Lenin and the Revolutionary Party
By Paul Le Blanc
With an introduction by Ernest Mandel
Humanities Press, 1990, 1993. 417 pp. $40 (pb)
Review by Karl Miller
This book is an excellent, detailed study of the Bolshevik party. Le Blanc examines the various discussions and arguments about the Bolshevik organisation and direction which Lenin participated in, and puts the formal organisational practice of the Bolsheviks in the framework of their broader political views.
Le Blanc, who was managing editor of the journal Bulletin in Defense of Marxism when he wrote this book, summarises his approach: "Two things are fundamental to Lenin — the political programme of revolutionary Marxism and the living movement and struggles of the working class. The function of the revolutionary party for Lenin is to bring these two phenomena together: to develop the programme in a way that advances the workers' struggles, and to help advance the workers' struggles in a way that contributes to the realisation of the programme."
The book begins by outlining what Leninism is not, debunking the main anticommunist and Stalinist distortions of Lenin's approach to the party. Then it sets the stage by providing the historical context for Lenin's ideas.
By the fourth chapter, Le Blanc settles into the main content of his work, and begins to follow the development of the Bolsheviks from the turn of the century until Lenin's death.
He covers all the main debates. First we read of Lenin's 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done?, which attacked economism and outlined Lenin's conception of party organisation.
In 1903 the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was held, at which the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks first formed separate factions over the issue of the definition of party membership. Le Blanc shows that Rosa Luxembourg's criticisms misunderstand Lenin.
Later, he considers the Bolsheviks' orientation to the 1905 revolution. He judges them to have been somewhat sectarian at first, an attitude overcome in time to provide a qualitative change in the social composition of the party.
The term "democratic centralism" is looked at: it was first used by the Mensheviks in November 1905, and soon adopted by Lenin.
Then we encounter arguments about how to orient to the years of reaction from 1907 to 1912, both between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, and within the Bolshevik faction. The outbreak of World War I follows, and finally we come to the events of 1917, and then the issues surrounding the running of the Soviet state.
Le Blanc finishes with a summary of Leninist thought, of both Lenin and others. In the 1993 edition, an afterword takes cognisance of the collapse of Stalinism. There Le Blanc restates the importance of Lenin's ideas in the new context of the rightward drift of many left intellectuals.
Despite a thorough examination of all these questions, and their relationship to Lenin's conception of the party, Le Blanc does overlook something important. In between discussions about what kind of party to form, and what its constitution and social composition should be, lies the hard work of building the organisation.
Le Blanc does not examine the methods Lenin and the Bolsheviks used to create a party matching their conception of a revolutionary vanguard.
This consists of two central ideas: firstly, the meaning or content of party democracy as opposed to its formal, constitutional representation; secondly, the role of the newspaper in the development of this democracy.
As a consequence, he also regards the Bolsheviks as the incarnation of Lenin's ideas, rather than Lenin as a member of the team developing the ideas.
The key concept he misses is the difference in content between capitalist democracy and Bolshevik democracy. The Marxist conception of democracy is more than simply rank and file voting and broad discussion in the party. Although those standards are necessary, they are not sufficient.
It includes involvement, education and training to allow the party to train all of its members as revolutionary leaders, and to prepare them to train others in the same fashion. Conscious, committed activists are the result of this process. If a Leninist party is not composed of them, democratic centralism becomes just a phrase.
Le Blanc tends to ignore the role of the newspaper in providing the basis of this extensive education and training of party activists. Here is Lenin with a revealing comment in "Where To Begin?" (1901): "The role of a newspaper, however, is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser ...
"With the aid of the newspaper, and through it, a permanent organisation will naturally take shape that will engage, not only in local activities, but in regular general work, and will train its members to follow political events carefully, appraise their significance and their effect on various strata of the population, and develop effective means for the revolutionary party to influence those events."
A minor limitation of the book's focus on Lenin is that it stops with Lenin's death, and does not really take up the issue of Stalinism and the degeneration of Bolshevik democracy. Le Blanc spends a page or two on this question, and Mandel develops the argument further in the introduction. He places the turning point in 1921, with mistakes the Bolsheviks made in narrowing democracy.
For a broader social analysis of the process of Stalinisation, see the pamphlet The Collapse of 'Communism' in the USSR by Doug Lorimer, and The Program of the Democratic Socialist Party.