BY FARRELL DOBBS  
In April 1917, soon after the abdication of the tsar, Lenin had outlined key aspects of the Bolsheviks' political responsibilities to the proletariat of Russia and the world in a series of proposals that became known as the "April Theses." Among these was the proposal to change the name of the Russian party, then formally called the Social Democratic Labor Party (the formal name of the Mensheviks, as well). Lenin urged that the Bolsheviks, who traced their programmatic continuity to the Communist Manifesto, call themselves communists as Marx and Engels had done.

In a subsequent article, Lenin noted that it was only following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the ensuing decline of revolutionary working-class struggle--which made long-term "organisational and educational work the task of the day"--that Marx and Engels had acquiesced to the German party's adoption of what they considered to be the inaccurate, ambiguous designation "Social-Democracy." And that name, over subsequent decades, had more and more been given opportunist content.

Lenin stressed that the Bolsheviks, as Marx and Engels had done in their day, should "understand the specific features and tasks of the new era." They should not imitate the sorry Marxists of an earlier day about whom Marx once said, "I have sown dragon's teeth and harvested fleas."

It was necessary to recognize that the conditions that shaped the post-1871 period had now been bypassed. The entire world had come under the domination of a handful of imperialist powers. And an entirely new objective situation had been created by the imperialist war and consequent revolutionary upheavals. Marxists must think and act in keeping with that changing reality.

The Bolshevik leader presented several reasons for the proposed change in party name. The designation "social" was scientifically incorrect, Lenin said; it was too limited. Following Marx's explanation to German socialists in the mid-1870s, Lenin explained that in overturning capitalism on a world scale, the workers could first construct socialism; by this, Lenin explained he meant state ownership of the means of production under which "the distribution of products [would be determined] according to the amount of work performed by each individual."

That doesn't end the matter, however, Lenin said. "Our Party looks farther ahead: socialism must inevitably evolve gradually into communism." Society would then have the abundance and productive capacity to apply the motto, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

The term "democracy" as used in the party's name was also scientifically incorrect, Lenin added. Democracy had come to signify a form of bourgeois state, a parliamentary republic, used to consolidate capitalist rule by means of a police, army, and government bureaucracy as a repressive force over the people. The goal of Marxists is the eventual abolition of "every kind of state," Lenin said.

Unlike anarchists, however, Marxists recognize "the need for a state for the purpose of the transition to socialism," he explained. Even this will not be a state in the previous sense of "domination over the people by contingents of armed men divorced from the people." It will be a state in which the armed forces are "the masses themselves, the entire people," mobilized to crush all attempts at counterrevolution.

Such a state, Lenin said, would represent an "emergent new democracy, which is already ceasing to be a democracy, for democracy means the domination of the people, and the armed people cannot dominate themselves." Therefore, the emergence of soviets of workers and peasants as the sole power in a state would be "the harbinger of the 'withering away' of the state in every form."

It was above all necessary to take into account, Lenin pointed out, that the official leaders of social democracy internationally had distorted and betrayed the Communist Manifesto on two main counts. They had repudiated the Marxist doctrine of the state by their political support to the bourgeois state under the guise of defending democracy, and they had gone over to "their own" national bourgeoisie in the imperialist war.

The people had been deceived and then led into the imperialist slaughter by those leaders. Hence, the Bolsheviks would inadvertently be aiding and abetting that deception if they kept the out-of-date name, which was as decayed and discredited as the Second International.

In fact, in December 1914, only a few months after the open betrayal by the main Second International leaderships, Lenin had written, "is it not better to give up the name of 'Social Democrats', which has been besmirched and degraded by them, and return to the old Marxist name of Communists?"

Lenin placed the proposal to change the party's name before the March 1918 congress of the Bolsheviks. His report on this question again touched on the reasons why it was scientifically correct for the Bolsheviks to call themselves communists, and the importance of an unambiguous break with the old social democracy. The congress agreed with Lenin's proposal and adopted the official designation Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).  
 
 
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