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revolution to criticise without the Bolshevik party? ... should leave politics alone will in the end be dropped by them." f course, the issue of elections is • directy linked to the ise of the party (Leninist or otherwise), because electoral intervention without party or proto-party organisation is barely credible - you need national organisation and a national (and international) programme commonly accepted. today is not a party, but it has party organisations as its backbone, and it is, as it were, a party in embryo. If you agree with what you see in this supplement and want to get
Email.. If you use telephone banking, our Acc. No. is 7018629700 Sort code: 08 02 28 Or send a cheque to us at PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU Tel: 0208 800 7460. wnw.sociadistresistamcebstomce.net [email protected] in organisation": of course, but what type of organisation? Revolutionary marxists think a national political party implies an elected leadership, with the right to make decisions for the whole organisation between conferences. This is much more than the "federation" to which the comrades allude.
Why do we think that? For us all democracy is representative. It means the delegation of decision making powers, over specifically limited timescales and in delineated political areas. By contrast, a constant rotation, meeting by meeting, of delegates to leadership bodies is chaotic and impractical, and fails to generate the continuity in discussion necessary for coherent decision-making.
Are there dangers in this form of party organisation? Indeed there are. The only guarantees are the formal rights of expres sion of and organisation for minority viewpoints and the level of political consciousness of the membership as a whole.
Representative democracy and elected leadership bodies are also of course guarantees of the rights of majorities; and in our book majority rule is part of the central definition of workers democracy.
Let me turn now directly to the points the comrades made. lain McKay says that "Lenin was clear in 1917 that the Bolshevik party would seize power, not the masses". lain is presumably referring to Lenin's insistence that the Bolsheviks, as the dominant revolutionary party in the soviets, take the initiative
1109 London N4 2UU. Printed by East End Offset. London E3 for the insurrection of October 1917.
But why didn't the soviets seize power without the initiative of the Bolsheviks? Why did it take the decision of the Bolshevik Party to seize the historic opportunity? In the concrete circumstances of Petrograd in 1917 a prolonged discussion within the very public meetings of the soviets about an insurrec tion would have prevented it ever happening.
Workers' councils and other organisations of mass struggle for power will always give rise to different groupings and trends, and the more workers support they have, the more politically diverse they will be. There will always be the need for the organisation and leadership role of the most consistent
Of course, to take the historic responsibility for an insurrection without a prior agree ment by the self-organised workers bodies is an enormous step, but in Russia it was justified. In the immediate aftermath of October 1917, with the bourgeois state overthrown, where were the revolutionary forces who opposed it?
Revolutionary marxists see workers power being exercised through the self-rule of the workers themselves in modern equivalents of soviets, workers and community councils - and not through the dictatorship of a particular party
As is well known, between 1917 and 1921 all non-Bolshevik parties were banned, and in 1921 the decision to ban factions in the Bolshevik party was taken. These decisions were taken in conditions of civil war. Decisive action was taken against the anarchists after some of their number bombed a meeting of the Moscow party committee, killing 10 delegates and injuring many more (including Bukharin). The repression of the Social Revolutionaries followed the shooting of Lenin by a member of that party.
Repression however was not the central reason for the decline of soviet democrac and the eventual degeneration of the revolution. Behind this gigantic social process was the decline and near-disappearance of the proletariat, the most conscious and determined elements of which died in the struggle against foreign invasion and counter-revolution (of which Makhno, to whom Zoe Barton refers positively, was part).
There is nothing in the history of the Russian revolution, which constitutes proof that a revolutionary party disables revolution and workers power. Do the critics of Lenin and Trotsky think there would have been a revolution to criticise without the Bolshevik party?
Zoe Barton says I am "wrong to assert anarchists do not believe in defending a revolution". I didn't say they don't believe in defending the revolution: I said they can't. The reason I said that is because the defence of any revolution against international impe rialism requires (democratic) centralisation.
According to Zoe "every state is A based on the delegation of power
into the hands of a minority, and so cannot be used to defend the rule of the majority against the minority." In fact delegation, including the delegation of some decision-making, is a precondition for all democratic politics; it does not imply a delegation of overall social and political power by the working class
Both lan and Alan see the source of the alleged authoritarianism of Marxism as being Marx himself. But their indictment of Marx is, from an anarchist point of view, logical and coherent. For there is no doubt that while Marx and Engels fought for the 'commune state', a state which was based on the selforganised power of the workers, they did not see this as necessitating immediately the abolition of all state institutions - notably a government and government ministries.
While refusing to draw up blueprints for post-revolutionary society, the balance of their writing suggests they saw a lengthy transition period; that's why they utilised the notion of the of the withering away of the state, rather than its immediate abolition.
For Anarchists parties, elections and governments have to be avoided at all costs. By doing this they can keep their hands clean, but they can never have any effect on anything important politically
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soctalist resistance April 2004 15 International Resistance