Leninism in action, or why Doug Lorimer has to give all the lectures : Melbourne Indymedia

Some thoughts on the party school

By DF, Canberra branch

From The Activist, Volume 13, Number 4, April 2003

Doug,

I thought I'd give you some constructive feedback on what I thought about the party school, in order to make it even better. I also compare it to the Fourth International school, which I attended while in Europe in 200I. If you want to put it in The Activist, feel free (if it's allowed in).

Yours, D

The greys and greens of the party school
"Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life."

Being in the (possibly unique) position of having done both the DSP version of the party school and that of the FI, called the "anti-globalisation school", I feel there are some suggestions I would like to make in order to improve the quality and effectiveness of our school.
The FI school, like ours, lasts approximately three weeks and is a very intensive course, with classes six days a week. But there the similarity ends.

There are some unavoidable aspects of difference between the schools. For a start, the Fl school is a live-in school, located in a couple of terrace houses in Amsterdam, which allowed for a greater intensity of discussion. And of course, the international spread of the participants is far greater, and involves comrades with much more varied experiences than is possible within the party. At the school I attended (in November 200I) there were about 20 participants, over half of whom were from Latin America, four from Europe, and four from Asia (and one from Australia).

Moreover, the classes were presented by a range of the Fl's intellectuals - mostly based in Paris - people such as Eric Toussaint, Pierre Rousset, Salah Jaber and Ernesto Herrera. This is in stark contrast to the present DSP school, which is given by Comrade Doug L for the entire duration of the course. Obviously we do not have the intellectual wealth of the Fl at our disposal, but where we do have comrades who have particular experience in certain fields, would it not be worth bringing them in to give the relevant class? For instance, we could have Comrade Dick N do a class, or classes, on the state of the social movements in Europe, or Comrade Pat B on feminism, or any number of other comrades covering particular areas, rather than Doug just doing everything. I understand that this was how the DSP school was done earlier, why not return to this format?

But the major point of difference between the DSP school and the FI's, which I just alluded to, is not in form but in content. The FI school, after being remodelled as an "anti-globalisation school" covers much more current topics and debates relevant to today's social movements across the world, For example, there were classes on the participatory democracy experiment in Porto Alegre (easier with comrades from Brazil with direct experience of the process attending the school) or on the question of whether globalisation constitutes a new stage of capitalism distinct from imperialism. And, of course, in November 2001 they were still grappling with the repercussions of the September 11 attacks and the new epoch of imperialist war.

Even when broaching more "classical" areas, such as Mandel's theory of long waves of capitalist growth, it was done in a way which took up current debates amongst left circles in Europe, such as whether the system was on the verge of inexorably entering a new wave of growth. Attendees of the school were actually able to see at first-hand proponents of different sides of some of these debates and take part in the arguments.
The readings given for the classes were also, obviously more current, and mainly consisted of articles from International Viewpoint or other left journals, with the odd FI resolution thrown in. The classics from Marx, Lenin and even Mandel were at a minimum. Additionally, much less emphasis was placed on reading than in the DSP school; participants were certainly not expected to keep up with a 100-page-a-day rate of reading. Instead more emphasis was placed on discussion, both formally in question and answer sessions with those presenting the classes, and informally in small groups or over the dinner table.

This stands in stark contrast to the DSP school. The school I attended could be divided up quite neatly in terms of the classes given each day: eight classes were on Marx and Engels, seven on Lenin and the Bolsheviks, three on the Comintern theses, one on Trotsky and one on Cannon. Personally, I think that the school offers quite a stale form of Marxism, ossified from events of the last 60 years. And sometimes it felt like comrades at the DSP school were merely receiving a history lesson from Doug on the outcome of some obscure incident such as Lenin's fight against the Otzovists.

I think another problem with the DSP school is a lack of participation in discussion by those receiving the classes, which can add to the "history lesson" feeling, but it is little wonder when the topic for discussion is an early split in the Bolshevik party or Marx and Engels' conduct in the I848 revolution. Perhaps we need to change the way in which the classes are presented. Here the Fl school was also quite different. Rather than, as in our school, have a set series of questions to be answered (and invariably the "correct answer" comes from Doug, the classes were done in the form of a lecture by the relevant intellectual, followed by a bit of a question and answer session, and then small group discussions. Perhaps this format could be investigated, as it seemed to boost levels of participation in discussion and can allow for more comrades to take the school at a time.

