Lenin’s method

What was Lenin’s method, the method that we’re beginning to understand a little better? The key is struggle. It’s the struggle of the masses out of which a vanguard develops, and which we seek to mould into a party. The program and organisation of the party are directly tied to the mass movement, they flow out of the mass movement. So the first test of an aspiring vanguard party is: What are you doing and what are you leading? That’s the test. We’ve got to stress that more and more. The loyalty of revolutionaries is tied to the living struggles of the working class and its allies.

That’s the way the program of the party is developed. We must continue to build our confidence in this approach. We’ve got to be prepared to live by what we say on this.

I want to quote a fairly famous passage from Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism which poses another level of problem which I don’t think we can pretend to have fully assimilated, grasped and understood yet, but which is one we have to take up as well. Lenin is discussing how the Bolshevik Party developed — that it didn’t develop overnight and so on.

“The first questions to arise are: how is the discipline of a revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism.” Lenin often says a great deal in a few words, and that’s the case here. To make a revolution, you have to be a real revolutionist, with the qualities Lenin names. Think about the history of the Vietnamese Communist Party, for example, and what was necessary for its victory. Lenin continues:

“Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and — if you wish — merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people — primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people.” So the party’s tasks aren’t confined to one particular layer — industrial workers or white-collar workers or whatever. It seeks to lead the broadest masses.

“Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct.” That’s a central point. The correctness is proved in practice: Once the masses see that strategy and tactics are correct, then they are correct, not before. It’s the test of life. What we vote here doesn’t tell us whether or not we’re correct; it only tells us what we’re going to test out in practice.

Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved. Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrasemongering and clowning. On the other hand, these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience. Their creation is facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory, which, in its turn, is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.15

The program arises out of mass struggles. We have to think what that means for us. I think that’s fundamentally the reason we still haven’t written those two, three or four books on Australia. The heart of our discussion has been on our own class struggle here, but it’s still a fact that we’re small, and the revolutionary movement in this country is at an early stage in comparison with the international situation, in comparison with the advance of the revolutionary movement in Nicaragua or Cuba or Vietnam, where we’re reading book after book after book on the lessons of those struggles. This tells us something. We can’t suck all this material that we are going to need to make a revolution out of our current cadre. The party is a thinking machine, but it still has limited links with the masses. We still have limited experiences, limited cadre, limited resources. It’s not fertilised by enough understanding of the revolutionary movement in this country because the revolutionary movement in this country hasn’t risen to the extent that it has in some other countries. That flows from what we’re saying about how the program is developed.

Nevertheless, we do think we’ve said enough, done enough, understood enough to take the next step. We understand the Accord. If we had more time and resources, we’d have a staff pumping out the counterpropaganda to the stinking ACTU research staff who prostitute themselves for capital. If we had a bigger party, if we had more resources, we’d be taking every one of their figures and cracking them apart. That would be part of the process, part of the exposure, part of our revolutionary work. At the moment we’ve got enough for the main lines, to take us the next step forward as we intervene in the class struggle as it is today. That’s about what we can expect. We can always strive to do better, but there are some objective limits for the moment.

Another observation I think we should understand: The program of a particular revolution is primarily developed in the living class struggle of that country. Yes, it’s set in an international context. But our revolutionary program in this country won’t include a point on Spain in 1936, for example. We want to limit the number of points of demarcation we have to make with other revolutionaries. We may discuss these questions in our party school, all of us will read history, some of us will make a study of it. That means that when we undertake polemics we have to keep a sense of proportion. We have to debate with the currents that are affecting the class struggle; it’s correct for us to go after the CPA and the AMWU on the Accord and other issues affecting the class struggle in Australia today. It’s correct for us to draw those lines of demarcation, but not about other continents, other periods and so on. What makes you a revolutionist is not having a program for 20 other countries.

On this we can learn a good deal from the Cubans, who very seldom engage in polemics with anyone. It’s not a “weakness” of the Cubans or the Sandinistas that they don’t have a “full program” for the class struggle in Iran. That’s one of their strengths — their understanding that revolutionaries should unite on the tasks before them, the tasks they can affect.