Date: Fri, 01 Aug 1997 13:57:57 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: A Critique of Leninism


[The New Socialist is published by a split from Tony Cliff's Canadian
organization whose best-known member is David McNally, author of a fine
critique of market socialism and other books. They are a sister
organization of Solidarity in the USA. Camfield's remarks show a certain
clinging to some of the fetishes of the Cliff tendency, but are otherwise
highly commendable. There is a certain overlap in my own critique of the
Comintern which should be apparent.]

Louis P.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leninism, Trotskyism and Socialist Organization Today:

A Statement from NEW SOCIALIST

by David Camfield



Contents

1. From the Russian Revolution to Today
2. Bolshevism Exported
3. The Trotskyist Experience: Marginalized Leninism
4. Critical Leninism
5. The IS Experience
6. Looking Forward
Notes
Sources

1. From the Russian Revolution to Today

Revolutionary socialist politics develops when socialists are able to learn
from the struggles of the exploited and oppressed. Marx learned from the
Paris Commune of 1871 that the working class must shatter the capitalist
state and create new forms of socialist democracy in order to take power.
The Russian Revolution made this clear again, as Lenin reminded the world
in STATE AND REVOLUTION. The success of the Russian Revolution and the
failure of the revolutionary upheavals in Europe between 1918 and 1923
proved that the working class cannot take power without an experienced mass
party of the revolutionary vanguard to lead it. 

At the close of the 20th century, the lessons of the Russian Revolution
remain the necessary -- but not sufficient -- foundation of socialism from
below. These lessons formed the basis of the programme of the Communist
International (Comintern) between 1919 and 1923. From them Trotsky
generalized his theory of permanent revolution and developed a critique of
Stalinism. The tiny and isolated Trotskyist movement sought to preserve
these politics ("Bolshevik-Leninism") in the "Midnight of the Century", the
years of Stalinism, fascism and imperialist war between the late 1920s and
1945. It succeeded -- but at the cost of hardening into dogmatism and
inflexibility. 

After the Second World War a new current (in Britain, the Socialist Review
group around Tony Cliff, later called International Socialism; in the U.S.
the Independent Socialist Clubs around Hal Draper) emerged. By criticizing
orthodox Trotskyism from the standpoint of the self-emancipation of the
working class and a commitment to developing Marxism to explain the postwar
world it made important theoretical contributions (the analysis of state
capitalism, permanent arms economy and deflected permanent revolution;
insights about class struggle in advanced capitalist countries during the
postwar boom; the concept of socialism from below). This current kept
classical Marxism alive as a small but dynamic force in the struggles of
the upturn of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It survived the downturn that
began in the mid-1970s.[1] 

Serious problems in the International Socialists in Canada and, more
generally, the IS Tendency, have made it clear that this "reoriented
Trotskyism" (Alex Callinicos's term in TROTSKYISM) needs to be critically
evaluated, much as it began to reevaluate the Trotskyist movement and the
early Comintern. To begin, we need to go back to the roots of Western
European and North American Leninism. 

2. Bolshevism Exported

In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks formed the Comintern
and attempted to export their politics to the millions of workers (and
others) who rallied to the powerful call for "Soviet Power" and world
revolution. Many of the men and women drawn to the Comintern were the cream
of the working class movement, self-educated socialist worker-intellectuals
and experienced militants. Politically, they were a varied lot: "centrists"
whose revolutionary aspirations had not been freed from the gradualist
parliamentarism of the Second International, revolutionary purists who
suffered from ultra-leftism, sectarianism and abstract propagandism, and
syndicalists who believed in organizing revolutionary industrial unions. 

