[Self-disclosure: As a young socialist radical in the 1960s and
a member of SDS. I was enamored with the “far left,” particularly
Leninism-Trotskyism. During the fierce
faction fight within SDS that began in earnest in 1968 between the
Maoist/Stalinist Progressive Labor Party (PL) and the SDS National Office
(N.O.), I reluctantly aligned myself with PL’s Worker-Student Alliance (WSA),
as I considered them actually pro-working class and serious Marxists, in
contradistinction to the SDS N.O., which I viewed as a bunch of hippies. After the collapse of SDS and disillusionment
with PL borne out by a summer of working with it and WSA in Chicago, I joined
the youth group of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Young
Socialist Alliance (YSA), from which I was expelled—twice! The late, great Peter Camejo congratulated me
sincerely on this, telling me that as he got deeper into the SWP, he realized
just how Stalinist it was internally also.
From 2001-2010 I was an at-large member of Solidarity, attended the 2006
Solidarity Summer School and Convention, and was an active writer for both Against
the Current and the Solidarity internal discussion bulletin, until I too
was expelled from Solidarity in October 2010 on “discipline” charges at a
hearing before the National Committee, which my defense witness called a “kangaroo
court.” Today, I wear all three
expulsions as a—badge of honor! In 2015
I became an enthusiastic supporter of the Presidential campaign of Bernie
Sanders, and even wrote an article supporting his candidacy that was published that
year on the website of the Third Camp socialist magazine New Politics. I’ve also “moved politically” from the Third
Camp “far left” to Third Camp democratic socialism because I enthusiastically
embrace Michael Harington’s idea of socialist politics as achieving the “left
wing of the feasible” (emphasis added), am a signatory to the DSA North
Star Statement of Principles, and a member of Central Indiana DSA, which has
adopted a pragmatic approach free of doctrine and jargon as its operating
political philosophy—GF]
Can
Marxist-Leninists and Leninist-Trotskyists be good, real, democratic
socialists? I want to answer that in the
negative. Marxist-Leninists and Leninist-Trotskyists
cannot be good, real, democratic socialists—and it’s not because
democratic socialism is merely “social-democratic” in its politics, proposals
and orientation; or insufficiently “anti-imperialist;” or “beholden to the
Democratic Party and against the independent mobilization of the working
class.” No, it’s because democratic
socialism is resolutely anti-authoritarian; values concrete results in the
here-and-now, not off in some distant but “inevitable” future which no one can
seriously predict; believes strongly in civil rights and civil liberties for all,
even for those deemed “bourgeois” or “incorrect;” distinguishes between
“incorrect” thoughts and writings and terroristic, violent, or discriminatory
deeds, and while supporting appropriate criminal punishment for the latter,
leaves the former alone—to be dealt with by open, democratic criticism and
counterproposal, not by punitive sanction; and because democratic socialism
respects the autonomy of the individual, and relies on his/her own personal
political consciousness and ethical conscience instead of authoritarian,
robotic, “discipline” imposed from above.
Contrast
that to Marxism-Leninism and Leninism-Trotskyism, which closes off discussion
and criticism once a decision has been made by the “proper” higher-ups; imposes an inviolable “party line” on its members and adherents, and
requires them to uphold that line affirmatively in all situations, even
requiring them to vote robotically as a bloc at meetings and assemblies; and acts
like an infiltrating sect in broader groups, assemblies and movements, where
the goal of the sect is to impose its (and overwhelmingly, only its) “correct”
line, proposals and programs upon others, whether they agree with them or
not. Be it with the CPUSA, Maoist
groups, or Trotskyist groups such as the SWP/YSA, ISO, or Solidarity,
historically that is precisely what has happened, and why so much of left
history, notably in the US, is that of acrimony, sectarianism, accusations of
bad faith, and other movement- and organization-dividing charges and
countercharges, which has enervated the process of building a genuinely mass
movement of the left. Even at those
times when there were mass movements of the left, notably here in the US,
everyone politically aware knew that there were leading individuals and groups
one did not cross or too strongly criticize.
That was true in the Popular Front era of the CP, within SDS, and, I
fear, will become the new norm within DSA.
DSA has responded in the past with its principled ban on
democratic centralism (the organizational hallmark of Marxism-Leninism and
Leninism-Trotskyism, even of the “soft” Leninism-Trotskyism of Solidarity), but
since DSA’s explosive expansion, that ban seems to be going by the wayside, so
to speak; while not formally rescinded as of yet, it is becoming a dead letter
in practice with the influx of Marxist-Leninist and Leninist-Trotskyist
individuals and caucuses within DSA.
