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The Bolsheviks had a lively, multi-tendency culture right the way through the revolutionary period, with internal debates published in the official party press, and minority factions producing their own public literature criticising the leadership line, throughout October 1917.
In 2019, the second biggest revolutionary socialist group in the UK (the Socialist Party) has just split, and apart from a few leaked documents there’s not a great deal in the public domain shedding any real light on what the split is actually about.
You might say: “who cares?”, and make some tedious “People’s Front of Judea” joke. But a) if you’re a trade union activist in a large city in Britain then what goes on inside groups like the SWP and SP probably does affect you, whether you like it or not...
...and b) it’s an extremely poor reflection on the method of these groups that they want workers to join them (because they are “the party”), but apparently don’t deem those workers capable of following an internal debate about what the politics of “the party” should be.
It’s a view of the working class that reduces it to a kind of historical stage army, rather than a conscious political and intellectual element that has to develop and take ownership over revolutionary ideas, “by” and “for” itself.
(I’ve heard defences of the behind-closed-doors approach to internal debate/dissent on the basis that we don’t want to give the state an insight into the movement. But if the Bolsheviks could maintain an open culture in Russia in 1917, we can do it in Britain in 2019.)