The Bolsheviks' aim was to build new mass revolutionary parties by winning
leftward-moving workers to the Comintern while separating them from
non-revolutionary labour leaders pulled in behind their radicalizing rank
and file. At first the Bolsheviks thought that the West was on the brink of
revolution. With the failure of the German and Hungarian Revolutions in
1918-19, it became clear to the Bolsheviks that the Western Communist
Parties (CPs) had to do more than call for soviet power and prepare for
insurrection. They set about winning the new parties away from ultra-left
attitudes to unions, parliamentary elections and alliances with the
peasantry. At the same time they battled centrism. But both ultra-leftism
and centrism persisted. Ultra-left directives from Russian Comintern
leaders led to the disastrous "March Action" putsch in Germany in 1921. The
3rd Comintern Congress later that year recognized that revolution was not
imminent in Europe (although the Comintern leadership still had an overly
optimistic evaluation of where the working classes in the Western bourgeois
democracies were at). It proposed the united front policy to win majority
support for the CPs among workers, but covered up responsibility for the
German disaster. A comprehensive transformation of the CPs into "parties of
a new type" was demanded. As a Canadian Communist argued, the revolutionary
party must be "a party of action... a party of the workers, and with them
in their daily struggles against capitalist oppression" (in Angus, 103). 

As Tony Cliff argues in one of his best books, the third volume of LENIN (3
vol. ed.), the Bolsheviks failed to "graft Bolshevism" onto the CPs outside
of Russia before the Comintern leadership succumbed to Stalinism in late
1923. Mass vanguard parties were built in Germany, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia,
Czechoslovakia, Italy, Norway and France (although centrists led the latter
two parties until 1923). However, strong, independent- thinking
revolutionary leaderships could not easily be developed in the time
available. Incompetent Comintern intervention in foreign CPs made this task
even more difficult. Even in the most important Western section of the
Comintern, the German CP (KPD), after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg a
leadership up to the task of leading the struggle for power was not formed.
Paul Levi, around whom such a leadership might have developed, was expelled
after he criticized the "March Action" in public. The revolutionary
situation in Germany in October 1923 tested the KPD and Comintern
leaderships and found both lacking. 

In many countries revolutionary mass parties were not built. While the KPD
fell to under 150,000 after the "March Action" but built itself up to over
218,000 by late 1922, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was not
formed until 1920, and had but 3,000 real members (while claiming 10,000).
In the U.S., a united, above-ground CP only emerged at the end of 1921,
with some 10,000 members. Likewise in Canada: the CP formed in May 1921 had
4,800 members, "the great majority" (Angus 80) of whom belonged to
semi-autonomous Finnish and Ukrainian "language federations". These three
parties were formed after the height of the post-war radicalization, which
peaked in 1919 in Britain, Canada and the US Although their "rooted" worker
members gave these CPs an influence larger than their small size suggests,
they only became the leading force in small pockets of the working classes
in their respective countries (e.g. in Canada among Cape Breton and British
Columbia miners). 

The 1921 Comintern Congress drew up a detailed organizational scheme ("The
Organizational Structure of the Communist Parties, the Methods and Content
of Their Work: Theses") that has become the model of a democratic
centralist vanguard party for most socialists. But at the 1922 Congress,
Lenin said it was "almost exclusively Russian: it is wholly derived from a
study of Russian developments. This is the good side of the resolution, but
it is also the bad side... if by rare chance a foreigner could understand
it, he could not possibly carry it out" (in HARRY WICKS, 25). 

Harry Wicks, worker militant and founding member of British Communist and
Trotskyist movements, had this to say about the 1922 reorganization of the
CPGB along the lines laid down by the Comintern (agitational newspaper,
small neighbourhood or factory groups replacing branches etc.): "The first
casualty... was the political discussion among the membership. Despite the
declared desire for monthly aggregate meetings, the demands of the group
meetings on members' time meant less and less opportunity for the exchange
and clash of opinions. The membership felt the loss of political life that
the old style branch meetings gave them. Were these growing pains or the
conservative clinging to past forms of organization? Two points are clear
from this period. The party became much more dynamic, and its press... was
soon revealed in its new role, that of agitating and leading on the
day-to-day issues" (24-25). It is fair to say that the impact of the
changes was mixed. 

