After reading the ECCI resolution and Zinoviev’s report, I went back to the source of the appendix concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat: “V.I. Lenin, Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. It can be found online here (it is the second item):

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/comintern.htm

I am curious if others have thought about one question: The repeated identification by Zinoviev of the working class and the Communist Party. For example:

“The Soviet government is in fact a workers’ government. Power is exercised by the working class and its party.”

“In a word, the party aims to rule the country wisely.”

“The only genuine revolutionary class, revolutionary to the end, is the working class. But this class – which means its party – can act in either an intelligent or a stupid way.”

I found no similar formations in Lenin’s 1919 report; no conception of a single party that speaks for the entire working class at all times. In fact in his concluding paragraph Lenin points to this task:

“Third: we must say that winning a Communist majority in the Soviets is the principal task in all countries in which Soviet government is not yet victorious.”

This point was emphasized again in:

“Resolution to the Thesis on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (which can be read below the original thesis and Lenin’s report, at the link above), which closes on:

3) to build a stable Communist majority inside the Soviets.”

A central feature of Lenin’s entire 1919 report is the centrality of Soviet power and of educating the world working class on the step forward it represents. If working people were represented in the Soviets by only one party at all times, what need would there be to fight for a “Communist majority.”

In fact a revolutionary communist party, while seeking to speak for the working class — and all working people — in its entirety, is a vanguard section of the class, not the entire class.

Zinoviev’s report acknowledges this when it says:

“Our parties are the vanguard of the working class. Imbued with the will to power, this vanguard will transmit this commitment to the broad layers of workers in their millions.”

This recognizes that of course the communist party and the entire working class are not synonymous, are not identical.

Of course I am as aware as others of what had changed in the new Soviet republic between 1919 and 1923; that the Left SRs who had joined the new government had split, with some going over to the side of the counterrevolution and others joining the Bolshevik Party. Some anarchists — such as Victor Serge and others — also joined the Bolshevik Party in the concrete situation that existed in Russia in those early years. But the question remains, what was intended by Zinoviev’s identification of the working class and a single party.