| PORKCHOPS STUART INTEREST PAGE | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| POLITICS (if there are any political issues you would like to be disscussed please e-mail me- see bottom of page) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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REFORM OF THE LORDS:- Case for: Britain is a vigorous, creative and dynamic country. Its people are inventive, talented and diligent. They deserve a framework for their country which reflects the unique character of the place and the people. Many of the key institutions of Britain are amongst the best in the world so why not this one. They have developed � many of them over centuries � in ways which catch the character of Britain and the British people: a character rooted in fairness, in decency and in democracy. They have changed throughout their history: they will continue to change, now and in the future. Their pattern of change reflects the constant need to ensure that the framework of Britain is as good as it can be: as principled, as practical, as supple and as strong as is necessary. Modernisation is a constant element of that process. All institutions need to modernise to maintain their impact, their importance and their integrity. New Labour was elected with a mandate to modernise. It is commitment to modernisation was clear and comprehensive in its manifesto which the people elected them on. It is modernising and bringing it closer to people representative arrangements in Scotland, in Wales and in Northern Ireland; introducing new structures for the regions of England; bringing in a new capital-wide authority and Mayor for the great city of London; bringing forward measures to reform and renew the vital democratic strand of local government; and implementing a significant programme of modernisation of the House of Commons. In line with this programme of renewal, the modernisation of the House of Lords is vital. The Government will be judged on the improvements as well as reforms and developments in health, education, crime, jobs and the economy. But reforming the House of Lords is a key element of the Government's legislative plans, and proposals for further reform beyond that. Reform of the House of Lords is long overdue. For too long, hereditary peers with no democratic legitimacy, whose role is based on birth and not merit, have been able to play a part in passing laws affecting everyone in Britain. For too long, Britain has got by with a second Parliamentary chamber which is less good than it could be. For too long, governments in Britain have shirked the responsibility of reform. New Labour in government will, as has been promised, carry out a careful and considered reform of the House of Lords: the immediate removal of the hereditary peerage, and longer-term reform of the House of Lords as a whole. This is a radical and historic task. It is argued it will be widely be supported by the people of our country. It will create a second chamber of Parliament of which both Parliament and the people can be proud. It will produce better government for Britain. http://www.lords-reform.org.uk/index/wpaper.htm CULTURE OF SECRECY LEFT UNBROKEN:- Charter88 has declared itself deeply disappointed with the Government's draft Freedom of Information Bill. It has accused Jack Straw of backtracking on Labour's key pledge to introduce freedom of information laws. Speaking in London, Charter88's Director Pam Giddy said: "Jack Straw today has sent the wrong message to Whitehall. He's told civil servants: 'Labour will not break your culture of secrecy'. In its Manifesto Labour said that 'unnecessary secrecy in government leads to arrogance in government and defective policy decisions'. I'm afraid that they are quickly becoming guilty of just such behaviour. "Labour's White Paper proposals would have provided a strong right to know for UK citizens. But we now have to ask if their Bill is any better than the Tories Code of Practice - would it have avoided the whole BSE farrago, or helped Stephen Lawrence's parents? Unfortunately, I suspect not. "The principle of a statutory right to know is very well worth having, and I congratulate the Government on this. However, we have to ensure that in practice there is true freedom of information in Whitehall." There will be a joint Charter88/Campaign for Freedom of Information briefing at 1.00pm Wednesday 26th May Committee Room C, 1 Parliament Street, For further info. contact MR J.Adams on 0171 684 3879. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| HISTORY | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Origin of the Workers� Bureaucracy I: The workers� movement before the Russian Revolution The subject of this book is Stalinism. With its origins in the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, Stalinism raised its head in Russia within a few years of the victorious workers� revolution of 1917. But until 1923, Stalinism was no more than a tendency within the Bolshevik Party. And yet! Within just a few short years, Stalinism had implanted itself within the workers� movement in every country in the world! To understand this astonishing transformation it is necessary to look at the condition and level of development of the workers� movement at the time. By the beginning of the century, capitalism had extended its dominion across the entire globe. It was however only in the �old� capitalist countries that modern industry had been established, and the working class had grown to the point of having its own organisations, political parties and trade unions, and working class consciousness. The rest of the world was drawn into the capitalist world market mainly as sources of raw materials and markets for commodities from the industrialised countries, where the workers were in the main unorganised and still lacking workers� organisation and consciousness. By the turn of the century, the workers� movement in most of Europe and Britain, Australia and the other settler-colonies, had become very powerful. Russia was still backward and semi-feudal, but the establishment of modern industry had given birth to a working class and a national bourgeoisie. The main tendencies in the workers� movement before World War One were �labourism�, �social democracy�, syndicalism and �Bolshevism�. In all the developed capitalist countries there were also small �doctrinaire socialist� groups. Labourism The classic country of �labourism� is Britain . Britain was the birth place of trade unions. The �craft� unions emerged out of the old feudal guilds as the working class itself emerged out of feudalism. Many of the leaders of these trade unions had participated in the �Working Man�s International� (or �First International�) built by Marx and Engels in the 1860s and 70s. By the late 1880s, unskilled workers such as gas workers and dockers, formed broad industrial unions. The leaders of these unions and the members of the exclusive �craft unions� formed the �aristocracy of labour�. In former times, the old guilds had provided the only route for a young worker to become a journeyman and earn a wage, and later perhaps become himself a master. In this century, the trade unions have also provided a stepping stone to bourgeois respectability for workers in the Britain. Thanks to the work of Marx and Engels and the other leaders of the First International, the trade unions embraced not only the immediate economic demands of workers, but also promoted a broad social program, and the vision of a future socialist society. Side by side with the trade unions in Britain, there was the Labour Party and the political parties and groups which advocated Socialism. Although the workers� movement in Britain had achieved a very high level of organisation, and through its trade unions, had raised the working class to a relatively high cultural level, from the political point of view, the British workers� movement was very immature. The leaders of the trade unions, especially the craft unions, were thoroughly imbued with the spirit of capitalist ideology, and revolutionary socialism had not gained a significant hold in Britain. Engels wrote in 1889: �The most repulsive thing here is the bourgeois �respectability� which has grown deep into the bones of the workers. The division of society into innumerable strata, each with its own pride but also its inborn respect for its �betters� ... even Tom Mann , whom I regard as the best of the lot, is fond of mentioning that he will be lunching with the Lord Mayor ...� The Fabians and others advocated that the workers� movement should lend its support to the Liberal Party. Marx and Engels on the other hand, insisted that the workers must build their own political party, to run for parliamentary seats independently of the bourgeois parties. By 1892, the first workers� representatives, Keir Hardie and John Burns, had been elected to parliament. Recognising that workers rights could not be advanced without parliamentary action, the Trade Union Congress set up the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) in 1900, which later became the Labour Party. By 1914, the Labor Party had two million members, and achieved government for the first time in 1924 with Ramsay MacDonald Britain�s first Labour Prime Minister. The Independent Labour Party (ILP), founded in 1893 by Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, was based on a mixture of Methodism and Marxism. The ILP participated in the founding of the Labour Party with the aim of winning the Labour Party to a socialist program. It at first opposed the Great War, but later, like the majority of European socialists, capitulated and supported the war. From the earliest times, most workers were very well aware of this process by which their best representatives became transformed into respectable bourgeois citizens. One of the earliest gains of the trade unions, in fact, was their recognition as �legal associations�, so that when their organisers ran off with the strike funds, they could be prosecuted as thieves! But the question being asked was, how could this transformation, and the betrayal that inevitably followed, be avoided? Many workers drew the conclusion that the whole class of officials and politicians were no good, and that the working class would be better off without them! While many workers