John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

The government had been defeated by a mass counter-power to the traditional military/state/media machine on which ruling elites have long relied. This counter-power is based on autonomous social networks difficult to isolate and shut down (although individual activists and groups can of course be suppressed) and it is used by activists who share its anti-authoritarian ethos. It is not sufficient on its own. The occupation of Tahrir Square by students and other militants was the beginning, not the end, of the Egyptian revolution. In February workers formed new trade unions separate from Mubarek’s corrupt state-run unions and threatened strike action against the regime, followed by Women’s Rights groups who marched in Cairo demanding an end to discrimination and violence against women. All these formed a critical mass of opposition that led the military to turn against Mubarek. Without the workers’ and women’s protests it is doubtful if the student revolt on its own would have succeeded. But it was that revolt–and its planning and dissemination on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube–that laid the groundwork.

The development of networks of free information and collaborative working has enormous political implications, even though social-media networks are heavily constrained by corporate ownership and the cultural logic of late capitalism. Networked individuals are still individuals. They have to want to access networks and find politically useful and incendiary information. Stoking that desire is the job of socialist parties, trade unions and other campaigning groups. The liberatory potential of social media is only tapped when it is politicised and weaponised in mass campaigns with clear goals and strategies. Ultimately, as the radical cultural theorist Jeremy Gilbert has suggested, huge global tech monopolies like Apple and Microsoft should be brought under democratic public ownership and run as mutuals or cooperatives by workers and users, empowered and regulated to provide a truly free and open social network. 16

Even without public ownership, Castells makes the essential point that “Mass self-communication is based on horizontal networks of inter-active communication that, by and large, are difficult to control by government or corporations”. 17 Iskra , by contrast, was far easier to control. Krupskaya later admitted that Lenin did not show Martov and the other editors all the correspondence he sent out and received. They did not sense that What Is To Be Done? was not simply an attack on wavering Economists, whose reformism Martov also rejected, but that it heralded an entirely new approach to revolutionary organisation and strategy. Between 1900 and 1903 these differences were obscured in Lenin’s and Martov’s mutual struggle to outmaneuver Plekhanov and to produce Iskra on a regular basis. But the elements of a major confrontation between them were stirring.

Lih and other defenders of Lenin maintain that “latter-day readers of What Is To Be Done? have removed Lenin’s book from its context and thereby fundamentally distorted its spirit and impact”. 18But many of Lenin’s contemporaries who were acutely aware of its context made their criticisms of it at the time –and because of these criticisms Lenin’s formulation of party membership, based on What Is To Be Done?, was rejected by a majority at the Second Congress of the RSDLP. This congress, held mainly in London in August 1903, has become the stuff of legend. 19The Second Congress of the RSDLP was in all but name the First Congress, its founding moment and crucible (the actual First Congress had been in Minsk in 1898, attended by nine self-mandated delegates and swiftly dispersed by the police). It was the culmination of years of work by Social Democrat leaders and activists, and was meant to form one united all-Russian Marxist revolutionary party around an agreed constitution and programme.

The Organisation Committee, which Iskra dominated, planned the conference, authorised numbers of delegates and sent out credentials. As a result, the Economists had only three delegates, the Jewish Bund (although much larger than Iskra ) only five, with six unaligned. The remaining thirty-three delegates were all from Iskra . Iskra ’s careful preparation was not entirely a response to reformism within the Russian left. The Bund was as committed to a socialist transformation of Russian society as the Social Democrats. It also wished to create an RSDLP. Its leader, the Marxist revolutionary Mark Liber, was the third most frequent speaker at the congress after Lenin and Trotsky, passionately making the case for the Bund to have the sole right to represent the Jewish proletariat within the Russian Empire (as part of a wider alliance within the RSDLP). This position was rejected by both Martov and Lenin.

The violent schism that would develop between Lenin and Martov arose from their definition of “party member”. In reaction to What Is To Be Done? , Martov formulated a detailed constitution for a future RSDLP, which indicates that he had had serious concerns about Lenin’s centralism before the Second Congress. His draft constitution followed an article he wrote in April 1903 for Rosa Luxemburg’s Social Democratic Review in which he sketched the concept of a flexible, less centralised party. In the article Martov posed the key question before Russian Marxists as “how to reconcile the urgent need for conspiracy with the yearning for the creation of a broadly-based social-democratic party of the working masses”. 20He suggested that as long as the party was united by revolutionary theory it should encourage initiative and relative autonomy amongst its constituent elements.

Martov’s draft attempted to do several things. It widened the membership criteria; the rights and independence of local committees and organising bodies was explained in detail, with the power of the central control organs to co-opt and to close down local bodies restricted; and rights were given to national and regional bodies to allow for the integration into the party of semi-autonomous bodies such as the Polish social-democrats and the Bund. The relative independence of the two main bodies of the party–the Central Organ (the ideological centre, located abroad) and the Central Committee (the organisational centre, located inside Russia)–was established, to allow freedom of thought and policy formulation. That Martov, never the fanatical organiser that Lenin was, took the trouble to map this out reveals his unspoken concerns for the Congress. His draft “was meant to cater for the widening and growing of the party; it would enhance local initiative of the committees and thus make for a certain weakening of centralisation”. 21

Lenin produced a shorter counter-draft and mocked the length and verbosity of Martov’s. But Martov’s was necessarily longer as it sought to protect the rights of members and local committees against central diktat , and provide an appeals process. Lenin’s was shorter because central diktat trumped all else. At the time, Martov was not inclined to formally challenge Lenin. Although irritated by the “hypertrophy of centralism” of Lenin’s plans, his primary focus for the Congress was the same as Lenin’s–to ensure that a united party emerged on the basis of Iskra ’s programme. Other differences seemed secondary. Martov, acknowledging Lenin’s eminence in organisational matters, withdrew his draft and allowed Lenin’s to go before the Congress. He merely told Lenin that he would probably query some of the membership criteria.

Although there were disagreements with the Economists and the Bund, the Iskra delegates had a clear majority and carried the day on the party programme. Having agreed this, the Congress moved to the precise formulation of a member. Lenin proposed a definition, which was “Anyone who accepts the party’s programme and supports it by personal participation in one of the party’s organizations is to be considered a member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party”. Martov proposed a slightly different wording, which was “Anyone who accepts the party’s programme, supports the party by material means, and renders it regular personal assistance under the guidance of one of its organisations is to be considered a member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party”. On the face of it there was hardly any difference, and members not privy to the prior disagreements between Lenin and Martov were astonished that the Congress divided so sharply on the issue.