Date: Thu, 7 Aug 1997 15:29:11 -0400 (EDT) From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: M-I: The Invention of Marxism-Leninism, part 6 THE "BOLSHEVIZATION" OF THE COMINTERN The German Communist Party went through 3 wrenching experiences from 1921 to 1923. 1) Bela Kuhn, the Comintern agent "assigned" to Germany, inspired the party to take part in the ultraleft 1921 putsch. Paul Levi, the German Communist Party leader, objected to this course and spoke up publicly. He was expelled for his trouble. 2) Levi was replaced by Ernst Reuter-Friesland, who by objecting to Comintern "intervention" in German trade union politics earned its disapproval. He was also accused of being too friendly to the recently expelled Levi who had argued for a united front of working class parties, by now official Communist policy. Reuter-Friesland was expelled in 1922. 3) After Reuter-Friesland's expulsion, the mediocre Heinrich Brandler took over. Summoned to Moscow, Brandler, against his own instincts, was persuaded to embark on a fight for state power in early November, 1923. Trotsky's role was to apply pressure on Brandler to go along with Moscow's plans, and to set a fixed date for the seizure of power. When the isolated German Communist Party failed to lead the masses to power, the Comintern once again found a convenient scapegoat in Brandler. He was expelled and replaced by the ultraleftist Ruth Fischer, who had been busy lining up support in the USSR. While these wrenching changes were being foisted on the German Communist Party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was going through its own tumult. Factional lines between the triumvirate of Zinoviev, Stalin and Kamenev on one hand, and Trotsky on the other were being drawn. The triumvirate decided to use the German events as a bludgeon against Trotsky, since Karl Radek, his close ally, was the chief architect of the failed German revolution. The scapegoating of Radek was in line with the degenerating state of affairs in Russian politics. The Russian party had become more and more bureaucratized. Lenin proposed to Trotsky that they wage a fight against Stalin, who they saw as a emerging bureaucratic dictator. Stalin's heavy-handed treatment of the Georgian nationality particularly incensed Lenin. When Lenin's wife Krupskaya was dispatched by Lenin to gather information on Stalin's handling of the Georgians, Stalin treated her rudely in his characteristic manner. Lenin interpreted this as a declaration of war. Meanwhile Trotsky had developed criticisms of the NEP. He thought that too many concessions were being made to the peasantry and to the NEP-men. Trotsky won the support of many veteran Bolsheviks who were disturbed by the trends in the party and nation. They put forward a New Course that articulated their ideas on the direction the Soviet Union should take. It was the first formal critique of the embryonic Stalinist system. In a letter to branches of the Communist Party, Trotsky defended the New Course: "Away with passive obedience, with mechanical leveling by the authorities, with suppression of personality, with servility, and with careerism! A Bolshevik is not merely a disciplined man [sic]: he is a man who in each case and on each question forges a firm opinion of his own and defends it courageously and independently not only against his enemies but inside his own party." While Trotsky surely believed these words, it is regrettable that he did not take them seriously himself when he was wearing down the hapless Brandler. It was a servile Brandler who decided to plunge ahead with the foolish bid for state power in Germany and it was the decidedly courageous Paul Levi who would have argued Trotsky down. In any event, Trotsky's letter captured the imagination of many Communists. An organized grouping already existed that concurred with many of Trotsky's New Course criticisms, even though the group could hardly be considered Trotskyist. While it included his close allies like Preobrazhensky and Antonov-Ovseenko, it also included members of the ultraleft Workers Opposition. Shortly after the opposition emerged, it began to win followers everywhere. At least one-third of the Red Army party units sided with the opposition as did a majority of the student organizations. The triumvirate launched a bitter and unprincipled counter-attack which culminated in the thirteenth party conference in May, 1924. They did everything they could to turn the fight into one of the Old Bolsheviks versus the upstart. Trotsky was depicted as "anti-party", a rather inflammatory but meaningless term that is often used against factional opponents in any internal struggle in a "Marxist-Leninist" group. While Trotsky spoke in the name of the workers, the triumvirate claimed that he was really articulating the interests of the students and intelligentsia. In other words, he was a spokesman for the petty-bourgeoisie. Finally, they said his hatred for the party machine indicated that he continued to harbor anti-Leninist sentiments. He was an unreformed semi-Menshevik. In brief, all of the methods of dehumanizing and smashing a political opponent were mobilized against Trotsky. He was depicted as a petty-bourgeois and a Menshevik. He was charged with not believing in the primacy of the working class. The triumvirate's underhanded attack on Trotsky is of course the first line of defense of so-called "Marxist-Leninists". What better way to demonize one's political opponents than by treating them as a wolf in sheep's clothing. Bolshevik in name only, the opposition was in league with the counter-revolution. Every single Marxist-Leninist sect-cult has learned this defamation technique from the early Comintern which used it first against Trotsky. The potential problem that the triumvirate faced was that Trotsky had an unblemished reputation internationally. He was considered to be the preeminent leader of the Russian Revolution, next to Lenin. When word was received of the anti-Trotsky crusade, the French and Polish Communist Parties protested and demanded that the differences between the two factions be resolved in a comradely manner. Unfortunately, most of the other Communist leaders had long given up any pretense of independence. In the process of eviscerating the German Communist Party leadership, the Comintern eliminated the possibility of independent voices being heard against bureaucratic maneuvers. Unfortunately, Trotsky himself had participated in the weakening of the German party. In the showdown with Trotsky, only the French leader Boris Souvarine had the courage to standd up for Trotsky. The rest of the Comintern leadership would prove only too willing to join in a ritual procession of anti-Trotsky denunciations. A month later the "Bolshevization" Fifth Congress of