Comintern leaders only partially understood the specific difficulties
involved in building revolutionary parties in advanced capitalist countries
where bourgeois democracy existed and working class reformism was much
stronger than in Tsarist Russia (even if labour bureaucracies were weak by
today's standards). Italian CP leader Antonio Gramsci made an effort to
come to terms with the differences between Russia and the West in his
PRISON NOTEBOOKS. But he did not work out an adequate explanation of these
issues, despite insights about workers' consciousness, the greater
importance of popular consent in maintaining bourgeois rule in the West as
compared with Russia, and the role of a revolutionary party in the process
through which the working class becomes conscious of its interests and
forges a revolutionary bloc with other social forces (peasants etc.). There
is still no adequate Marxist theory of how workers' experience in advanced
capitalism generally produces a fragmented non-revolutionary consciousness
that fits with reformism. 

3. The Trotskyist Experience: Marginalized Leninism

The rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR and the Stalinization of
the Comintern produced resignations, expulsions and splits in CPs around
the world during the 1920s. The International Left Opposition (from 1930,
International Communist League) formed by Trotsky opposed Stalinism and its
politics of "socialism in one country" from the perspective of the Marxism
of the 1919-1923 Comintern. Although it was the only coherent
anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist current, it was extremely marginal.
The "Fourth International (World Party of the Socialist Revolution)"
founded prematurely by Trotsky in 1938 had a membership of only a few
thousand. Its largest section, the American Socialist Workers Party
(American SWP), then numbered 1,520. Many of the sections were tiny
internalized grouplets. Few had more than handfuls of worker militants. In
most countries, most workers who considered themselves revolutionaries were
in the Stalinist CPs, despite massive losses of those who had joined in the
1920s. Although there are a few positive and rather more negative lessons
to be learned from the Stalinist CPs in the 1930s, the CPs ceased to be
revolutionary parties in any sense after the Popular Front line of alliance
with the "progressive bourgeoisie" against fascism was adopted in 1935.
Many then grew substantially, recruiting from the working and middle classes. 

The strength of the Trotskyist movement lay in Trotsky's political analyses
(of the Russian, Chinese and Spanish Revolutions, the struggle against
fascism in Germany, permanent revolution etc.). But it also had major
political weaknesses. Trotsky's analysis of the USSR as a "degenerated
workers' state" was one. Others, set out in the Transitional Programme in
1938, included the belief that capitalism was in its "death agony" and that
"The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary
leadership." The first claim was not based on any serious Marxist economic
analysis. The second would only have been true if revolutionary situations
existed everywhere but workers were being misled by non-revolutionary
leaderships (as in Spain 1936-37). In 1938, this was a fantasy. It gave
Trotskyism: 

a fixed model of society in which the working classes were continually
straining at the leash, or about to strain at the leash, held back only by
the betrayals of their perfidious leadership... from it derived one of the
characteristic traits of post-war Trotskyism: a systematic blindness to the
actual consciousness and concerns of the working class" (Molyneux 180). 

To this model was added the belief that tiny Trotskyist groups were
"revolutionary parties" because they and they alone possessed the programme
for revolutionary leadership. Only in Sri Lanka and Bolivia in the 1950s
did Trotskyists come anywhere close to forming mass revolutionary
parties.[2] But in 1946 American SWP leader James Cannon wrote that "The
revolutionary vanguard party destined to lead this tumultuous revolutionary
movement in the US does not have to be created. It already exists, and its
name is the Socialist Workers' Party" (in Wald, 37). At the time, the
American SWP had only 1,470 members. 

This kind of ridiculous self-importance and failure to understand the real
tasks for groups with few if any roots among workers generated sectifying
pressures to which many orthodox Trotskyist groups succumbed.[3] The
material basis for this was isolation from the struggles of workers and the
oppressed. But sectification also had a theoretical source inherited from
the pre-Stalinist Comintern. 

