On the Party: Ben’s How-To
Posted by Mike E on March 1, 2008
Kasama is publishing discussions on the need and nature of revolutionary organization. These postings do not endorsement — we are at the beginning of a presumptuous work. The initial views of the 9 Letters on the vanguard party are concentrated in Letter 3, in the section entitled “Becoming a Living Vanguard: Protracted Fusion or Last-Minute Telescoping.”
This essay was forwarded to Kasama by Ben Seattle. Send us more suggestions.
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How to Build the Party of the Working Class
by Ben Seattle
The most important task for revolutionaries at this time is the creation of a genuinely revolutionary organization (or system of organizations) capable of uniting everything healthy in the progressive and workers’ movements and laying the foundations for a mass workers’ party that can overcome both the reformist and sectarian diseases and unite the majority of the working class around a program centered on the overthrow of bourgeois rule.
Why do we need organization?
Revolutionary organization will give the working class the ability to raise its consciousness, coordinate its actions, overthrow the system of bourgeois rule and create a world of peace and abundance for all.
What form will our organization take?
The revolutionary organization of the working class will eventually take the form of a party with a mass character. This party may take the form of a single organization–or it may take the form of a system of organizations which share common core values and have the ability to combine their efforts when necessary and, so to speak, strike with a single fist.
Party will emerge from network
This mass party will most likely emerge from a self-organizing network of cooperating (and competing) individuals and organizations.
Network will self-organize around revolutionary news service
This network may initially take the form of an informal and open community that is likely to emerge out of common work to build a revolutionary news service that will offer comprehensive news, analysis and discussion (from the perspective of the class interests of the working class) to many millions of people.
Poles of attraction will emerge
As this network (or informal community) develops and matures, it will likely witness the emergence of two primary poles of attraction corresponding to and reflecting the material interests and ideology of the two main contending classes in society.
The revolutionary pole
One of these poles will represent the material class interest of the proletariat (ie: the working class) and be organized around the central mission of overthrowing the system of bourgeois rule and creating a society where everything is run by the working class. I will refer to this pole as the revolutionary pole.
The reformist pole
The other pole will represent the class interests and ideology of the bourgeoisie (ie: the largest capitalists who own or control the corporations, the government, the mass media and all the influential institutions of society) and will be organized around the mission of keeping the working class passive or restricted to useless (or marginally useful) activity aimed at making conditions of life for the working class less bad while leaving intact the foundations of bourgeois rule. I will refer to this pole as the reformist pole.
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Competing agendas
The primary axis of political development of this community/network/organization will be the struggle between these two poles of attraction as each works to win activists and workers to their respective programs. Each pole will have its own agenda.
The revolutionary pole will work to lend assistance to independent struggles of workers and activists and raise their consciousness concerning the nature of the society in which they live. The reformist pole will do everything possible to promote illusions. It will assist popular struggles at times and at other times will do its best to sabotage struggles—depending on what it can get away with.
The revolutionary pole will tell the workers and masses the truth and represent their interests. The reformist pole will promote illusions and represent the interests of the bourgeoisie with which it will have a defacto alliance and which will support the reformist pole with favorable publicity, resources, tactical concessions, “respectibility” and a thousand other levers which will help the reformist trends to win the support of workers.
Emergence of mass organization without reformists
As the many struggles of the working class develop–and as the struggle between the revolutionary and reformist poles develops–the nature of this struggle will become more clear to many millions of workers. This process may take a number of years–or it may take decades.
Eventually this process will mature to the point where the center of gravity within the workers’ network (or organization or party) will shift to the revolutionary pole. As this struggle continues to develop–a mass organization or party will emerge without a reformist pole and in which reformists are not welcome.
Why will this take so long?
Many activists with experience in the antiwar and/or revolutionary movements may ask why the network (or organization or party) of the working class should contain within itself political trends which stand in direct opposition to the interests of the working class.
The answer to this question is that the process by which millions of workers learn about the nature of reformist and revolutionary politics—will take years (or decades). During this lengthy period many organizations will be created which are hostile to reformism and reformists—-but these will not tend to be mass organizations. The emergence of mass organizations without reformists–will require a period of struggle in which many millions of workers acquire bitter experience with the treachery of reformism.
The experience of Russia (1903 to 1912)
In Russia the process described above took place in roughly the period from 1903 to 1912. In Russia the main organization of the working class was called the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). By 1903 (shortly after the birth of this party) it became clear that two antagonistic poles of attraction had emerged within it. These poles became known as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
At that time the nature of the differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was not clear to most members and supporters of the RSDLP. These members and supporters insisted that the two poles (ie: the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) cooperate with one another–and they did so–while at the same time each pole also created its own “party within the party”. At the time most members and supporters of the party were not aligned with either of the two poles (please refer to the first diagram above–the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks are colored red and blue and the undecided section is colored yellow).
Over the course of the years that followed the nature of the two poles and their differences became clear to most members and supporters of the party. By 1912 both the Bolshevik and Mensheviks sections had grown at the expense of the undecided section. By this time the militant workers concluded that the Mensheviks had an agenda that was not compatible with their class interests–and the formal cooperation between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks ended–and the RSDLP split up.
A few years later, in 1917, the Bolsheviks led a revolution against the provisional government of the bourgeoisie and landlords. The leading politicians in this government were Mensheviks.
