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Leninism–as Lenin’s general philosophy and strategy for revolution can legitimately be called from 1903 onwards–had a different focus. It did not, at least initially, seek a mass party at all. The party it aspired to create was controlled from above and based on the assumption that most workers could not develop political initiative without a trained elite to show them how. Its fatal flaw was a lack of empathy with the workers it claimed to speak for. In the later analysis of the American socialist Irving Howe, Lenin’s conception of the Vanguard Party and its relationship to the working class “assumes a homogeneity of interest and outlook in that class which is rarely present, and thereby it diminishes the claims of other radical parties to be authentic representatives of the working class or portions of it”.27 The conception, though, was meant to be divisive. Whatever its ultimate intentions, it was a charter for command, control and hierarchy.

The debacle of the Second Congress did not go unnoticed by European social democrats. Rosa Luxemburg, in Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy (1904), acknowledged the particular problems facing the Russian party by the conditions of autocracy, and that in those conditions it had to adopt clandestinity and centralisation, but she questioned the degree of centralisation advocated by Lenin. She noted that Lenin defined a revolutionary social democrat as “a Jacobin joined to the organization of the proletariat, which has become conscious of its class interests”. To this she responded:

The fact is that Social Democracy is not joined to the organization of the proletariat. It is itself the proletariat. And because of this, Social Democratic centralism is essentially different from Blanquist centralism. It can only be the concentrated will of the individuals and groups representative of the working class. It is, so to speak, the ‘self-centralism’ of the advanced sectors of the proletariat. It is the rule of the majority within its own party.

Her concern was that Lenin’s scheme for a Vanguard Party would downgrade working-class self-activity.

Luxemburg wrote one year before the Russian Revolution of 1905 and thirteen years before the revolution of February 1917, both of which were mass popular uprisings in which the Bolsheviks played a small, negligible and in some respects negative role. Already, she had discerned:

It is a mistake to believe that it is possible to substitute ‘provisionally’ the absolute power of a Central Committee (acting somehow by ‘tacit delegation’) for the yet unrealisable rule of the majority of conscious workers in the party, and in this way replace the open control of the working masses over the party organs with the reverse control by the Central Committee over the revolutionary proletariat.

She also sensed a deeper problem. “The ultra-centralism asked by Lenin is full of the sterile spirit of the overseer”, she wrote. “It is not a positive and creative spirit. Lenin’s concern is not so much to make the activity of the party more fruitful as to control the party–to narrow the movement rather than to develop it, to bind rather than to unify it”. She concluded, “Stop the natural pulsation of a living organism and you weaken it, you diminish its resistance and combative spirit […] The proposed means turn against the end they are supposed to serve”.28

In the same year, Luxemburg wrote a pamphlet called Leninism or Marxism?, in which she identified the danger of giving the leadership of a revolutionary socialist party sweeping powers that “would multiply artificially and in a most dangerous measure the conservatism which is the necessary outgrowth of every such leadership”. She concluded:

There is nothing which so easily and so surely hands over a still youthful labour movement to the private ambitions of intellectuals, as forcing the movement into the straight-jacket of a bureaucratic centralism which debases the fighting workers into the pliable tools of the hands of a ‘committee’.29

It was not only Luxemburg who foresaw the future. On arrival in London in 1902 after escaping Siberian exile, Leon Trotsky initially gravitated to Lenin. But Lenin’s intolerance and hyper-centralism revolted him. When the split came Trotsky sided with the Mensheviks, although his allegiance would be highly quixotic (several times he tried to meld the two sides of Russian Marxism back together but the divisions went too deep). After the Congress he wrote a pamphlet, Our Political Tasks, in which he analysed Lenin’s plans for a centralised party in which only full-time professionals had initiative and command. He criticised Lenin for setting up an “orthodox theocracy” in the party and came out for a conception of the party similar to that of Martov and Luxemburg. Lastly, he predicted what would occur if Lenin’s schemes were fully implemented. “Lenin’s methods”, he wrote,

lead to this: the party organisation at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally a single dictator substitutes himself for the Central Committee.

Trotsky would live to see every part of his prediction come true.

CHAPTER THREE

1905–The First People’s Revolution

RSDLP workers who risked prison and exile to distribute Iskra were baffled by reports of a massive schism at the London Congress. The young worker Pianitsky echoed many activists on the ground when he recalled, “I could not understand why petty differences kept us from working together”. Even Lenin’s acolyte, the Bolshevik engineer Krzhizhanovky, admitted that when he heard the criticism leveled at Martov by supporters of Lenin, “the thought of Comrade Martov’s opportunism seemed particularly farfetched”.1 After the Congress, having been defeated on the criteria for membership, Lenin also lost control of the editorial board. Plekhanov, appalled at the split and at the manner in which he had forfeited the support of his old comrades for a man he could not abide, reversed himself rapidly and took against Lenin. Without his support Lenin no longer controlled Iskra.

Despite claims from his latter-day defenders that Lenin was reluctant to pursue the split, his actions speak otherwise. In his account of the Congress, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904), Lenin claimed that differences on organisational points reflected a deeper and more significant divide. Referring to Martov’s off-hand remark that Lenin’s centralised schema would turn members in to “serfs”, he wrote that this revealed a strain of bourgeois individualism unworthy of a proletarian revolutionary. “To the individualism of the intellectual”, he wrote, “which already manifested itself in the controversy over Paragraph 1, revealing its tendency to opportunist argument and anarchistic phrase mongering, all proletarian organisation and discipline seems to be serfdom”.2 Instead of working within the newly formed RSDLP and contributing to its official newspaper, Iskra, he opted to create a separate newspaper, Vyperod (Forward), and began to organise his own parallel organisation of activists to distribute it. Almost alone he set out to organise a new Congress which hardly anyone else in the party wanted.