rejected both the conservative politics and the �opportunism� of their �respectable� leaders, the socialist groups, the groups which promoted revolutionary socialism, were all small, isolated and sectarian groups, incapable of fulfilling their program. For instance, the Social-Democratic Federation (SDF), founded by Henry Hyndman, was mainly responsible for popularising Marxist theory in Britain. There was also the Socialist Labour Party, following the American Daniel De Leon. Both were very isolated and sectarian. Lenin wrote in 1907: �What Marx and Engels criticise most sharply in British and American socialism is its isolation from the working-class movement. ..that the SDF ... have reduced Marxism to a dogma, to �rigid orthodoxy�, that they consider it �a credo and not a guide to action�, that they are incapable of adapting themselves to the theoretically helpless, but living and powerful mass working-class movement that is marching alongside them�. Lenin explained this tendency of the workers� movement in Britain and America thus: �the absence of any big, nation-wide, democratic tasks facing the proletariat; the proletariat�s complete subordination to bourgeois politics; the sectarian isolation of groups, mere handfuls of socialists, from the proletariat; not the slightest success among the working masses at the elections, ... �Engels stressed the importance of an independent workers� party, because he was speaking of countries where there had formerly been not even a hint of the workers� political independence� In Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin showed how imperialism splits the working class of the �home� country, creating a privileged upper stratum, which makes up a majority of trade unions and other workers� organisations, and a lower stratum, which is completely excluded. Imperialism also saw the reversal of emigration from the imperialist countries, which was replaced instead by a flow of immigrants into the imperialist countries from the more backward countries. These workers then moved into this lower stratum. This split strengthened the opportunist tendencies in the working class. In England, the vast colonial possessions and the monopoly position England enjoyed in the world market in the nineteenth century, meant that the workers were already dominated by this opportunism. In 1882 Engels wrote to Kautsky: �You ask me what the English workers think about colonialism. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers� party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers daily share the feast of England�s monopoly of the world market and the colonies�. As Trotsky explains in 1925, in Where is Britain Going?, the stagnation in Britain�s industrial development and the decline in its monopoly position in the world market, threw the British working class into conflict with the bourgeoisie, but this process was only just beginning at the time of the outbreak of the First World War. Social Democracy Almost all the workers� organisations of the world were at this time a part of the Second International, founded in 1889 as the successor to the First International. While giving the outward appearance of a world party of the working class, the Second International was in fact a loose federation of national parties, which included both reformist parties such as the British Labour Party, and small revolutionary parties such as the American Socialist Labor Party (SLP). Trotsky commented in 1922: �The war has drawn the balance sheet on an entire epoch of the socialist movement; it has weighed and appraised the leaders of this epoch�. Almost all the leaders of the Second International eventually supported �their own� bourgeoisie at the outbreak of the First World War. The Second International fell apart. Those precious few leaders who did not capitulate to the enormous social pressures brought to bear upon them by the war, formed the foundation of revolutionary socialism in the post-war period. In Europe, the political development of the workers� movement contrasted with its development in Britain. Whereas in Britain, the Trade Union Congress had initiated the founding of the Labour Party, in Europe, the socialist parties were electoral forces in themselves and initiated the building of the industrial unions. Even to this day, the union movement in most European countries has several peak bodies, each affiliated to different political parties. The most important of the European Socialist parties was the mighty Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The SPD was founded in 1875 by the fusion of the parties of Marx and Lassalle, and by 1914 had more than one million members. Activity covered everything from parliamentary representation to social clubs, education, credit, welfare services and trade unionism. Its members included Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Kautsky, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and Clara Zetkin. The problem of isolation from the workers� movement and sectarianism which dogged the socialist movement in Britain and the US was not the problem in Germany. Rather it was the infection by opportunism and