to accept the right to minority views.
The SWP never had a culture permitting differences. Every group that ever raised any questions regarding any of its policies was eventually driven out.
In this sense it had no resemblance to the party Lenin led, which was continuously alive with debate and differences. Lenin's party had various newspapers that would debate each other publicly. In fact, in the 1908 period when Lenin was arguing against one grouping in his organization he accused them of hiding their minority views and not publishing them in their public organ.
I do not think most DSP members would think it Leninist for a minority to start up its own public organ and publish its differences with the majority. Well, that was the reality of Lenin's party. In that specific case Lenin even argued that the minority should not use the excuse that the party was not in a pre-convention discussion period to not publicly publish their minority views.
Lenin wrote letters to friends all the time expressing his personal views. He thought it quite normal for there to be private discussions and correspondence between members of his organization. He saw that as a right. In fact, in one letter he began by saying that if anyone read this letter when it wasn't addressed to them, that person was violating his right to private correspondence.
Cannon tried to set up norms of functioning. Some are undoubtedly of great value, while others are completely opposed to the reality of Lenin's Party, but they were always presented as "Leninism".
Cannon introduced the idea that members of a Leninist party are violating norms if they express their differences within the organization to anyone outside the organization or engage in private correspondence, even within the organization.
At the time I joined the SWP in the late 1950s there was a lose grouping in the SWP that the Dobbs leadership referred to as "petty bourgeois" and that was eventually driven out, called the Weissites (named after Murry Wiess a leader of the SWP). One of their horrendous crimes was that they had circulated letters to each other about the internal situation in the SWP.
In saying all of this my point is not to say that responsible people should not think out how they act and the consequences of their actions in terms of how best to carry on a discussion within an organization. Nor do I mean that we should not have rules and norms and try to function in an organized manner.
I am trying to get people to think through these issues and to realize that the norms the US SWP taught the Australian DSP were a misrepresentation of what Lenin's movement had been like, and not necessarily at all a "proven" organizational method. My point is the norms Cannon developed had little to do with the reality of Lenin's party.
The underlying difference has its roots in the fact that Lenin's party was directly leading the masses in a powerful radicalization and the SWP was an isolated ideological propaganda grouping. Even if the SWP had really reflected Lenin's organizational forms they might very well not be at all applicable to its specific circumstances. The idea of ​​a generalized organizational method is about as correct as the idea of an abstract "correct political program".
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Talking tough
It is for the above reasons that in my opinion the DSP is not, and should not refer to itself as, a Leninist party. The new preamble of the DSP's program, in my opinion, is an attempt to codify some of these incorrect concepts of organization.
Its language is that of an organization that is not dealing with the reality of mass struggles. When an organization is isolated it can talk in tough terms about "Overthrow" and "revolutionary action" and so on. Organizations that actually lead the masses, like the FPL in El Salvador or the Alliance in New Zealand, would pay an immense negative price for that kind of needless and easily misunderstood language.
What that language does is give those wanting to block our movement a weapon to attack us and help isolate us. It is posturing that serves no purpose and miseducates the membership on how to handle themselves. Deep down it reflects a method that lacks seriousness. It is ultraleft in that sense. p> Such language is completely unnecessary to maintain our principles. It is revealing when people believe that they have to use language easily misunderstood in order to maintain their principles. It shows a great fear of selling out. p> It is true the DSP lives today in a world that has seen so much betrayal of our ideals for a democratic and just world that it fears the same shift away from socialist ideals could affect it. While this is definitely part of our reality, the use of such terms and acting tough and passing tough-sounding phrases is no ...
