Sentiment and Will: The Qualities that Distinguish the Communist (Pt. 2)

We view the party as a “school of thought and method for action”; a school that all comrades attend and all comrades learn, from the youngest to the veterans. Obviously not all comrades are equal, but all learn and study, and differences in ability and knowledge are used by the party to organically assign each comrade to the most suitable function. This aspect is also well made clear in Lenin’s book What is to be done?

The opposite of this way of understanding the party and the militant’s role is to annihilate ourselves in submission to an unquestioned authority, a leader. This “leader” would regularly provide us with instructions and solutions, without ever struggling to find these out for ourselves. We reject this tendency, which parallels the presumption of those who claim to have it all figured out.

“So, our long, tragic experience should have taught us that whilst it is necessary to utilize everyone’s particular skills and aptitudes in party operations, ‘we should not love anyone’; indeed we need to be prepared to chuck anyone out, even if they’ve spent eleven out of twelve months in prison every year of their life. At important junctures, decisions about the course of action to follow have to be made without relying on the personal ‘authority’ of teachers, leaders or executives, and on the basis of rules of principle and of conduct that our movement has fixed in advance. A very difficult concept, we know, but without it we cannot see how a powerful movement will reappear…. Polemics about persons and between persons, and the use and abuse of personal names, must be replaced by the checking and verification of the statements on which the movement, during successive difficult attempts at reorganization, has based its work and its struggle” (Politique d’abord, 1952).

It is obvious that we feel love for each other in the party, a love that flows from the common struggle and the common ultimate goal, but it is certainly not something that can be imposed. It would be infantile to claim that one must regulate such sentiments, even if that were possible in the first place.

All that we have mentioned does not mean that the party has an open door through which anyone can enter by simply professing their faith, like entering a church, synagogue, or mosque. The party has a duty to make an assessment of the individual, denying admittance to figures who might endanger it. Moreover, membership must always, without any exception, take place on an individual basis.

“The party must effect a strict organizational rigour in the sense that it does not accept self‑enlargement by means of compromises with other groups, large or small, or worse still through bargaining over concessions with alleged bosses and leaders in order to win rank-and-file members” (Force, Violence, Dictatorship… 1948).

The danger to the party is not so much physical, vis-à-vis the safety of comrades and the organization (although in certain moments we must also contemplate this possibility), but related to the party’s doctrinal and organizational integrity. Party members are able to assess the passion and sincerity of the sympathizer by working with them for a certain period of time. This is not the definitive criterion, but the senior comrade’s sensibility and experience allows them to get a general picture of the sympathizer, and there are aspects that are not difficult to identify. Ljudvinskaja narrates:

“In Paris Lenin directed all our activity…. Lenin’s harshness and intransigence toward opportunists upset some comrades. One of them said to Lenin, ‘Why expel everyone from the section? Who are we going to work with?’ Lenin replied with a smile, ‘It matters little if we are not very numerous today, because, on the other hand, we will be united in our action, and conscious workers will support us, since we are on the right path.’ He taught us to have a strict attitude, a principled attitude toward the conduct and acts of comrades” (Lénine tel qu’il fut, 1958). Radek, when commenting on the issue of the famous paragraph 1 of the statute, debated at the 2nd Congress in 1903, wrote: “On the question around the first paragraph of the statute of the Social Democratic Party Lenin posed a problem that is no less important than all other political differences with the Mensheviks. Instead, it can be said that this first paragraph of the statute prepared the possibility of the practical realization of Lenin’s political line…. In the rejection of tsarism, which aroused the indignation of the broadest strata of petty-bourgeois intellectuals, there was no jurist who did not shelter himself under the aegis of socialist thought. He who welcomed him into the party on the simple condition that he recognize the program of the proletarian party and provide financial support, put the divided labor movement at the mercy of the petty bourgeoisie.

“Lenin, by making it a condition that only those who were active in the organization of the proletariat be admitted into the party, aimed to limit the danger of the workers’ movement falling under the influence of petty-bourgeois intellectuals. It is true that even those who, by joining the organization and becoming professional revolutionaries, showed that they had broken all ties with bourgeois society, did not give complete assurance that they would remain loyal to the cause of the proletariat. Nevertheless, these choices represented in some way a guarantee” (Lenin, 1924).

