"American Leninism in the 1970s," by Jim O'Brien in Radical
America
reviewed by MC5, 9/7/90

A xerox copy of the article by O'Brien is available for $3
cash. MIM, PO Box 3576, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-3576

The first thing to point out about this is that it is an
historical essay already because "American Leninism" is now in
the Gorbachev era. The pro-Moscow parties across the world are
dropping their insistence on upholding Lenin's What Is To Be
Done? For example, the British Communist Party has really
dropped any semblance of communism; others have dissolved
outright.

Still the essay is valuable because to understand where things
come from in the United States, you need to know this history.
The recent diatribes I wrote against revisionism in the United
States and its strangling of internationalism is much related
to this past. (See MIM Notes 42)

Soon however, we can hope that the CP will dissolve. Surely it
cannot avoid a period of even greater confusion and change
very revealing to people who follow things over a long period
of time.

Anyway, about Obrien's article: the main thing O'Brien wants
to do is piss on the idea of building a real communist party
in this country.

The main thing that the author seeks to prove is that the
parties that arose out of SDS in the 1960s do not have the
size or other kinds of visible success of the Communist Party,
which he did not imagine having the kind of problems it has
today. Therefore, if you look at these efforts "objectively"
in O'Brien's mind, you should give up on revolution. Nothing
even surpasses the CP.

O'Brien's ideology is what will be labelled "sizeism" and
"pragmatism." Really, this is the invidious comparisons game
applied on the organizational level.

Anyway, O'Brien goes through the history of the splinters
since SDS. This is the only reason to read his article. It's
good sectarian training.

It's just that none of this history can really prove the point
O'Brien wants to make. At a larger comparative historical
level, O'Brien's argument falls apart. It is really quite
interesting that O'Brien notices this without addressing it.
"Second, the existence of more than a dozen countries governed
by Leninist parties offered a prospect of apparent success."
(p. 10)

In the United States, he also should have started with the CP
in the 1930s. He would have noticed all the actual gains it
won with its power.

He should have noticed that the Maoist-inspired Black Panthers
(before they were smashed and degenerated) organized more
Blacks for revolutionary change than any previous group in
post-World War II history. Yet, this gets passed over in the
discussion as the essay focuses on other groups. O'Brien
clearly does not take the Panthers seriously, while he takes
semi-Trotskyist groups like Workers Power or the Socialist
Worker Party that dropped its Leninism more seriously.

Anybody who takes Trotskyism more seriously than the Black
Panthers clearly hasn't thought too much about history. Even
by O'Brien's own measuring rod of numbers, the Trotskyists
have been a failure, even in this land of the bought-off white
working class that according to the Spartacist League in
classic Trotskyist industrialized-is-better-form "is amongst
the most advanced in the world."

Another point is that the article proceeds without an analysis
of goals and talks vaguely about the "left" as most "leftists"
are apt to do. So for "O'Brien," organizing white workers is a
success and with that as a measuring rod he not surprisingly
concludes that the revolutionaries have been a failure.

Finally, it is this kind of unspecified measuring rod of the
movement that leads O'Brien to conclude that party
organization itself is a waste of time. "Even at best, a
tremendous amount of time, for members of nearly all the
Leninist groups, is spent in activities whose chief purpose is
to build the organization itself rather than to spur working
class activity more directly." (p. 33) This implies that
O'Brien thinks that people should dissolve their parties and
just join the working class, something he also implies by
saying that the Leninist who were students who took up blue-
collar work are doing the best work. (p. 32)

In the closing pages of the article, O'Brien hammers the issue
of size and concludes that the plan to build a genuine
communist party is a failure. Then he throws in that the SWP
degenerated into reformism (no surprise to those who never
took the Trotskyists seriously.) For the rest he attacks each
group with one anecdote each and thinks that is a serious
evaluation of their revolutionary coherence. And while MIM
does not agree with any of the groups O'Brien cites, MIM would
not use that kind of empiricist method to attack them.

So whenever O'Brien intends to lead people, he ends up taking
them into anarchism, sizeism and pragmatism. No where does he
take his own measuring rods and examine them from a
comparative historical perspective to see if they have any
meaning.

Yet, MIM has already done this. Size of an organization says
nothing about its eventual historical impact as the Bolshevik
party and the Chinese Communist Party have both already proved
in comparison with larger organizations--mush-collections
without a scientific class analysis.

And like it or not, organization is necessary to get things
done. It is not an accident that the Communist Party of the
1930s accomplished what it did in putting together the CIO and
the whole deal for labor at the time. On the reverse side of
things, while disciplined organizations have seized power
again and again in the world, mush-collections and
individualist organizers have failed again and again in the
world in creating social change.

The best historical example to the contrary is the FSLN of
Nicaragua, which is pretty mushy although not totally devoid
of organization or a line. To a large extent, the FSLN led
part of a bourgeois revolution, and much of what is said above
does not apply to bourgeois revolutions. Yet even to the
extent that the FSLN seemed to be for something more, the FSLN
still proves the weaknesses of pluralist approaches in an
imperialist-dominated world. The FSLN took on a battle within
the rules of the pluralist game and lost. In the end, the
legacy that the FSLN leaves in the struggle toward ending
oppression is smaller than that of Albania, another small
agricultural country with a population of 3 million. Nicaragua
seems "heavier" in many deluded people's minds, but in
actuality, the revolution in Albania went further. If the FSLN
is to have success in the future, it will be to the degree it
ignores its own pluralistic rhetoric and takes up Maoism.

In conclusion, O'Brien's whole problem is the measuring rods
of success that he chose. Size, pluralism of views and white
working class roots have no proven track record of being
important in the battle against oppression. Where steps toward
the ending of oppression have been made, these factors were
not relevant.

Related readings:

J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat