What was Bolshevism?

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A RECENT study ('The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, 191723' , by Rubert Service) backs up, I think, Clive Bradley's reply to Jan McCalman on Lenin (Socialist Organiser last week). lan's argument, if I have understood it correctly, is that rigid centralism within the Bolshevik party led to rigid centralism within the Soviet state, and thus eventually to the horrors of Service (who is no Leninist) shows that on the contrary, it was rigid state centralism (initially evoked by the Civil War) which generated rigid party centralism.

As late as 1918 the Bolshevik party had the most minimal central apparatus - a Secretariat with a staff of no more than a dozen, for a party with hundreds of thousands of members. Far from being a tidy, centralisea phalanx, rather ramshackle, anarchie, highly argumentative party.

For most of its history before 1917 any rigid centralism had been physically impossible because transport and communication links between different areas of the party were so poor.

Of course it is arguable that errors by the Bolsheviks played a role in the growth of a bureaucratic oligarchy in the USSR, supplementing the pressures due to the isolation of the revolution in backward Russia. But those errors were not in the area of concepts of party organisation.

Political

It was not organisational rigidity which distinguished the Bolshevik party in the pre-World War 1 socialist movement. It was political qualities. It was the drive of the Bolshevik leadership always to argue issues through, to pose questions sharply, to draw out the logic of ideas to practical conclusions.

Other parties - notably the German Social Democracy were less ramshackle, but had a political regime of consensus and muddling through. In those parties, the role of the leadership was not to fight for political clarity, but to provide a sort of "chair's summing up" on political issues.

Lenin was prepared, again and again, to come out as a minority of one, even among the Bolsheviks, and to fight hard (and usually successfully) for bold ideas.

Even the best leaders of the German Social Democracy, like August Bebel, could not imagine themselves doing likewise. To them Lenin seemed to be an insane factionalist, an intolerant dogmatist, a doctrinaire splitter.

In short, what was distinetive about Bolshevism, and Lenin's method in particular, was precisely what lan describes as 'the positive Leninism":

'The devotion to Marxist analysis, the revolutionary elan, the self-sacrifice, the unyielding striving for working class power.

There was no special Bolshevik technique of organisation, other than the drive to make political ideas clear and concrete by drawing organisational conclusions from them.

Ithink lan looks at Bolshevism from the wrong end of the telescope.

While rigidifying, bureaucratising and finally crushing the Bolshevik party, the emergent state bureaucracy in the USSR also falsified the history of the Bolshevik party. In books such as Zinoviev's history of the Bolshevik Party, and even more so in later Stalinist works, it depicted a Bolshevik party in the mould of the civil-war state or (later) the Stalinist dictatorship - a party whose main distinguishing mark was organisational rigidity.

Healy

This picture of Bolshevism has been accepted, or partly accepted, by many would-be Trotskyists. For Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League/ Workers Revolutionary Party, in the years when it was still a serious political organisation, it was translated into a concept of the Bolshevik party as first and foremost a hard organisational machine. Politics were not determined by Marxist reasoning, but by the needs of the machineagainst-machine combat of the 'alternative leadership' with the labour bureaucracy.

I suspect that Ian's picture of Lenin's Bolshevik party is too much influenced by the model of the SLL/WRP. There is some logic, then, in him seeing Stalinism as partly caused by Bolshevism: but the truth, I would submit, is the reverse. His picture of Bolshevism is partly moulded by Stalinism.

COLIN FOSTER Islington LABOUR FOCUS ON FASTERN EUROPE FOR ROCK * MUSIC ZHORES MEDVEDEY ANDROPONIS Box 23, 136 Kingsland High St., London E8

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