Which, I am convinced, will be the downfall of DSA as a viable democratic
socialist organization, and cause it to be but another Solidarity, ISO, Maoist
sect, other authoritarian grouping of the left, or all of the above, a gaggle
of competing rivalries—and lead to its collapse, same as the influx of
competing Marxism-Leninisms and Leninism-Trotskyisms into SDS in the 1960s led
to its downfall.
The
only solution, I assert, is for DSA to affirm its principled ban on democratic
centralism within DSA, both in principle and in practice; while I certainly
don’t want, or support, a wholesale expulsion of Marxism-Leninism- or
Leninism-Trotskyism-sympathetic individuals, groupings or caucuses from DSA, I
do steadfastly support a ban on their acting as such; let them, the supposed
“far left,” participate openly within DSA and advocate for their policies and
proposals, yet demand of them that they not practice any form of democratic
centralism—which means a ban on robotic voting blocs held together by
“discipline” instead of autonomous fealty to certain positions by individuals
and groups of individuals. Every
individual and caucus member within DSA must to be free to dissent from and
abstain from voting on caucus and group proposals, even as members of those
caucuses or groups. Individual autonomy,
trust by comrades in the good consciousness and conscience of other DSA
comrades, must become the sine qua non across the board—be they groupings and
caucuses of Solidarity, as but one example, or of their “social-democratic”
opposition, such as North Star! “Let a
hundred flowers bloom, let a thousand schools of thought contend” within a
truly “big tent” DSA where a “disciplined” voting bloc does not determine the
DSA “line” due to organizational maneuvering, but only through truly free,
democratic and open debate involving all DSAers, or chapter delegates, who wish
to participate, in truly free, democratic and open DSA meetings. Otherwise, I fear, the inevitable takeover of
DSA by some “disciplined” democratic centralist clique, caucus, or organization
is inevitable. If not in the foreseeable
future, then eventually, as it did in SDS—to the complete disarray and
unviability of SDS! Which went from a
mass organization of the mostly-student left of 100,000 members to poof!
overnight. (Already we are seeing the
ill effects of this within DSA itself, which has seen its membership drop 20%,
from 94,000 to 74,000; and while those numbers may seem large, remember, the
whole of DSA membership in either case could fit within the confines of the
average pro football stadium, which should give the reader a sense of just how
small, in a country of 330 million, the organized left really is—GF)
Already
we are seeing it within DSA in proposals, programs and resolutions of a “far
left” cast being rammed through as supposedly the consensus thinking of the
whole of DSA. Further, from such as support
for BDS to the “rank-and-file” strategy, and for several others, these DSA
“proposals” are not only causing havoc and consternation within DSA itself, but
also, in how DSA relates to other organizations of a progressive and leftist
bent. And may well be leading to DSA
members dropping out in significant numbers, by not renewing their dues, for
example, or not attending DSA meetings.
That surely is not what we in DSA want, but it is what all too easily
could happen; and then DSA becomes but a shell of itself, just as the various
Marxist-Leninist and Leninist-Trotskyist sects were but shells, sects little
noticed or paid attention to in the outside world until their members and
sympathizers (formally or informally) joined DSA and thus organizationally
amplified their voices. Such a DSA is
not the DSA we of the democratic left, such as a caucus whose approach I generally
support, but am not a member of, North Star, want, but it may become the DSA we
are saddled with—as long as democratic centralism is given its new lease on
life within DSA itself, as it has since 2016, with the explosive influx of new
members. That is why the principled ban
on democratic centralism within DSA must be reaffirmed and upheld, both
in principle and in practice: not to
squelch the voices within DSA that are “far left” (as will inevitably be
charged), but to save DSA as a “big tent” organization itself, one where both
socialism (in its many varieties and advocacies) and meaningful democracy
can prevail.