the Comintern took place. This congress was designed by Zinoviev and Stalin to export the monolithic model that the Russian party had adopted. Whatever independence remained in the world-wide Communist movement would soon disappear after this congress. Zinoviev and Stalin had one and one interest only: to line up the world's revolutionary forces behind their faction. Ironically, the model that this monstrous Comintern congress adopted was identical to the one that the world Trotskyist movement itself subsequently adopted. This "Marxist-Leninist" monstrosity has been the organizational lynch-pin of all party-building attempts from 1924 on. Trotskyists have always disavowed the political decisions made at this congress, but have never addressed the organizational methodology that was ratified at the same time. The bureaucratic politics and the monolithic party-building model go hand in hand. The Fifth Congress gave the new leader of the German Communist Party, Ruth Fischer, the opportunity to rail against Radek, Trotsky and Brandler. They were all Mensheviks, opportunists and "liquidators of revolutionary principle." In the words of Isaac Deutscher, "she called for a monolithic International, modelled on the Russian party, from which dissent and contest of opinion would be banished. [She said], 'This world congress should not allow the International to be transformed into an agglomeration of all sorts of trends; it should forge ahead and embark on the road which leads to a single Bolshevik world party.'" The Statutes of the Communist International adopted at the fifth congress were a rigid, mechanical set of rules for building Communist Parties. All of the Communist Parties were subordinate to the Comintern and members of the parties had to obey all decisions of the Comintern. The world congress of the Comintern would decide the most important programmatic, tactical and organizational questions of the Comintern as a whole and its individual sections. It would be appropriate, for example, for the Comintern to overrule a member party that had decided to support Trotsky's New Course. The Statutes also included the sort of ridiculous measures that mark most of the sect-cults of today. For example, statute 35 declares that: "Members of the CI may move from one country to another only with the consent of the central committee of the section concerned. Communists who have changed their domicile are obliged to join the section of the country in which they reside. Communists who move to another country without the consent of the CC of their section may not be accepted as members of another section of the CI." It was a ruling like this that was used as the pretext to expel Peter Camejo, long-time leader of the American Socialist Workers Party. Camejo had moved to Venezuela for a year to take a leave of absence to study Lenin and develop a critique of SWP sectarianism. When he returned to the United States, he was prevented from rejoining because his move was "unauthorized." He was victimized for his political beliefs under the rubric of anti-Bolshevik "indiscipline." C Compare these unbending strictures with the norms of the Bolshevik Party. In the Bolshevik Party, there was no such thing as formal membership. A Bolshevik was simply somebody who agreed with the general orientation of Iskra and who accepted the discipline of the party in actions such as strikes and demonstrations. Nobody had to get permission to transfer from one Bolshevik branch to another because such a concept was alien to the way the free-wheeling Bolsheviks functioned. Even more insidious than the Statutes were the Theses of the Fifth Congress on the Propaganda Activities of the CI and its sections. This document sets in concrete the methodology of turning every serious political disagreement into a battle between the two major classes in society. It states: "Struggles within the CI are at the same time ideological crises within the individual parties. Right and left political deviations, deviations from Marxism-Leninism, are connected with the class ideology of the proletariat. Manifestations of crisis at the second world congress and after were precipitated by 'left infantile sicknesses', which were ideologically a deviation from Marxism-Leninism towards syndicalism....The present internal struggles in some communist parties, the beginning of which coincided with the October defeat in Germany, are ideological repercussions of the survivals of traditional social-democratic ideas in the communist party. The way to overcome them is by the BOLSHEVIZATION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTIES. Bolshevization in this context means the final ideological victory of Marxism-Leninism (or in other words Marxism in the period of imperialism and the epoch of the proletarian revolution) over the 'Marxism' of the Second International and the syndicalist remnants." So the legacy of the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern was organizational rigidity and ideological conformity. This has been the unexamined heritage of the Marxist-Leninist movement since the 1920s. Any attempt to veer from this method has been dubbed "Menshevik." Zinoviev was the architect of these measures. He himself was soon deposed by Stalin who found the guidelines perfect for his own bureaucratic consolidation. "Trotskyism" soon entered the vocabulary of curse-words that now included "Menshevik", "opportunist" or "syndicalist". The Comintern was now transformed by these measures, even though the seeds of the transformation were present at the time of the 21 Conditions. There were signs that Lenin had been troubled by the drift of the Comintern. He considered moving the headquarters to Western Europe where the Russian influence would be much less preponderant. He also was developing a critique of the organizational model of "democratic centralism" that had been encoded in the Second World Congress in a document he found "all too Russian". But Lenin did not survive his stroke. We have no way of knowing what the outcome would have been had he lived. After all, Stalin's power did not rest on his charisma but on his roots in a powerful social layer: the state bureaucracy. The only way that history can be changed is not by rewriting it but by creating it anew. We have the opportunity today to uproot this rotten "Bolshevization" methodology which belongs to the tortured early years of the Soviet Union. In my final post in this series, I will examine the impact of the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern on the American Communist Party which tried to apply these precepts to their own organization with fateful results. Louis Proyect --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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