parliamentarism. Engels, and later Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fought a constant battle against the Right within the Social Democratic Party. The SPD was founded by August Bebel, a collaborator of Marx and Engels in the First International, and Wilhelm Liebknecht (father of Karl). According to Trotsky �This combination of practical opportunism with revolution in principle reached its highest expression in Bebel, the brilliant skilled worker who became undisputed leader of the party for almost half a century�. After Engels� death in 1895, Engels� literary executor, Eduard Bernstein, was the leading theoretician of the German SPD. Bernstein developed the theory of the gradual transformation of capitalism into socialism, set out in his book Evolutionary Socialism. It was Bernstein who coined the famous aphorism: �The movement is everything, the final goal nothing�. Bernstein was the first �revisionist�. That is, rather than saying �I reject Marxism, I am a reformist�, he claimed to �up-date� Marxism, .... to �evolutionary socialism�. He adopted a pacifist stand during the war. The Austrian Marxist Karl Kautsky became a Marxist under the influence of Bernstein, and was Marx and Engels� literary assistant, along with Marx�s daughter Eleanor. After Engels� death, Kautsky was recognised as the foremost authority on Marx�s writings and the greatest populariser of Marx�s theory. It was Kautsky who defended �orthodox� Marxism against Bernstein's revisionism. However, Kautsky accommodated himself to the conservative bureaucratic life-style of the SPD and found himself on the right-wing of the Party at the outbreak of the War. He denounced the Russian Revolution as a �betrayal of Marxism�. The right-wing leaders of the SPD were Gustav Noske, who competed with the conservatives in patriotism, and became Minister for War in 1919; Philipp Scheidemann, and Friedrich Ebert, SPD leader after Bebel�s death in 1913. These parliamentarians, though more sophisticated than their British counterparts, exuded contempt for the workers� movement, and served their militarist masters with a brutal and cynical effectiveness. On the left-wing of the SPD, on the other hand, were Rosa Luxemburg, founding leader of the Polish Social Democrats, who fought against Bernstein and later Kautsky�s revisionism, and Karl Liebknecht, founding leader of the Socialist Youth International in 1907. Luxemburg and Liebknecht founded the Spartacus League in 1914 to oppose the War and spent most of the War in prison. The names of Liebknecht and Luxemburg inspired millions throughout the world for their courageous opposition to the War. And there was Clara Zetkin, a founder of the socialist women�s movement, and a member of the Bookbinders Union, and International Secretary of the Tailors and Seamstresses Union. Syndicalism In the United States, revolutionary socialism had found its way into the working class through the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), which had 1,500 members, mostly German and few English-speakers, and was factionalised and isolated, when Daniel De Leon joined it in 1890. De Leon transformed the SLP into a much more dynamic party with roots in the organised working class, which was instrumental in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905. The SLP was however a far cry from the great socialist parties of Europe. De Leon developed its special brand of revolutionary socialism, combining electoralism and industrial unionism in a characteristic mix. The Party aimed to win governmental power and thereby act as a �shield� while the �sword�, the workers organised in the unions, would capture economic power from the capitalists, unable to use the state power to protect their property. With the launching of the IWW, the perfect form for the workers� organisation had been found - the workers would build the new society �within the shell of the old�, in the form of the OBU - One Big Union. Whereas the old SLP had worked to build and win leadership within the existing union structure, albeit ineffectively, under De Leon�s leadership, the SLP moved towards the sectarian policy of building branches of the OBU in opposition to existing conservative structures. At its Chicago Congress in 1908, the IWW split when anarcho-syndicalists led by Bill Haywood captured a majority over De Leon�s group. The �Chicago� branch did not accept the �sword and shield� theory of De Leon�s �Detroit� branch, and rejected electoralism altogether. The best elements of the American working class, such as Eugene Debs, �Mother� Jones, (Big) Bill Haywood, and James Cannon, were a part of this �Chicago� branch of the IWW. While anarchism has a long history and had a strong following in Europe, America is the natural home of syndicalism. Syndicalism is the doctrine that workers should rely exclusively upon trade union organisation for the fight against capitalism and their eventual liberation. A mass working class party has never been established in the United States. To this day American workers have to decide which of the two bourgeois �teams� to vote for. In Australia, features of both the British and American workers� movements were to be found. The trade union movement had been firmly implanted on Australian soil in the 19th century. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) was founded in 1891, following the defeat of the maritime strike and the shearers strike, despite widespread solidarity from transport workers. Workers drew the inevitable conclusion that industrial action alone could not defend the interests of the working class and they needed their own political party. By 1899 the first workers� party to be elected to government held power for one week in Queensland. By April 1904 the first federal Labor government held power for 4 months, and the Andrew Fisher government established a secure majority in Federal Parliament in 1910. These first experiences of Labor government soon convinced many workers socialism could not be achieved through parliament, or at least not through the ALP. The De Leonist SLP established itself in Australia when the Sydney-based Australian Socialist League adopted the De Leon program in 1907. The SLP described itself with the metaphor of a �beacon�, the light from which workers would see when the moment for revolution arrived. Tom Mann visited Melbourne in 1902 and spent several years in Australia. As a result of his initiative the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) was established. The VSP resembled a socialist party on the European model, but never grew beyond its peak of about 1500 members in 1907. It conducted socialist propaganda, organised industrial unions and participated as a �faction� in the ALP. The VSP was much more pragmatic and more deeply involved in the mass movement than the SLP. Like the European socialist parties, it organised a very broad range of social and cultural activities. Many of its leaders, such as John Curtin, Maurice Blackburn and Frank Anstey, were later to become leaders in the ALP. . All the socialist parties rallied around the cause of the One Big Union after the OBU National Conference convened by the VSP in Melbourne in 1907. Following the Chicago-Detroit split, the IWW became identified with the syndicalist Chicago branch. The IWW published a weekly paper, Direct Action, which achieved a readership of 15,000 by 1916. Apart from the syndicalists, all the socialists agreed on the need for a workers� party[1]. The debate took the form of �beating from without� versus �boring from within�: the VSP hoped to bore from within and win the ALP for socialism; the SLP beat from without in the hope of winning the mass of workers to the ranks of their own party. All shared an enormous optimism that the impending catastrophe would usher in a workers� republic. Only the Victorian Socialist Party ever had more than a few hundred members. And when for a short period of time in 1908 the VSP broke from the ALP, they rapidly lost membership. Never again did the VSP risk isolation from the Labor Party. Bolshevism In Russia, however, extraordinary social conditions had prevailed since the introduction of modern industry in the 1880s. The clash between a working class, dragged off the land into vast urban concentrations in a single generation, and a feudal autocracy of unspeakable brutality, had given birth to a generation of revolutionaries - Anabaptists, Terrorists, Anarchists and Socialists; rebellious peasants, young intellectuals and workers. Revolutionary politics went through a telescoped evolution from religious sects to Marxist parties in two or three decades. The first Marxist circles were formed in Marx�s lifetime. The first draft program of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was published by Plekhanov�s Emancipation of Labour Group in 1883. These Marxist circles formed and dissolved in a short space of time - usually due to police repression. It was out of these exceptional conditions that Lenin built the Party that made the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Party, the founders of modern revolutionary socialism. This was the state of the workers movement in the developed capitalist countries at the time of the First World War. In the �old� capitalist countries the workers� movement was in its �adolescence�. The great workers� organisations were controlled by respectable, bourgeoisified bureaucrats who confidently predicted the inevitable prosperity awaiting workers at the end of the parliamentary road. The revolutionary groups, on the other hand, showed an equally naive confidence in the inevitable arrival of Socialism by means of the revolutionary road. The syndicalists and anarchists denounced all �politicians� and advocated �direct action�. In either case, Socialism was more of a moral ideal than a practical program. There had been no experience of genuinely revolutionary struggle since the earliest days of the struggle against the Combination Laws and the Chartist Movement. Socialist revolution was something which existed only in the books and pamphlets of the socialist apostles. This was the workers� movement in 1917, when the Russian Revolution burst on to the scene. Hardly had workers in Germany and Britain, let alone in far away America or Australia, made contact with the leaders of the Russian