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From the International Socialism, Internal Bulletin, May 1972.
Transcribed by Ted Crawford September 2012.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
It is right that any comrades inclined to see What Is To Be Done? as sacred text should be reminded by John Molyneux, and by Dave Lyddon and Mike Caffoor, that Lenin was primarily concerned with writing an internal party polemic. This does not mean, however, that we should dismiss out of hand Lenin’s assertion that “the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness”. It is simply wrong to imagine that Lenin based this argument merely on muddle-headed quotations from Kautsky implying that workers are not intelligent enough to develop socialist theory.
Lenin’s assertion that “class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without” needs to be quoted in full. “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers” (my emphasis). What was the basis for this assertion? That “working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse ...” “The Social Democrat’s ideal,” Lenin went on, “should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects”.
The case against factory branches (as opposed to factory cells subject to the authority of the local branch) is not primarily that manual workers become segregated from students and white-collar workers. (Though if nothing else, such segregation is likely to have a harmful effect on the political education of the students etc.). The whole argument for factory branches, in counterposing the factory to the locality, assumes that the point of production is the only significant focus of the class struggle. The implication is that work among tenants, immigrants, women, youth, unemployed, etc. etc. will be left to students and any other odds and sods. The standpoint of revolutionaries must be, on the contrary, that all the connections must be built between such activities and the struggle in industry. This in turn means that our industrial cadres in each locality should participate in and help direct all local activity.
It is most unfortunate that the debate over factory branches seems to have been posed in terms of “workers versus intellectuals”. Surely Coventry is not unique in having members in more than one factory? A factory branch, under the control only of the national centre, is virtually autonomous, since the centre cannot hope to have full and up-to-date information on the situation in every factory, and such national control will become increasingly difficult as our industrial membership grows. A factory cell, on the other hand, can be subject to effective supervision by the local branch, and can directly help to develop and carry through local perspectives. This does not mean workers having to take instructions from students, but workers at Chrysler and GEC, for example, helping to guide activity at British Leyland. (Such control might also be possible where factory branches existed subject to the decisions of a local or district committee and occasional aggregate meetings of district members. But such a structure would not differ greatly from the existing system of local branches and factory cells.)
One important reason for overall control of factory cells by the local branch is the likelihood that industrial recruits will be attracted, in the first instance, by our industrial militancy rather than by our revolutionary politics. Since we have decided – correctly, in my view – not to impose rigid political tests on new members, the most extensive links between IS membership inside and outside each separate factory are extremely important. There is another reason for external control of the IS organisation in each factory which will become increasingly important as IS grows. When the situation is reached where the majority of a factory’s shop stewards’ committee are IS members, the pressures on the cell towards a preoccupation with parochial issues – and a tendency to take decisions in the light of sectional interests – will be enormous. To say this is not to argue that workers are stupid, simply to recognise the strength of reformist pressures on any revolutionary who is also a trade union representative.
The geographical branch, we are told, “corresponds not with the class struggle but with the parliamentary struggle”. This is ridiculous: to pose the individual factory as the focus of the class struggle is to abandon What Is To Be Done? in favour of the economism that Lenin was attacking and if the local branch is so essentially a reformist structure, why were the Soviets organised on a local basis?
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Last updated: 20 February 2020