panel members are involved with a website called www.sanhati.com that is devoted to a critique of neoliberalism in Bengal.

The first two speakers used statistics-heavy Powerpoint presentations to demonstrate:

–India had not succeeded in developing large-scale industry based on heavy concentrations of workers.

–The peasantry was being forced into smaller and smaller plots, while the ranks of the landless were growing. Additionally, feudal social relations in the countryside were on the decline, including money-lending and sharecropping.

Neither speaker spent much time drawing political conclusions from the statistics except to say that capitalism was not developing in the manner orthodox Marxism would have predicted.

The next two speakers focused on class struggles in West Bengal which pit the poor peasants and their Maoist leaders against the CPI-M. I was shocked to hear some quotations from the party’s leader, which sounded more like Thomas Friedman than Karl Marx.

Amit Basole, who introduced himself to me before the talks began as a reader of my blog (his talk concentrated on class relations in the manufacturing sphere), has an impressive background. He received a PhD in neurobiology but then decided to study economics at the U. of Massachusetts to help him understand society and politics in his homeland. I urge you to check out his website, which includes the following biographical information:

There is an Indian aphorism, “he who has seen only India, has not India seen”. At the age of 23 when I first left India, I had seen nothing but India. Like many middle-class, city bred Indians, as I grew up I had become inured and insensitive to its problems. I came to America to become a scientist, to pursue a childhood dream. Being here for the past six years I have learnt much about India and about myself. While I started my PhD thinking that I would do research in Neuroscience as a career, most likely in the US, I am now certain that I would eventually like to work in India in a more socially conscious capacity.

Despite being involved in basic research for nearly eight years (see ‘academic background’ below), I have been increasingly interested in social causes. About three years ago I began volunteering in my spare time with the Association for India’s Development, a US-based non-profit that supports developmental projects carried out by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in India. My volunteer experience with AID included coordinating two projects, one supporting an education program for underprivileged children in government-run remand homes in Maharashtra and the other project supporting the activities of a union of landless agricultural laborers in Andhra Pradesh, a state in southern India. Through this experience I have understood better (but only slightly) the inextricably intertwined processes of “modernization” and “development”. My decision to quit Neuroscience and start afresh in Economics stems from a desire to acquire a more systematic knowledge of the economics, the history and philosophy behind such massive changes that affect millions of people the world over. A fortuitous combination of events landed me in the Economics department at the University of Massachusetts, where I am currently in the middle of yet another PhD.

During the discussion period, I asked for some clarification on what the Maoist movement consists of in India today. I was especially interested in their views on the CPI-ML Liberation, a group that favors Marxmail with their very interesting newsletter on a fairly regular basis and which does not come across as standard Maoist fare in the Bob Avakian mold. I was told that they are not narrowly Maoist and have often paid tribute to Gramsci in their writings. They are also a sizable group, credited by some to have a membership of over 75,000. As one other audience member put it, they could swallow up a European left group at one sitting and still have room for another meal.

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12-2pm Universities in (the) Crisis: Class Contradictions in Higher Education

As you might expect from the cutie pie title of this panel discussion, it was organized by Rethinking Marxism, the neo-Althusserian journal that is sponsoring its own conference later this year.  Despite my aversion to the often high-falutin’ approach of Rethinking Marxism, I found this session one of the best I attended all weekend.

As a graduate of Bard College and the New School, schools run by egomaniacal empire-builders; an employee of Columbia University for more than 18 years; and finally as a friend to a number of young struggling adjunct professors in New York, the question of class contradictions in higher education is of great interest to me.

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein and Rona Jaleel reported on the struggles they participated in at NYU as members of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC-UAW). The villain in this story is the university’s president John Sexton, who appears to be an even bigger rogue than Leon Botstein and Bob Kerrey.

Sexton’s latest ploy to undermine the teaching assistants is to recategorize them as adjunct professors, which would provide marginally better wages and working conditions at the cost of undercutting the momentum they had built in struggling for recognition as TA’s. Sexton has a most peculiar idea about who adjuncts are, naming Spike Lee as a typical adjunct.

Sexton is also something of an amateur futurologist, positing New York City’s emergence as a focal point for ICE (Information, Culture, and Education) development rather than the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) that it is today. Of course, given the events of the past 6 months, the city might not have an alternative to get out of FIRE since it is going up in smoke all on its own.

Sexton is even more expansionist than the state of Israel, attempting to gobble up real estate near NYU and setting up satellite colleges across the globe, including one in Abu Dhabi that relies heavily on non-union labor. Go to http://fairlabornyu.wordpress.com/ for information about efforts on their behalf organized by the Coalition for Fair Labor.

Next to speak was Sarah Stookey, a most unlikely business administration professor at Central Connecticut State University who started out as a solidarity activist working in Nicaragua. Her website explains:

Sarah’s interest in studying business and management arose from almost a decade of helping to promote community-based economic development in Nicaragua. She also spent several years helping to create grassroots-managed lending programs in the Philippines and Zambia. Her current research is motivated by a desire to create organizations that respond to the needs of society broadly defined. This involves articulating and evaluating the economic and philosophical assumptions underlying the treatment of money in management theory and practice. She is also very interested in promoting community-based financial institutions such as credit unions.

Her talk was a fascination class analysis of who majors in business and why. It turns out that 22 percent of all college students are business majors since their goal is to get a job right out of the gate upon graduation that has health insurance. Most of them come from culturally impoverished working class or small shopkeeper families and have never read a newspaper, Karl Marx, or the world’s great literature. On the other hand, they have a better grasp of how the capitalist economy works than the average undergraduate since they are forced to cope with budgets, quarterly statements, etc. as part of their day job.

By contrast, the people in business school at places like Columbia University have plenty of culture but no understanding of how the real world works. That in Sarah’s opinion has a lot to do with the exotic hedge fund strategies that come out of such schools. These future MBA’s are also there to develop leadership skills that will enable them to lord it over the working class kids who are in the lower tier business schools.

The last speaker was David Kristjanson-Gural, an economics professor at Bucknell who organized the panel and who presented an analysis of the university system based on Marx’s value theory. He believes that the board of trustees extracts surplus value from the professors. The value they produce is supplemented by endowments and government grants for research, etc. During a financial crisis, this funding tends to dry up and forces the board to put pressure on the faculty to produce more value through larger class sizes, pay cuts, etc. All of this makes perfect sense, of course.

In the Q&A, I raised a question with David about the difference between a college like Bard that has quadrupled in size since I graduated and the average for-profit corporation. What were the laws of accumulation that dictated that a Bard College or a Columbia University or an NYU must expand? Since they are non-profits, they would not seem to be governed by the same economic laws. In responding to me, he mentioned the “mindset” of the board but that did not satisfy me. Surely there must be something else going on besides mindsets. This is something I want to explore more on my own.

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3-5pm: The De-Stalinization of Chinese Marxism

This was a case of false labeling since the speakers, all Chinese, did not address “de-Stalinization” at all.

Wei Xiaoping gave a presentation blaming Engels for everything that has gone wrong in Marxism, using a manuscript of German Ideology with side-by-side entries by Marx and Engels. According to her, Engels introduced the whole notion of “historical materialism” that Marx never endorsed. It is a theory that starts with the existence of material relationships, out of which ideas and consciousness proceeds. I suppose this analysis implicitly blames Engels for Stalinism since he was past master at crude base-superstructure Marxism, except that it usually blames Engels for “dialectical materialism”, an even worse offense than “historical materialism”. While there is not much point in defending Engels here (he needs no defense), I only would have pointed out to the speaker that blaming Marxism’s failures on Engels’s intellectual misconceptions ends up putting us back into the idealist traditions that both Marx and Engels were trying to refute in German Ideology.

Wang Dong spoke about Chinese efforts to put together MEGA2, a volume of Marx and Engels’s writings that was supposedly more reliable than MEGA1. I’ll take her word for it, I guess.

Li Zizi was the most interesting speaker of the three, if only for demonstrating what official Marxism looks like in China today. Her talk was on Lenin and how he is viewed by scholars in China today. She said that the scholarly consensus held that the CCP was following in the path set down by Lenin with the N.E.P. I asked her what historical works scholars relied upon in order to make such a comparison since my readings convinced me that no two periods could be more unalike than the USSR in the 1920s and China today. She gave me a blank expression for a moment or two and said that they only went by what Lenin wrote.

