“The problem on which Russian Social Democracy has labored for several years is how to effect a transition from the type of divided, totally independent circles and local clubs— which corresponds to the preparatory, mostly propagandistic phase of the movement—to an organization such as is necessary for a unified political action of the masses in the entire state. Division and total autonomy, the self-rule of the local organizations, were the dominant characteristics of the old type of organization. Inasmuch as the old organizational model has become unbearable and politically out of date, it is natural that the motto of the new phase of the great organizational work should be: centralism.
The accentuation of the idea of centralism was the theme of the three-year campaign of the Iskra in preparation for the last Party Congress, which was, in fact, the constituent assembly of the Party. The same idea is dominant among the entire young guard of Social Democracy in Russia. However, at the Party Congress, and even more so after it, it became evident that centralism is a slogan which does not completely exhaust the historical content and the particularity of the Social Democratic organization. Once again, it becomes clear that the Marxist conception of socialism cannot be fixed in rigid formulas in any area, including that of the question of organization.
The book which we are reviewing is written by Comrade Lenin, one of the outstanding leaders and fighters of the Iskra in its campaign in preparation for the Party Congress. The book is the systematic presentation of the ultra-centralist viewpoint in the Russian party. The conception expressed here in a rigorous and exhaustive manner is that of a relentless centralism. The life-principle of this centralism is, on the one hand, the sharp accentuation of the distinction of the organized troops of explicit and active revolutionaries from the unorganized, though revolutionary, milieu which surrounds them; on the other hand, it is the strict discipline and the direct, decisive, and determining intervention of the central committee in all activities of the local organizations of the party. It is sufficient to remark that, for example, according to this conception the central committee has the power to organize all partial committees of the party. Therefore, it can also determine the composition of the personnel of each individual Russian local organization from Geneva and Liege to Tomsk and Irkutsk; it can give them its ready-made rules of local organization; it can dissolve and reconstitute these local groups by decree; and finally, in this way it can indirectly influence the composition of the highest party authority, that of the party congress. Thus, the central committee appears as the only active element of the party, and all the other organizations simply as the tools which implement its decisions.
Lenin thinks that precisely the unification of such a strict centralism with the Social Democratic mass movement is a specific revolutionary-Marxist principle. He brings a series of facts to bear in support of his conception. Yet we must look more closely at this.
There is no doubt that, in general, a strong tendency toward centralism is inherent in Social Democracy. Social Democracy grows in the economic soil of capitalism, which itself tends toward centralism. Its struggle occurs within the political framework of the large, centralized bourgeois state. Further, Social Democracy is fundamentally an outspoken opponent of every particularism and national federalism. It is called upon to represent, within the framework of a given stale, the totality of the interests of the proletariat as a class, as opposed to all partial and group interests. Therefore, it follows that Social Democracy has the natural aspiration of welding together all national, religious, and professional groups of the working class into a unified party. It is only in exceptional, abnormal cases, such as in Austria, that it is forced to make an exception in favor of the federative principle.
In this context, there neither was nor is any question of Russian Social Democracy organizing itself into a federated conglomerate of an immense number of particular national and provincial organizations. Rather, it must become a unitary, compact labor party for the entire empire. The question, however, concerning the greater or lesser degree of centralization and its particular character within a unified and single Russian Social Democracy is a very different one.
From the standpoint of the formal tasks of Social Democracy as a fighting party, centralism appears, at first, as a condition on which directly depend the capacity for struggle and the power of the party. But the specific historical conditions of the proletarian struggle are more important than the point of view of the formal necessities of any fighting organization.
The Social Democratic movement is the first in the history of class societies which, in all its moments, in its entire course, reckons on the organization and the independent direct action of the masses. Because of this, Social Democracy creates a wholly different organizational type than the earlier socialist movements, for example, those of the Jacobin or the Blanquist type.