Revolution, and enrolled as students in the school of Bolshevism, than the party which had resolved all these problems, and made the first workers� revolution, had succumbed to a horrible degeneration. II: The Russian Revolution The source of the success of the Russian Revolution lay in the extraordinary historical position of Russia and its relation to Europe. The success of the Czarist autocracy in maintaining its dominance over a vast Empire to the East had allowed it to hold out the European powers and keep Russia in almost feudal backwardness, on the edge of developed and industrialised Europe. This feat involved ferocious repression and Europe�s capitals hosted thousands of Russian emigr�s. All the political theories of Europe flowed back with them to the East, where they were tested out in the crucible of the revolutionary struggle against the autocracy. In the late nineteenth century, capitalism and modern industry began to penetrate Russia, in much same way as it has penetrated the Newly Industrialised Countries of the Pacific Rim more recently. Domestic and village industry was destroyed, trade increased, and the social structure of Russia changed rapidly. Peasants came into the cities to work in vast factories and lived in huge proletarian suburbs under conditions of extreme poverty and backwardness. The Czarist autocracy rested upon a working class which was still culturally very backward, but was being organised and disciplined by the conditions of modern industry. The working class of Russia confronted not simply the tasks of achieving their rights and living standards within bourgeois society, but was faced with the tasks that had been achieved by the bourgeoisie in Europe in the struggle against feudalism in the 17th and 18th centuries. Classical Marxism had conceived of Socialism as the negation of modern capitalism, arising out of the conditions created by modern capitalism. Consequently, some Russian Marxists believed that Russia was obliged to pass through capitalist democracy in order to arrive at the door of workers� power and Socialism. But the Russian bourgeoisie was young and weak. The Czarist state had always dominated all commercial and industrial relations with Europe. Consequently, the bourgeoisie was dominated by the state and was incapable of overthrowing Czarism. It was closely tied to the landed gentry and was incapable of leading the peasant masses against the landlords. The task of overthrowing Czarism and establishing basic democratic rights fell to the only force in Russian society capable of carrying out this task - the proletariat. Leon Trotsky was the only Marxist of this period to provide a theoretical basis for the social revolution in a backward country in the imperialist epoch, the theory known as �permanent revolution�. The political struggles out of which the Bolshevik Party was built hinged around these questions of historical perspective - of the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; the relation between the peasantry and the working class; the relation between the tasks of the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. In the latter part of the nineteenth century Russian Marxism took the form of numerous �revolutionary circles� - groups of revolutionaries who debated questions of theory and perspective, and intervened in workers� struggles, organising trade unions, political campaigns and demonstrations. For anarchism or socialism? For a professional revolutionary cadre or the spontaneity of the masses? Would the peasantry or the working class lead the revolution? Could workers� struggle transcend the economic struggle? Could Russia by-pass capitalist development altogether? It was these questions of program and revolutionary strategy that were fought out in the revolutionary circles - and prisons - of Czarist Russia. And it was through these revolutionary circles that Marxism was introduced into the Russian working class. A generation of revolutionaries were trained, and gained their basic experience this way. From 1901, the principal axis of this struggle was the struggle between the Bolshevik and Menshevik wings of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). This struggle continued up until November 1917 when the Russian workers took state power under the leadership of the Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP. Here is not the place to tell the story of the Russian Revolution. Why re-tell the story that has already been told so brilliantly by Trotsky himself, in his History of the Russian Revolution? The question for here is this: there is nothing infectious or magnetic about Stalinism. Indeed, few political diseases could be more repulsive! The force which transformed the workers� movement in the two or three years after 1917 was the Russian Revolution, not Stalinism. Stalinism was its antithesis. Stalinism corrupted the movement which crystallised around the Revolution. Stalinism was not the child of the Revolution, but its executioner. Its success in corrupting the Communist International depended on the success of the Stalinists in passing themselves off as the true and only inheritors and representatives