As unimpressed as I was with these three presenters, I did take heart in the fact that they and so many other Chinese scholars remain committed to Marxism today as evidenced by the sheer numbers attending the Left Forum in New York City in 2009.

Left Forum 2009 journal (Saturday)

As will be obvious from my take on the very first panel I attended, the Left Forum is as always a mixed bag. But this year there were so many panels that promised to be of extraordinary interest that I made the decision to attend both the Saturday and Sunday sessions. I report on Saturday first.

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10-12am: “Dependency Theory Revisited: Elements for a Critical Interpretation of the New-Developmentism in Latin American Governments”

As a long time dependista, I was curious to see what this was all about. Who in the world would be “revisiting” a theory that was considered distinctly unfashionable in the academy and why? The scheduled speakers were Brazilians-Fernando Corrêa Prado and Monika Ribeiro de Freitas Meireles-studying at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). As the session began, Monika informed us sarcastically that Fernando could not make it because he had recently gotten married and preferred to go on his honeymoon rather than attend the Left Forum.

Monika is a graduate student and unfortunately appeared to be just getting her feet wet around the dependency debate. She gave a presentation using Powerpoint, just like my wife does in her microeconomics course. All in all, I was made to feel like a student and did not enjoy it very much, especially when the teacher was so misinformed.

The “new developmentalism” referred to in the title of the workshop encompassed all of the new left-oriented governments in Latin American ranging from Hugo Chavez on the left to Chile’s Michelle Bachelet and Brazil’s Lula on the right. What they all had in common, according to Monika, was their willingness to promote the class interests of a section of the national bourgeoisie in a kind of neo-Peronism.

I found this use of the term “developmentalism” rather odd since it has always meant a mixture of Walt Rostow type economics internally and free trade treaties externally, such as NAFTA, CAFTA, etc. to me.

She then proceeded to present a survey of dependency theorists, breaking them into two camps, mainstream and Marxist. For those who have some knowledge of the history of this tendency, her inclusion of Raul Prebisch and Fernando Cardoso in the first group and Andre Gunder Frank in the second was to be expected.

What was missing entirely from her calculations was the role of the Robert Brenner influenced theorists in Latin America who blamed Andre Gunder Frank for exactly the sins she attributed to the “developmentalist” governments. If you look at the debate that raged in the pages of Latin American Perspectives in the 1970s and 80s, you will see that Frank and his co-thinkers were accused over and over again of adapting to the national bourgeoisie. You might even say that the reaction against the 1960s dependency theorists was inspired by this passsage from Robert Brenner’s 1977 New Left Review article “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”:

Yet, the failure of Frank and the whole tradition of which he is a part-including Sweezy and Wallerstein among others-to transcend the economic determinist framework of their adversaries, rather than merely turn it upside down, opens the way in turn for the adoption of similarly ill-founded political perspectives. Where the old orthodoxy claimed that the bourgeoisie must oppose the neo-feudalists, Frank said the neo-feudalists were capitalists. Where the old orthodoxy saw development as depending on bourgeois penetration, Frank argued that capitalist development in the core depended upon the development of underdevelopment in the periphery…The consequence is that Frank’s analysis can be used to support political conclusions he would certainly himself oppose.

Thus so long as incorporation into the world market/world division of labour is seen automatically to breed underdevelopment, the logical antidote to capitalist underdevelopment is not socialism, but autarky. So long as capitalism develops merely through squeezing dry the ‘third world’, the primary opponents must be core versus periphery, the cities versus the countryside-not the international proletariat, in alliance with the oppressed people of all countries, versus the bourgeoisie. In fact, the danger here is double-edged: on the one hand, a new opening to the ‘national bourgeoisie’; on the other hand, a false strategy for anti-capitalist revolution.

This is the real antithesis to the “new developmentalism”, not Andre Gunder Frank type dependency theory.

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12-2pm: “Making Sense of the Greek Uprising”

This was worth the price of admission, four Greek Marxist professors sizing up the December uprising.

Costas Panayotakis gave an introduction to the Greek left, which was either critical of the uprising or bypassed by it. As might be expected, the Communist Party was appalled by the destruction of property. The CP generally steers clear of any protests–violent or nonviolent–that it does not directly control and habitually calls its own demonstrations rather than participate in a united front. It has a rival called the Coalition of the Radical Left (commonly known by its Greek abbreviation SYRIZA) that Costas described as Eurocommunist, with the peculiarity of the leader identifying with Chavez’s 21^st century socialism. SYRIZA is closer to the youthful rebels than the CP but is not really part of it.

Andreas Kalyvas began his presentation by applying three categories to the revolt that suggested David Harvey’s influence:

1. Time: 44 cities were affected in 24 hours and the uprising lasted for 3 weeks.

2. Space: rural areas were affected as well.

3. Size: the uprising incorporated the kinds of numbers of participants not seen since 1974.

Next he dealt with some of the unique features of the revolt, starting with the fact that it took place in a liberal democracy and on European soil. But most importantly, it involved a social layer that had only recently become a major player in Greek politics, or perhaps more accurately that had been external to Greek politics: the immigrant community.

Of the 1.5 million immigrants, who were mostly economic victims of Eastern European privatization, 900,000 were undocumented. Of the 300 arrested, half were immigrants. They along with the high school students were the primary foot soldiers of a revolt that has more recently moved in the direction of urban guerrilla warfare attacking police stations and banks which Kalyvas likened to Italy in the 1970s. And, as was the case in Italy, the organized parliamentary left has been bypassed totally.

Peter Bratsis focused on the legitimation crisis that produced the explosion. He explained that relationships between the state and capitalism, peculiar to Greek society, created vulnerabilities that reached a boiling point as Greece became integrated into the European Union’s neoliberal framework.

Apparently, capitalism came rather late to Greece and in the absence of a fully developed capitalist economy the state became a source of employment, particularly for people who had been admitted to the state-funded universities. Until the 1980s, half of all college graduates worked in the public sector. All in all, this arrangement sounded to me a whole lot like Kemalist Turkey.

Under the impact of neoliberal restructuring, the welfare state in Greece has been eroding at a rapid pace. High school students are in the vanguard of resisting these changes, particularly because it affects them personally but also because they are cultural rebels reacting against the rampant commodification taking place. As proof of this, a number of the rioters came from wealthy suburban families who were not directly affected by the neoliberal changes. (This observation came from Neni Panourgia, the speaker who followed Bratsis.)

Stathis Gourgouris introduced a cautionary note, drawing attention to the fact that for the rioters rage played more of a role than politics. Sparked by the cop murder of a high school student in a “bohemian” neighborhood sounding like Athens’s East Village, they moved against the 3 C’s: corruption, cops and commodification.

Gourgouris warned that there was a nihilist streak in the uprising that could not be ignored. It was fueled by a sense that all politics was rotten, including that of the left. He said that it was possible that under certain conditions the movement could shift to the right. But for the time being, it was shaped by three equally important factors: nihilism, spontaneism, and anarchism. During the discussion period, I commented that it sounded like the Argentine piqueteros who also had a fetish against politics. Considering the fact that Greece has powerful anarchist traditions, this outcome might be expected to some extent.

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3-5pm: “Indigenous Mobilization in South America” (cancelled)

I was looking forward to this more than any other event this weekend, since it included Hugo Blanco, the Peruvian Trotskyist who led a guerrilla movement in the 1960s. Blanco is now 74 and in failing health so I wanted to get a chance to hear him speak, especially around the question of indigenous mobilization. I also worked overtime this week to finish scanning Mariategui’s 7 Essays on Peruvian Reality just to be able to announce it to the workshop. Unfortunately, it was cancelled. Why I do not know, although I do worry that it might have something to do with Blanco’s health.

Instead I went to hear Joel Kovel, who I ran into in the hallway just outside the room where Hugo was scheduled to speak. Joel and I spoke briefly about his struggle at Bard and he reported that he had a meeting with Botstein recently to discuss the terms of his firing. It seemed that Botstein was reacting to the pressure mounted by a disgruntled blogosphere and hoped to mollify Kovel in some way, short of course of giving him back his job. Joel revealed to me that he was glad to be free of Bard in some ways. The prospects of returning to this feudal baronage had as much appeal to him as it would for a parolee being invited to return voluntarily to prison.

Joel’s fellow panel members included Barbara Nimri Aziz, the WBAI broadcaster, Adam Shapiro, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, and Alan Goodman, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party who organized the event and served as chairperson.

This was my first opportunity to ever hear an RCP’er speak and it was quite an earful. I was shocked by the boneheaded sectarianism that made groups like the British SWP and the DSP in Australia look like Proyectites by comparison. He started by “preaching to the choir” by telling us about all the bad things that Israel has done. He had nothing good to say about Hamas, whose Islamic fundamentalism was explained in terms of the defeat of the Cultural Revolution that he regarded as one of the greatest revolutionary movements of the past half-century. If Maoism still prevailed in China, people in the Middle East would be reading the Little Red Book rather than the Quran. I am not making this up.

Against my better judgment, I asked Goodman a question during the discussion period. Since Joseph Stalin was part of the RCP’s pantheon, how would he explain USSR support for the creation of the state of Israel? Once my better judgment returned to me, I walked out of the room before I had a chance to endure his response. Although I have little use for www.marxist.com type vanguardism, they are always useful for providing orthodox Marxist politics on matters such as these:

At the beginning of 1947 a very strange coalition had come into being over the Palestinian question — the USA, the USSR and the Zionists. They all supported the partition of Palestine. Of course each one of these had their own specific interests. The USA wanted to push out the old British colonial lion and replace him in the oil rich and strategically important Middle East. As for Stalin, he wanted to use the Jews in Palestine against British imperialism, and to establish a point of support for the Soviet bureaucracy in the Middle East. We also know what Ben-Gurion and his gang wanted a “Great Israel” on both sides of the Jordan or at least encompassing the Sinai peninsula.

We could ask ourselves the question as to whether Stalin had any inkling of a Marxist understanding when he supported Zionism? The answer is, of course, that he did not. His approach was all reduced to playing the old game between Russian and British imperialism for control of this region. Stalin didn’t support any drastic social changes in Palestine and thus a bloody conflict to divide Palestine was absolutely predictable.

5-7pm: Regroupment of the European Left

This too was worth the price of admission since it included Leon Cremieux of the LCR and now the NPA. I brought along my new Flip Video Camera, which is about the size of a digital still camera, to record the event. Alas, the camera’s software refused to compress the video, thus making it unusable. I cannot judge whether buying the Flip was a mistake (it was only $115) but if not for this problem, I can recommend it strongly.

The session was chaired by Sebastian Budgen and also included Cinzia Arruzza from Sinistra Critica in Italy (a leftwing split from Refundazione) and Katja Kipping and Oliver Nachtwey from Die Linke in Germany. It was too bad that my video experiment did not work since the visual contrast between Cremieux and the others was quite striking. Cremieux was in his fifties and described himself as a trade unionist. I don’t know what kind of job he had but he had the hands of a pipe-fitter and a beer gut. Everybody else dressed in black, looked like art students or punk musicians, and was surely under fifty if not under forty. The big surprise was Sebastian Budgen, a rather lofty figure in the world of Marxist journaldom. He must be very bright and of singular determination to have carved out a niche in this world at such an early age. I expected someone older and tweedier, not the Johnny Rotten image he projected.

Cremieux’s talk did not break new ground, although it was interesting to hear. Basically, the LCR decided to launch the NPA because there was massive opposition to capitalism per se rather than some foggy notion of neoliberalism in France. The LCR’s judged that a new party could galvanize all the radical-minded people in France who were fed up with the SP and the CP’s reformist politics. During the discussion period, I asked whether the LCR’s encountered any resistance in their ranks when they proposed something that might seem “liquidationist” in traditional Trotskyist terms. And also whether there would be problems with them interacting with people who had never been members of the LCR. He said that the comrades were not interested in maneuvering behind the backs of such people and understood that the tasks of the class struggle in France dictated such an approach. I was very impressed with his reply.

He was followed by Cinzia Arruzza who reported on the disgusting treachery of Refundazione. I had not been paying much attention to this once promising formation, but apparently it has lost most of its support because many of its leaders have backed the “war on terror” and neoliberal economic policies as part of its coalition deal with the social democrats who now call themselves the Democratic Party of Italy (!!!). Even after losing all its parliamentary seats, the rightwing leaders persist in their shitty politics. Cinzia stressed that once you start cutting deals with the right, you lose all credibility as a leftwing party. Sounds to me like Italy and the U.S. have the same kinds of problems nowadays.

The comrades from Die Linke were proud of having built this promising new party but worried about two things: one, the tendency to believe in neo-Keynesian solutions rather than anti-capitalist struggle that led to total transformation of the system; two, a tendency toward social conservatism attributable to the trade union base in West Germany that was instrumental in launching the party. One hopes that Die Linke does not go down the same road as the Greens in Germany or Refundazione. Perhaps the severity of the economic crisis will help keep the party on the right road.

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Socializing

I am glad that my pre-registration name tag was in large block letters since a couple of my favorite people spotted my name and chatted with me briefly. One was Richard Seymour of Lenin’s Tomb fame who was much more soft-spoken and even shy in person than his flamboyant Internet persona. But that’s true for me as well, I guess. The other was Derrick O’Keefe from Canada who is about Richard’s age and writes for various online publications. I regard both of these youngsters as the cream of the upcoming revolutionary crop and only hope that they can avoid the mistakes of my youth. I know for a fact that Derrick has a very good handle on sectarianism and I expect good things from him in the future. I told Richard that he has an outstanding future in front of him as a Marxist intellectual and was of course happy to tell that to him in person.

A group of us met up at the Monthly Review table after 7pm and went out for drinks. That included my old friend Michael Yates, the irrepressible Sartesian, Kurt Hill, an ex-SWP’er and Bard College graduate like me, and Robbie Laurel Kwan from the Philippines. We chatted about Spanish colonialism in Mexico and the Philippines, working on the railroad, and various other topics while munching on chicken wings and fried mozzarella sticks and drinking beer and whiskey. A fine time was had by all.

Tomorrow I report on Sunday’s sessions.

The Democratic Socialist Perspective’s dirty laundry

Last year there was a split in the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) in Australia, a group that was originally modeled after the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. but went its own way rather than drinking the SWP’s workerist Kool Aid in the 1980s. The DSP’s break with sectarianism was not total, however. To this day it retains a belief that the writings of SWP founder James P. Cannon remain valid even though there are clear indications that the SWP’s batty turn in the 1980s was a natural outcome of Cannon’s own wrongheaded understanding of Leninism. An early symptom was the remarks of Morris Stein, Cannon’s chief lieutenant, to the party convention in 1948:

We are monopolists in the field of politics. We can’t stand any competition. We can tolerate no rivals. The working class, to make the revolution can do it only through one party and one program. This is the lesson of the Russian Revolution. That is the lesson of all history since the October Revolution. Isn’t that a fact? This is why we are out to destroy every single party in the field that makes any pretense of being a working-class revolutionary party. Ours is the only correct program that can lead to revolution. Everything else is deception, treachery. We are monopolists in politics and we operate like monopolists.

But if you are going to break with this kind of madness, you have to go all the way. Unfortunately, the DSP’s problems in the Socialist Alliance reflect its failure to make a clean break with sectarianism. Like the RESPECT Party in Great Britain, the Socialist Alliance was hampered by a contradiction between the British SWP’s own narrow goals and those of the broader left. While it was careful not to advertise its goals, the DSP clearly had the intention of using the Socialist Alliance to achieve hegemony on the Australian left. Perhaps they were not even fully conscious of this goal, but it was almost predetermined so long as you embrace the Cannonite party-building model.

Apparently, the Socialist Alliance project has exhausted itself according to an open letter being circulated by a new group on the Australian left called the Revolutionary Socialist Party that is made up of expelled members of the DSP that had operated as the Leninist Party Faction (this nomenclature is a tip-off as to their hardnosed orientation). It seems that these comrades were never comfortable with even a half-hearted attempt to break with sectarianism. They revolted against what they perceived as a “liquidationist” trend in the DSP and perhaps longed for a return to more of a “we are monopolists” approach.

