Lenin and the End of Politics by A. J. Polan

Author:A. J. Polan [Polan, A. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Modern, 20th Century, General
ISBN: 9781351794275
Google: IRS9DgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-04-21T01:28:11+00:00

THE PARTY PROBLEM

It is common in critiques of the Soviet state to attribute its deficiencies to the authoritarian structure of the Bolshevik party from its earliest pre-revolutionary days. Its intolerance, its exclusivity, its hierarchical structure, its concentration of effective power at the top can all be detected in the Soviet Union not long after the seizure of power. This apparent similarity suggests a process of organic growth as the authoritarian party creates the authoritarian state. My argument would not seek to deny this, but rather to relegate it to a subordinate status as an explanatory schema. A concentration on the responsibility of the party allows the responsibility of the constitution to escape unexamined. Indeed, the absence of the party from the pages of The State and Revolution had provided an argument for the innocence of that text, by implying to its ideas a viability and practicality that was simply corrupted or abolished by the democratic centralist organization. In contrast, I would suggest that the regrettable features of the Bolshevik party were not a world apart from features that all political parties tend to display; the fact that these features came to define the lineaments of the Russian state, whereas elsewhere they appear to have been kept under control, is due to Lenin’s concept of state form, not his concept of party.

The Leninist party is accused of two ominous qualities. Internally, it has an excessively rigid and centralist character, denoted by the term ‘democratic centralism’; and in its relations with the external political world, it claims a status of privilege over other political tendencies inasmuch as its politics claim to be ‘scientific’. The consequences of both these assumptions may then be identified in the subsequent authoritarian regime.

Essentially, democratic centralism was intended ‘to make the local organisations the principle organisational units of the Party in fact and not merely in name, and to see to it that all the higher-standing bodies are elected, accountable, and subject to recall’.56 In this it differs hardly at all from the manner in which the internal life of political parties is normally organized except in one respect. The differentia specifica of democratic centralism lay in its definition of conditions under which no democratic norms would be allowed to prevail:

In the heat of the battle, when the proletarian army is straining every nerve, no criticism whatever can be permitted in its ranks. But before the call for action is issued, there should be the broadest and freest discussion and appraisal of the resolution, of its arguments and its various propositions.57

The question acutely posed is therefore, who shall issue the ‘call for action’ which will terminate discussion? Who is to decide what shall constitute such an ‘action’ and for how long shall its authority be deemed to have sway? Lenin proposed the simple answer: the party congress, the highest and most representative authority of the party. But if the ‘action’ situation ever came to prevail over a number of years, as it quite publicly did in the desperate

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