I am not suggesting that we junk all of the Marxist classics from the school syllabus. Far from it, in fact my main criticism of the FI school is that they go too far the other way in this regard. Rather I contend that more emphasis should be placed on issues and debates that are current and relevant for steeling cadre for the present revolutionary straggle, which is more along the lines of the Fl school. And I think it would be valuable for these to be given by a range of our leading comrades, or even for comrades with differing views to present classes together as a panel.

It could be argued that the school offers comrades the main opportunity to immerse themselves in the classics, while day-to-day branch life is the place for education on current themes. In my opinion, however, this viewpoint creates a false division between "high theory" (Marx and Lenin) and on-the-ground education (what's going on in Venezuela, how we relate to social movements and so on). In reality such a distinction does not, or at least should not, exist.

While we should recognise that in some areas more current documents are far more useful than those written a hundred years ago or more, there is, of course, an important place for the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky as part of any Marxist education. But we should use them much more in connection with their relevance for the tasks of revolutionaries today, rather than study them in isolation, which I think is done too much in the DSP school.

This is not a categorical statement, there are some classes of the DSP school where linking up the classics with current issues is done well. One that springs to mind is the class on Marxism and the National Question. The reading is pretty much all Lenin on Poland and other oppressed nations within Russia, but comrades doing the school were pretty quickly able to relate it to national independence struggles being waged today. This provided for a much more fruitful discussion, with more comrades feeling able to take part in it, given that they would have actual experience with, say, the East Timorese struggle for independence. It stood in contrast to other classes where this is not done so well, which echo to the sound of Doug's voice for three hours.
So let's take an example of how a school which was more under the model I have outlined would operate a class. Let's take a class on how Marxists relate to the peasantry: obviously we would keep a lot of the experience of the Bolsheviks and the Russian peasantry, but maybe add some recent articles on Via Campesina or Movimiento sem Terra (the Brazilian landless peasants movement). Maybe Comrade Jorge J, or someone else with knowledge of this area, could give the class that day.

Or let's say we had class on the united front, which is most definitely a pertinent topic for the present. Part of the syllabus could be Trotsky or the Comintern on the question, but it could be added to Nick McKerrell from the Scottish Socialist Party's recent article on the question, or other stuff on the relationship between movement and party, and the discussion could take up the general question of how we do movement work in the here and now. Or if we take on the question of liquidationism, we could posit it in the framework of left regroupment in many countries today, the experience of the SSP or the Party of Communist Refoundation, or indeed the Socialist Alliance. The possibilities are endless.

I hope these suggestions are taken into consideration for how to make the party school a more effective tool for educating our cadre. I understand fully that there are huge limits to what can be be done in three weeks in a non-live-in school, but this limitation only heightens the need for getting the mix right.

During the party school I attended, Doug made an off-the-cuff remark that the Comintern theses were the "finished article" on Leninism. In reality, there is no such thing. Leninism, and Marxism, are living beasts, which are evolving as the world evolves. If the party is to survive and prosper then we need our cadres thoroughly educated in a "green", living Marxism, which means more than just combing over the works of Marx and Lenin, it means actually learning from the struggles and debates that are happening today all over the world.

Reply to Comrade DF on the party school

By Doug Lorimer

Dear DF,

In your February 8 email to me you raise a series of criticisms and suggestions for changes to the character and content of our central party school on Marxist political theory, contrasting it with the three-week Fourth International school you attended in November 200I. In responding to these, let me begin by restating (and elaborating) some of the points I made at the introductory session of the central party school which you attended in January.

The purpose of our central party school on Marxist political theory is to enable comrades to take time off from their normal day-to-day party work to be able to devote themselves for two-and-a-half weeks to acquaint themselves with Marxist political theory and the history of the revolutionary working-class movement. There are two reasons for this.