As gadflies, they are doing a rather good job. In asking “What has happened to the Socialist Alliance“, they air the dirty laundry:

Putting a positive face on the SA these days is not easy. Nichols mentions as a “positive advance” the fact that “lazy hack journalists” sometimes report that the SA is the organiser of events that in fact it hasn’t organised. Despite this help from the commercial media, he has to admit that the SA’s membership has “shrunk quite seriously”. He reported that its membership during 2008 dropped by 282 – not counting whatever the decline may have been in Western Australia, which apparently couldn’t be bothered to send statistics to Nichols.

More telling than any numbers is the message from a DSP comrade in Perth, which Nichols quotes: “I don’t invite people to join Socialist Alliance now, because what can we offer them?” Nichols elaborates the meaning of the Perth comment: “You give us money, and we won’t ring you, we won’t organise you, we won’t keep you up to date with our activity”.

The open letter also calls attention to the growth of Socialist Alternative, a state capitalist group ideologically that is independent of the worldwide formation headed by the British SWP and that represents something like Avis to the DSP’s Hertz:

Nichols admits, belatedly, that the DSP’s preoccupation with the SA has opened the field for Socialist Alternative (SAlt) to gain a hearing from radicalising young people. When the DSP minority pointed that out in 2005 and later, we were accused of wanting to imitate SAlt’s sectarianism. This section of Nichols’ report, bearing the subhead “The costs of building the Socialist Alliance”, makes some devastating confessions. SAlt, says Nichols, can go to a Gaza demo, distribute leaflets on the “socialist view” of what is happening, get five people to come to a discussion and recruit one of them. As for DSP-SA? “Our tendency has not been able to match that, and Socialist Alternative will continue to grow while we fail to do so.” The “broad” SA can’t recruit even one would-be socialist out of a pro-Palestinian demonstration. Did the old “narrow” DSP find this such an obstacle?

Not wanting to take sides in this dispute particularly, I am sympathetic to the charge that the comrades wanted to “imitate SAlt’s sectarianism”. As I have tried to point out in a critique of this group’s party-building ideas, it rests on a schematic understanding of Leninism that finds its most virulent expression in Morris Stein’s 1948 braggadocio.

While it is arguably true that groups like the RSP and SAlt are better equipped to “recruit” young radicals than the DSP, one really must ask the question whether recruitment is the right way to go about things. Recruitment suggests a process of adding raw material that can be shaped into finished products like the Marines winning over an 18 year old at an electronic games arcade and turning him or her into a cold-blooded killer. Maybe it is best to drop this idea altogether and think more broadly about helping to build a party based on a very broad net that can grow by the hundreds and thousands rather than by ones and twos-like the NPA in France.

The British SWP doesn’t quite know what to make of the NPA, on one hand hailing its success while fretting over its seeming inability to confront the “reformists”. To its credit, the DSP has been publicizing the work of the NPA with nary a quibble. One hopes that they might even consider following their example and move toward building a broad anti-capitalist political party in Australia. Considering the economic and environmental crisis taking place there, the prospects would be most auspicious.

Apparently, there is some discussion in the DSP for moving in that direction. The open letter states:

During the discussion prior to the 2006 DSP congress, the minority pointed out that there were three distinct views within the majority. A group of minority comrades from Melbourne wrote in the Activist in December 2005: “It is clear now … that the majority actually represents at least three distinct tendencies. The minimalist interpretation integrates into its perspective those elements of the resolution that emphasise the practical importance of rebuilding the DSP … The maximalist tendency can’t let go of the earlier hopes we had for SA. It has no practical perspectives for how to move forward but a complete reluctance to accept the conclusions … about the conditions that would be necessary for us to re-launch SA as a new party project. At its best this tendency is banking on a major upswing in the mass movement … to provide a new basis for building SA as a new left party. At its worst, this tendency errs toward SA as a permanent tactic …”

“The third tendency in the majority is a pragmatic one, represented by the report given to the [October 2005] NC itself, and fundamentally concerned with keeping the SA experiment going. This is why the report consisted of an emphasis on specific measures to keep the DSP afloat, and left the development of SA priorities to the pragmatism of the branches …”

Although I am obviously sympathetic toward the “maximalist” tendency, I somehow doubt that the Socialist Alliance is the proper vehicle for moving forward. I am afraid that it has become tainted by the record of the DSP in the past few years in the same way that RESPECT was tainted by the British SWP until a split occurred. I simply do not know enough about Australian politics to make recommendations about, for example, whether the Green Party is a better vehicle and frankly, even if I did, I would not give advice since that would smack too much of Trotsky in Coyoacán. As much of an admirer as I am of Trotsky’s Marxism, I find the advice from afar business to be self-defeating in the long run.

Alex Callinicos reacts to the NPA

The latest issue of International Socialism, a quarterly journal of the Socialist Workers Party in Great Britain, contains Alex Callinicos’s Revolutionary paths: a reply to Panos Garganas and François Sabado.

In the previous issue, Sabado-a member of the NPA in France-had made a number of points in an article about party-building that I am fundamentally in agreement with, especially this:

So in what respect does the new party constitute a change compared to the LCR? It must be a party that is broader than the LCR; a party that does not incorporate the entire history of Trotskyism and that has the ambition of making possible new revolutionary syntheses; a party that is not reduced to the unity of revolutionaries; a party in dialogue with millions of workers and young people; a party that translates its fundamental programmatic references into popular explanations, agitation and formulas. From this point of view, the campaigns of Olivier Besancenot constitute a formidable starting point. It must also be a party that is capable of conducting wide-ranging debates on the fundamental questions which affect society: the crisis of capitalism, global warming, bioethics, etc; a party of activists and adherents, which makes it possible to integrate thousands of young people and workers with their social and political experience, preserving their links with the backgrounds they come from; a pluralist party that brings together a whole series of anti_capitalist currents.

We do not want a second LCR or an enlarged and broader version of the LCR. To make a success of the gamble we are taking, the new party must represent a new political reality, following in the tradition of the revolutionary movement and contributing to inventing the revolutions and the socialism of the 21st century.

Panos Garganas is a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in Greece, a member of the international state capitalist tendency that the British SWP effectively leads. His article summarized the kind of opposition mounted by the state capitalists toward the NPA initiative, which I would liken to a neurotic’s fear of a loss of control-or worse, General Jack D. Ripper’s feelings about fluoride in “Doctor Strangelove”, the fluoride in this case being non-revolutionary ideology:

The mistake that the LCR may make is if they liquidate their organisation once these conditions are met. Even within such a “sharper” radical left it is necessary to maintain revolutionary organisation as a source of education and political initiatives that pushes the rest of the left forward. Indeed a dissolution of the LCR would be a huge concession to the false pluralism that flattens all traditions within the radical left to the same level. The idea that the disputes between left reformists, anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists or Stalinists all belong to the past and that the radical left can make a fresh start by wiping out these “ideological” differences and moving on with current political debates has more to do with liberalism than Marxism. The Italian left has paid a huge price because such ideas predominated in Rifondazione. We should urge the comrades of the LCR not to go for a repeat.

Perhaps better insulated from non-revolutionary germs than the French Trotskyists, Garganas offers up an approach that sounds suspiciously like the one that they have taken:

Throughout the 35 years since the collapse of the Greek Junta the left to the left of these parliamentary parties has existed as a milieu that was powerful enough to attract not one but two mass breakaways from the youth organisations of reformism: the Eurocommunist youth broke en masse to the left in 1979 and the CP youth did the same in 1989, forming the NAR. It is within this context that SEK, our revolutionary socialist organisation, has been trying to regroup the radical left in a way that avoids the twin dangers we are discussing.

In 2007 SEK joined the United Anti-capitalist Left (Enantia) along with four other organisations, including the Greek sister organisation of LCR. Now Enantia is in the process of discussions over a united intervention with the left alliance, Mera, which is led by NAR. The coming months may see a new anti-capitalist left emerge not only in France but in Greece too.

I wish Garganas and his comrades well, but would only urge them to avoid the mistakes made by the British SWP in Respect, mistakes that reflect “vanguardist” thinking although it is doubtful that they understand that this has been a problem. Callinicos’s article continues along the same anxious trajectory set out by his comrade Garganas.