of the Revolution. And who in 1923 could challenge the credentials of the leaders of the Communist International? Who could question the wisdom of those who had taken on and defeated all that world capitalism could throw at them? The Bolshevik Party In 1895 Lenin founded the League for the Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, uniting all the Marxist circles in Petrograd at the time This group was the first to combine struggle for socialist ideas with the day-to-day struggle of workers. The first real practical step towards the building of an all-Russian workers� party! As editor of Iskra (The Spark), Lenin wrote the first draft program of the RSDLP. Written from exile, this document was circulated illegally throughout Russia in the pages of Iskra and laid the basis for the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903. At this Congress the RSDLP split into the Bolshevik and Menshevik wings. Lenin, with the majority of (Bolshevik) delegates, broke from Plekhanov and others over Lenin�s concept of �democratic centralism� - unfettered �democracy� in discussion but disciplined �centralism� in action - as the basic principle of working class organisation. As an illegal party, the Bolshevik Party was spared the corrupting influence of well-paid parliamentary positions. Its internal life was one of intense political struggle, under conditions when political errors were frequently punished by exile to Siberia, courtesy of the Czarist police. Because of these illegal conditions much of its internal discussion took place in Paris, London or Geneva, and was smuggled into Russia via the pages of its newspaper. Censorship meant that there was an eager readership for this material in the working class suburbs and factories. It is common knowledge that Lenin built the Bolshevik Party in a fight against the �circle� mentality, that he established his leading role among revolutionaries in Russia in his call for a democratic-centralist Party as against the disparate circles, that the principle role of Iskra was to bind these circles together into a single national organisation. It is this idea - the �model� of Lenin�s Bolshevik Party and its organ - that underlies the programs of those various revolutionary groups today which see themselves as Leninist parties. However, in this historical transplantation, there are two common misconceptions about what kind of party the Bolshevik Party was. Firstly, the repressive conditions under which the Bolshevik Party worked obliged them to operate with great discipline and professionalism. The revolutionary circles of the nineteenth century had been so easily disorganised by the police because of the �primitivism� and undisciplined nature of the circles. Only correct leadership could win the authority needed to build a disciplined party. But far from being a homogeneous party of �top-down� diktat, the Bolshevik Party was a party in which temporary groupings and factions were formed and dissolved, people changed sides, criticised and denounced each other, and formed new combinations the next day! Secondly, it is frequently ignored that the state of revolutionary organisation today has in some senses more in common with la | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| PUBS AND CLUBS | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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REVIEW:- | Our latest review is concerning the greatest night spot in the Northwest. We sent one of our undercover journalists, Gavin Waddington to check this highly popular town. Nantwich, it has been revealed to be the most popular meeting place of the regions whores, rentboys and gigilos. At 9 o' clock our representative arrived at the much renowed public house, the Frog and Ferret, at the heart of Nantwich. Upon arrival he was offered various drugs by local drug baron, Rob Jones (aka Black Rob). After consuming a mitsibishi and a cocktail of various other drugs, Mr Waddington was offered sex on a plate, by the blow job queen of Nantwich, Wendy Chew. After a fracas with one of bouncers, duely named Martin, our correspondent met up with local studs Stuart Copeland (who had been let off his leash by his girlfriend, hannah) and Maui (the much sought after and renowed Chilean bachelor). Within a few minutes of arrival to the highly acclaimed Gregs, Gavin had an unexpected fight with the Big Guy (aka Karl Munslow-Ong) who kicked his arse, the reason for this brawl was because Gavin stated in his stuppor that Mr Ong was impotent. These claims were later to be confirmed to be true, when Karl tried to give Gav a portion of his one eyed monster. The local whores Ellen Williiams and Emily Hufton joined the orgy, after being given a good seeing to in the toilets by the much acclaimed Maui. Gavin was unable to comment on the allegations of pseudo masicism that proceeded these late night events. Gavin is now on the run after it was discovered he had sex with a 15 year old dog believed to be named Louise Elson. It has now been uncovered that he now lives in Audlem and works at Crewe Hall enterprise Park tel: 01270 411102.
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