The experience of the Communist International (1919 to 1935)
The Communist International was founded in 1919 and the basic idea was to export and accelerate the process of differentiation between the reformist and revolutionary poles within the working class movement–so that revolutionary parties could be more quickly put together in other countries.
For a while this was successful. Parties could only be part of the Communist International if they made a decisive break with their reformist wings. The result was the relatively rapid creation of many parties worldwide that had a revolutionary orientation and which were no longer dominated by the reformist methods and ideology which were undermining the struggle of the workers.
The methods of the Communist International allowed workers in many countries to bypass the lengthy period of struggle between reformists and revolutionaries that had taken place in Russia–and advance directly to the goal of a mass revolutionary organization that was not hobbled by reformist treachery.
This success was possible because the Communist International was, in some ways, hierarchical in its nature.
By this I mean that the success, prestige, accumulated revolutionary experience and influence of the Bolshevik Party in Russia allowed the Russian comrades to help give useful direction to parties around the world. (This is not to say that the various communist parties that were created simply followed orders from Moscow–it was not that simple–but rather that the experience and prestige of the Russian Party had a deep influence on activists in both the leadership and base of the various parties around the world and became a powerful factor in the internal struggles within these parties.)
But this kind of quick success carried a risk–because the “knowledge base”, so to speak, was lopsided: the Russian party had far more revolutionary experience than the other parties and therefore had enormous influence on them. This worked as long as the Russian party was capable of giving other parties around the world effective leadership and could assist these parties to better understand their circumstances and tasks.
However, by the early 1930’s, the Russian party had degenerated. In particular, Stalin was frightened by the installation of Hitler into power in Germany in 1933–and understood that Western imperialism (ie: Britain, France, the U.S., etc) intended to use Hitler as their tool to invade and lay waste the Soviet Union. (This was the real logic behind the Western policy of “appeasement” to Hitler–this was a policy of giving Hitler the resources he would need to carry out his invasion of Russia.)
Desperate to “make a deal” with the Western imperialist countries (ie: so that they would pull back on Hitler’s leash) Stalin used his considerable influence (beginning with the 7th Congress of the Communist International in 1935) to lead the communist parties worldwide into the reformist sewer under the flag of Dimitrov’s “united front against fascism”.
In the years that followed nearly all of the communist parties in the world degenerated–and the working class movement has never recovered from this treachery.
Cargo-cult attempts to clone Lenin’s party
In the years since, there have been innumerable attempts by revolutionary activists to duplicate Lenin’s success and create revolutionary mass organizations that were not crippled by reformist methods, reformist ideology and reformist treachery. Generally speaking, all of these attempts have failed.
The most successful of the efforts to create a party like the Bolsheviks are probably those that were part of the national liberation struggles of the Chinese and Vietnamese peoples. These struggles were successful in regard to the effort to free their respective countries from foreign domination. These struggles were less successful in creating parties of the working class.
Efforts to create parties similar to the Bolsheviks in the Western imperialist countries have generally fallen victim to the reformist or sectarian diseases–or remained small, relatively isolated groups.
The problem may be that a party like the Bolsheviks cannot be created except by a process similar to that which created the Bolsheviks (ie: a lengthy period during which the two principal poles in the workers’ movement were in open competition with one another and large numbers of workers had the opportunity to learn how each pole acted as the class struggle developed).
We cannot “grow” a small group into a mass party
It appears likely (for several reasons) that a mass party without a significant reformist component cannot be created by “growing” a small group and keeping the reformists out as it grows. Groups that attempt to grow in this way generally either eventually collapse into reformism themselves in an effort to escape their isolation–or fall victim to the sectarian disease as they compete with other similar groups for the warm, living bodies of activists who are new on the scene and are looking for some organized force with which to hook up.
The lengthy sorting process that the RSDLP went through had the virtue of allowing workers to see (on a very large scale) the struggle between the reformist and revolutionary poles. This helped activists and workers to understand that the struggle between these two poles was the principal struggle within the workers’ movement. This represented a higher degree of clarity and political consciousness than is held by many activists today who have come to believe that the basic dividing lines in the movement are those between the various political religions (ie: trotskyism, maoism, anarchism, etc) that have emerged as significant militant trends in the wake of the failure of the 1917 revolution.
The view that a mass revolutionary party can grow from a small group while keeping itself oriented along the correct line (as determined from applying so-called “democratic centralism” to the summation of experience) most likely originates in the practice of the Communist International which encouraged methods and beliefs similar to these–as well as what I call “cargo-cult Leninism” (ie: a political religion which repeats various phrases or actions Lenin used without understanding what Lenin actually meant by these phrases or what the aims were of his actions).
But the problem here, as I noted, is that these methods do not tend to work well when there is no international leadership with enough experience and prestige to help the small groups correctly orient themselves and unite.
Which is better ? Building a brick wall ? Or casting a wide net ?
For this reason I have concluded that revolutionary activists today must recognize that the revolutionary organization we need must emerge from a lengthy period of principled struggle between these two principal poles and this lengthy struggle must take place within the context of a mass organization or a large and informal network or community of activists. Efforts to simply “grow” a small group into a mass party with the correct line–tend to leave the small group isolated and leave the mass of activists out of the process of struggle between reformist and revolutionary politics. Under these circumstances (with the mass of activists uninvolved in this struggle and largely unaware of it) the reformists will win because the revolutionary group will remain small and isolated.