What is obvious from the outset is Callinicos’s tendency to think in terms of categories, a habit no doubt associated with decades spent in the academy. He lays out a kind of political taxonomy:

The most important point to emerge from the discussion is that the general term “radical left formations” encapsulates two quite different types of organisation, even though they are both a product of the radicalisation of the past decade. There are those cases where the level of class struggle and the political traditions of the left make it possible for revolutionary Marxists to unite with others who regard themselves as revolutionaries in new, bigger formations. So far the only example where this has come to fruition is the NPA, whose founding principles, as we shall see below, are in a broad sense revolutionary. Then there are other cases in which the most important break is by forces that reject social liberalism but have not broken with overt reformism-Die Linke in Germany, the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) in Italy under both its old and its new leadership, Synaspismos in Greece and some elements in the Left Bloc in Portugal.

So you get the sense from reading this that there is a kind of evolutionary process, with groups like the British SWP at the top of the totem pole being the most advanced. At the bottom of the totem pole is out and out reformist formations like the SP’s and the CP’s. Then you have groups in the middle with traits inherited from the top and the bottom. Die Linke and Rifundazione are closer to the bottom, while the NPA is closer to the top insofar as its founding principles are in a “broad sense” revolutionary, as opposed to being revolutionary in a presumably “narrow sense” like the SWP. As a veteran revolutionary, I’d go with broad any day of the week since I have seen narrow lead to ruin over and over again.

You can see how obsessed Callinicos remains with “impurity”, despite the magnanimous tip of the hat to the NPA, by this:

It remains the case, however, that these parties [NPA] will still have to grapple with the problem of reformism. One of the main lessons of the history of the workers’ movement is that the development of the class struggle, by drawing new layers of workers into class-conscious activity, will tend to expand the base of reformist politics, since seeking to change the existing system seems, initially at least, an attractive halfway house between passive acquiescence in the status quo and outright revolution.

Don’t you love that bit about a halfway house? It suggests that impure, middle-of-the-totem pole formations like the NPA are also in some sense like the institutionalized living arrangements for junkies, prisoners, or the mentally retarded while they become accustomed to living in normal society. And by calling it “attractive”, you can see all the enlightened attempts to make such institutions palatable, like potted plants, shag rugs and travel posters on the wall. Lovely.

To illustrate his point, Callinicos takes his reader through a tour of revolutionary history spanning continents and centuries:

Thus if we consider the great revolutionary experiences of the past century, the Russian working class, after the overthrow of Tsarism, gravitated first to the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, not the Bolsheviks. In Germany, thanks to the ingrained experience of reformism and the relative weakness of the far left, it was the Social Democrats and the Independent Socialists who were the first main beneficiaries of the revolution of November 1918. Nor are these experiences confined to the imperialist countries. Consider how the Brazilian Workers Party, which Sabado’s comrades in the Fourth International helped to build in the belief that it was a non-reformist organisation, has become, under the Lula presidency, a pillar of social liberalism.

While it would take far too much time and space to fully refute the faulty logic and poor grasp of the facts in the assertions above, we can state first of all that there was not much difference politically between the Bolsheviks and their rivals in the early days of the Russian Revolution, as evidenced by Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin’s opposition to the April Theses. In fact, if Lenin had died in a train wreck en route to the Finland Station, it is doubtful whether there would have been an October revolution. This does not even address the question of the relevance of 1917 to politics in West Europe today, in which there is no massive working-class movement poised to take state power. As we used to say in the American SWP, revolutionary politics is a bit like pregnancy. If you don’t know whether you are in the 3rd month or the 9th month, you will likely end up with an abortion. The American SWP sadly confirmed this through their own praxis since the 1980s until now.

But more importantly, even if you have absorbed the “lessons of history” and the need for a revolutionary party, what assurances do you have that such a party must be built on the basis of the British SWP, which implicitly defines itself as an alternative to the “halfway houses” of what really amounts to what Trotsky called “centrism”.

Although the term “centrism” is never mentioned, as far as I know, in Callinicos and company’s polemics, there is a strong sense that they are acting as if they were Leon Trotsky trying to straighten out the POUM, or other organizations associated with what was once called the Second and a Half International. The assumption has always been that a rock-solid, germ-resistant program can form the foundation of a revolutionary party-in the case of the British SWP amounting to a proper grasp of state capitalist theory. My conclusion, however, is that the search for such a prophylactic program leads to sect-formation, not revolutions. All credit is due to the NPA for finally dumping this methodology.

Callinicos also-rather unwisely in my estimation-continues to defend the “united front” electoral perspective that led to the disaster in Respect:

But a radical left party is like a united front of the classical kind in that it brings together politically heterogeneous forces. This is partly a consequence of the relatively open character of such parties’ programmes, which generally finesse the alternatives of reform or revolution (though this not true of the NPA). More profoundly, however, it reflects the character of a period in which it is possible to draw people from a reformist background into parties of the radical left where revolutionaries play an important role. The programmatic openness (what Sabado would call the “incomplete strategic delimitation”) of these parties reflects the recognition that it would be a mistake to make membership conditional on breaking with reformism. This stance is correct, but the price is a degree of political heterogeneity.

Callinicos continues to miss the point. United fronts were conceived by Lenin and Trotsky as temporary partnerships between Communists and non-Communist workers parties to participate in actions around specific goals, such as strike support, opposing fascist violence, etc. It was never conceived as a party-building initiative. Most importantly for the case of Respect, it is meaningless to describe the goals of non-SWP members (except for self-avowed Marxists such as Andy Newman et al) as “reformist”, especially when it comes to the rank-and-file Muslim member. Reformism is an ideology that is associated with a rather hardened, if not calcified, veteran of the socialist movement.

For example, Max Shachtman and Jay Lovestone in the early 1960s were reformists. But a Muslim cabdriver or shopkeeper who joins Respect on the basis that the party is standing up to Islamophobia, war and social injustice is not a “reformist” even if he is unlikely to have ever read the Communist Manifesto, or having read it, agree with its main tenets. The British SWP should have tried to figure out a way to work in a milieu where such people are in the majority, but with their Manichean divisions between “revolutionary” and “reformist”, I doubt that this would have been possible even with generous amounts of time spent in sensitivity training.

What kind of party do we need?

I received a query prompted by my annotated Lenin bibliography:

I read with interest your views on the type of new party needed.

I have a few questions I hope you can answer.

What role if any do you see for party press? Traditional newspaper? If the party doesn’t take positions on historical questions what does it fill its press with? What does it do when confronted with the issues of Stalin, Mao, etc.? How would the party raise funds? What would be the practical, day-to-day work of its members?

Do you consider this model valid solely in the United States?

Do you see a need for a new international? If so, what kind of body do you see and how would it come about?

Your attention is appreciated.

1. On the party press:

There will always be a need for printed material, but it is becoming clearer day by day that the epoch of the printed newspaper is coming to an end. The Internet is not only more economical; it also provides a lot more flexibility than the traditional newspaper. For example, it eliminates the need to have writers occupying the same physical office space. With the ever-increasing sophistication of tools like Skype, it will make online editorial meetings more feasible.

I do think there is a need for party newspapers to take up historical questions, such as Stalin versus Trotsky, but they are best reserved for the back pages. I think that Solidarity, for all its other faults, figured this out pretty well in their founding statement:

There is another, more subtle error which has exacerbated the tendency toward splintering of the revolutionary left.  We believe that it is a mistake today to organize revolutionary groups around precise theories of the Russian revolution.  We want to be clear about what this means.

Precision, clarity and rigor are the highest of virtues in developing theory and historical analysis; however, lines of political demarcation do not flow in a mechanical and linear way from differences of theoretical interpretation.  Such an approach leads to unnecessary hothoused debates on issues where long-term discussion would be more in order.  It also contributes to the dynamics of factionalism and splits, which in any case have been too high owing to our history of misassessing the political realities of our own society.

In seeking to overcome this negative legacy, our new organization brings together currents and individuals with a variety of views on theoretical and historical questions, from the interpretation of the Russian Revolution and its leadership to the struggle in Central America today.  We will carry on discussion and mutual education, making no public pretense of monolithism and seeking to learn from each other’s views.