The problem lay in a confusion between revolutionary socialist groups as
they actually existed and the mass vanguard party required to lead a
socialist revolution. According to the Comintern theses on party
organization discussed earlier, "At every stage of the revolutionary class
struggle... the Communist Party must be the vanguard, the most advanced
section of the proletariat" (234). This equation of party with vanguard led
many a Trotskyist group to consider itself a vanguard party. But what if
the group in question was not in fact the vanguard, a substantial layer of
revolutionary workers? Only a few groups both realized that their
organizations were not and drew the appropriate conclusion. Three years
after Cannon proclaimed the American SWP the party of the American
Revolution, the Workers' Party (the other significant Trotskyist group in
the US) changed its name to Independent Socialist League in recognition of
the fact that it was a propaganda group, not a party (the initiative came
from Hal Draper). 

4. Critical Leninism

After the Second World War the fundamental issue became clear: there was no
working class vanguard. The task of Marxists after the Russian Revolution
had been to organize and expand an existing vanguard, or elements of one,
into a party. By the 1950s, the vanguard layers in North America and Europe
had been destroyed by repression, years of working class defeat, the twists
and turns through which the CPs degenerated into bureaucratic reformist
pawns of the Kremlin, and the recomposition of the working class in postwar
capitalism. 

In the late 1960s, Duncan Hallas of the British IS wrote: 

"Not only has the vanguard, in the real sense of a considerable layer of
organised revolutionary workers and intellectuals,      been destroyed. So
too has the environment, the tradition, that gave it influence... The crux
of the matter is how to develop      the process, now begun, of recreating
it ("Towards..." 16)"

Vanguard and revolutionary organization are not identical. In most of the
world today there is no vanguard. It is absolutely vital to understand this
and draw appropriate conclusions about how socialists should orient and
organize themselves if a current of socialism from below is to flourish in
the 21st century. 

Hallas also laid out other features of "critical Leninism" that distinguish
it from most of the Trotskyist tradition -- including, sadly, many groups
in the IS Tendency today: 

"a party cannot possibly be created except on a thoroughly democratic
basis... in its internal life, vigorous controversy is the      rule and
various tendencies and shades of opinion are represented... Internal
democracy is not an optional extra. It is      fundamental to the
relationship between party members and those amongst whom they work... The
self-education of      militants is impossible in an atmosphere of sterile
orthodoxy. Self-reliance and confidence in one's ideas are developed in the
     course of that genuine debate that takes place in an atmosphere where
differences are freely and openly argued. The      "monolithic party" is a
Stalinist concept. Uniformity and democracy are mutually incompatible" (21)."

This critical Leninism remains a very important contribution to the
tradition of socialism from below. 

5. The IS Experience

It is not enough to have a critical understanding of Leninism. Socialists
also have to understand what Leninist ideas about revolutionary
organization mean for their activity in the actual situation in which they
find themselves. 

One of the greatest strengths of the Socialist Review/International
Socialism group in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s (and the American ISC)
was that they realized that the Leninist model of party-building was
irrelevant for such a small organization. SR/IS realized that it would be
foolish to set itself the task of building a revolutionary party.[4] Its
members had a healthy sense of proportion. As the official Socialist
Workers Party (British SWP) history puts it, "Indeed, one of the things
that distinguished IS from most other revolutionary groupings at the time
was an ability to look at itself with a sense of humour, at times a
self-deprecating one" (Birchall 8). 

At first, SR's few dozen members concentrated their efforts on spreading
their ideas within the Labour Party. Later on they were active in the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Although SR had only a few unionists,
they were active and the group paid close attention to British working
class issues as well as international politics. This perspective was a
counterweight to the dangers of total isolation and "falling into a
complete fantasy world" (6) that afflict tiny Marxist groups. In 1960 SR
launched INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM as a quarterly journal, and in 1961 began
to publish a monthly paper aimed at industrial workers. From 1961 SR also
worked through a Labour left paper. In 1965 IS (the name changed in 1962),
by then over 200, began to withdraw from the Labour Party. 

