Part 1: The Leninist party…

The Leninist party in history and present

“The Bolsheviks and Lenin in particular identified three principle tasks of the newly victorious revolution. The first task was to hold on to state power in the face of a ferocious counterrevolutionary assault waged by world imperialism, which worked alongside and with both bourgeois and landlord elements inside of Russia, and also sectors of the left whose opposition to the Bolsheviks put them into a de facto alliance with world imperialism. The second task was to begin the process of reorganizing society on a socialist basis. And the third task was the reorganization of the world socialist movement by effecting a complete split with the Second International. This meant splitting the existing socialist movement in a formal and organized way. This became the division between the communist wing of the socialist movement and the social democratic wing of the movement. Prior to the split and prior to the creation of the Third International, the revolutionary socialists, including the Bolsheviks, considered themselves to be social democrats.”

https://www.liberationschool.org/the-leninist-party-in-history-and-the-present/

1. The first task: The bourgeois and landlord elements not only threatened the state with the White Army but also joined the Bolshevik Party itself to obtain positions within the new state. This allowed them to affect policy. A major difference between Lenin and previous Marxists was the slogan of a democratic dictatorship of the workers’ and peasants.’ This inclusion of the peasantry accounts for the partial capitalist nature of the Soviet state. Since the proletariat only accounted for a small section of the population, the Bolsheviks could depend for their continued hold on power on the peasants. This meant they could veer away from the construction of socialism whenever the needs of the state demanded, which meant the needs of the workers went unmet. They accomplished this by using the secret police themselves on other Bolsheviks and removing elected officials, replacing them with the above elements organized into a new state.
2. To account for an opposition to this policy as de facto alliance with imperialism ignores the facts established by the Brest-Litovsk treaty, ending the war with imperialist Germany. Trotsky and Luxemburg both opposed its signing, arguing that the future of the Russian state depended on an immediate transfer of power in Germany. Soon after Lenin signed the treaty, German soldiers could return from the front and murder Luxemburg and Liebknecht, putting an end to the German revolution. Luxemburg had criticized the secret police tactics of the Bolsheviks in power before her death.
3. The second task: With the German revolution defeated, the new leaders of Russia now had every excuse to put off the construction of socialism and the large peasantry upon which to base their rule. As Marxists have always argued, the peasantry does not form the basis for socialism since their relationship to the means of production determines their support for private ownership. The ownership of a small amount of land can provide subsistence, but the workers need to capture the largest machines and factories of the capitalists in order to ensure their survival under conditions of war and de facto slavery.
4. The third task: This distorts the position of Lenin in his Left Wing Communism. As Sylvia Pankhurst clarified, the “Infantile Disorder” could actually translate into “Childhood Diseases.” Lenin’s policy for Great Britain contradicted his own policy for the Bolsheviks. He wanted Pankhurst to join the Labor Party, which demanded she shut down her newspaper and independent group. She rightly characterized the Labor Party as imperialist, but Lenin looked the other way. He saw the various groups in Great Britain as children who must infect each other and heal themselves to build up an immunity to deviations from Comintern Theory. For Russia, he had advocated a separation of the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks and the RSDLP from the liberals. For Russia, he advocated a direct road to revolution while in the UK, he imagined more intermediary periods of organization-building under capitalism. In other words, Lenin did not represent the complete break from the chauvinist Social Democratic Second International that he claimed.
5. The Comintern turned into a tool for the suppression of the revolutionary movement under imperialism by way of foreign relations. Pankhurst and others had responded to this new glass ceiling on revolutionary consciousness by founding the Fourth International in 1921. As a result, the Comintern isolated her and defeated her before refounding the Fourth International in 1938. Just as Lenin argued about theory, we can as well, “The correctness of this revolutionary theory, and of it alone, has been proved…” Only a complete historical view can provide the factual basis for the revolutionary theory of Marxism. A theory that excises Pankhurst, even though she led a party, edited a newspaper, participated in the Second Congress of the Comintern, and appeared in Lenin’s very important but flawed Left Communism. We do not attribute the flaw to Lenin alone, thereby saving the wealth of theory he left behind, but instead to the entire context of a post-war, revolutionary Russia. Marxists often emphasized the development of the Marxist movement out of the radical tradition of 19th century revolutionaries. The establishment of the Romanov Dynasty itself, however, rose from the Time of Troubles, when a string of usurpers took the throne as a precursor to the rise of the capitalist monarchy. This led to a devastation for the Russian population and an intensification of slavery. That the fall of the Romanov government led to the rise of the Stalinist usurpers should inform our view of the Russian head of state, who inevitably sees in every foreigner (a brother at arms for a communist revolutionary) an occupier and a false Dimitry.

Part 2: From counterrevolution to revival…

From counterrevolution to revival: Communism and the primacy of the international situation

“Stalin, who became completely demonized in the West once the Cold War began, was treated with respect in the media during World War II.”

https://www.liberationschool.org/from-counterrevolution-to-revival-communism-and-the-primacy-of-the-international-situation/

“In the WWP several ideological tendencies of an essentially reactionary character converge. These include the outlook of protest politics, Stalinism, bourgeois nationalism and forms of identity politics such as black nationalism.” 

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/10/work-o12.html

The above document shows how the Party of Socialist Liberation defends Stalin, an ally of imperialism and one of the worst killers of revolutionaries. This position transitions seamlessly into a defense of the entire foreign policy of the Soviet Union, in alliance with national bourgeois regimes. The Workers’ World even agreed with the military assault on Hungary’s revolutionary workers’ committees that Hungarian workers established to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy, from which the phrase “tankies” originates. The defense of a community’s enemy or the defense of a criminal preying on a community can itself turn into a tactic during war. For that reason, a party posing as Trotskyist but acting to defend Stalinism hovers over the revolution of the working class. With help from the Soviet Union or even Cuba, the intervention of a state in favor of Stalinism tips the balance in their favor. Their dependence on Stalinism, however, turns them into an unthinking mob known for arguments with no substance and a blind, threatening allegiance to Stalinist states. To prepare a leadership to confront these traitors, the general cultural level must rise and rise above their heads and further. That will not take much however, since they keep their heads to the ground for all the wrong reasons. A look at their publications shows absolutely no interest in cultural affairs.

Within the present political climate, we should emphasize that we encourage and support a PSL campaign to oppose Cornel West and all the reformists of the corporate oligarchy. We should draw a line between the membership, who have an interest in participating in organized campaigns to raise awareness about socialist politics, and the leadership, who have a professional responsibility to form a revolutionary party that would actually take the power given the opportunity. The leadership, because of decades of submission to Stalinism and bourgeois nationalism, cannot accomplish their tasks. The people can use this organization, whose foundation was in the balance a political gain for the working class, to realign political forces in favor of a direct course towards revolution.