2. How would the party raise funds

Leaving aside the technical questions of using something like Paypal, I think the most important element will be reconfiguring membership financial obligations in line with relaxed norms. My experience in the SWP, and I suppose it is true for other “democratic centralist” formations although probably to a lesser degree, is that a tightly disciplined membership shelling out up to 60 dollars a week is the wrong way to go. It begins to take on the dimensions of a religious sect tithing its members. It would be far better to make it easier for ordinary people with families and debt to join if party dues were in line with the average membership organization. You would make up for a smaller per capita donation with increased membership. Instead of having 400 people paying 40 dollars a week, as like the case with the SWP today, you would have 4000 people paying 10 dollars a week. When you do the math, you realize that there would be more money coming in after all.

3. Day-to-day work

The tendency today for “democratic centralist” organizations is to have a national convention that outlines tasks for “the coming period” as we used to put it. I no longer think that this is a valid approach. A revolutionary party must emerge out of the mass movement, which means accepting activists on their own terms rather than looking at party members as chess pieces to be moved around on a board. For example, if a new party was formed in the next year or so under the impact of a radicalization induced by financial crisis, it should open its doors to people who have been involved in anti-foreclosure movements, trade union activists fighting to implement EFCA (if it can get passed despite the lukewarm support of the DP), immigrant rights activists, etc. In other words, whatever people are currently doing they should continue to do. This is the only way that the party can accurately reflect the existing mass movement and not try to substitute it with its own ready-made solutions. The main need for a revolutionary party is to coordinate all those struggling against capitalism on a class struggle basis. Fundamentally, this was the orientation laid out by Lenin in “What is to be done” and remains valid today.

4. Is this a US-only model

I don’t think so. In fact, as I have pointed out, my ideas were borrowed from Peter Camejo who arrived at them through a study of the Cuban revolutionary movement, as well as the FSLN and FMLN during the 1980s. I would urge you to look at Roger Burbach and Orlando Nunez’s “Fire in the Americas: Forging a Revolutionary Age”, a book that is now out of print but fairly easy to get your hands on. (Amazon.com has a couple of used copies.) Burbach, who like Peter had lived in Nicaragua, tried to imagine what a Sandinista-type party would look like in the U.S. I understand that the FSLN of today is not the party it was in the 1980s, but a study of Burbach’s book as well as the FSLN of that period is worthwhile.

5. On a new international

I think a new international will be very useful, but I don’t think that the pyramid structure of the Third or Fourth Internationals will be very useful. Although the Marxism mailing list I moderate is certainly not the embryo of a new international, I and just about every other subscriber greatly value having exchanges between comrades from every corner of the world.

Finally, although I am not really in the business of prescribing in any kind of detail what a revolutionary organization should look like, I did take a stab at a kind of “what if” exercise in which the SWP shifted toward the kind of paradigm I favor. It is written as a speech that party leader Jack Barnes would have given to an SWP convention in 1974:

The Speech that Jack Barnes Should Have Given in 1974

Comrades, 1974 is a year which in some ways marks the end of an era. The recent victory of the Vietnamese people against imperialism and of women seeking the right to safe and legal abortion are culminations of a decade of struggle. That struggle has proved decisive in increasing both the size and influence of the Trotskyist movement as our cadre threw their energy into building the antiwar and feminist movements. Now that we are close to 2,000 in number and have branches in every major city in the US, it is necessary to take stock of our role within the left and our prospects for the future.

In this report I want to lay out some radical new departures for the party that take into account both our growing influence and the changing political framework. Since they represent such a change from the way we have seen ourselves historically, I am not asking that we take a vote at this convention but urge all branches to convene special discussions throughout the year until the next convention when a vote will be taken. I am also proposing in line with the spirit of this new orientation that non-party individuals and organizations be invited to participate in them.

A) THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT

While our political work of the 1960s was a necessary “detour” from the historical main highway of the socialist movement, it is high time that we began to reorient ourselves. There are increasing signs that the labor movement is beginning to reject the class collaborationist practices of the Meany years. For example, just 4 short years ago in 1970, various Teamsters locals rejected a contract settlement agreed to by their president Frank Fitzsimmons and the trucking industry. They expected a $3.00 per hour raise but the contract settled for only $1.10. The rank and file went out on a wildcat strike that Fitzsimmons and the mainstream press denounced. Fitzsimmons probably had the student revolt on his mind, since he claimed that “Communists” were behind the teamster wild-cat strike. Nobody took this sort of red-baiting to heart anymore. The burly truck-drivers involved in the strike were the unlikeliest “Communists” one could imagine. The trucking industry prevailed upon President Richard Nixon to intercede in the strike at the beginning of May, but the student rebellion against the invasion of Cambodia intervened. The antiwar movement and the war itself had stretched the US military thin. National guardsmen who had been protecting scab truck- drivers occupied the Kent State campuses where they shot five students protesting the war. In clear defiance of the stereotype of American workers, wildcat strikers in Los Angeles regarded student antiwar protesters as allies and invited them to join teamster picket lines. The wildcat strikes eventually wound down, but angry rank and file teamsters started the first national reform organization called Teamsters United Rank and File (TURF).

It is very important for every branch to investigate opportunities such as these and to invite comrades to look into the possibility of taking jobs in those industries where such political opportunities exist. What will not happen, however, is a general turn toward industry that many small Marxist groups made in the 1960s in an effort to purify themselves. Our work in the trade unions is not an attempt to “cleanse” the party but rather to participate in the class struggle which takes many different forms. We are quite sure that when comrades who have begun to do this kind of exciting work and report back to the branches that we will see others anxious to join in.

B) THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

We simply have to stop observing this movement from the sidelines. There is a tendency on the left to judge it by the traditional middle-class organizations such as the Audubon Club. There are already signs of a radicalization among many of the younger activists who believe that capitalism is at the root of air and water pollution, etc. Since the father of the modern environmental movement is an outspoken Marxist, there is no reason why we should feel like outsiders. Our cadre have to join the various groups that are springing up everywhere and pitch in to build them, just as we built the antiwar and feminist groups. If activists have problems with the record of socialism on the environment based on the mixed record of the USSR, we have to explain that there were alternatives. We should point to initiatives in the early Soviet Union when Lenin endorsed vast nature preserves on a scale never seen in industrialized societies before. In general we have to be the best builders of a new ecosocialist movement and not succumb to the sort of sectarian sneering that characterizes other left groups who regard green activists as the enemy.

C) THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST MOVEMENT

This will strike many comrades as controversial, but I want to propose that we probably were mistaken when stood apart from all the various pro-NLF committees that were doing material aid and educational work. We characterized them as ultraleft, whereas in reality those activists who decided to actually identify with the Vietnamese liberation movement were exactly the kind that we want to hook up with. In the United States today there are thousands of activists organized in committees around the country who are campaigning on a similar basis for freedom for the Portuguese colonies in Africa, against neo-colonialism in Latin America, etc. Nearly all of them are Marxist. Their goals and ours are identical. While we have had a tendency to look down our noses at them because many of the insurgencies they were supporting were not Trotskyist, we have to get over that. For us to continue to regard the revolutionary movement in a Manichean fashion where the Trotskyists are the good forces and everybody else is evil is an obstacle not only to our own growth, but the success of the revolutionary movement overall. This leads me to the next point.

D) RELATIONS WITH THE REST OF THE LEFT

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

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

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

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

This new sense of openness to other groups on the left has organizational consequences that I will now outline.

E) REDEFINING OUR ORGANIZATIONAL PRINCIPLES

Much of our understanding of “democratic centralism” has been shaped by James P. Cannon’s writings. Although the notion of 500 to 1500 people united ideologically around a homogenous program has a lot to recommend itself, it can only go so far in building a revolutionary party. This was Cannon’s contribution. He showed how a small band of cadre dedicated to Trotsky’s critique of Stalin could emerge as a serious force on the American left.