Lenin appears to underestimate this fact when, in his book, (page 140 of the original edition), he asserts that the revolutionary Social Democrat is nothing but “a Jacobin indissolubly connected with the organization of the class-conscious proletariat.” Lenin sees the whole of the difference between Social Democracy and Blanquism in the organization and the class consciousness of the proletariat as opposed to the conspiracy of a small minority. He forgets that this difference implies a complete revision of the concept of organization, a whole new content for the concept of centralism, and a whole new conception of the reciprocal relation of the organization and the struggle.”
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“On the one hand, apart from the general principle of the struggle, there is no ready-made, pre-established, detailed set of tactics which a central committee can teach its Social Democratic membership as if they were army recruits. On the other hand, the process of the struggle, which creates the organization, leads to a continual fluctuation of the sphere of influence of Social Democracy.
It follows that the Social Democratic centralization cannot be based on blind obedience, nor on the mechanical subordination of the party militants to a central power. On the other hand, it follows that an absolute dividing wall cannot be erected between the class-conscious kernel of the proletariat, already organized as party cadre, and the immediate popular environment which is gripped by the class struggle and finds itself in the process of class enlightenment.
For this reason, the construction of centralism in Social Democracy, as Lenin desires, on the basis of these two principles—1) on the blind subordination of all party organizations in the smallest detail of their activity to a central power which, alone, thinks, plans, and decides for all; and 2) the sharp separation of the organized kernel of the party from the surrounding revolutionary milieu—seems to us to be a mechanistic transfer of the organizational principles of the Blanquistic movement of conspiratorial groups to the Social Democratic movement of the working masses. And Lenin identified this perhaps more rigorously than any of his opponents could when he defined his “revolutionary Social Democrat” as the “Jacobin indissolubly connected with the organization of the class-conscious proletariat.”
The fact is, however, that Social Democracy is not bound up with the organization of the working classes; rather, it is the very movement of the working class. Social Democratic centralism must, therefore, be of essentially other coin than the Blanquist. It can be nothing but the imperative summation of the will of the enlightened and fighting vanguard of the working class as opposed to its individual groups and members. This is, so to speak, a “self-centralism” of the leading stratum of the proletariat; it is the rule of the majority within its own party organization.
The investigation of the particular content of Social Democratic centralism already shows that the necessary conditions for such a centralism could not be completely given in modern Russia. These conditions are, namely: 1) the existence of a noteworthy stratum of proletarians already schooled in the political struggle, and 2) the possibility for these workers to express their influence at public party congresses, in the party press, etc. The latter condition can, obviously, only be created with the advent of political freedom in Russia. The first—the building of a class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat capable of self-direction—is only now emerging, and must be seen as the principal goal of the next agitational and organizational work.
The opposite conviction on the part of Lenin, according to whom all the preconditions for the formation of a large and extremely centralized labor party in Russia are already present, is in this context all the more surprising, He shows a far too mechanical conception of the Social Democratic organization when he proclaims that today “not the proletariat, but many intellectuals in the Russian Social Democracy are in need of self-education in the sense of organization and discipline” (page 145 in the original edition), and when he glorifies the educational influence of the factory on the proletariat, which makes it immediately ripe for “organization and discipline.” The “discipline” which Lenin has in mind is implanted in the proletariat not only by the factory but also by the barracks, by modern bureaucratism—in short, by the whole mechanism of the centralized bourgeois slate. It is nothing but an incorrect use of the word when at one time one designates as “discipline” two so opposed concepts as the absence of thought and will in a mass of flesh with many arms and legs moving mechanically, and the voluntary coordination of conscious political acts by a social stratum. There is nothing common to the corpselike obedience of a dominated class and the organized rebellion of a class struggling for its liberation. It is not by linking up with the discipline implanted in him by the capitalist state, by the mere transfer of authority from the hand of the bourgeoisie to that of the Social Democratic central committee, but by breaking, uprooting this slavish spirit of discipline that the proletarian can be educated for the new discipline, for the voluntary self-discipline of Social Democracy. This same train of thought shows further that centralism in the Social Democratic sense is not at all an absolute concept which can be applied in the same way to every phase of the labor movement. Rather, it must be conceived of as a tendency whose realization progresses with the progress in the enlightenment and political education of the working masses in the course of their struggle.
