The crisis in the Socialist Workers party appears to confirm every one of the worst comic clichés about all that lies left of Jon Cruddas, as if the party's central committee were specifically aiming at eliciting unfunny Python comparisons. Not that there's anything remotely comic about covered-up rape allegations being handled by a committee partly consisting of the accused's friends, nor the assumption that to do otherwise would be "bourgeois justice", although there's something grimly farcical about expulsions for discussing said matter on Facebook.

But are gross abuses of power inevitable on the far left, part of its organisational practices? The party's leaders have chosen to frame an increasingly public debate over their conduct as being really about organisational forms, rather than about rape. It transforms into an argument over something called Leninism, which the SWP's opposition are apparently using the allegations as an excuse to abandon.

Leaving aside the huge and overwhelming matter of a self-selecting internal "disputes committee" quizzing a woman making a rape allegation about her drinking habits, there is something here that should be investigated. What exactly is, or was, this Leninism that is under threat? Received opinion and the SWP leadership can more or less agree on what it is. It's alternately the original sin or the greatest innovation of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as leader of the majority wing of the Russian Social Democratic party in the 1900s-1910s, based on his 1902 text What Is To Be Done?, which apparently advocates the need for a centralised, disciplined vanguard party to steer the working class into something more radical than the "trade union consciousness" it achieves by itself. For the right, this leads inevitably to the gulag; for the SWP or similar organisations such as the Socialist party, it eventually leads to a glorious history of paper sales, rather successful front organisations and the mass production of branded placards. Is it historically accurate?

Both received and official SWP opinion run contrary to the most recent scholarly research on what actually happened in the Russian Social Democratic party. Lars T Lih's Lenin Rediscovered, for instance, roundly debunks the notion that Lenin ever wanted to create something distinct from the large and democratic Social Democrats of Germany. That said, there's little doubt that Lenin as a leader had a tendency to provoke splits, or that a tight organisation was useful in a party regularly infiltrated by the Russian secret police, whose agents even rose to a leadership position. Nor is there any doubt that Lenin's party genuinely became a "monolith" during the brutal Russian Civil War of 1918-21, and remained one until its 1991 dissolution.

The best thing about the myth is that it provides a formula. If a vanguard party led the Russian workers to revolution in October 1917, then maybe it might do so again. In its heart of hearts, every one of the Leninist groups of today, whether SWP, SP, the Communist Party of Britain or the smaller grouplets, believes that one day history will bestow upon it the mantle of the new Bolshevik party. Intelligent people, such as the respected social scientist and SWP leader Alex Callinicos, appear to genuinely believe this. So each organisation of the kind bans factions (except in the immediate run up to and during party conferences), offers a slate of previously agreed leaders to its members for ratification, rather than an open vote for leadership candidates. And in an interesting innovation that was nowhere to be found in What Is To Be Done?, each regularly creates front organisations as feelers into the non-revolutionary mass.

Yet, strangely enough, as the SWP's "democratic opposition" has pointed out, the Bolshevik party that seized power in October 1917 was a disputatious creature, large, unwieldy, democratic and faction-ridden. On the eve of the insurrection, two of its leaders published an attack on the planned action in a non-party newspaper. They were not expelled, but then Facebook had not then been invented. Perhaps, they seem to say, flipping the venerable historical example on its head, an organisation that was more democratic and less insular might actually be more successful, with Syriza a potential model. Thousands of non-aligned leftists would surely agree.

Yet Leninism conceived as a party drilled like an army has always had its uses. For the Stalin-led Communist International, it effectively silenced dissent from the 1920s on; as a useful organisational model, it was admired by Mussolini and the far right; but more pertinently, it can work as glue to keep together small, embattled groups. For the Militant Tendency of the 1980s, for instance, discipline helped protect members from being found out by and then expelled from the Labour party. For the SWP today, it provides a means of sealing itself off against the bad world outside. And as is now obvious, it is a useful means of protecting an organisation's leadership against its members, although the allegations suggest it is the membership that needs protecting.

A party committed to the total overthrow of the existing political and economic order necessarily follows different rules to any other (although attendees at Labour conferences may find some methods familiar). Such an overthrow would plausibly need a party of some kind capable of co-ordination and organised action.

But a party and a sect are not the same thing. Historian Gareth Stedman-Jones wrote of the SWP's great-grandfathers, the perpetually splitting Marxist sects of late Victorian Britain, that it was not their sectarianism that got them ignored by the mass of the people. On the contrary, the fact that workers were not radicalised turned the far left organisations into self-contained sects, whose impotence was sublimated into aimless doctrinal righteousness. The question is, when political circumstances change, can a sect change into a party? Being in a sect can be oddly cosy, reassuringly and stuffily familiar – to the point where any voices outside it are no longer heard at all.