Although this will sound like heresy to most of you, I want to propose that Cannon’s writings are a roadblock to further growth, especially in a period when Stalinism is not a hegemonic force. In reality, Lenin’s goal was to unite Russian Marxism, which existed in scattered circles. Our goal should be identical. Despite our commitment to Trotsky’s theories, we are not interested in constructing a mass Trotskyist movement. That would be self-defeating. Many people who are committed to Marxism are not necessarily committed to Trotsky’s analysis of the Spanish Civil War, WWII, etc. We should take the same attitude that Lenin took toward the Russian left at the turn of the century. We should serve as a catalyst for uniting Marxists on a national basis.

Are we afraid to function in a common organization with Castroists, partisans of the Chinese Revolution, independent Marxists of one sort or another? Not at all. We should not put a barrier in the way of unity with the tens of thousands of Marxists in the United States, many who hold leading positions in the trade union and other mass movements. The only unity that interests us is the broad unity of the working people and their allies around class struggle principles. Our disagreements over historical and international questions can be worked out in a leisurely fashion in the party press. In fact we would encourage public debates over how to interpret such questions in our press, since they can make us even more attractive to people investigating which group to join. It is natural that you would want to join a group with a lively internal life.

This question of ‘democratic centralism’ has to be thoroughly reviewed. Although the Militant will be running a series of articles on “Lenin in Context” this year, which explores the ways in which this term was understood by the Bolsheviks and then transformed by his epigones, we can state with some assuredness right now that it was intended to govern the actions of party members and not their thoughts. The Bolshevik Party, once it voted on a strike, demonstration, etc., expected party members to function under the discipline of the party to build such actions. It never intended to discipline party members to defend the same political analysis in public. We know, for example, that there are different interpretations of Vietnamese Communism in our party. We should not expect party members to keep their views secret if they are in the minority. This is not only unnatural–it leads to cult thinking.

F) CONCLUSION

As many of these proposals seem radically different from the principles we’ve operated on in the past, I want to make sure that all disagreements–especially from older cadre who worked side by side with James P. Cannon–are given proper consideration. The last thing we want is to railroad the party into accepting this new orientation. Since a revolution can only be made by the conscious intervention of the exploited and oppressed masses into the historical process, its party must encourage the greatest expression of conscious political decision-making. There are no shortcuts to a revolution. And there are no shortcuts to building a revolutionary party.

The Leninist Party: an annotated bibliography

Last week I received this request:

Louis,

I want to ask you a favor….

I am engaged on a major writing project criticizing the rigid model of “leninist vanguard party” that was established (and mythologized) in the 1920s in the comintern. And (obviously) it is part of a larger project of conceiving of new forms of communist organization for now.

I’m well aware that this whole issue has been close to your heart…. so i want to ask you a favor:

Can you point me toward all your writings and explorations of this? Can you suggest what other writings I should give a close study? Are there valuable books demythologizing the Cominterns “bolshevization” campaign? The Zinoviev decisions of universal party formation? etc.?

Where are creative writings on the other possible forms and conceptions of communist organization?

I’m hoping that the names of works are at the tip of your tongue — so that it won’t be a lot of work to share them with me.

Thanks (in advance) for your help and advice.

This is a preface to the list of electronic and print resources below that might help put my response to this request in context.

To start with, I should begin by stating that my interest in Lenin’s party-building concepts is completely separate from what have been called “programmatic” questions. For example, I agree with perhaps 90 percent of what the Socialist Workers Party in Great Britain or the Democratic Socialist Perspective in Australia have written about ecology, the war in Iraq, the labor movement, etc. But I have sharp differences with them on organizational questions. When I first joined the Trotskyist movement in 1967, I was told that political and organizational questions cannot be separated. I no longer believe that.

In particular, I believe that unless revolutionaries really get to the bottom of what Lenin was trying to do when he built the Bolshevik Party they will continue to end up with sectarian formations no matter their best intentions. In my opinion, the following set of overlapping assumptions that “Leninists” share today have little to do with the way that the Bolshevik party functioned historically:

1. Democratic centralism must include defense of the party’s analysis of political questions in public as well as its discipline in actions such as demonstrations, strikes, votes in parliament, etc.

2. Party members must avoid disagreeing with each other in the mass movement. In the labor movement and the social movements, the party must speak with a single voice.

3. Debates in the party must be internal. Prior to conventions, party members have the freedom to submit resolutions that go against the current party line but once the convention is over, the debate ends as well.

4. Violations of these “norms” must be punished by expulsion.

5. Deep political differences reflect different class orientations. The Leninist party is subject to class pressures from outside society and must periodically purge elements that have caved in to petty bourgeois prejudices.

This bibliography is organized in chronological order roughly, but it also follows a certain conceptual framework since my thinking has naturally evolved over the years. For example, in the very first article I ever wrote on organizational questions I referred to the ANC and the Workers Party positively. History has of course rendered its unfavorable judgment on these two parties, at least from the standpoint of Marxism.

1) Peter Camejo’s “Against Sectarianism“

In 1983 I became increasingly concerned about the SWP’s abstention from the Central American solidarity movement and began asking current members and ex-members like myself what was going on. Librarian union leader Ray Markey, who was still in the party but on his way out, sent me a copy of Peter’s article “Against Sectarianism” that had a major impact on my thinking about these questions. Although Peter was focusing on the SWP’s workerism, much of what he wrote has a general application.

2. Lenin in Context

In 1995, on the original Marxism list operated by the Spoons Collective, John Plant, a British Trotskyist who belonged to no party as far as I know, asked whether Lenin’s party-building concepts were still viable. This led me to post a series of articles that included the favorable reference to the ANC and the Workers Party. Except for the deletion of this reference, nothing has changed.

3. Three important books

In writing the article above, I found Lenin’s “What is to be Done” very useful but two books on Lenin helped me sharpen my analysis. One is Neil Harding’s “Lenin’s Political Thought” that received the Isaac Deutscher prize in 1981. The other is Paul LeBlanc’s “Lenin and the Revolutionary Party” that was written in 1993. Harding’s book, alas, is out of print but Paul’s is now available in paperback. Harding’s book was a scholarly effort to understand Lenin in his historical setting in the same spirit as Lars Lih’s recently published “Lenin Rediscovered“, a study of “What is to be Done”. Although I have not read Lih’s book, it is consistent with Harding’s analysis that “democratic centralism” and “vanguard” were not innovations by Lenin but concepts that he borrowed from Western European social democracy. Paul wrote his book for pretty much the same reason Peter wrote “Against Sectarianism” and I began writing about party-building questions. It was an attempt to diagnose the degeneration of the SWP into a workerist sect. George Breitman, a long-time SWP leader who had been expelled with LeBlanc from the SWP, pretty much commissioned Paul to write the book. They were grappling with the problem of what went wrong. Although I found much useful information in Paul’s book, it did not really go to the roots of the SWP’s collapse. He and Breitman pinned their hopes on a return to the party-building norms that were in place under SWP founder James P. Cannon and his successor Farrell Dobbs but I had come to believe that it was these “norms” that sank the SWP. This was the focus of my next article below.

4. The Comintern and the German Communist Party

In August of 1998, I began writing a series of articles on Marxmail, which had been launched in May of that year, about the origins of Zinovievism, a term I coined to describe the kind of mechanical “democratic centralism” that was accepted by virtually all self-styled Leninist organizations whether Maoist, Trotskyist or Stalinist. I used that term since the organizational principles were the product of the 1924 “Bolshevization” Congress of the Comintern which adopted a proposal by Zinoviev to launch parties using the schemas I alluded to in my preface. I found Werner T. Angress’s 1963 “Stillborn Revolution, the Communist Bid for Power in Germany, 1921-1923” very useful as background material but it does not really address the organizational problems that were of interest to me.

5. The Cochranites

Not long after Marxmail was launched, someone named Sol Dollinger became a subscriber. The name rang a bell. I remembered that Genora Dollinger was a leader of the woman’s auxiliary in the Flint Sit Down strikes of 1938 and I asked if he was related. It turned out that this was his wife who had died in 1995. I also learned that the two were very involved with a non-sectarian initiative called the American Socialist Union that had split with the SWP in 1953 because of objections similar to those that Camejo and I had raised. Sol put me in contact with Cynthia Cochran, the widow of Bert Cochran who led the ASU with Harry Braverman, who would eventually join Monthly Review after the ASU folded in 1959. I scanned articles from their magazine American Socialist which can be read here.  I also made available a number of documents related to the Socialist Union that deal with party-building questions including Bert Cochran’s “Our Orientation” that is of key importance to me.  Another document worth reading is my own on “The Cochranite Legacy” that was presented to a conference on American Trotskyism organized by Paul LeBlanc in 2000.