While
the “far left” may decry this as “bad faith” or even “anticommunism,” they
would completely miss the point, which is—not to silence their proposal of
ideas and policies, but to prevent them from being implemented by a mere voting
bloc of robotic adherents acting under “discipline,” despite what others may
think or wish. Marxist-Leninists and
Leninist-Trotskyists defend democratic socialist organizational norms as needed
to create a “fighting army of the proletariat,” conveniently forgetting that an
army is but a body for fighting that lacks a head; and thus, in this all armies
are but instruments that can be used for fighting for good, or for fighting for
ill. In this, both the organizations of
the Red Army under Trotsky which successfully staved off the Whites and the foreign
imperialist invading armies in the Russian Civil War, and the Japanese Imperial
Army which ravaged East Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, were exactly the
same. Also, the reactionary Guomindang
(Kuomintang), which massacred thousands of Communists and workers, was a
democratic centralist organization! (Specifically reorganized as such under the
aegis of Comintern agent Michael Borodin as the “leading force of the “national
democratic revolution” in China in the 1920s, let us recall.) Democratic centralism is but an instrument,
and a blunt one at that, and historically, has always been far more centralist
than democratic. Trotsky, before he
became enamored of it, spoke trenchantly in 1904 of what becomes of democratic
centralist organizations:
The
organization of the party will take the place of the party itself; the Central
Committee will take the place of the organization; and finally, the dictator
will take the place of the Central Committee.
This
dreary prognosis has been exactly confirmed historically, not only from the
ascendancy of Stalin in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), but
also right up to the present, in the unquestioned and unopposable ascendancy
not only of Mao and others, and now Xi,
in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but also of Jack Barnes in the SWP (which
led to the demise of this venerable political voice of US Trotskyism) and Bob
Avakian in the Maoist/Stalinist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Hardly models for a mass democratic socialist
“big tent” organization such as DSA!
Democratic
centralism can also be strongly criticized from the standpoint of
“revolutionary socialism” itself, notably in the trenchant critique of it,
solidly documented, by Rosa Luxemburg. In The Letters
of Rosa Luxemburg (London and New York: Verso, 2011), in an October 20,
1913 letter to the Editors of Social-Democraten, (pp. 325-328) she
specifically excoriates Lenin (pp. 327-8) for organizational heavy-handedness
and factionalism in attempting to split the Polish Social Democracy “in a
planned and deliberate manner…as the one they [the Leninists—GF] pursue as
their specialty in the Russian [Social-Democratic Workers’] Party [RSDRP]” (p.
327) . The Russian Revolution and
Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961)
consists of two notable essays by Luxemburg that criticize both democratic
centralism and the undemocratic aspects of Bolshevism as found early on after
the Russian Revolution of 1917.
“Leninism or Marxism?” was what her essay was titled in English; it was
originally published in 1904 in Iskra, the newspaper of Russian
Social-Democracy, in Russian, and in German in Neue Zeit, the newspaper
of the German Social-Democracy, as “Organizational Questions of the Russian
Social Democracy;” and excoriates Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
as advocating Blanquism, undue centralization, and opportunism. (See especially
pp. 84-91 in this volume.) Her unfinished 1919 “The Russian Revolution” is
famous not only for its line, “Freedom only for the supporters of the
government, only for members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no
freedom at all.” (p. 69) But her following lines, a paean to individual
freedom, are even downright “bourgeois liberal”! (In a positive sense, of
course.) She writes (ibid.) “Freedom is
always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of
‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in
political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its
effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.” In footnote 579 in Letters of Rosa
Luxemburg (p. 330), it is noted, “On August 4, 1914, the SPD [German
Socialist Party, Germany’s mass socialist party headed by Kautsky]
parliamentary group—with group discipline applied against the minority (emphasis
added—GF)—voted in favor of the war-credits motion of the imperial
government. The decision to approve
money for war was made on August 3, after a heated debate within the SPD
parliamentary group, by a vote of 78-14.
The support given by the majority to the war meant that an open split in
the SPD was inevitable.” “Group
discipline” was also applied in the CPUSA in silencing and later expelling the
Trotskyists, the followers of Earl Browder, and others, as well as causing
splits within Leninist-Trotskyist groups to become especially acrimonious.
