Joel Geier on Zinoviev v Lenin

Joel Geier from Chicago, in a piece originally written for the ISO, argues that the distortions inflicted upon the Bolsheviks by Zinoviev fatally weakened the party prior to Stalin’s coup de grace.

We are partisans of the Russian Revolution as the greatest act of working class self-emancipation and human liberation in history. We understand and sympathize with the revolutionary movement and the heavy and tragic decisions it had to make during the civil war, and its commitment to keeping workers power alive while waiting for relief from the European Revolution. Zinovievism was both product and ideology of the degeneration of the revolution, prior to its final defeat by the Stalinist counter-revolution.

There is no reason today to defend the process of degeneration, or as Lenin called it, “retreats from democracy” and “retreats from socialism” that resulted in the gutting of the revolution and the gutting of Leninism. We stand for the most democratic revolution possible, the “revolution of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.” We have the most democratic organization that exists in the image for which it is created. We want to reassert Leninism as the guide to that revolution and organizational practice. We want to liquidate any barriers to that, and we want the revolutionary movement internationally to liquidate Zinovievism and any lingering remnants from the period of degeneration in order to return to a genuine, democratic Leninism.

Read the whole thing here: Joel Geier: Zinovievism vs Leninism