Every problem presents a new solution. The problems of party degeneration occur under capitalism as well and not just during and after the revolution. The real issue however is as much philosophical as it is economic. In that sense, bureaucracy also comes from Russian Marxism dominating Marxism as a whole through the use of the Comintern and Stalinist state agents.

This strategy involved creating a false dichotomy betweem Stalin and Trotsky. This left people outside Russia with the wrong impression that their working class and their intellectuals could not join forces for the cause of the revolution. It is as if Stalin said to Trotsky, “You can run the Fourth International if we can agree to erase Sylvia Pankhurst from the history of the Fourth International.” And Trotsky accepted the deal.

Lenin’s real internationalist allies in Marxism were not Stalin and Trotsky but actually Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, and Sylvia Pankhurst, who were all Marxists that worked together to defend democratic rights for the workers as an international Marxist movement. As Sylvia Pankhurst pointed out, the Bolsheviks did understand the peasants better when they included them in the call for a dictatorship of the workers and peasants. They actually fought the Russian peasants by preventing them from raiding German farms during the war and transferring advanced German agricultural machines to the Russian peasants, long deprived of technological modernity. They justified deprivation for their people of the spoils for defeating Russia by arguing that establishment of a state monopoly in Russia over trade should organize the transfer of property through an arrangement between the Kaiser and Lenin.

The state bureaucracy (although not Lenin himself due to his consequent assassination) benefited from a deal with Germany because they could then sit at the table with their counterparts in the reactionary state. They betrayed the peasants again later to cause a famine to push forward “advances” in agriculture through capitalist reforms known as the NEP and later “forced collectivization,” a more brutal form of slavery. As you can see, the internal struggle of the party is a product of a hidden compromise with the ruling class that enslaves or demasculates the working class majority politically. This compromise must be exposed by a living “organic” movement as a means of removing the elite from executive positions that must be reserved for workers themselves.

The First International had this arrangement. If we really want to enact these changes, then we need to form legal groups specifically for this purpose: to restore the rights of the membership to control the party’s political views, to control its funds, and to choose its executive board through regular elections.