No doubt, the insufficient presence today of the most important presuppositions for the complete realization of centralism in the Russian movement can have a formidable negative effect. Still, in our opinion, it is a mistake to believe that it is possible to substitute “provisionally” the “transferred absolute power” of the central committee of the party for the yet unrealizable majority rule of the enlightened working class within its own organization; and it is a mistake to believe that the lack of open control by the working masses over the action and conduct of the party organs could be replaced by the opposite: control by the central committee over the activity of the revolutionary working class.
The actual history of the Russian movement gives many reasons for the doubtful value of centralism in this latter sense. The omnipotent central power with its unlimited right of intervention and control, such as Lenin suggests, would be an absurdity if it had to limit its authority only to mere technical aspects of Social Democratic activity—to control of the external means and resources of agitation, such as the supply of Party literature, and the correct division of agitational and financial resources. Lenin’s centralism would only have a clear political goal if it used its power for the creation of a unitary tactic in the struggle, for the unleashing of a vast political action in Russia. But what do we see in the previous developments of the Russian movement? Its most important and most fruitful tactical developments during the last decade have not been “invented” by several leaders of the movement, and even less by any directional organizations. In each case, they were the spontaneous product of the movement in action.
This was the case in the first stage of the veritable proletarian movement in Russia, which began with the rudimentary outbreak of the giant strike in Petersburg in 1896, an event which inaugurated the economic mass action of the Russian proletariat. The same is true of the second phase, that of political street demonstrations, which began in a wholly spontaneous manner with the student agitation in Petersburg in March 1901. The next significant tactical turn was the mass strike in Rostov-on-Don, which opened new horizons. “By itself,” with its street agitation, great outdoor meetings, and public speeches—all improvised ad hoc—this strike was such that the boldest Social Democratic daredevil would not have dared to imagine it only a few years before.
In all these cases, in the beginning was “the act.” The initiative and conscious direction of the Social Democratic organizations played an extremely limited role. This was not, however, the fault of the insufficient preparation of these specific organizations for their roles (though this may, to a certain degree, have entered into the picture), and it was certainly not that of the absence of an all-powerful central committee, as Lenin’s plan presents it. On the contrary, such a central committee would more than likely have only had the effect of increasing the indecisiveness of the individual committees of the party, and have brought forth a division between the turbulent masses and the temporizing Social Democracy.”
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“[T]o grant to the party leadership such absolute powers of a negative character as Lenin does is to artificially strengthen to a dangerous extent the conservatism inherent in the essence of that institution. If the Social Democratic tactics are not created by a central committee but by the whole party—or, better still, by the whole movement—then it is obviously necessary that the individual party organizations have the elbow-room which alone makes possible the utilization of the means presented by the given situation to strengthen the struggle, as well as to develop the revolutionary initiative. The ultra-centralism which Lenin demands seems to us, however, not at all positive and creative, but essentially sterile and domineering. Lenin’s concern is essentially the control of the activity of the party and not its fruition, the narrowing and not the development, the harassment and not the unification of the movement.
Such an experiment seems doubly risky for Russian Social Democracy at the present moment. Russian Social Democracy stands on the eve of great revolutionary struggles for the overthrow of absolutism. It stands before, or rather, has already entered a period of intensive creative activity in the tactical realm and—as is usual in a revolutionary period—of feverish and vivid extensions and shifts of its spheres of influence. To wish to put chains on the initiative of the party spirit at such times, to wish to hem in its capacity for expansion with a barbed-wire fence, is, from the outset, to render it largely incapable of accomplishing the great tasks of the moment.”