Leninism

By Doug Lorimer

• 1921 Comintern resolution
• Public debate
• Party discipline
• Ideological heterogeneity
• Lenin's struggle for a Marxist party
• Notes

The disintegration of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union opened an important debate within the Marxist movement about how to evaluate the history of the socialist movement, and especially of the Bolshevik Party, the party that led the world's first successful socialist revolution. One of the central aims of Links has been to provide a forum for such debate.

It is obviously important to carry out this evaluation in a way that does not make the mistake of confusing Stalinism with the theory and practice of the Bolsheviks when Lenin was the foremost leader of that party. Moreover—as was only to be expected—there are different views of what constituted the theory and practice of Bolshevism. Some of these differences have revolved around the role of Grigory Zinoviev.

By Jonathan Strauss

I. The theory of the labour aristocracy

By Murray Smith

The Second International

Split and unity, 1905-06

The party reconstituted in 1912

By Jonathan Strauss

The labour aristocracy in monopoly capitalism

The sources of monopoly superprofits

The bribe and other causes of working-class material differentiation

The bribe as a mass social relationship

Incorporation and integration

Notes

Doug Lorimer is a member of the National Executive of the Democratic Socialist Perspective in Australia. This is a talk presented to the DSP's January 2005 Marxism Summer School.