Mg Attacks Bolshevism

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, paper of the international Marxist Group, has publi ns of the Workers Socialist League. We welcome the welcome the start of such an open discussion, and publish TING NOWA OPPRETO (Top) SWP 1968 demo demands "Withdraw troops from Vietnam " while (bottom) IMG calls for "Victory to the NLF" The editorial board of the IG's paper "Red Weekly' has ir several weeks been twisting e history of Bolshevism and rotskyism in their series of demics against the Workers scialist League.

While we welcome the fact that IG have ventured into print in ply to some of the differences on inciple and programme that ride the WSL and the IMG, we • only deplore the fact that to do they feel obliged to distort the rory of Bolshevism from the very ginnings. ¡ Our last edition carried a reply i the fraudulent "united front" inception put forward by the G, and the linked issue of that pup's refusal or inability to take verbal programme into the uggles of the working class brement. • Now we will concentrate on the »re developed attacks on Marxism ntained in the Red Weekly series titled Faction or Party?.

The first of these. articles lempts to hurl the continuity of nin's struggle for the Bolshevik ity out of the window: the zond abuses and twists the cision of Trotsky in the light of • defeat of the German working Is by Hitler in 1933 that a new, arth International must be tmed. | But in the third of these articles • purpose of the IMG's revisions ! these principled questions is faed more openly: they want to over and ayoid serious Etical discussion on the split in • Fourth International in 1953. In laying the basis for this, they empt to prune the history of tin's fight for democratic Iralism to make it seem to fit in • their own history and their opportunist inner-party ime.

COVER The IMG obviously feel obliged provide a cover for the so-called nited Secretariat of the Fourth ernational" (USFI) of which y are a part. This body is of se to all intents and purposes • bodies, one section of which ports the majority Secretariat, Socialist Workers Party (which prevented by US law from formal aliation). fe militants who have obscrved It will come as no surprise to continuous public divisions thin that "United" international dy (the latest display being the pacifist slogan "Get the pops out of Angola" , clashing ch the USFI majority's call toj ictory to the MPLA") to find IMG. now telling us in all aousness that the Bolsheviks and pesheviks were in reality a single ity until 1912 - and that the split ween them was organisational, ¡ not political! Our article in this tion will deal centrally with this ticular question. Firstly, in case anyone thinks we distorting the IMG, we will ote extensively from Red Weekly $.2.76): "No Bolshevik Party was created 1903. What was created was the Shevik faction of the Russian cial Democratic Labour Party. Furthermore, not merely was no berik party formed at this e, but Lenin was relentlessly hast any split into two parties.

struggle after 1903 was a Stical and ideological faction *gle against the Mensheviks and altaneously a struggle for a fied Party against what he ned the 'anarchistic' actions of • Mensheviks, which threatened ¿ Party with a split" *Furthermore the actual split b two different parties through • expulsion of various elements I not take place because of the asheviks political views [!], but ause of a rejection and violation ¡ the organisational principles of The Red Weekl he political positi ere the second of HOME development of the Bolshevik Party (writing after the Revolution with rather more background knowledge than Red Weekly) was in no doubt:

"As a current of political thought and as a party, Bolshevism nas existed since 1903" ' (Left Wing Communism, p8). and again:

'In 1908 the "left" Bolsheviks were expelled from our Party for stubbornly refusing to understand the necessity of participating in a most reactionary , "parliament" "

Surely, IMG comrades, this passage refers to a political split, in which ultra-lefts within the Bolshevik Party were expelled?

Lenin is even clearer on the question of. "unity" with the Mensheviks:

"Between 1903 and 1912, there were periods of several years in which we were formally united with the Mensheyiks in a single Social-democratic Party, but we never stopped our ideological and political struggle against them as opportunists and vehicles of bourgeois influence on the proletariat". (055). the Party....

If we were to accept this point of view, then to call themselves members of a revolutionary party, people would obviously need no agreement on programme, strategy or tactics - just as long as they adhered to some form of "organisational unity"

This is quité obviously a case of special pleading on behalf of the IMG, within which only the most notional political unity exists.

But it is worth examining in some detail the real relationship between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks during the period of "unity" referred to by Red Weekly.

The division first emerged in the open in 1903. Lenin, when analysing the historical POLITICAL shed start sur articles in reply to the points the IMG raise.

So as far as Lenin is concerned in retrospect therefore, (though for a number or reasons he may have made varying pronouncements in the heat of the struggle), the Bolsheviks after 1903 were a distinct party grouping which at times made temporary, formal unity arrangements with the Mensheviks.

Zinoviev in his History of the Bolshevik Party makes the same point at length. In describing the 1903 Conference he concludes:

"The Congress closed with a split. The Central Committee was elected by the Bolsheviks alone... The Menshevik delegates set off for Russia and formed their own special "bureau' which at once declared a boycott of the Bolshevik Central Committee... In this way by the end of 1903 we already had two •clear-cut groups, two organisations, and two parties. " (p 96, emphasis added).

For the IMG to answer this by hanging on to a form of words is pure deception. The two "factions" within the RDSLP operated completely autonomously.

In 1904, the Mensheviks took control of the paper Iskra, and Menshevik delegates replaced the Bolshevik Central Committee members who were arrested. Lenin was confronted by complete Menshevik domination of the RSDLP leadership, under conditions where illegality made a recalled conference or appeal to the membership impossible.