The distinction here is between what I call the methods of “building a brick wall” and “casting a wide net”.
The first method corresponds to restricting one’s efforts to creating and attempting to “grow” a small, “pure” organization into a mass party.
The second method corresponds to creating a larger and more informal network or community and participating (with a smaller, more disciplined and advanced organization) in a protracted and open struggle within the larger organization/network/community in such a way that the entire community has opportunities over the course of time to witness this struggle and participate in it and draw conclusions.
Can we build a “party of a new type” ?
The standard cargo-cult Leninist view is that Lenin built a “party of a new type” (ie: with “democratic centralism” — without reformists — and without the class enemy having a home within the workers’ party) and that this somehow means that, at that time, the world somehow entered a new stage — and that this is how we build a party.
(Interestingly enough–such a view would hold that either the Bolsheviks were mistaken to co-exist with the Mensheviks within the RSDLP for a period of ten years–or that the world somehow changed in the period between 1903 and 1912.)
This is not true. Nor was this Lenin’s view.
A small, disciplined organization with the “correct line” (or what it thinks is the correct line) cannot “grow” itself into becoming a mass party.
What such a small group can do is participate in the open struggle against reformism (and for a correct line in any number of areas) within the context of a larger mass organization which aspires to be revolutionary.
But this means that some kind of larger organization (or network or community which has many of the features of an organziation) must exist. This larger organization must have a mass character (meaning that it is large and includes activists from many trends) and it must aspire to be revolutionary and be generally recognized as having potential to make good on this aspiration.
It also means that this larger, mass organization (which will contain activists from many trends) will not have unity on some of the most fundamental and decisive questions. More than this — this organization or network must be permanently characterized by political transparency and by active and highly public confrontations between opposing views.
What this larger organziation will be is:
- a platform for a lot of practical work to assist the independent struggles of the workers
- a platform for the struggle of trends within the workers’ movement and a laboratory capable of proving to many millions which trends are aligned with the class interests of the workers and which trends represent the voice and views of the class enemy.
Cargo-cult method cannot create the revolutionary pole
The experience of many attempts to create revolutionary organizations suggests that the cargo-cult method of growing a small organization while keeping it correctly oriented and united around a single monolithic “correct” line is not only incapable of creating a mass party–but is also incapable of creating the revolutionary core that would participate with skill in the struggle to expose the nature of reformism.
The overwhelming result of practical experience is that such groups fall victim to reformism or sectarianism or both. The main “revolutionary” groups within the left all have strong cult-like features (some with strong comical overtones) and “democratic centralism” (which once was a living concept that allowed the majority of activists at the base of an organization to exercize control over the direction and fate of the organization) has degenerated into a set of principles mainly used to stiffle independent thought and maintain a cult.
I believe it is likely that the process of struggle between the revolutionary and reformist poles within the context of a larger mass organization or network (as I have outlined above) will have the effect of throwing together, so to speak, individuals and groups which today may not even be aware of one another (or are barely on speaking terms if they are aware of one another).
Revolutionary core will emerge from primal struggle
It will be this “throwing together” of disparate groups and individuals that takes place in the context of the protracted and primal struggle for the ascendency of revolutionary politics over reformist treachery — that is most likely to forge the revolutionary pole of the larger mass organization. And it is this revolutionary pole which will emerge as the core of a mass revolutionary party that has made a decisive break with reformist methods, reformist ideology and the reformist social stratum (ie: liberal-labor politicians, trade union bureaucrats, religious misleaders, poverty pimps, “progressive” media personalities and professional “opinion leaders”) — which will lead the working class to victory over the system of bourgeois rule.
Ben Seattle
What will be our common work?
The concept of a single organization that contains opposing factions only makes sense if the organization has a program of common work that the opposing factions (as well as the undecided sections–which for a long time would be the majority) can easily support and get into.
If the organization is doing useful work–then I think activists will want to be part of it. If it is not–then they won’t.
The program of common work that I see as emerging would revolve around the creation and development of the revolutionary news service (as outlined above). This would involve a certain amount of technical work but more than this would involve investigating, writing and editing articles and helping to guide or moderate discussion on the articles.
This means that the different individuals or political organizations within this network would maintain a common database of public domain (ie: free of copyright) articles (including text, graphics, video, summaries, comments and rating and filtering data, etc) and would be able to freely use and modify anything contributed to this database for their web and/or printed agitation.
Other kinds of principled cooperation between people and organizations in this network might include such things as the following:
(1) Agreements to give credit (and a link) to a person or organization when an article of theirs is used or modified.
(2) Agreements to give a public answer to public questions or challenges made by a person or organization within the network (within the limits of practicality).
(3) Agreement that no statement could go out in the name of the entire mass organization without a supermajority vote of some kind (ie: such as two-thirds, or something like that) and that each person or organization would identify itself as a section or contingent of the organization rather than claiming to represent the entire organization. This would mean leaflets might be signed something like: “The ABC contingent of mass organization XYZ”.
The aggregation of work and content, the agreements to give credit and links for content used and the agreement to give public replies to public challenges would make it and easier for activists to understand the political differences between the different sections and would increase political transparency.