Further, as Hal Draper, perhaps the leading
ideological interpreter of Third Camp revolutionary socialism, notes in his The
“Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1987), Lenin and the Bolsheviks in power too easily made it into
a “dictatorship over the proletariat” enforced by “party discipline.” (See especially
pp. 101-105) Last, Trotskyism-sympathetic scholar Tom Smith, “Beyond Hero
Worship: A Marxist Critique of Bolshevik Terror and Its Indebtedness to
Jacobinism,” Socialism and Democracy 20, Vol. 10, No. 1, Summer 1996, writing
at length that (p. 48)
Bolshevism has failed to be
effective after 1917, or to inspire the masses of the world to revolution, or
to prevent the Stalinist degeneration within its own process of
development. I would argue that one
important reason for these failures (though by no means the primary or
exclusive reason) is the following assumption on the part of the
Bolsheviks: that popular fear of
arbitrary violence and of minority rule is actually irrational, a fear that the
masses need to and should “get over.” I
also believe that such nonsense is a big factor in the tendency of Leninist
groups to degenerate quickly into cults, with practically no effect upon the
real world whatsoever. (Emphasis in original)
Later, (p. 75) Smith critiques Lenin’s
“Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?” for arguing that 240,000 Bolsheviks
could be “a permanent, collective, one-party ‘Lawgiver’….In other words, the
soviets would become the means of whipping up support for the Bolsheviks’
policies—but not so much, for significantly challenging those policies.” Or in other words, the Bolshevik Party would
become the tail that wags the soviet, working-class, dog! But such authoritarianism, that such “popular
fear” of “minority rule” is “actually irrational,” is, as the critiques of
Luxemburg, Draper and Smith show, a built-in feature of democratic
centralism! In fact, as Draper’s book so
well shows, and as Smith’s essay also demonstrates, the “social democratic”
rejection of democratic centralism, i.e., the organizational feature of
Marxism-Leninism and Leninism-Trotskyism, is integral to Marx’s and Engel’s own
conception of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” But not only that: democratic centralism not only embraces and
enhances myriad evils, but rejection of democratic centralism is far closer to
what Marx and Engels themselves envisioned as constituting socialism and
socialist organization. Marx’s famous long
essay on the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France, makes this
abundantly clear, as does Engels’s remark that the “dictatorship of the
proletariat” looks exactly like the Paris Commune—where the Marxists were
actually a minority, and had to compete for influence with Prodhonists,
Blanquists, and others.
All this makes a strong, even overwhelming,
case that democratic centralism has no place within DSA, and that its principled
rejection by DSA must not only be upheld, but also deepened and enforced!
So let our “far leftists” within DSA
eschew any practice of democratic centralism, not force through resolutions and
policies based on robotic “discipline,” and trust the political instincts and
consciousness of DSA members themselves to come to the “right” conclusions, and
I would gladly say to all of them—“Welcome, comrades! While we may disagree, we will, above all,
agree to disagree, and agree wholeheartedly that dissenting comrades are not
automatically class enemies. We will win
over by persuasion, not by the robotic force of ‘disciplined’ voting blocs.”
Our comrades in the British Leninist-Trotskyist
organization Alliance for Workers Liberty (though some will call them only erstwhile
comrades, or not comrades at all) strike a good balance between party
discipline and individual autonomy with the following stipulation to its
members that they must first present the Alliance’s position on an issue; then,
if they disagree, they are fully allowed to present their dissent from that
position without fear of discipline or expulsion. Thus, striking a most acceptable balance
between upholding the group’s position and individual autonomy within the
organization as a trusted, principled member.
That is the way it must be within the organized caucuses within
DSA: the right to affirm the caucus’s
position, the right to dissent from the caucus’s position, and the right to
abstain—even when it comes to voting.
Sadly, that is not the way Marxist-Leninist and Leninist-Trotskyist organizations
or caucuses work: it’s either uphold the
“line” or risk expulsion. Which is
unacceptable within a “big tent” democratic socialist organization such as DSA,
or really, anywhere! Also, there is
nothing more cringeworthy than the way “freewheeling” Marxist-Leninists or
Leninist-Trotskyists will fold in terror and fear when faced with threats from
the organizational “disciplinary committee”!
Right now, this tolerance of democratic centralism (for that is what
Marxist-Leninist and Leninist-Trotskyist organizational philosophy is, what it
invokes is) has made DSA essentially inoperative except as a sounding board for
outrageous ultraleft, often Stalinist, political positions, as each disciplined
caucus tries to outdo the others in displays of “how left we really are.” Such a political approach, however, will doom
DSA to the 100+-year irrelevancy that has politically characterized
Marxism-Leninism and Leninism-Trotskyism in the US, and from which the growth
of DSA was as a beautiful flower emerging through the concrete cracks in the
pavement.
My autobiographical note at the end of my manuscript is also of high relevance:
George
Fish is a Central Indiana DSA member living in Indianapolis, Indiana, and a
North Star Statement of Principles signatory.
A socialist writer and poet, he is a regular contributor to New Politics
and other left periodicals and websites.
