Some notes from Pankhurst on Lenin's pamphlet "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, which appeared in the Vol. 7 No. 22 (21 August 1920) issue of the Workers' Dreadnought. Lenin's pamphlet had appeared earlier in Russian in June 1920 before being published in English in July of the same year. Lenin had criticized Pankhurst in Chapter 9 ("'Left-Wing' Communism in Great Britain") of his pamphlet for refusing to participate in parliament or associate with the Labour Party.
Infantile Sickness of the "Left."
Nicholai Lenin has certainly added to the gaiety of Communism by his treatise under this head. Whatever his brilliance of leadership of the Russian movement, his knowledge and judgement of British Communism is badly deficient.
To argue a tactics for revolutionaries over here from Russian tactics in the Russian Duma is unsound. The Russian Duma itself was, but a few short years before, won from Czardom through revolutionary effort. The experience Russians had had of a "Constituent Assembly" was therefore very limited and incomplete. Here every worker has had a bellyful of our hoary old institution of Parliament. His father had a bellyful before him. And his grandfather away before him. British workers are far from being the political babes Comrade Lenin seems to imagine.
A clear-cut call of "Down with Parliament, all Power to the Soviets," may well be made in six months time, if we get to work, and not after Henderson and Thomas,1 with their palliative dope, have endeavoured to queer the pitch. The fact that the Capitalists want the workers everywhere to participate in Parliament, want them to send Henderson, Thomas, and the group of fakirs, lawyers, Liberals, and other political sycophants who constitute the Labour Party, to power, is a good enough argument for us not to want them to do anything so suicidal to revolutionary triumph.
I sincerely trust that the "great influence" that some leaders wielded in the past, will be wielded by no future individual in the movement. British Revolutionary Communism, if I interpret its spirit aright, stands, probably more than the Communism of any other country, for strict discipline and subordination of ego to the movement, accurate infection by delegates of the letter and spirit of their instructions. Brilliant individual efforts from the star turns of the team are not wanted. Solid combination and sound team work are what the rank and file stand for. The sooner the whole movement is built up from bottom to top on sound Soviet principles, with recall of all delegates and persons entrusted with executive posts by the body delegating such powers to them, with strict Party control of all such delegates, the healthier for the movement.
Taken from the Workers' Dreadnought, Vol. 7 No. 22, 21 August 1920.
- 1Arthur Henderson and James Henry Thomas were Labour Party figures.—adri
Comments
With hindsight, it is easy…
With hindsight, it is easy to see the policy advocated by Lenin merely as Russian foreign policy, as a means of shoring up the restructured capitalist (Bolshevik) state.
Against the "Left", for revolutionary communism!