Centrist current that between 1924 and 1929, under the leadership of Grigory Zinoviev, paved the way for the destruction of the International and its sections with the organizational policies of "bolshevization" and "proletarianization" within the framework of the "class against class" tactic, which denied the need for transitional objectives in class struggles.
The three axes of Zinovievism
1. Bolshevization
Bolshevization can be defined as a bureaucratic reinterpretation of "democratic centralism" that destroys centralism by replacing it, in the name of functionality, with the centralization of decisions in the executive bodies and the leadership, which thus end up creating organizations tailored to themselves. One of its spokesmen in Spain, later a Stalinist leader, argued it this way:
The communist parties, unlike the social democratic ones, are in essence and fundamentally parties of action. Discussions among the members are not opened by virtue of the democratic principle of "equality", but exclusively to strengthen, to reinforce the action of the vanguard of the conscious proletariat. That is why our parties are disciplined parties; one joins them not to impose one's own particular point of view, but to devote all one's energies to the defense of the supreme interests of the party. That is why there is no room in them for idle discussions.
[...] In every critical situation, the demand for democracy has been characteristic of the reformist elements, incapable of understanding and, above all, of applying or enduring the Bolshevik iron discipline without which the working class cannot forge its political class party.
Gabriel León Trilla. Bourgeois democracy and proletarian discipline, 1926.
From 1925-26 onwards, the sections of the International thus gradually became organizations following the old Blanquist mold, adorned with extreme militarism. In the party, the only thing discussed is how best to carry out the directives of the higher level; the line to be followed is not discussed. Zinovievism paved the way for Stalinism.
The petty-bourgeois conception of democracy, which has penetrated even into the Communist Parties, enshrines a sacrosanct respect for "freedom of discussion", for the right to the free exercise of criticism.
[...] And when they are told that the Communist Parties were not created to worship democracy, when we reject the fetishism of "freedom of criticism and discussion", anathemas and accusations arise. When they are told that what is essential for us is to attain the political ends we set ourselves, and that if democracy gets in the way, if it prevents us from advancing, we restrict or suppress democracy, they brand us, scandalized, as wanting to stifle human thought, and if the scandalized one is some petty bourgeois who has slipped into the Party, he even claims that "we want to stifle the voice of the opposition dictatorially and by violence".
"La Antorcha". Fractions and the party, 1926
2. Proletarianization
It is the fetishistic belief that, by introducing quotas based on the social origin of the members of certain executive bodies, the class nature of an organization is guaranteed... regardless of its program and its political practice.
3. The "class against class" tactic
Although the communist left criticized this tactic as a negation of the united front, which it was, in reality it went much further: it was a negation of the very need for the party in the concrete struggles of the class, to which it refused to give transitional objectives that would serve their advance, replacing them with exhortations about the need for revolution in the abstract, as if revolution were not the result of leaps in class consciousness arising from concrete struggles that escalate because they know how to set transitional objectives to move forward.