These modest measures would represent an improvement over the current situation where many leftist groups routinely act as if their critics and other groups do not exist.
Sidebar Articles
(Available on the web along with illustrations at http://struggle.net/Ben/2008/222-HowTo.htm )
- We need answers to these questions
- A revolutionary news service will be the central task that will unite all the warring factions of the left
- Attempts to create working class parties and an international organization of the working class
- Do we create a mass revolutionary party by (1) building a brick wall or (2) casting a wide net ?
- We need to hear your voice
- What does the word “party” really mean ?
- What is Political Transparency … and why do we need it?
- The revolutionary party will need an open and informal community to help it spread its influence and resolve its disagreements
- We must resolve the crisis of theory–and dare to talk about our goal
- Related Reading
- What will be our common work?
- Who’s Who in the Ecosystem?
- What is “cargo-cult Leninism” ?
Attempts to create working class parties
and an international organization
of the working class
- Communist League • 1847 – 1852 This was a relatively small international organization of communists, mainly workers. Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto for this group. Many of its members became leaders of radical trends in the European revolutions of 1848-49.
- International Workingmen’s Association • 1864 – 1874 Now also known as the First International, it was founded by Marx and Engels. By mobilizing international support for strikes it created a sensation and became well-known and influential among workers. It included reformists and anarchists. It broke up after the Paris Commune uprising was crushed in 1871.
- Second (Social-Democratic) International • 1889 – 1914 Created following the success of German social-democrats and their nationwide political agitation. Encouraged the formation of mass workers’ parties that had the goal of “socialism” (ie: rule by the working class). Took an active role in mass struggles of an economic and political nature and the ideological struggle between trends. The German party had many daily newspapers and was the largest political party in the country. The Russian party was the RSDLP (see above) which included (1903 – 1912) both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Nearly all of the parties of the 2nd International became dominated by their reformist (ie: class collaborationist) wings and (with the notable exception of the Bolsheviks and a few splinters from other parties) betrayed the working class by supporting the mutual slaughter of worker by worker known as the first world war.
- Third (Communist) International • 1919 – 1943 Created in the wake of the October 1917 revolution in Russia. Had the aim of creating workers’ parties everywhere that were not dominated by the kinds of reformist politics that had led the Second International to hell. The parties associated with it were highly disciplined and had unprecedented success–including leading national liberation struggles that ultimately were successful in China, Vietnam and elsewhere. Most of these parties degenerated in the 1930’s as a result of the degeneration of the Russian party which was the leading and most influential party.
- Other Attempts Trotsky founded the 4th International in 1938. Since then there have been a number of other less well-known attempts (see 1, 2, 3 and 4 ) to create international groups of workers’ parties.
- Future Efforts The creation of genuinely revolutionary mass organizations and an international organization of such organizations remains on the agenda for revolutionary activists. No one today has a clear idea of how this will come about. It is this author’s hope that the ideas here may help contribute a small amount of clarity to this question. It is this author’s conviction that the emerging revolution in communications will play an important, and possibly decisive, role in the emergence of genuine revolutionary organizations on a national and international scale.
Source: The history of the proletarian party.
See also these chapters from the uncompleted: How to Build the Party of the Future series: • The German Social-Democratic Party and the Great Betrayal (Communication and Competition • Government censorship and repression • Censorship of revolutionaries by reformists • Communist Cooperation and Competition with Reformists) • Lenin builds a party within a party (Marxism takes root in Russia • The local circle spirit • Iskra • Lenin takes on the “Economists” • Parties within a party – Bolsheviks & Mensheviks 1903-11 • Concept of a party with an active base) • Centralism in the Service of Democracy (How centralization and secrecy slow the rate of information metabolism • Centralism to achieve a high productivity of political labor • Centralism to increase democracy • The Gohre Incident: Centralism vs. Localism and Opportunism • Summary: stages in the development of inner-party democracy • Distributed Authority)
Available online at mikeely.wordpress.comSend comments to: kasamasite (at) yahoo (dot) com
Stanley W. Rogouski said
This is a lot to chew on and I’ll try to read it and give it a response it deserves. But since the people who criticized WCW for enabling the Democrats (well it was more like the Democrats simply didn’t need them) did have a point I’ll try to write out a response to it over the next few days.
Chuck Morse said
Some of the graphics here are awesome! I particularly liked those in the “Time line of Key Events” text box. Nicely done.
Ben clearly raises important questions, although I am skeptical of the value of strategic discussions when they aren’t linked to an analysis of social relationships. The world has changed a lot since Lenin’s time and some of those changes have important implications for revolutionary strategy
Indeed, I believe that globalization–and the interdependence of national economies that it assumes–has undermined the material basis of Lenin’s ideas. Dreams of seizing power and building socialism in one country are superfluous when the global financial institutions can wreck your revolution by simply devaluing your currency. There is no need for nuclear bombs or a “prolonged peoples war” or any of the other apocalyptic events that Maoists have long anticipated. They just need to move a couple of digits from one column to another and, next thing you know, you’ll be wondering if you can buy grain or oil or steel (or whatever) with hot air while hoping that you can trust the army to crush the food riots spreading from the city to the countryside.
I have political objections to Leninism too, but that’s a different matter.
