First Published: The Call, Vol. 5, No. 28, November 15, 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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This is the second in a series of Call articles highlighting the main lessons of One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, written by VI Lenin in 1904. All the member groups in the Organizing Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party are now studying this book.
Readers are invited to send in their comments, questions and articles based on their own study.
Pages cited in this study are from the Progress Publishers edition of One Step Forward; Two Steps Back, which is available from The Call for $1.50 each. See also Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 7, p. 203.
This particular section of the study focuses on the Preface and Section A.
* * *
Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back sums up in detail the crucial struggle of the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, against the Menshevik opportunists at the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. This congress, held in 1903, had as its chief purpose the creation of “a real party on the basis of the principles and organizational ideas that had been advanced and elaborated by Iskra.” (p. 13)
Iskra was the newspaper which served as the collective organizer and scaffolding of the RSDLP. It had carried forth Lenin’s plan for building the party, uniting the scattered local circles and leading the struggle against opportunism of all types, especially the economist tendency. Only when clear “lines of demarcation” with the opportunists had been ’drawn, Lenin pointed out, could a real party be formed. (p. 12) “Thus the last thing we can be accused of,” Lenin added, “is having been hasty in convening the Second Congress.” (p. 12)
Lenin in fact opposed the congress being called a year earlier, for the economists were not yet fully defeated. It was Lenin’s work What Is To Be Done? (published in 1902) that drove the nails into the coffin of the economists, who were opposed to the forging of a vanguard party of the working class.
The economists, as Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? showed, worshipped the spontaneous, economic struggle of the workers and belittled the need to bring socialist ideas and leadership to these struggles. They believed the workers should confine themselves to the economic struggle, leaving politics to the liberal bourgeoisie.
But the defeat of the economists was by no means the end of the struggle against opportunism. At the congress, differences on questions of organization emerged which produced a division in the party between the majority, the Bolsheviks, and the minority, the Mensheviks. It was the Mensheviks who would become the main spokesmen for opportunism in the workers’ movement, a position previously held by the advocates of economism.
In the preface to One Step, Lenin stressed that the central and fundamental point of his book was “that of the political significance of the division of our party” at the Second Congress, which “pushed all previous divisions among Russian Social-Democrats far into the background.” (p.7)
Lenin pointed out that the Russian Social-Democrats should not be afraid of self-criticism and ruthless exposure of the shortcomings which led to this division. He observed that these shortcomings would inevitably be overcome and the party strengthened through the process of open exposure of the struggle between the majority and the minority.
The second point Lenin addressed concerned the difference which had emerged over the question of party organization. He pointed out that the main disagreement between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks concerned, “not questions of program or tactics, but only organizational questions.” (p. 8) The Bolsheviks were the only ones among the so-called Iskra-ist supporters at the congress who upheld the organizational principles which Iskra had fought for since its founding.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks staunchly opposed the organizational position of the Menshevik Martov, who advocated a diffuse, loosely formed party with little or no centralism, a party that would allow “every professor, every high school student and ’every striker’ to declare himself a member of the party.” (p. 9) Martov, the spokesman of the Mensheviks, proposed that party members did not have to join or submit to the discipline of any organization of the party.
Lenin argued against the anarchism and autonomism of the opportunists and for a militant, centralized party with unity of will and unity of action with a clearly defined organization and rules. He called for a single, unified party that could successfully lead the Russian people in their revolutionary struggle and withstand the fierce repression of the state. In contrast to Martov’s opportunist view, Lenin demanded that every party member belong to a unit or organization of the party.
The preparations for the congress by the Organizing Committee provided the basis for this single center to be built. Point 18 of the congress rules declared that all decisions of the congress were “binding on all party organizations.” Lenin pointed out that this specific provision was necessary because there was a danger that the former isolated and independent groups which had come together might refuse to recognize and be bound by the decisions of the congress and that they would cling to their former small circles.
Only within a democratic-centralist organization could two-line struggle unfold while the party continued to carry out its tasks. But the Mensheviks refused to abide by the decisions of the congress after their defeat. They mocked the authority of the congress as the party’s highest body and demanded their own “autonomy” in the party.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back is an exposure of petty -bourgeois opportunists like Martov who posed as Iskra-ists but who maintained “the mentality of the bourgeois intellectual, who is only prepared to accept organizational relations platonically.” (p. 9)
It strikes a firm blow at the modern revisionist concept of a “party of the whole people,” organized on electoral’ lines, with bureaucratic centralism at the top and anarchy in the ranks. At the same time, Lenin’s views on organization also expose today’s anti-party forces of the Menshevik type who are trying to oppose the building of our party. Instead, they promote the loosely organized, local circles of yesterday within which they can maintain their own bourgeois intellectualism.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back paves the way forward towards building a party of the Bolshevik type, a vanguard party of the working class.
Study Questions: pages 1-13:
1. What was the state of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party prior to its Second Congress? (See History of the CPSU-B for further background). How was it similar or dissimilar to the communist movement in the U.S. today?
2. What was the significance of the adoption of Rule 18 of the Congress rules?
3. Why are formal rules (or a constitution) necessary within a Marxist-Leninist party?