6. Hal Draper

Around the time I began writing about Leninism on the Internet, I discovered Hal Draper’s writings. Like Bert Cochran and Harry Braverman, this veteran of the Trotskyist movement in its Shachtmanite flavor had rethought many of the same questions. I recommend the following:

1971 – Toward a New Beginning – On Another Road: The Alternative to the Micro-Sect

1973 – Anatomy of the Micro-Sect

1990 – The Myth of Lenin’s “Concept of The Party”

7. Critiques of the DSP, Socialist Alternative, and the British SWP

In the most recent past I have tried without much success to persuade the Australian DSP that they were going about things in the wrong way. I suppose if Peter Camejo could not penetrate through their thick wall of “Leninist” orthodoxy, there was not much I could do. Peter wrote a superb article in 1995 titled “Return to Materialism“ that like “Against Sectarianism” has general interest even though it was offered as advice to the DSP. My own advice was proffered in an article titled A debate with Links over the revolutionary party. The comrades don’t appreciate my advice but I will continue to offer it when the need arises. Socialist Alternative is a “state capitalist” formation in Australia that is sort of Avis to the DSP’s Hertz. Although they will have none of my ideas on party-building either, they at least took the trouble to publish my critique of the orthodoxy contained in an article by SA leader Mick Armstrong.  It is a useful summary of my views on “Zinovievism”. Finally, as many of you know, the British SWP has been going through a crisis that I view as rooted in “Zinovievist” misconceptions, although they obviously would not see it this way. The articles can be found on my Columbia web page on organizational problems of the revolutionary movement, along with a number of other articles not mentioned in this piece.

In reply to a comrade

The day before yesterday I received this email:

Hi Louis,

The longer that I am on the Marxism list the more that I find that we only disagree when it comes to the big organizational question. I see you defending the proper analysis on so many issues that I felt I had to take a very close at this organizational issue.

Given the recent developments in Italy, England and France this might be the foremost issue (for Marxists in/around the FI or non-stalinist marxists) of our time. Obviously we have a wealth of documentation detailing the debates in recent times (Callinicos, Sabad, etc), but I am interested in perspectives from the early 20th century to round this out. You often refer to Zinoviev as the originator of these views, and I was wondering if you know of anyone who called him on it in those days, or debated him? Basically, was there anyone else who put forward a different viewpoint? Also, how do you feel about the SWP entering and leaving the SP (I know it was before the SWP was formed) back in the 1930s? Would you criticize that move in the same vein as how you did with SWP (Britain) in Respect? Also, how do/did you feel about the Black Panthers, who purported to be a vanguard party as well but seem to have worked well with other groups better than most sectarian trotskyist groups of today?

I have read your blog posts on these issues to make sure I didn’t ask you something you’ve already answered, but if I somehow missed an answer I apologize. If you only have the time to answer one question I think my question on Zinoviev is the most important to me. Thanks for your perspective.

Since it would have required a fair amount of time and energy to prepare a reply and since the questions raised would be of general interest to Marxists, my correspondent gave me permission to answer him publicly.

To start with, nobody challenged Zinoviev’s organizational ideas on either side of the Stalin-Trotsky debate. In the 1920s and 30s, Trotsky never really paid much attention to “democratic centralist” norms since he was obviously far more preoccupied with questions such as fascism, the popular front, and the true nature of the USSR.

Trotsky had a tendency to dismiss leftist alternatives to the “democratic centralist” model as centrist, the most important example being the POUM in Spain. While the POUM made serious mistakes, they at least figured out how to reach the masses through constructing an organization that was far more rooted in Spanish culture and society. In a way, the POUM anticipated later developments such as the FSLN and FMLN.

In comparison to the POUM, the program of the Spanish Trotskyists was superior but they failed to make much of an impact on the mass movement. Although the American Trotskyists were far more rooted in the mass movement, largely as a function of James P. Cannon’s experience in the IWW and the broader left, there was still a tendency to view party-building as a kind of project rooted in “Defending the Program”, which unfortunately spawned sectarian tendencies everywhere it was attempted.

In 1929, the Militant published Trotsky’s letter to Cannon that included this tell-tale passage:

The revolutionary Marxists are now again reduced (not for the first time and probably not for the last) to being an international propaganda society….It seems that the fact that we are very few frightens you. Of course, it is unpleasant. Naturally, it would be better to have behind us organizations numbering millions. But how are we, the vanguard of the vanguard, to have such organizations the day after the world revolution has suffered catastrophic defeats brought on by the Menshevik leadership hiding under the false mask of Bolshevism? Yes, how?

For me, this encapsulates the problems that have dogged the Trotskyist movement since its inception. The assertion that you are the “vanguard of the vanguard” based on a set of ideas reflects-obviously-an idealistic approach to politics. It has led to innumerable splits in the Trotskyist movement as differences over one question or another have led small groups to split, and then split again.

The Communist Party never had such problems because they were blessed by rapid growth wherever they were founded. Even though they followed the same kinds of mechanical “party building” ideas as the Trotskyists, this did not stand in the way of them becoming massive. Such was the power of the USSR to inspire millions of workers to join the party even though the party always found ways to screw things up in the mass movement. A split in a CP might have been fairly easy to recover from, since there were always fresh bodies to fill the ranks. In the small and fragile Trotskyist movement, a split would often prove fatal.

To my knowledge, the review of the Zinovievist model did not really begin until after WWII when Bert Cochran and Harry Braverman decided to not only transcend the dead-end of the Stalin-Trotsky debate, but to adopt party-building methods that were far more geared to the tempo of the mass movement and the need to respect ideological diversity. This was a period in which many others were trying to figure out a new way of doing things. The Guardian newspaper and Monthly Review were both launched as an effort to break with sectarian and dogmatic habits of the traditional left. For his part, Hal Draper, who came out of a Shachtmanite background, was seeking similar ways of moving forward. I consider this period to be very instructive for the one that we are in now, since it too was on the cusp of a new radicalization.

But it was difficult for their efforts to bear fruit since the existence of the USSR tended to reinforce the old Stalin-Trotsky divide. The CP’s found “democratic centralism” useful in enforcing ideological conformity; so did the Trotskyists. The CP’s tended to use the bureaucratic hammer to stifle dissent, while the Trotskyists relied much more on peer pressure.

On the Trotskyists in the SP, I believe that this was a big mistake. While it might have been inevitable that the rightwing of the party find some excuse to get rid of the Trotskyists, the Trotskyists did not help their own cause by basically carrying out an “entryist” tactic, which should have been transparent to all members. For all of the bad reputation that the SP leaders deserve, the plain truth is that someone like Norman Thomas was far to the left of Ralph Nader today. If you read Sol Dollinger’s account of the Flint sit-down strikes, you will learn that Thomas was instrumental in building support for the strikers. If the Trotskyists had viewed the SP in more or less the same way that the French LCR now views the new anti-capitalist party, American politics would look a lot different today. The SP would have entered the Cold War as a party of 20,000 with a strong left wing and without the taint that the CP had earned to some extent by its own crappy policies during WWII.

On the Panthers, I have to be up front about this. In my view, they were far less important than Martin Luther King Jr., particularly during the end of his career when he was becoming more and more militant. He was able to mobilize Black workers in a way that the Panthers never did. Instead, the Panthers relied much more on “serve the people” efforts such as the breakfast programs which simply reflected a misguided effort to emulate the Maoist experience of the 1930s and 40s.

The other problem with the Panthers was their tendency to operate as a militia, which opened them up to victimization. It was far harder to mobilize public opinion against killer cops when their targets insisted on marching with guns and using “off the pig” rhetoric. If the Panthers had modeled themselves much more on Malcolm X’s Organization for African-American Unity, they would have had much more success. In Malcolm’s entire career, he was never photographed with a gun nor did he call for armed struggle. He always stressed the need for self-defense, which actually is what happens in all revolutionary struggles.