Lenin’s attitude on this issue is well understood from the discussion of Paragraph 1 of the Statute at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903. This is particularly important because it raises the broader question of party organization.

Even though the Bolsheviks who agreed with Lenin had a majority at the congress, they did not side with him on this issue. Martov made a different proposal, and got a temporary majority. While Lenin did not make a big deal out of this, it is still beneficial to understand his attitude on this issue.

Lenin proposed a paragraph (number 1, to emphasize the central importance of this issue): “A member of the Party is one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organizations.” Are you really in favor of a distinction between party and class? Prove it by accepting these conditions.

Below is the report that Lenin later gives of it, which we published in our text Lenin the Organic Centralist. Says Lenin:

“The definition given in my draft was: ‘A member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party is one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organisations.’ In place of the words I have underlined, Martov proposed: ’work under the control and direction of one of the Party organizations’. My formulation was supported by Plekhanov, Martov’s by the rest of the editorial board (Axelrod was their spokesman at the Congress). We argued that the concept Party member must be narrowed so as to separate those who worked from those who merely talked, to eliminate organizational chaos, to eliminate the monstrous and absurd possibility of there being organizations which consisted of Party members but which were not Party organizations, and so on. Martov stood for broadening the Party and spoke of a broad class movement needing a broad—i.e., diffuse—organization, and so forth. It is amusing to note that in defense of their views nearly all Martov’s supporters cited What Is to Be Done? Plekhanov hotly opposed Martov, pointing out that his Jauresist formulation would fling open the doors to the opportunists, who just longed for such a position of being inside the Party but outside its organization. ‘Under the control and direction’, I said, would in practice mean nothing more nor less than without any control or direction” (VII, 27-28).

Martov hoped for a mass party, but in doing so he opened the doors to all sorts of opportunists, and made the party’s limits indeterminate and vague. This was a serious danger, as it was not easy to distinguish the boundary between the revolutionary and the idle chatterbox: Lenin says that a good third of the participants at the Congress were schemers.

“Why worry about those who don’t want to or can’t join one of the party organizations,” Plekhanov wondered.

“Workers wishing to join the party will not be afraid to join one of its organizations. Discipline doesn’t scare them. Intellectuals, completely imbued with bourgeois individualism, will fear entering. These bourgeois individualists are generally the representatives of all sorts of opportunism. We have to get them away from us. The project is a shield against their breaking into the party, and only for this reason should all enemies of opportunism vote for Lenin’s proposal” (Proceedings of the Second Congress, session of August 2 (15)).

Trotsky spoke against Lenin’s proposal, considering it ineffective. Lenin replied to him:

“[Trotsky] has failed to notice a basic question: does my formulation narrow or expand the concept of a Party member? If he had asked himself that question, he would easily have seen that my formulation narrows this concept, while Martov’s expands it, for (to use Martov’s own correct expression) what distinguishes his concept is its ‘elasticity’. And in the period of Party life that we are now passing through it is just this ‘elasticity’ that undoubtedly opens the door to all elements of confusion, vacillation, and opportunism.”

Those unstable elements are the harbingers of uncertainties and deviations, without much work to show for it. The danger can be great: “The need to safeguard the firmness of the Party’s line and the purity of its principles has now become particularly urgent, for, with the restoration of its unity, the Party will recruit into its ranks a great many unstable elements, whose number will increase with the growth of the Party” (VI, 499-500).

On the other hand, where is the danger of a rigorous delimitation of the party, through specific limits to the definition of “Social Democrat?”

“If hundreds and thousands of workers who were arrested for taking part in strikes and demonstrations did not prove to be members of Party organizations, it would only show that we have good organizations, and that we are fulfilling our task of keeping a more or less limited circle of leaders secret and of drawing the broadest possible masses into the movement.”

But the party, a vanguard component of the working class, cannot be confused with the whole class, as Axelrod did.

