We are pleased to announce a new translation from our party, Lenin, the Organic Centralist: Organic Centralism in Lenin, the Left and the Actual Life of the Party. This major work, never before published in English, shows that our party’s organizational principles are in complete agreement with the real traditions of Bolshevism. The brief excerpt below recounts the history of the Bolshevik party from its foundation until World War I.

The entire book is now available in digital form on our party’s website.

*** The Formation of the Bolshevik Party

The International Communist Party is not only the heir of the Italian Left; it is our firm belief that there are no substantial differences between our way of understanding the party and that of Lenin, obviously after having appropriately assessed the historical and environmental differences between the situations in which the two organisations have found themselves operating. This work intends to read the experience of Lenin and his party, underlining the characteristics that are of general value, the same characteristics of our small movement today.

To understand what the revolutionary party meant to Lenin, and to interpret his position correctly, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the context in which Lenin operated, especially in the period of defining what the Bolshevik Party would be, before and after the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). A brief historical preamble is therefore necessary to allow us to define the characteristics of the various political actors, movements and ideologies that circulated in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Lenin gives us a description of the origins of the party in Russia both in the conclusion of the What Is to Be Done? and in the preface to the Twelve Years collection (1907).

It was in the 1880s that Marxism penetrated Russia, where the populist movement had developed. The Emancipation of Labour group was established abroad around Marxist theory and with correct propositions on the tactics of the proletariat in the double revolution.

In What Is to Be Done? Lenin claims that that group possessed not only theory but had also developed a tactical plan for the perspective of the Russian revolution and the function of the proletariat in it.

In the first period, 1880‑1898, the Marxists’ struggle was directed above all against populism, a political movement that developed in Russia between the last quarter of the 19^th Century and the early 20^th Century; its aim was to achieve, through the propaganda and proselytism carried out by intellectuals among the people and with terrorist direct action, an improvement of the living conditions of the lower classes, in particular of the peasants and serfs, and the realisation of a kind of rural socialism based on the Russian village community (the mir), in contrast to western industrial society. To confront this doctrine it was not only authentic Marxists who intervened, but also a whole series of actors for whom the criticism of populism meant the need for a passage to bourgeois democracy. This was the era of “legal Marxism”.

The struggle was therefore waged on two fronts: against populism and against petty bourgeois Marxism, and the first socialist writings are dedicated to this struggle, mainly by Lenin and Plekhanov. The year 1890, Lenin’s debut in the political arena, simply coincides with this: the appearance of the working class in Russia. In this era, Russian Marxists were reduced to a small group; what Lenin writes in What Is to Be Done? is important: this group of intellectuals had already worked out everything; they did not wait for “the masses”.

The first notable workers’ unrest occurred in 1896, and the group of intellectuals threw themselves into the struggle, indicating to the movement not only its immediate tasks, but its entire perspective up to socialism.

The effects of this and subsequent movements were as follows:
     - the established ties to the working‑class masses;
     - the party separated itself clearly from legal Marxism;
     - the party organisation was formed (1898).

Lenin states in all his works, including What Is to Be Done? that from 1896 onwards the Russian proletariat was never static. The situation was that the party organisation was inadequate to guide the lively movement of the working masses. So the crucial question is posed in What Is to Be Done? precisely: what must a party fit for the purpose of leading the workers’ movement be? It was in the face of this exuberant workers’ movement that the economist deviation manifested itself.

This is a first characteristic trait that must be noted if we truly believe that the party is a product and a factor of class struggle. The difficulties regarding the formation of a revolutionary party must be seen in the particular situation of Russia compared to other industrialised countries, or on the way to industrialisation. The workers were very few in percentage, and concentrated in some industrial districts; the rest of the vast country was a large countryside with small and medium-sized farmers (in addition to large estates with wage laborers or former serfs), from whose ranks came the generation which, at the turn of the century, constituted the industrial proletariat. Trade union tradition was almost non‑existent, as was socialist propaganda. The revolutionaries therefore had to speak to a predominantly illiterate and suspicious audience.

This was a situation, however, that could reveal positive aspects; indeed, not even the opportunistic poison had penetrated that much into the class, and it was easier to confront proletarians with the reality of their conditions, and to help them to draw valuable indications from the struggles as to who were their friends and who their enemies. On the other hand, the bourgeois-oriented opportunism of a bourgeoisie that had to be revolutionary towards absolutism did not have the weapons typical of opportunism, or had little of it: propaganda, traditions, electoralism. It was therefore at first an opportunism little equipped with theoretical tools, although rapidly evolving, even within the socialist movement, and also thanks to the development of opportunism in western Europe in those years.

The second characteristic that must be taken into account: since 1894‑1895 the Russian working class never lost contact with its party. Its size can be deduced from Lenin’s data on members:
     1894‑1895 – several hundred workers
     1906 – around 33,000 members attend the Stockholm congress
     1907 – 150,000‑170,000 members
     1913 – 33,000‑50,000.

Lenin provided these figures in 1913, while arguing with Vera Zasulic, who claimed that Russian social democracy was composed of intellectual currents. It is natural that this situation needs to be taken into account when dealing with organisational problems. It was Lenin himself who categorically stated this in the preface to the aforementioned Twelve Years collection.