The first is that this school aims to help comrades become better revolutionary political activists by giving them an opportunity to more systematically acquaint themselves with the theory that guides their revolutionary political activity. Marxist theory is a guide to the practical activity of organising the revolutionary political struggle of the working class, the aim of which is to organise the proletariat as the ruling class ("dictatorship of the proletariat") as the means of reorganising capitalist society so as to eradicate class divisions (and with them the class struggle). This, of course, presupposes a certain conception of human society and its development such as the existence of classes and their developing struggles; that these classes have a specific historical origin but that they can, ultimately, be brought to an end by a continuation of the development of the class struggle. Equally, it presupposes that the course of development of these struggles is influenced by the purposive and conscious action of people as individuals and in their class combinations. This, in turn, presupposes a specific conception of the relation of people's consciousness to their practical social life. This is why the school syllabus begins with this conception - the "materialist conception of history", as the founders of the Marxist movement termed it.

As a theoretical guide to practical revolutionary action, Marxism was developed by revolutionary working class political activists confronting a series of specific class-struggle experiences and generalising the lessons of these experiences. The school aims to acquaint comrades with these specific class-struggle experiences and the lessons drawn from them by the foremost exponents and practitioners of Marxism of the time, so that comrades can understand where our revolutionary political theory comes from and begin to get a better grasp of the Marxist method of dealing with immediate political questions. That's why, after examining the materialist conception of history and the fundamental propositions of scientific socialism, the school syllabus consists of the key political writings of Marx and Engels during the I848 revolutions in Germany and France and their immediate aftermath, their main political writings during the revival of working-class struggles from I864 onwards, the main political writings of Lenin from the late I890s to the early years of the Communist International, and Trotsky's and Cannon's writings on the eve of World War II, ending with some of Cannon's main speeches in the political struggle in the US Socialist Workers Party at the beginning of the Cold War. The latter works are the nearest by a Marxist authority to our own conditions and circumstances.
The second reason why the school syllabus has the content it does is that there is a very restricted period of time in which comrades can be freed from their normal day-to-day political work, from earning a living or studying at university or in high school to attend the central party school. This usually constrains us to schools of no more than I9 days duration; with two off-days, this gives us only I7 days for study/discussion. (Because the last party congress was held at the end of December, we were able to start the most recent school in early January and thus increase the number of classes from I7 to 20.) When we had a live-in school during the I980s and there existed the ability of comrades to obtain financial support for many months without having work or engage in job-training, we were able to hold central party schools which ran for four months at a time and to have a much more extensive curriculum. However, even then, we did not include as specific subjects in the syllabus "issues and debates which are current and which are relevant for steeling cadre for the present revolutionary struggle ... more along the lines of the FI school", as you put it in your email. This is because we did not conceive of our central party school either as an extended educational seminar on the party's policy on current political issues or as a substitute for a party-wide discussion on our policy toward current struggles. This would be the effect of your suggestion that we should have classes given by "comrades with differing views".

You contrast the FI school (on "the anti-globalisation movement") you attended in November 200I with the January DSP school, noting that at the former "the readings given for the classes…mainly consisted of articles from International Viewpoint or other left journals, with the odd FI resolution thrown in" and that the "classics from Marx, Lenin and even Mandel were at a minimum", which simply illustrates that the purpose of this school was not to acquaint attendees with the past experiences of the revolutionary working-class movement and the key political lessons drawn from the by foremost Marxists of the time, but to discuss a current issue, that is the "anti-globalisation movement and the FI's orientation to it. The character of the curriculum was obviously adapted to the purpose set by the school's organisers. If we decided to run a school whose purpose was to educate our comrades in our party's assessment and orientation to the "anti-globalisation movement", the "classics" would most likely constitute a very limited amount of the reading material (though if it was going to take up the issue of whether neoliberal globalisation constitutes a new stage of capitalism distinct from imperialism, I would think we want to enable attendees to carefully study the main writings presenting the Marxist theory of imperialism and its development over the last I00 years, such as, Lenin's Imperialism and Mandel's Late Capitalism, and possibly also the sections of Marx's Capital dealing with credit, joint-stock companies, capitalist monopolies and unequal exchange).
You go on to observe that at our central party school the emphasis is on reading the main political writings and speeches of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, to which you add the comment: "Personally, I think that the school offers quite a stale form of Marxism, ossified from the events of the last 60 years." These writings contain the key theoretical conquests of the Marxist movement, which, in Lenin's case were able to be tested and verified by direct and successful participation in the only proletarian revolution to be carried to victory in an imperialist country. It's true that today that these theoretical conquests are not fresh or novel. They are the "granite foundation" (to use Lenin's expression in "Left-wing" Communism) upon which our party has been, and will continue to be, built. In that sense they are "ossified".

You also claim that these works present a "stale form of Marxism ". What exactly do you mean by that? That you find the ideas contained in these works lacking in interest? That you do not think much can be learned from reading them about how Marxists should relate to current issues and struggles? If this is what you mean, then you are making a serious mistake. Lenin undoubtedly displayed a great ability to learn from contemporary struggles. But as Nadezhda Krupskaya observed in her Reminiscences of Lenin, he acquired this ability by repeatedly re-reading the works of Marx and Engels:

"Lenin carefully studied the experiences of revolutionary struggle of the world proletariat. These experiences are brought out very clearly in the works of Marx and Engels. Lenin read and re-read these works over and over again. He re-read them at every stage of our Revolution ... their works helped Lenin in estimating the contemporary situation and the perspectives of development at each stage of our Revolution."
Lenin himself explained why he re-read the relevant political writings of Marx and Engels at every new stage of the Russian revolutionary struggle in a preface to the Russian edition of Kautsky's 1905 pamphlet The Motive Forces and Perspectives of the Russian Revolution:
"Marxists cannot adopt the viewpoint of the ordinary radical intellectual, with his allegedly revolutionary objectivity -- 'no authorities'. No. The working class leading a difficult and stubborn world-wide fight for complete emancipation needs authorities; but it stands to reason, only in the sense that every young worker needs the experience of the old fighters against oppression and exploitation. He needs the experience of those who have been through manifold strikes, who have participated in the ranks of the Revolution, who have become learned in revolutionary traditions and a wide political vision."

At the end of your email, you argue that, "If the party is to survive and prosper then we need our cadres thoroughly educated in a "green", living Marxism, which means more than just combing over the works of Marx and Lenin, it means actually learning from the struggles and debates that are happening today all over the world." This is, of course, true. But in order for Marxism to be lived, it has to be understood. In order to actually learn from the struggles and debates that are occurring today, our cadres need to be able to assess them in the light of the generalisations (lessons) drawn from the past experiences of the revolutionary working-class movement.

Of course, there is no way that party members can fully assimilate all the political lessons contained in the main political writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin through a two-and-half week course of reading and discussion of these works. The purpose of our central party school is, as I explained in the introductory session at the January school, to provide comrades with the opportunity to free themselves from day-to-day political activity so as to be able to systematically acquaint themselves with the fundamental propositions of scientific socialism and the history of the revolutionary working-class movement. In the normal course of party life, our members do not have the time to do this. They often do not know what to read and in what order. Our central party school seeks to provide comrades with a guide to such study.
You write: "It could be argued that the school offers comrades the main opportunity to immerse themselves in the classics, while day-to-day branch life is the place for education on current themes. In my opinion, however, this viewpoint creates a false division between "high theory" (Marx and Lenin) and on-the-ground education (what's going on in Venezuela, how we relate to social movements and so on). In reality, such a distinction does not, or at least should not exist."
In reality, there are a variety of different vehicles within the party for education in theoretical, historical and contemporary issues. For example, insofar as the issue of "What's going on in Venezuela" is a matter of informing comrades of the facts and providing a political analysis of the developing class struggle in that country, the main vehicles are articles in GLW, plus public forums, and Socialist Alliance and party branch educational lectures. If there are theoretical questions comrades wish to raise arising out of the developments in Venezuela, they can canvass them in the Activist, which is open for contributions on any theoretical or historical issues comrades may wish to raise. If it is a matter of discussing and deciding what policy the party should adopt in relation to these developments, then this is a matter for discussion and vote within the framework of the party's national policy decision-making structures (Political Committee, National Executive, National Committee, Congress). The same approach applies to the issue of "how we relate to the social movements".
The political ideas of Marx and Lenin are not "high theory" which we reserve solely for study at the central party school. They are the bedrock upon which our party's ideological and programmatic positions are built upon and are incorporated into the Introduction to Marxism classes for provisional members and in the introduction to Marxist Classics classes designed for branch study classes.