Lenin did not then, as the IMG claim, fight to maintain "unity" under such leadership. Zinovier's account makes this clear:

"As a result of this situation it became increasingly apparent to the Bolsheviks that it was necessary to organise themselves separately and to strengthen such an organisation formally ... Comrade Lenin after lengthy reflection and an all-round examination of the question decided upon such a split ... And so a whole number of regional •ries polemical articles chal lenging ruch open discussion, and publish party conferences - from the north, the south, Moscow and other areas -put forward a plan for creating in Russia a 'Bureau of Committees of the Party Majority' as a counterweight to the Menshevik Central Committee. Once an all-Russian central organisation of Bolsheviks had been founded in this way and came into direct conflict with the Menshevik Central Committee, Comrade Lenin gave his final agreement to an organisationally separate party . . • " (p. 113).

This "organisationally separate party" went on to call on their own behalf the Third Congress of the RSDLP - which the Mensheviks refused to participate in !

So "united" was the RSDLP at this point that Bolsheviks and Mensheviks each had separate, simultaneous conferences in different cities, both taking completely different political positions.

It was not until the ebb of the revolutionary wave after 1905 and increasing mass pressure from working class supporters towards 'unity' that the joint Unitication Congress at Stockholm was convened in 1906.

OUTVOTED

All-round political conditions were unfavourable for an open division at this point, and the Bolsheviks were outvoted at the Congress. But there is no very promising material for the IMG 'unifiers" to pick up from this turn. As Zinoviev points out:

... the Unification Congress did not in practice re-unite the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in any way and we left Stockholm in fact as two separate factions. . . But at the same time the Bolsheviks had set up during the Congress their own internal and, for the party, illegal, Central Committee ...It was a situation where two parties were seemingly operating from within.. the structure of one". (emphasis added).

On the 1907 Congress again Zinoviev wrote that "this forced marriage with the • Mensheviks" could not last, and "the Bolsheviks had to be independently organised". The development amongst the Mensheviks of a growing tendency which fought to liquidate the illegal party apparatus in order to move closer to the 'liberal' bourgeoisie sharpened this political conflict:

"After the 1908 Conference, and more especially after the 1910 plenum, we Leninist Bolsheviks said to ourselves that we could not work together . with the liquidator Mensheviks and that we were only awaiting a convenient-moment to break finally from them CONSCIOUS The IMG of course knows this very well, and there is conscious deception when they use a 1911 quotation from Lenin to back their case. The quote comes from Lenin's Introduction to a pamphlet by Kameney which was revealingly titled - "Two Parties"! In the article, Lenin writes"Kamenev has proved conclusively that in point of fact [Lenin's emphasis the liquidationist group represents a separate party, not the RSDL Party. His evidence sums up the experience primarily of the years 1909-11, which confirmed the resolution of December 1908." (Collected Works, Volume 17 What then, about Lenin's repeated calls to unity, vaunted by the IMG? The fight for unity carried on by Lenin was inseparable from the fight for clarity on real differences. He attacked the "one view on unity" which he described as:

"[placing] in the forefront the "reconciliation" of "given persons, groups and institutions" • The identity of their views on Party work, on the policy of that work is a secondary matter. One should try to keep silent about differences of opinion and not to elucidate their causes, their significance, their objective conditions.. ... Live and let live. This is philistine "conciliation" which inevitably leads to sectarian diplomacy" (Collected Works, Vol 16, pp 209-19)

This of course rings very loud with parallels in today's IMG and USFI. The other view, subscribed to by Lenin, was that:

"The process of unification does not necessarily take place among "given persons, groups and institutions". , but irrespective of given persons, subordinating them, rejecting those of them who do not understand or who do not want to understand the requirements of objective development, promoting and enlisting new persons not belonging those "given" effecting changes, reshufflings and regroupings within the old factions, trends and divisions". (ibid)

In the years of reaction, the reunification of the two wings of the RSDLP was also clearly understood by Lenin as the necessary step for the preservation of a cadre for the future:

"The proletariat is now confronted with the elementary task of preserving its proletarian party, which is hostile both to the reaction and counterliberalism". (Collected Works, 16 pp 387-92)

NUCLEUS Of course if Lenin had not regarded the Bolshevik faction as operating as a party th ere would have been no nucleus ar ond which forces from Menshevism could have been won.

Indeed to look back over these turbulent years of "faction" struggle we can only draw the conclusion of Lenin that for certain periods a formal agreement for unity existed, while for the most part the two tendencies organised themselves with or without the name as opposed parties.

This too was the verdict of the SWP leader James P. Cannon, in 1953 when he drew the lessons from the Bolshevik experience as part of the fight against the liquidationist politics of the International Secretariat:

By. "g. • Ens 1 ....ini cian se aria ** ÷ ÷÷= 1654 2 L= q7 5 5: Đ0 Q 30 Zinovier "The /workers) sometimes presented the simplest argument: the more of us the better. It was only with difficulty, and by learning the lessons that history taught, that the working masses digested the fact that there are situations when to split is the sacred obligation of a revolutionSOCTALIST PREST, Vestresde, N 740k, 1976

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"Didat he [Lesia] orprie a faction in 1903, the Boteberi faction, and didn't that remain a hard and fast faction all the way up to the retolution? Not entirely. The faction of Lenin, which split with the Mensheriks in 1903, and subsequently had negotiations with Mensheviks as the rehicke of bourgeois ideology in the workers' movement, even though the first expression of that appeared to be a simple difference of wording on the conditions of membership! Lenin aw clearly that a tendency which ought to "make Party members of bopias with a singte programme. But it is bound by its very nature to become hospitable to different and even contradictory programmes. Nothing is going to be done about it in the realm of action anyway, so why get excited?

The Leninist principle of organIS RIGHT TO WORK CAMPAIGN

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