ALB wrote: I started to read

  While it certainly is the case that Lenin is rightly known for having stood for a “centralised hierarchical vanguard party to lead the masses” I wonder if the situation isn’t a bit more complicated than this?  After all the Bolsheviks emerged out of the split within the Russian Social Democratic party and so presumably would have had some sympathy for the Social Democratic ideal of a mass open Democratic party along the lines of SD parties in the  West – particularly of course the German SDP.  This is the point that Lars Li makes in his  Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context  (2008) but the oppressive circumstances prevailing in Russia at the time “What is to be Done” was written induced Lenin to favour instead a quite different organisational model based on a small tightly knit body of professional revolutionaries and subject to a rigorously hierarchical command structure.  It was thus for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons that Lenin favoured this model.  What is to be Done (1902) does contain that notorious statement that has often been seized upon as evidence of Lenin’s intrinsic elitism: “We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without”    Hal Draper, in his classic paper The Myth of Lenin’s “Concept of The Party” or What They Did to What Is To Be Done?  (1990), asks rhetorically whether it was really the case that Lenin was saying that here that ” the workers cannot come to socialist ideas of themselves, that only bourgeois intellectuals are the carriers of socialist ideas” to which he gives the following answer:”Not exactly. The fact is that Lenin had just read this theory in the most prestigious theoretical organ of Marxism of the whole international socialist movement, the Neue Zeit. It had been put forward in an important article by the leading Marxist authority of the International, Karl Kautsky. And this was why and how it got into WITBD” (http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1990/myth/myth.htm#section1)There are also direct quotes from Lenin that cast doubt on whether he stood straightforwardly for a kind of centralised conspiratorial Blanquist type organisation as opposed to a broad mass democratic open party.  For instance, in his letter in late 1916 to P.Keivsky he asserts that “socialism can be implemented only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, which combines violence against the bourgeoisie, i.e., the minority of the population, with full development of democracy, i.e., the genuinely equal and genuinely universal participation of the entire mass of the population in all state affairs and in all the complex problems of abolishing capitalism” (Proletarskaya Revolutsi Nos. 7 (90), 1929).  Similar sentiments can be found in his more well known work The State and Revolution written in 1917.  Finally of course it should be mentioned that at least in early days of the Bolshevik revolution, the reality did not really conform to model of a tightly knit centralised disciplined party.  Even by early 1918 as  Robert Service notes  in his The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organsational Change, 1917-1923:  “The image of a disciplined hierarchy of party committees was therefore but a thin, artificial veneer which was used by Bolshevik leaders to cover up the cracked surface of the real picture underneath. Cells and suburb committees saw no reason to kow-tow to town committees; nor did town committees feel under compulsion to show any greater respect to their provincial and regional committees than before.” (p. 74). Of course a lot of this might have been due to the huge influx of new members unaccustomed to the ways of the old Bolsheviks I don’t wish to appear in any way to be apologising for Lenin and Leninist politics.  I think there was a strong streak of authoritarianism and elitism in him and in the whole Leninist model of political organisation and this came to the surface in the “organisational metamorphosis” that Service refers to that in due course overtook the Bolsheviks.  And that was not just the result of external circumstances like the Civil war: it was latent in Bolshevism itself. Still, I think this representation of the Leninist outlook needs to be counterbalanced with other representations which at least suggest a superficial dalliance with the idea of an open democratic mass party along the lines of the Western SD parties Robin