I would think that grappling with changes in the political economy would be a major priority for Marxists, although admittedly you’re not going to find many insights into these questions in Marx’s texts, given that the world has failed to confirm his prophesies.
ulises276/2 said
Chuck writes:
“There is no need for nuclear bombs or a “prolonged peoples war” or any of the other apocalyptic events that Maoists have long anticipated. They just need to move a couple of digits from one column to another and, next thing you know, you’ll be wondering if you can buy grain or oil or steel (or whatever) with hot air while hoping that you can trust the army to crush the food riots spreading from the city to the countryside.”
The interdependence of national economies doesn’t necessarily mean that imperialists can just go around manipulating economies without any consequences to their own economies. For instance, think what would happen to the global economy if they tried to cut the U.S. economy out. The entire thing would, at least momentarily, fall to pieces. Interdependence often has the effect of limiting the ability of imperialists to act, including acting in their own best national interests.
Chuck writes: “Indeed, I believe that globalization–and the interdependence of national economies that it assumes–has undermined the material basis of Lenin’s ideas.”
Lenin’s ideas were all about interdependence. In “Imperialism” he shows the connections between British and French capital and the Russian Empire, and then he theorizes on the relationship between these empires and the colonized sections of the world. All of this actually seeks to prove and define what kind of interdependence exists, an imperialist interdependence. Perhaps you’re saying that the export of capital on a global scale is passe. What exactly is different in today’s situation in your mind? To me it seems to be a matter of depth and scale in capitalist development, not a qualitative change in the basic mechanism of this development.
Cho Seung Hui said
Why are you misrepresenting the facts? The “workers” did not agree with Bolshevik rule. If they did then the workers would not have voted against the Bolsheviks in the 1917 election. The results of which were of course repressed by the leaders of the Leninist Coup.
tellnolies said
Chuck,
The capitalist world-economy is clearly very different in many respects today than it was in 1917. But your reading of the implications of these transformations is facile.
Further, your claim that “you’re not going to find many insights into these questions in Marx’s texts” suggests that you probably haven’t read them too closely yourself. An excellent place to start is David Harvey’s “Limits to Capital.” The title is a play on words in so far as it deals with both capitalism’s propensity for crisis and the limits of the anlysis presented in Marx’s three volumes of “Capital.”
What Harvey basically does is elaborate a much more complete Marxist theory of credit and rent than Marx was able to do in the unfinished latter two volumes of “Capital.” These in turn have significant implications for both a general analysis of imperialism and a particular one of it in its present phase.
It is absolutely true that socialist revolutions confined within the borders of a single (peripheral) national state and economy are profoundly vulnerable to the intrigues of international financial institutions. While the repertoire of methods at their disposal has undoubtedly changed, the basic fact of the situation is hardly new (nor unremarked on by Lenin or many other 30th century communists).
It does not follow, however, from this fact that such revolutionas are pointless undertakings. I think it stands to reason that the political conditions for socialist revolution will arise unevenly making it neccesary to do what can be done within certain national or regional constraints before a global transformation is possible. This flows from the uneven development of capitalism itself.
Neither should the fact that the first attempts at this in the 20th century proved ultimately abortive lead us to think that the whole project is a dead end. These revolutions all occurred within the context of extreme economic and political underdevelopment. It is hardly surprising that they failed. (Indeed what is truly surprising is the various successes they had before they were ultimately defeated.)
What 21st century revolutionaries need to do is ruthlessly mine these experiences for lessons that will assist us in avoiding their fate. I agree that this won’t be accomplished by holding up the leaders of these revolutions as infallible guides to all future situations. But it is equally foolish to imagine that they have nothing positive to teach us.
Now this is not to say that the idea that there is some sort of straight path progression from the seizure of power in one national setting to a world communist revolution doesn’t require serious critical re-examination. I think we need to really develop a more serious understanding of the role of autonomous spaces within countries where, for various reasons, the seizure of state power is not immediately viable. The experiences in Latin America and South Asia both suggest the need for a theory of the interrelations between social movements, autonomous spaces, parties and state power that rejects both the Leninist fetishization of the state above everything AND the anarchist refusal to recognize its pivotal character.
Taking the Latin American case, it is striking to compare the fleeting nature of the counter-power in Argentina and the precariousness of the gains of the Zapatista communities with the massive transformations made possible by Chavez’s possession of state power in Venezuela. This is not to minimize the importance of either the Chaiapas or Argentine experiences, nor to disregard the real problems with Chavez. All three experiments are compromised by the fact of their embeddedness in global capitalism.
Peoples War is not an “apocalyptic” vision. Its a political military strategy developed under conditions that existed at a certain time in China and that have persisted to varying degrees in a number of other (mainly Asian agrarian) countries and regions. It has shown some recent real viability in Nepal, the Phillipines, and rural India. That said, it is clearly not viable in advanced industrialized countries like the US or even in much of the rest of the global South. But the exhaustion or limits of a particular military strategy don’t mean the question of state power is no longer a real one.
In Mexico, for example, sooner or later the Zapatistas will have to deal with it. The fragile autonomy they have carved out of a frontier zone can not last forever. It must either link up with larger forces and really contest to displace the existing state OR find itself isolated and ultimately destroyed by that state. Dual power is inherently transitory and the anarchist fetishization of this moment rests on a willfull blindness to this elementary fact.