It is true that at the central party school the reading material is restricted to "the classics", but this does not mean that issues such as "how we relate to social movements" are not dealt with. Most of the political writings of Marx and Lenin deal precisely with how Marxists relate to the social movements - to the spontaneous working-class movement, the national liberation movement, the peasant movement and so on. Moreover, in the "tutorials" no restriction is put upon comrades "linking up the classics with current issues". Indeed, you make that point yourself when you write:
"There are some classes where linking up the classics with current issues is done well. One that springs to mind is the class on Marxism and the National Question. The reading is pretty much all Lenin on Poland and other oppressed nations within Russia, but comrades doing the school were pretty quickly able to relate it to national independence struggles being waged today. This provided a much more fruitful discussion, with more comrades feeling able to take part in it, given that they would have actual experience with, say, the East Timorese struggle for independence."

The real limitation on comrades' ability to "link-up the classics with current issues" in the discussion at the central party school is not the "stale form of Marxism" which you allege is presented at the school, but the lack of political experience of many of the comrades attending the school. In recent years branch leaderships have tended to nominate for attendance at the school relatively new comrades with limited political experience, who are therefore unable to relate the political lessons contained in the "classics" (such as the past experiences of the revolutionary working-class movement) to contemporary struggles. You suggest we try to overcome this problem by giving those attending the school reading material on contemporary struggles. But that would simply mean cutting back the reading material on the past experiences of the revolutionary working-class movement, which would undermine the central purpose of the school - which is not to "link-up the classics with current issues" - but to provide comrades with a systematic introduction to the past experiences of the revolutionary working-class movement, and the political lessons drawn from them the leading Marxists of the time.

Furthermore, I very much doubt that adding in reading material on contemporary situations from other countries would enable comrades to "link-up the classics with current issues". For example, your suggestion of adding to the class on the Comintern and the fight against ultra-leftism Nick McKerrell's article on the Scottish comrades' experience of applying the united front tactic: this article devotes a total of four paragraphs to what McKerrell describes as a 'model of how a united front should operate in a modern context", that is the anti-poll tax campaign. How would comrades who have no other knowledge of this particular campaign than what is provided in McKerrell's article be able to "link-up the classics" (in this case Trotsky's I922 article On the United Front) with the experience of this campaign?

If we want to ensure that comrades attending the central party school are better able to "link-up the classics with current issues" then the solution lies in restricting attendance at the school to comrades who have had a much greater range/depth of involvement in contemporary struggles/campaigns than the often very new and politically inexperienced comrades that are usually nominated by the branch leaderships.
Finally, on the issue of why only one comrade leads all the classes in our existing central party school on Marxist political theory. The reasons for this are (a) limitations on leadership resources (even I have had to combine leading the school with other leadership responsibilities, such as over the last two years, with editing GLW, but my past experience in leading the classes that are assembled in the current school curriculum has made it easier for me to combine the school assignment with other leadership responsibilities), and (b) the content and structure of the present school curriculum. Aside from the initial classes on the fundamental propositions of historical materialism/scientific socialism, there is a general historical continuity in the topics covered by each successive class and it therefore makes sense to have a continuity in the comrade leading each of the "tutorials". The long schools that we had in the I980s, as you note, had a number of different "tutors". This was because (a) limited leadership resources meant we could not spare one comrade to be the tutor for the entire four-month course, and (b) the course was organised into distinct subjects (such as Marxist philosophy, Marxist economic theory, Marxism and women's liberation, the bourgeois revolutions, the Russian revolutions (I905, I9I7), the Bolsheviks in power, the post-WW II revolutions, Marxism and the party question), which therefore did not make it necessary to have a tutorial continuity throughout the whole school curriculum.