The events of 1968 pushed IS membership from 447 to over 1,000 (mostly
students). After heated debates at two conferences, IS reorganized itself
along the kind of lines that Hallas advocates, those of critical Leninism.
Then followed a "turn to the class". This eventually produced a group that
peaked in early 1974 at close to 4,000 members (mostly workers) and a paid
sale of 35,000 copies of its weekly paper. Yet in September 1976 its
leadership still insisted that with 3,000 members it, like the 300-strong
American IS, was "basically a propaganda organisation striving to transform
itself into an interventionist organisation" even if it was "somewhat
further along the road" than the US group. ("To Members of the NC of ISUS"
2). Critical Leninism was still alive, despite the many mistakes and
internal debates of the early 1970s. 

Almost twenty years later, there is little evidence of critical Leninism in
the leadership of the British SWP or any of the other groups in the IS
Tendency (IST). How exactly this came about is a question that remains to
be answered. The downturn that set in in the mid-1970s and the British
SWP's response to this difficult period are part of the explanation. Like
orthodox Trotskyism before it, the IST is losing sight of its marginal
position and real tasks. On the basis of the idea that the 1990s are "the
1930s in slow motion", the current IST perspective pushes the rapid
transformation of propaganda groups of a few hundred into agitational
organizations. There is little sense of proportion left. The gap between
the analysis of the period and the "party-building" perspectives on the one
hand and the reality of the world on the other produces sectifying pressures. 

At least one leading member of the Canadian IS has stated publicly that the
group is in transition from a propaganda group to an agitational
organization.[5] This is simply false, and raises the question of how to
understand different kinds of socialist organizations and their appropriate
tasks. Although groups take many different forms, and what they should do
differs depending on the conditions in which they operate, it is helpful to
think of four basic kinds of socialist organization. However, in looking at
socialist groups in this way it is important not to make the mistake of
thinking that a group will automatically grow through these various stages
in a linear way. 

Study circles learn and clarify basic Marxist ideas, with little attention
to non-members. Propaganda groups use Marxist ideas to explain what is
happening in the world and recruit because they are able to do so. They may
or may not also have some capacity to agitate and intervene in struggle.
Propaganda involves explaining many ideas to relatively few people (e.g.
arguing why cutbacks are caused by capitalism, not misguided politicians).
Agitation involves spreading a few ideas to many people (e.g. arguing to
build a general strike called by union leaders). Agitational organizations
or parties are able to lead mass struggles and recruit on that basis. Mass
revolutionary parties organize a significant portion of a working class
vanguard. 

Between 1987 and 1993 the Canadian IS went from being a fairly loose and
passive organization with elements of both a propaganda group and a study
circle whose propaganda was usually quite general to a more active
propaganda group making more concrete propaganda and capable of a little
bit of agitation and involvement in struggle. It had a healthy sense of how
small it was. Objectively, the IS today is a sectifying propaganda group
with little understanding of its tasks. Most IS members are students and
university-educated workers. Yet the IS tries to organize as a miniature
version of a group more than thirty-five times its size, the British SWP,
which is best described as a hybrid propaganda group/agitational
organization of over 9,000 members (including many union activists) and a
real capacity to intervene. This is the background to the formation of the
Political Reorientation Faction, which has left the IS and is now
organizing around the magazine NEW SOCIALIST. 

6. Looking Forward

What can we learn from this history? Revolutionary socialists are building
on sand unless they have a reasonably accurate answer to three questions:
what is going on in the country in which they are active, where are they
located within that, and what are their appropriate tasks? Getting one or
more of these wrong will sooner or later cause problems for an organization
(the Canadian IS is wrong on all three). 

There are no short cuts to building stronger revolutionary socialist
groups. It is a fact that since the end of the 1920s most revolutionary
socialist organizations have been small propaganda groups with weak
implantation in the working class. Yet the early Comintern, on which
Trotskyist politics are based, had very little to say about such groups.
The Comintern in Lenin's day seems to have assumed that CPs would be at
least agitational organizations able to lead a layer of vanguard workers in
struggle. Trotskyists have by and large failed to understand the
distinction between working class vanguard and revolutionary organization.
Nor did many see that by the 1950s working class vanguards no longer
existed in most countries and that the task was to help recreate them in
the mass struggles of the future. 

