50 Years Ago – Bert Ramelson buries Lenin
What happened when the BBC’s ‘Newsday’ interviewed the industrial organiser of the Communist Party would have been more suitable for the Goon Show, or Monty Python. Bert Ramelson, keeping a perfectly straight face, point-blank denied everything that the Communist Party was founded on and peddled for over thirty years!
True it is, as he said in the interview, that he only joined the CP in 1936; whereas some of us knew it intimately since 1920. However, that should not prevent him (or anybody else) knowing the facts. The interviewer did not know a great deal about the subject, and questioned from a prepared brief.
But even the political department of the BBC had heard that the Communist Parties were founded on ‘Leninism’. That is, seizure of power by an intrepid, resolute minority of ‘professional revolutionists’, leading the working class — who would then lead the ‘toiling masses’ (meaning peasants) to socialist victory. For thirty years a vast mass of pamphlets, books and newspapers flogged the Leninist dogma of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, meaning minority action.
Many able writers waded patiently through Marx’s work to show that, from The Communist Manifesto onward, Marx never used this then-popular French slogan to mean anything else than majority democratic methods. For instance, Lucien Laurat, who in Marxism and Democracy quotes The Communist Manifesto:
‘The first stage in the working class revolution is the constitution of the proletariats as the ruling class, the conquest of democracy.’
No use! For thirty years CP writers and speakers denounced democracy and exhorted the workers to follow ‘Marx’s best disciple’ Nikolai Lenin. Parliament was a useless ‘gasworks’, elections a waste of time (although they regularly took part in them, but ‘only for propaganda, comrade’). The state would be smashed and ‘bourgeois’ parliaments replaced by Soviets, ‘the workers’ democracy’ (…)
Understandably, the interviewer politely raised the question of the CP’s present policy, and its past. ‘Was it not the case that the CP had advocated ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the past?’
‘Not any more’, replied Bert. Not any more! And do you know why, dear reader? Let Bert tell you. Because there has been ‘so much misunderstanding of what Marx really meant’. He actually said this. ‘Marx meant the action of the vast overwhelming majority’, said Bert; the CP has not used the phrase in any document since 1950, to avoid any more misunderstanding.
(from article by HORATIO, Socialist Standard, March 1976)