Dear Comrades

I was surprised by the extreme hostility in Al Richardson’s treatment of my book Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Revolutionary History, Volume 4, no 3). As a sometime reader of your magazine, I had assumed that there would be a critically-minded review, but also a more serious and comradely review. I thought - perhaps mistakenly - that Richardson and I had more in common politically than appears to be the case. He writes that I have produced a work that ‘is far from being a Marxist book’, that what I wrote ‘does not qualify as Marxism at all’, etc. This mode of argument leaves a bad taste.

Richardson is negatively impressed by my admiration for the late American Trotskyist leader James P Cannon, my political kinship with Ernest Mandel, and the fact that I have a different and more positive appreciation than he does of the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. This sets the framework and tone for his review. But my book is not about these things. To quote the two positive comments in the review, ‘all the hard work that has gone into this book’ has resulted in a ‘compilation of most of Lenin’s remarks upon the subject’ of the revolutionary party, which - the reviewer ignores what follows - are related to the political, social, economic, intellectual and cultural context of Lenin’s time, as presented in a broad array of eyewitnesses’ and participants’ writings and memoirs, plus a variety of works by serious historians.

Richardson accuses me of ‘hero-worshipping’ James P Cannon because I make such positive reference to him. A Stalinist reviewer has levelled a similar accusation that I make Leon Trotsky a hero. The same could be said for Rosa Luxemburg, Victor Serge, Rose Leviné-Meyer, Nadezhda Krupskaya - and, of course, for Lenin himself. Anyone having a negative view of any of these people would be as justified as Richardson in accusing me of indulging in ‘hymns of hero worship’. But I think the book is better than this.

A number of interpretive differences raised by Richardson might fruitfully be discussed: the relationship of Lenin’s philosophical perspectives of 1908 to those of 1914, the relationship of his philosophical views to his practical-political orientation, the continuity or lack of continuity in Lenin’s political orientation from 1905 to 1917, etc. Here I feel I should limit myself to three polemical points that Richardson makes.

Firstly, Richardson falsely asserts that I ‘approach Leninism as a purely organisational phenomenon’. Such a view is alien to me and to the book I wrote. Lenin and the Revolutionary Party gives considerable attention to the relationship of organisation to political analysis and strategy, and it does so in a manner that is the opposite of what Richardson attributes to me. I urge readers to take neither my word nor Richardson’s word as the final judgement on this question, but instead to look at the book itself.

Secondly, Richardson makes much of my passing reference to the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. He says this proves that I am ‘heir to the cult of Third World Stalinism that is an indubitable component of the legacy of Cannon’. (As someone expelled from the US Socialist Workers Party for opposing the displacement of Trotskyism by Castroism, Richardson’s freewheeling charges seem especially ignorant to me.) He writes ‘in view of what has happened in Nicaragua, LeBlanc must be feeling pretty foolish right now’. Whatever criticisms could be levelled at the Sandinistas, the dismissal of them as ‘Third World Stalinists’ is - to put it mildly - shallow. Richardson obviously feels there is nothing positive to be learned from these revolutionaries. I do not feel foolish for disagreeing with him. I will explain my views on this in a different study, a new version of which will be published in the near future. Of course, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party contains only a couple of sentences on this question.

Thirdly, Richardson accuses me of ‘snobbery’ (and of discussing Lenin’s politics ‘among the lions of fashionable salon and seminar rooms of the literary establishment’!), apparently basing this charge on three things: i) I allegedly dismiss all other left wing groups while seeking ‘to appropriate the legacy of Lenin to the advantage of... [my own organisation’; ii) I make positive reference in a footnote to something written by Perry Anderson, seriously discuss Sheila Rowbotham’s criticisms of Leninism, and respond to the anti-Leninist attacks of ‘one bourgeois savant after another’; and iii) ‘the very price of the book.., tells its own story’. I will take these proofs of my snobbery in reverse order. The hardcover edition of the book does cost too much—despite my objections to the publisher—but I have tried to make cheaper prices available for interested readers, and a less expensive paperback edition is due to appear in 1993. It is true that I utilise Anderson (and others), discuss Rowbotham, criticise bourgeois (and Stalinist, Social Democratic, Anarchist and other anti-Leninists)—but it is not clear to me why this is a bad thing, let alone proof of ‘snobbery’.

