What then is the point of your parties central ideological perspective? Yeah i note, it was the other lenin, the one that ignorant people like me know zip about but the SP do.
If anyone cares this is what today's Taaffeite SP consider a healthy and unhealthy regime with respect to Lenin:
http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/keyword/Marxism/Lenin/15973/14-01-2013/party-amp-internal-regime
"Of course, permanent 'factions' - on the pattern of the LCR in France - are not a 'good thing' in a revolutionary organisation. They were certainly not the 'norm' in the Bolshevik party, with trends, tendencies and even 'factions' occasionally developing but then dissolving when the issues under discussion were resolved by the march of events or some left the ranks of the Bolshevik party for either opportunistic or ultra-left reasons. It is true that, at the Tenth Party Congress in the exceptional conditions of civil war, Lenin proposed a temporary ban on factions. However, it was then and remains today, a highly contentious issue. This action of Lenin undoubtedly became a starting point from an 'organisational' point of view for Stalin and the rising bureaucracy to legitimise later its lasting and formal ban on all 'factions'. But the burgeoning Stalinist bureaucratic counter-revolution utilised this 'precedent' - in a completely dishonest and disloyal fashion - to not only ban factions but stamp on all dissent, particularly of the Left Opposition, within the 'party'. Lenin believed that this temporary measure of 'banning' factions would be lifted as soon as the immediate danger of the civil war had passed.
To be sure, the existence of 'permanent factions' is not a reflection of a 'healthy regime', à la Lenin and Trotsky, as some in the Mandelite USFI believe. In fact, it denotes a lack of confidence in the leadership, an inability once the immediate issues under dispute recede, to then reunite the party. If you are in 'permanent opposition', which is what a 'permanent faction' means, why then remain within a party? Sometimes, it is better for a separation to take place in order that different ideas, programmes and tactics can be tested out before audiences of workers and young people. This, of course, then presupposes collaboration, an element of the united front discussed previously, is employed by separate organisations. Trotsky pointed out that the French social democracy was quite willing to tolerate tame 'permanent factions' because it gave the false impression that it was 'democratic'. However, as soon as a serious organised political oppositional current developed from the left, it was invariably shown the door."
CWI is politically confident:
"A politically confident leadership always acts in the fashion that the CWI has done. Lenin never resorted to disciplinary measures in the first instance nor did Trotsky advocate such a course in the International Left Opposition in the 1930s, for instance."
