Letter: Why you should read Eric Blanc

When the Labour Party left was at its height in the early 1980s, the SWP's critique was that this left was doomed by its wish to win elections, which would make it adapt to un-radical opinion.

We replied that revolution required winning elections, in workers' councils even if not in parliament.

Today the SWP's model of revolution remains one of lots of strikes and demonstrations, plus a "disciplined" party which will eventually be strong enough to defeat the bourgeois state. The issue of how the working class can become organised and aware enough to become a ruling class – through workers' councils, or how? - is sidelined.

Eric Blanc, author of the book Revolutionary Social Democracy reviewed by Simon Nelson in Solidarity 685, was trained in the ISO, the US offshoot of the SWP though tactically at odds with it after 2001. The book reads to me as, in part at least, an effort to think his way out of the SWP model.

Simon is right to criticise Blanc's adoption instead of a "Finnish model" and of the ideas of Ralph Miliband. But he is also right to recommend reading Blanc's book.

It is the best compact demolition of the cod "Leninism" initiated by Zinoviev in the early Communist International, only partly rectified at that time, codified into a rigid myth by Stalinism, and taken as truth both by most bourgeois scholars and by "Orthodox Trotskyists" (and some not so orthodox, like the SWP).

The Bolshevik faction was lively and often unruly. It was distinguished from other factions, as Blanc notes insufficiently, by intense striving for clarity and definition and self-correction, as against the German Social Democracy's usual search for bland consensus; but that was an untidy process, not monolithic or exclusive.

Rosa Luxemburg did not represent a "broader" party idea than the Bolsheviks; in fact, the Polish party she led, the SDKPiL, was more tightly controlled and (often destructively) disinclined for united action, than the Bolsheviks ever were.

The core differentiation between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was not over party rules, but a divergence after 1905 as the Mensheviks softened their attitude to bourgeois liberals and the Bolsheviks stuck to independent working-class politics.

And there's much more. Read the book!

Martin Thomas, London