Finally, it is absolutely false to claim that I dismiss all left wing groups but my own. Negative references to ‘self-styled “Leninist” organisations and grouplets that have proliferated like mushrooms’ should be understood in the same spirit as Richardson’s own comment that the revolutionary movement in currently ‘splintered and impotent’. The small group that I was part of when I wrote Lenin and the Revolutionary Party did not have any monopoly on Leninist virtue. It has fused with a somewhat larger group, which is also only a fragment of the revolutionary Socialist movement. My belief when I wrote the book was that a Leninist party worthy of the name can only come into existence if small group conceits and backbiting are transcended, with pseudo-revolutionary ‘one-upmanship’ and competitiveness giving way to a more serious collective process. I conceived of this, in part, as involving a growing number of us giving serious attention to theoretical texts and their historical contexts, involving ourselves in self-critical evaluations of our own experiences, and also working together in real struggles of the workers and the oppressed today and tomorrow. My book was meant to be a contribution to that process.

Fraternally

Al Richardson replies

If comrade LeBlanc was expelled from the US SWP for opposing the Castro cult I can only applaud his stance, but it seems to me that he has not thought his ideas out to their logical conclusion. A book that can make a contrast favourable to Fidel Castro’s movement as against those who attempt to apply the dialectic must surely be ‘far from being a Marxist book’. Let us not forget that Lenin’s Testament criticised Bukharin for not having really understood the dialectic, and his contributions to Socialist thought will long outlast Castro’s tedious monologues, even if they are still being churned out by the American SWP in 200 years’ time. In any case, it is inescapable that it was under Cannon’s leadership that the SWP took up this cult, and that the magazine which comrade LeBlanc edits is doing the same with the Sandinistas (there are over a dozen articles devoted to them in our incomplete file, even running to statements from Tomas Borge).

On the other hand, comrade LeBlanc’s belief that I described his book as ‘not qualifying as Marxism at all’ is based upon a misunderstanding. A glance at my review will show that I was describing how Lenin changed his basic conception of Marxism during the First World War, and that his previous formula about the ‘democratic dictatorship’ of two classes ‘does not qualify as Marxism at all’ in terms of the exposition in State and Revolution. If comrade LeBlanc wants to accept this as a rebuke directed at himself, all well and good. The fact remains, however, that he does quote with approval a statement describing a party representing two classes—a concept about which Trotsky is a good deal more scathing than I ever was (cf The Spanish Revolution, pp135-8).

I must admit to some amazement about comrade LeBlanc’s concept of scale in his second paragraph. Surely he is not attempting to rank James P Cannon alongside Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Serge, Leviné-Meyer and Krupskaya? I would tend to agree rather with CLR James, that Cannon had the capacity for ‘propaganda speeches to build up the movement’ and ‘intricate organisation’, but that ‘as for the refinements of political policy, he wasn’t into that’ (CLR James and British Trotskyism, London, 1987, p14). The references I gave to mine and Sam’s books show that he was none too scrupulous in his organisational methods, to which we might add that when he came to Edinburgh to make contact with the Revolutionary Socialist Party on Trotsky’s instructions, he received their delegates in his hotel room without deigning to rise from his bed. The following remark from the British Workers International League is most instructive:

‘We cannot but remark in passing, that in nearly every letter that arrives from the States, like some King Charles’ head, the name of Lawrence appears as the subject of praise. This method of ballyhoo and advertisement- or, as it is termed in the States, “a build up”, on the “key man” principle, is certainly not the organisational method of Bolshevism, and savours more of bourgeois publicity methods.’ (Reply to Comrade Lou Cooper, September 1943)

Cannon’s use of this technique to create the reputations of Pablo and Healy should have taught us something by now, and his unashamed praise for Zinoviev’s direction of the Comintern is well documented (cf The Struggle for Socialism in the American Century, pp186-7).

Finally, I still believe that comrade LeBlanc devotes far too much space to discussing books from the university syllabus (the modern equivalent of Peter Struve’s ‘Legal Marxism’) whilst today’s revolutionaries receive little more than insult in his pages. To my mind, there is just as much a class divide in what is regarded as Marxism as there is in broader society.