The Marxists who best understood all this were in the British SR/IS. It
survived and grew not only because of its state capitalist analysis of
Stalinism but because it put the "working class at the centre of its
analysis and activity, as opposed to the parliamentary vanguard of the
Tribune left [in the Labour Party] and the revolutionary vanguard of the
comic opera bolsheviks [orthodox Trotskyists]" (Higgins, 8). It explicitly
recognized its size and tasks, did not pretend to be building a Leninist
party, and in an open-minded manner paid close attention to the British
working class as well as developments in world politics. It developed a
critical Leninism and after 1968 made a transition from a largely student
propaganda group to one rooted in the working class with a real ability to
intervene in struggle. 

In many countries, elements of a new vanguard, or possibilities for
creating them, emerged in the last international upturn in struggle (c.
1965-1975). However, these gains were eroded in the subsequent downturn. We
should remember that the biggest revolutionary socialist group built in
English Canada since the C.P. degenerated was the Revolutionary Workers'
League, a Fourth International affiliate which had between 350 and 500
members (largely students and ex-students) in the late 1970s. Quebec-based
revolutionary Maoists were several thousand strong (including many union
activists) slightly later. These groups were wrecked by the downturn,
politics that at best only partially rejected Stalinism, and by unrealistic
perspectives for building. 

The development of a new layer of revolutionary workers in North America
and Europe will not happen without an upsurge of class struggle greater
than anything seen in this part of the world for many years. Contrary to
what Trotsky wrote in 1938, the working class in the advanced capitalist
countries and much of the rest of the world today has a crisis of
SELF-MOBILIZATION: there are few or no networks of worker militants to
organize resistance, and weak political traditions in the working class. Of
course, revolutionary socialist leadership has a vital part to play in
addressing these problems. However, workers will have to devise new forms
of class organization on a rank-and-file, class struggle, internationalist
basis. Without a sharp increase in the level of class struggle new
vanguards cannot be even partially recreated (although many workers will be
radicalized by the ongoing ruling class offensive). Without revolutionary
politics, workers are finding it difficult to successfully fight back in a
world economy where capital is highly mobile and economic restructuring is
wreaking havoc on their lives. 

Today, socialists need to learn from the SR/IS example when considering the
years ahead. While the period in which we live is very different from the
years in which SR/IS built, our situations do have real similarities. What
we can take from them is more than the politics of socialism from below
plus a commitment to learn from and analyze the working class as it really
is and not as we might wish it to be. It is also a question of how to
organize and build: THERE IS NO POINT IN PRETENDING TO ORGANIZE ALONG THE
LINES OF A LENINIST PARTY. It is a dangerous mistake for small groups of
socialists to believe that if they adopt a highly centralized ("Leninist")
form of organization they can propel themselves into becoming genuine
agitational groups, with the necessary roots in a vanguard layer of
workers. To apply the methods of Leninist party-building to small
propaganda groups creates pressures that push such groups towards becoming
sects. 

Although the working class needs to build parties along the lines sketched
out by critical Leninists, socialist groups of a few hundred or even
thousands of members are not parties. A socialist group in Canada that
could honestly call itself a party would have to be an agitational
organization of many thousands of workers. We cannot predict exactly how
the kind of parties that we want to see will emerge. However, they can only
be built if larger groups of open-minded, honest and self-critical
revolutionary socialists merge with larger new forces: groups of
radicalizing workers and the oppressed that do not exist now but which will
emerge in future struggles. 

It is a mistake for a small group of Marxists to say that it is trying to
build itself into a party. Instead it should commit itself to making a
serious contribution to the development of such a party. The alternative to
pretentious "party-building" is not a loose group in which revolutionary
socialism and identity politics coexist[6]. Instead, we need a group that
both has coherent revolutionary socialist politics and is flexible in its
organizing. 