Would a new revolutionary regime in Mexico face financial sabotage? Undoubtedly that would be only one of its enormous problems. But if the objective is the overthrow of the whole global capitalist order, the existence of such a regime sharing such a large border with the global capitalist hegemon would be invaluable for advancing a revolutionary process in the heart of the beast.
Nobody here, I presume, wants to relive the 20th century. Rather we want to really learn all that it has to teach us. Your approach, with its sweeping dismissals of the contributions of Marx or of any positive lessons in the socialist revolutions in Russia, China or elsewhere, is about confirming you in your previously acquired ideological prejudices and is therefore fundamentally at odds with the real possibility of learning. The fact that you are consistently drawn to these discussions, however, gives me hope that on some level you already recognize this.
Tilting at the ossified expressions of failed attempts to build a revolutionary movement in the US can only be so fruitful. Certainly many here still have to shake off the encrusted remnants of what Ben Seattle so vividly calls “Cargo-Cult Leninism.” But I think they will be more encouraged to do so by an approach that takes more seriously the historical experiences of hundreds of millions of people with making revolution in the 20th century. The anarchist movement has gotten a lot of mileage out of the brief and abortive experience of the Spanish Revolution. I would never suggest that this experience shouldn’t be studied for its positive and negative lessons, but I am consistently amazed at the anarchist insistence on the irrelevance of clearly much more significant events in China and Russia.
redflags said
Am I wrong Chuck, or is your basic premise that we are all just fucked and self-deluded in a futile struggle?
I keep waiting for you to drop the hammer with a statement of intent and vision that we could actually learn from instead of recycling the entirely conventional wisdom and talking points of anti-authoritarianism’s non-navigators.
Can you point to examples in the world you know something about instead of simply reducing complex experiences to (genuinely) facile, and unfruitful verdicts?
Or even draw a picture of how you think people could move forward…
All ears, really. Please, dude. Be a mensh.
Chuck Morse said
Tellnolies – I am trying to figure out where you disagree with me. You fault me for not having a sufficiently reverent posture toward the history of Marxist Leninism, and you’re bothered by the fact that I’m an anarchist, but what’s your point? You seem to concede that my main arguments are correct.
It’s weird that you cite David Harvey to redeem Marx. Harvey’s writings and Marx’s writing are two different things, right? And it’s especially weird that that you cite Harvey in this context: Harvey is a social democrat who thinks that the “New Deal” is the very most that “radicals” can hope for (check out his book on Iraq for his position on these matters). .. . Harvey is not the sort of person that you want to turn to for a defense of Marxist Leninism.
Redflags – no, I don’t think that we’re doomed and have never suggested as much. I have pointed to what I see as material constraints upon the Leninist vision. Why not respond to that and cut out the ad hominem? Where exactly do you differ with me?
redflags said
I don’t know where we differ because I honestly don’t know what you advocate.
redflags said
Nor am I set in my own thinking, which is why I’m exasperated by the limit of your participation (here) so far.
Chuck Morse said
Redflags, in one post, you write: “Can you point to examples in the world you know something about instead of simply reducing complex experiences to (genuinely) facile, and unfruitful verdicts?”
Then, in the next post, you say: “I don’t know where we differ because I honestly don’t know what you advocate.”
So, let me get this straight: you’re saying that you don’t know what my views are, but you think that they are uninformed nonetheless? Is that what you’re arguing?
Why not respond to my comments (above) about how changes in the political economy have undermined the Leninist vision? Whether you agree with me or not, my comments were substantive, relevant to this post, and relevant to this site’s purposes.
zerohour said
Chuck -
Why don’t you clarify what you mean buy Leninist vision?
While you’re at it, why don’t you put forth an alternative position? Your refusal to do so is why it’s hard to know what you advocate. We can infer certain conclusions from your comments, but that’ll just lead to more misunderstanding.
redflags said
Okay, I will try.
Chuck Morse said
Zerohour,
I don’t have an alternative position if, by that, you mean a clear plan for making world revolution.
I have far more questions than answers (like many here, it seems), although I am committed to participating in discussions about what a new revolutionary perspective could or should look like.
Quorri said
I absolutely love the idea of uniting similarly minded groups in order to have one centralized movement of a revolutionary intent and makeup.
I don’t love the idea that the main thing that would get done, the main work of this “party” would be reporting of news and facts. I think that is an essential component, as this site supports, but I can’t even begin to see why it would be fundamental to the organization.
I can’t see now how an organization like this would actually exist without some huge risks of one group or person or set of people becoming uber powerful about it… But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible, right?
I think that this post speaks well to the kind of thing we’ve been talking about in various posts/comments not only about how to interact and integrate many movements and sentiments that already exist into a more revolutionary framework, but also how to be able to show skeptics that there are fruitful things that can be done and places to begin in this mad mess of capitalistic reality. :)
Ben Seattle said
Hi Quorri,
Thanks for your comments–which are the most substantive comments my essay has recieved on this site.
Yes, we need to be thinking in this direction. The key question is how to make this happen. Most of the groups that have locked within their ranks comrades with years of experience as revolutionary activists–are thoroughly infected with the sectarian disease–and will never voluntarily join any project that threatens their exclusive hold on these comrades. So there is a need for a project that will, so to speak, drag these groups (against their will–kicking and screaming) together.
Will it degenerate into a cult?
