Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

The Bolsheviks and the Expression of Public Differences

by Murray Smith  ·  2013-02-15  ·  351 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.
Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did.

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Murray Smith

Murray Smith, formerly international organiser for the Scottish Socialist Party, is a member of the anti-capitalist party Dei Lenk (the Left) in Luxemburg. In this 2005 article he replied to Doug Lorimer, then a leader of the Australian DSP, on the issue of internal democracy and public debate in revolutionary parties. Contrary to Lorimer, Smith argued that debating party differences in public was the norm, and not the exception, in Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. It has many relevant lessons for debates among revolutionaries today.

2nd Comintern Congress: Zinoviev on steps behind Lenin with long jacket and waistcoat. Radek and Bukharin are on far left balcony - a man with a white cap peers between them The debate started with an article on an internet discussion list by the American Marxist Louis Proyect. Doug Lorimer replied to Proyect in the journal ’Links’, issue 24. [ 1 ] Murray Smith’s rejoinder (originally called ’Some remarks on democracy and debate in the Bolshevik Party’) was published in the same journal, issue 26 .

I would like to make some comments on Doug Lorimer’s article, "The Bolshevik Party and `Zinovievism’: Comments on a Caricature of Leninism", published in Links 24.

Louis Proyect’s affirmation that there is no such thing as Leninism reflects an idea that is now quite widespread on the left. Like many mistaken ideas, it has a kernel of truth. This kernel resides in the fact that the post-Lenin leadership of the Communist International invented the term "Leninism" in 1924 as what Daniel Bensaïd has called "a religiously mummified orthodoxy".

Previously, as Doug Lorimer recalls, the term "Leninist" had been used only as a factional epithet in the debates of the pre-1917 socialist movement. The invention of the concept, according to Bensaïd, "corresponds to the codification of an organisational model then associated with the `Bolshevisation’ of the Comintern, which allowed the Kremlin to brutally subjugate the young Communist parties to its own tutelage". [ 2 ] This process, often known as "Zinovievism" after its principal author, was really nothing more nor less than the first stage in the Stalinisation of the Comintern.

The capture this was recovered from