Mark Phillips: The American Question

There's no such thing as "Leninist norms of organization".

The Bolsheviks organized in different ways at different times according to circumstances. During Lenin's lifetime, they transformed their organization from a faction within an underground party into a mass above ground party with a very loose structure, an entirely clandestine organization with secret "cells" and almost no internal democracy, a legal mass party with hyperdemocratic internal practices including highly autonomous public tendencies and semi-factions, and a semimilitarized organization in partial fusion with the state. Each of these transformations took place when circumstances, that is, the political context, changed. Each was an attempt to organize appropriately for current circumstances. There was never any one defining "Leninist" organizational practice to which the Bolsheviks tried to adhere.

The notion of "Leninist norms" was propagated originally by the Third International, which had a proclivity for mythologizing Bolshevik history in ways which were at best distorting, at worst self-serving for the Russian faction which controlled the TI machinery. It was accepted by the Left Opposition and the later international Trotskyist movement because it seemed to serve their criticisms of the antidemocratic evolution of the Communist parties. It was, nevertheless, entirely historically false.

It is, furthermore, methodologically Idealist. It's an ideal model to which reality supposedly approximates, and with which reality is negatively counterposed. Macherey calls it the normative fallacy.

The historical reality of Leninist organizational practice can be summarized as "Figure out your circumstances and organize accordingly," always with the provision that the greater the amount of control from below, the better.