I tried to address this issue in one of the sidebars of my main article titled: “What does the word ‘party’ really mean?”. Most of these sidebars were not included as part of what was reposted here on the Kasama blog because the length involved would have reduced readership. But the sidebars are all readily available on the web at: struggle.net/Ben/2008/222-HowTo.htm
In response to your post–I took another look at this secondary article and realized that it was too long–so I broke it up into three separate sidebars:
(1) What does the word “party” really mean?
(2) What’s the deal with “Democratic Centralism”?
(3) One big party or a system of multiple parties?
The section on “democratic centralism” includes the following comment:
I also note (in this same section) that the term “democratic centralism”:
It appears to me that when you talk of the “huge risk” that one faction of the party could effectively seize control of it–that you are thinking in terms of an organization that is run in accord with this corrupted form of “democratic centralism” that lends itself toward the creation of a cult that is controlled by a few.
Is this your concern?
There are two issues here:
(1) The mass organization would not be bound together by such a corrupted form of democratic centralism. The groups and individuals in it would agree on certain basic things–but would not agree to be controlled by one another.
The disagreements and open competition between rival groups, as well as the political transparency of the organization and its struggles, together with fairly loose rules would make it difficult for a few people to seize control of the project.
(2) It is fair to ask, in this case, what would hold the organization together?
The organization would be held together by the work of its central project (ie: the news service) and by the expectation of the non-aligned majority that the groups and individuals must find a way to work together.
For example: if group A quit the mass organization and ceased contributing to the central project–then group A would forfeit the support of this non-aligned majority and this non-aligned majority would find itself drawn more to groups B and C and D, etc. So it is the competition between groups A and B and C, etc for the support of the non-aligned activists that drives the unity. The groups that quit would lose the competition.
This is what held the bolsheviks and menshiviks together in the period of 1903-1912. Of course once the non-aligned majority is no longer non-aligned but has decided what trends to support (a process that will likely take many years and a lot of experience in the class struggle) then the entire dynamic changes. And by that time we are, so to speak, in a different world–with a genuinely revolutionary mass organization that has made a decisive split with the reformist ideology, reformist tactics and the reformist social strata.
I was asked on the pof-300 email list about the forms of practical cooperation that might exist between rival groups within the mass organization. I posted my reply to the Ginger Group blog:
http://thegingergroup.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/how-to-build-the-party-of-the-working-class/#comment-16
Why a revolutionary news service?
I would like to better understand your thinking.
Why would you think that such a project would not be fundamental to the organization?
If such a project would not be fundamental–that what would? Do you have some ideas about this?
I think there may be one sense in which your comment would be correct.
The main work of the revolutionary mass organization would be to assist the many ongoing mass struggles in society. This would include the various economic struggles of the working class as well as many other kinds of struggles such as against forms of racism and injustice.
Support of these struggles would include mobilizing class-wide support for them. It would also include giving an accurate analysis of the issues, circumstances and tactics that are likely to be successful–including exposure of the false “friends” of the struggles who attempt to lead these struggles into passivity and defeat.
It is by its work in support of these struggles that the mass revolutionary party will demonstrate to the working class and oppressed that it understands how society works and is deserving of their attention.
What is important to understand, however, is that the development of a revolutionary news service will play a big role in all of the tasks above. Such a news service will be inseparable from these tasks. The news service will help to mobilize support for the various mass struggles. It will help in the development of an accurate analysis of conditions and tactics. It will help to expose the false “friends” of the movement.
My conclusion that a revolutionary news service will emerge as the central task that will unite everything healthy in the progressive movement comes from two sources:
(1) The weak link in the chain
My analysis of the emerging revolution in communications strongly indicates that the bourgeois control of the news and of the mass perception of events will rapidly erode once a mass revolutionary party makes determined, effective and systematic use of the potential of the emerging forms of communication.
It has ofen been said that “freedom of the press belongs to he who owns a press”. But what happens when the cost of a “press” approaches zero? At that time (and that time is now) something new becomes possible (and, I believe, inevitable): efforts by the working class (and the activists who represent its interests) to launch an attack on (ie: compete with) mainstream bourgeois news sources in a way that is roughly parallel to how the Linux computer operating system has attacked the Microsoft Windows monopoly. Linux will eventually win against Windows because it can draw on a very large (and growing) pool of free (and increasingly skilled) labor whereas Windows is dependent on a smaller pool of paid labor.
For similar reasons–a revolutionary news service will eventually be able to draw on the free labor of millions–and create news (and culture) that provide a comprehensive and accurate view of the world from the perspective of the material interest of the working class which will be centered around the need for the working class to run society.
Bourgeois rule requires a skillful combination of both (1) force and (2) political deception. But bourgeois political deception requires a monopoly (or near-monopoly) of control over media that shape the mass perception of events. The core media in this equation involve the presentation and interpretation of the news. When the bourgeoisie loses its ability to shape the mass perception of events–it will lose its ability to engage in political deception. This will also mean that it will no longer be able to keep the working class and masses ignorant and passive–and it will lose its ability to maintain its rule. At that point, so to speak, all hell will break loose.
(2) The analogy with “What is To Be Done?”
