The Russian Communist Party banned factions at its Tenth Congress. The decision was temporary and reluctant, taken in very exceptional circumstances, and it was not voted for application to the Communist International or to any other party. Everything that came afterwards, in every communist party that prohibited tendencies and factions as a matter of course, rested on an abuse of that vote.

Pat Jordan makes the point in “Notes on the concept that the role of the Leninist Party is that of generating revolutionary consciousness”, written under his pen-name Peterson. Jordan was a founder of the International Marxist Group and its national secretary for many years, so this is a practitioner writing about the organisation he had to run.

His argument is that the ban is a symptom rather than the disease. What matters is the prior question, which almost no organisation asks itself out loud: what is our discipline actually for?

Two answers to that question

Jordan’s answer is that discipline in a Leninist organisation is a function of the need for unified practice in order to understand the world, and part of the whole experience of developing revolutionary consciousness. Discipline exists because you cannot test a line without acting on it together. It is an instrument of knowledge.

The other answer he calls the administrative conception. Here party building is an end in itself and discipline is a means of enforcing, and even policing, the decisions of higher bodies. The two look identical on a good day. They come apart the moment somebody disagrees.

The administrative version has a characteristic error, which Jordan describes as generalising out of norms that are correct in particular situations to the whole experience of the Leninist organisation. An emergency measure is correct in an emergency. Making it permanent is a category mistake, and the Tenth Congress ban is the largest example in the history of the movement.

Factions are the normal state of a revolutionary party

Jordan’s claim about the right of tendency is not that disagreement should be tolerated. It is that the history of Bolshevism is a history of the struggle of factions, so an organisation with no tendencies is not a healthy Bolshevik party but an unusual one.

The record supports him. There was hesitation and opposition inside the Bolshevik party, including against Lenin. There were divergences within the Politburo before the Third Congress of the Comintern, and struggles inside the Soviet delegation at that Congress. Lenin had his own struggles against Stalin. Internal difference was the ordinary condition of the early revolutionary movement, not a defect that appeared later.

What appeared later was the machinery for suppressing it: measures of intimidation and disciplinary procedures introduced into the Communist International, Stalin’s insistence that combating the opposition could not be done without victims, and bolshevisation as a project for producing monolithic parties able to crush opposition. The party-guide and state-guide model, tied to socialism in one country, is the finished form. Administration displaces consciousness, and the party stops being an instrument for understanding anything.

The test that catches it early

Jordan names one symptom that is worth more than any amount of constitutional analysis, because you can observe it in a single meeting. The worst administrative organisations apply one attitude to discipline for majority supporters, especially those in the leadership, and another for dissidents. He calls this absolutely deplorable, and he is right that it is the tell.

A rule enforced against opponents and waived for allies is not a rule. It is a weapon with a procedural label, and an organisation that has started using discipline that way has already made the shift Jordan is describing, whatever its constitution says.

The other symptom is the outcome. Administrative discipline, cut loose from revolutionary consciousness, produces measures that are awkward and hostile and that drive dissidents out of the organisation. The membership then narrows, which makes the next disagreement more threatening, which produces more discipline.

The IMG’s pluralism, read correctly

Rival groups criticised the IMG for its open debates, its acknowledged divergences and its tolerance of tendencies, and read all of it as weakness and want of unity.

On Jordan’s framework it is the opposite. Open discussion and the right to form tendencies are what keep an organisation able to adapt, to learn from experience and to avoid the dogmatism that crippled parties under administrative rule. They are the defence mechanism against exactly the degeneration he is describing. The discipline that results rests on shared understanding rather than conformity imposed from above, which is the only kind that survives being tested.

Put plainly: the IMG’s pluralism was not a liability it tolerated. It was the thing protecting it.

What to do with this

Three questions, all answerable about any organisation you are in or thinking of joining.

Is discipline here justified as a way of testing a line in practice, or as a way of making sure decisions from above are carried out? Ask people to say which, in those words, and watch how hard it is for them.

Are the rules applied the same way to the leadership’s supporters and to its critics? This is observable. It does not require a theory.

And when an emergency measure is adopted, is it written down as temporary, with the circumstances that justify it named? The Tenth Congress did that, and it still was not enough. An organisation that does not even do that much has no defence at all.

The Ban Was Meant to Be Temporary