“It would be better if ten who do work should not call themselves Party members (real workers don’t hunt after titles!) than that one who only talks should have the right and opportunity to be a Party member…. The Central Committee will never be able to exercise real control over all who do the work but do not belong to organizations. It is our task to place actual control in the hands of the Central Committee. It is our task to safeguard the firmness, consistency, and purity of our Party. We must strive to raise the title and the significance of a Party member higher, higher and still higher” (VI, 500-502).

In 1955 we wrote in Russia and Revolution in Marxist Theory, Part 2, §37:

“Apparently it seems that Lenin was distinguishing between mere party militants and the ‘professional revolutionaries,’ whose smaller groups formed the leadership backbone. We showed several times that here we are dealing with the illegal network, and not with the superimposition on the party of a bureaucratic apparatus of paid people. Professional does not necessarily mean salaried, but dedicated to the party’s struggle by voluntary membership, disengaged now from any association for reasons of defending collective interests, although this remains the determinist basis for the rise of the party. The whole importance of the Marxist dialectic lies in this double relationship. The worker is revolutionary out of class interest, the communist is revolutionary for the same end, but elevated beyond subjective interest.”

And in Croaking of Praxis, from Il Programma Comunista No. 11/1953:

“The right wing of the Russian party wants the party member to come from a professional or factory worker group federated in the party: the trade unions were called professional associations by the Russians. In a polemical sense Lenin forges the historic phrase that above all the party is an association of professional revolutionaries. They are not asked: are you a worker? In what profession? Mechanic, tinsmith, woodworker? They may be as well factory workers as students or perhaps sons of nobles; they will answer: revolutionary, that is my profession. Only Stalinist cretinism could give such a phrase the sense of revolutionary by trade, of being salaried by the party. Such a useless formula would have left the problem at the same point: do we hire employees of the apparatus among the workers, or even outside? But it was about more than that.”

For the Bolsheviks, the communist militant is one who accepts the program, without necessarily knowing it or understanding it in detail, and is willing to work at the party’s orders: qualities of self-sacrifice, willingness to fight, that any proletarian can have, even if illiterate. Such an acceptance of the program can be based on an understanding of a few essential aspects, sometimes just slogans, but which coincide with their deepest aspirations, their needs. An acceptance based more on passion than intellect. Understanding will come, in time.

This understanding will never be complete, however. The total understanding of doctrine cannot be of the individual but of the party collective, and is expressed in its press, its theses, its revolutionary tactics.

“Doctrinal knowledge is not the single fact of even the most learned follower or leader, nor is it a condition for the mass in motion: it has for its subject a proper organ, the party” (Russia and Revolution…, Part 2, § 37).

This concept is repeated in the Characteristic Theses of the Party, of 1951:

“The Party is not formed on the basis of individual consciousness: not only is it not possible for each proletarian to become conscious and still less to master the class doctrine in a cultural way, but neither is it possible for each individual militant, not even for the leaders of the Party. Consciousness consists in the organic unity of the Party alone.”

“Beyond the influence of social democracy there is no other conscious activity of the workers” Lenin says at the Second Congress. We add, “It is heavy, but it is so. Proletarian action is spontaneous insofar as it arises from economic determinants, but it does not have consciousness as a condition, either in the individual or in the class. Physical class struggle is spontaneous fact, not conscious. The class achieves its consciousness only when the revolutionary party has been formed in its bosom, which possesses the theoretical consciousness resting on the real class relation, proper, in fact, to all proletarians. The latter, however, can never possess true knowledge—that is, theory—either as individuals, or as a totality, or as a majority as long as the proletariat is subject to bourgeois education and culture, that is, to the bourgeois fabrication of its ideology, and, in good terms, as long as the proletariat does not win, and ceases to exist. So, in exact terms, proletarian consciousness will never be there. There is doctrine, communist knowledge, and this is in the party of the proletariat, not in the class” (“Russia and Revolution…” Part 2, § 39)

Concluding on the discussion on paragraph 1, it is obvious that there was a difference between working under the leadership of one of the organizations and participating in it, being part of it, in the sense that participating in one of the organizations required a path that not all sympathizers or kindred were able or willing to take. Thus, there was a process of acceptance into the party, which presuppose characteristics that Lenin describes elsewhere, and which we pointed out above that we fully share.