Such a group needs to be involved with the struggles of the day and
dedicated to developing Marxist theory to explain the changing world in
which we live. Its publication should be oriented to the next century and
have the feel of the 1990s, not the 1970s. This does not mean forgetting
the lessons of the past, but these must not be mechanically repeated in a
way that fails to connect with readers. Rather than preaching, the group
and its publication need to strive for a real dialogue with its audience of
radicalizing young people (many of whom do not identify with socialist or
working class political traditions), radical labour and social movement
activists and independent leftists. Such a group should organize in ways
appropriate to its tasks, not some inherited model. A spirit of comradely
debate, modesty, laughter and commitment should animate all that it does. 

David Camfield 

Notes

[1] Despite the many weaknesses of what is now the IS Tendency, its
politics shine in comparison to orthodox Trotskyism (see Alex Callinicos,
TROTSKYISM, 23-54). The largest orthodox Trotskyist current, the United
Secretariat of the Fourth International (whose best known figure was the
late Ernest Mandel), is now divided between a disoriented majority that has
adapted heavily to non-Marxist politics and advocates regroupment with
non-revolutionaries, and a minority that clings to the party-building
approach of the 1970s. Most other orthodox Trotskyists are stuck in the
late 1930s. 

[2] The Sri Lankan LSSP espoused Trotskyism verbally but was in practice a
left reformist party, while the Bolivian POR's support for a middle class
radical nationalist government prevented it from taking advantage of a
revolutionary situation. 

[3] Although Marx used the term sect to refer to small socialist groups in
general, as opposed to "an independent historical movement" (Marx to Bolte,
253) of the working class, in this document the term is used to refer to a
group so cut off from reality that it can no longer contribute to advancing
the class struggle. A sect in this sense is not necessarily a cult (e.g.
the "Sparts") or sectarian in the sense of counterposing its own narrow
interests to those of the struggle. Today the Canadian IS. is not yet a
sect, but it is pulled in this direction by its "party-building"
pretensions, the gap between the real world and the leadership's analysis
of the world and perspectives, and its bureaucratic centralist internal
regime. 

[4] Before 1968, many members of SR/IS actually thought of a revolutionary
party in terms that were closer to those of the early Rosa Luxemburg than
of Lenin. This is clear in Cliff's essay "Trotsky on Substitutionism" and
the first edition of his ROSA LUXEMBURG. 

[5] Abbie Bakan in a talk, "Leninism: Theory and Practice," at the Toronto
cadre school held August 12, 1995. 

[6] Such as the American group Solidarity. 

Sources cited

Angus, Ian. CANADIAN BOLSHEVIKS (Vanguard, 1981). 

Birchall, Ian. 'THE SMALLEST MASS PARTY IN THE WORLD': BUILDING THE
SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY, 1951-1979 (S.W.P., 1981). 

Callinicos, Alex. TROTSKYISM (Open University Press, 1990). 

Cliff, Tony. "Trotsky on Substitutionism." (1960). Reprinted in NEITHER
WASHINGTON NOR MOSCOW (Bookmarks, 1982). 

________, LENIN, vol. 3, REVOLUTION BESIEGED (Bookmarks, 1987). 

Hallas, Duncan. "Towards a Revolutionary Socialist Party." Reprinted in
PARTY AND CLASS (Pluto, 1972). 

HARRY WICKS: A MEMORIAL (Socialist Platform, 1989). 

Higgins, Jim. (ed.) A SOCIALIST REVIEW (International Socialism, 1965). 

ISGB Central Committee. "To Members of the NC of ISUS." (unpublished
letter, 1976). 

Marx, Karl, to Friedrich Bolte, Nov. 23 1871. In Marx and Engels, SELECTED
CORRESPONDENCE (Progress, 1975), 253-255. 

Molyneux, John. LEON TROTSKY'S THEORY OF REVOLUTION (Harvester, 1981). 

"The Organizational Structure of the Communist Parties, the Methods and
Content of Their Work: Theses." THESES, RESOLUTIONS AND MANIFESTOS OF THE
FIRST FOUR CONGRESSES OF THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL (Pluto, 1983), 234-261. 

Wald, Alan. "The End of 'American Trotskyism'? (Part Three)" AGAINST THE
CURRENT 55 (1995), 33-37. 





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