In WITDB Lenin argued for a revolutionary news service to unite the revolutionary movement in Russia. Lenin’s argument was based, in part, on an analysis of the kinds of skills and labor required to create a news service (including collecting information on struggles, analyzing this information and creating illegal networks to distribute the resulting leaflets and articles) and the kinds of skills and labor that activists had. Lenin also considered matters such as training and noted that there was a clear correspondence between the kinds of journalistic and organizational training that revolutionary activists needed–and what could be provided in the course of creating such a news service.
It has been many years since I read WITBD–but I remember Lenin’s arguments on this. And I have argued that the situation that revolutionary activists face in the U.S. has a number of similarities to the period in which Lenin wrote WITBD. So for those activists here at Kasama who have high regard for Lenin (ie: probably a majority) as well as those who do not have a high regard for Lenin–my arguments are roughly parallel with those that Lenin made in WITBD. There is a correspndence between our needs from the point of view of (a) mobilizing support for mass struggles and (b) making use of skilled labor and training activists to be journalists as part of the work of organizing mass struggles.
Of course we live in a different world than existed a hundred years ago. The main form of a revolutionary news service today would be electronic rather than paper (although it would also make use of paper). And some of the features of the digital world will make things more practical for a project that will involve rival political trends which are in intense competition with one another. For example, with a database of public domain articles–it will be easy for organization A to create a modified and alternate version of an article written by organization B–and to promote and distribute through its channels (ie: paper and electronic) the version of the article which it believes is better.
I would like to see more attention on this blog to the issues, such as this, that are more important. It is relatively easy to see at least part of what is wrong with organizations like the RCP–because they are a relatively clear example of an organization with strong cult-like features. What is not so easy is to sort our the shape of our alternative to a revolutionary-organization-as-cult. Until we can take this step–then Avakianism has the upper hand: the RCP can say to activists: “we have an organization that can get things done while our critics can do nothing but whine and complain and talk among themselves.”
If we can only point out the bankruptcy of the RCP but are unable to make positive steps to sort out the nature of our alternative–then Avakianism (as a general method applicable to the many other revolutionary political cults of maoist, troskyist or anarchist bent) will continue to exercize hedgemony in the left.
– Ben Seattle
JJM+ said
I think that there are elements of economism in Seattle’s article, mainly on the party being a mass party of workers. The party that is created must a be a communist party of the most resolute communists, those who can put everything they have for the revolution and the masses.
A ‘party of workers’ does imply economism and a tailing of the masses. This should be about leading the proletariat to make communist revolution, not focusing on trade union struggle (not that thats not relevant).
The Bolshevik Party, although it did have a mass base, was not a mass party. It was a relatively close knit party of the most militant communists.
I also disagree that in China, the CCP was not a party of the working class. The communist party is not defined by how many workers there are in its party, but the ideology that guides it, in this instance Marxism-Leninism. What you do is equate communist ideology with that of individual workers instead of the proletariat as a class.
I am a rush, so I just wrote these thoughts down, but I plan on continuing this very soon.
Ben Seattle said
Hi there JJM+,
Thanks for taking the time to read my article and for responding.
I look forward to further comments you might have.
I will make an effort to look at this thread on a weekly basis and reply to the most substantive comments and/or questions at least once on each weekend.
(1) What is “economism” ?
You used the term “economism” and “tailing the masses” but it is unclear what you mean by these terms. In Lenin’s time “economism” was a description of (among other things) the practice of failing to do political work among the working class on issues other than their economic struggles. For example: the bolsheviks would distribute leaflets to workers at factories (doing so was ilegal–but they had underground distribution networks) of two kinds: (a) leaflets that might address the struggle at that particular factory for better wages or conditions and (b) leaflets on broader political questions in society.
If the bolsheviks had only distributed leaflets of the first kind–that would have been an example of economism (as the term was used by Lenin).
But the meaning of this word (like many other “ism” words such as socialism, communism, democratic centralism, dialectical materialism, marxism, leninism, etc) has changed over the decades in the wake of the degeneration of the international communist movement and the class need of the bourgeoisie to render language (and word usage) in such a way that it becomes impossible for us to think. This is part of what I call “cargo-cult Leninism” — which involves tossing around words like this as if all these words had a clearly understood and agreed-upon meaning.
There is a theory (it had a certain level of popularity in the 1960’s) that held that it was wrong to assist workers in their economic struggles (such as trade union or strike struggles). This theory held that this amounted to nothing more than putting gold glitter on the workers’ chains. According to this theory–it is actually better if the workers are more oppressed–because this will supposedly make them more revolutionary. I call this theory the “concentration camp” theory–because its logical conclusion is that the best conditions–would be if the workers were in concentrations camps with zero rights. Remnants of this theory exist today–although I hope (and assume) that this is not where you are coming from. The core issue here is whether or not the working class, by virtue of its position in society, is a revolutionary class that is bound to, sooner or later, act in its own interest and overthrow the system of bourgeois rule.
In the early 1980’s the group I supported (the Marxist-Leninist Party) was distributing leaflets to metal trades workers who were on strike. (The Seattle branch of the MLP had done a lot of political work among this section of the workforce.) I was distributing a leaflet (which gave an analysis of the strike and the issues involved) and giving the slogan “Fight for the maximum possible wage increase” when I ran into the guy who was then the head of the Seattle branch of the RCP. He claimed that my slogan was supposedly economist. He was wrong. It is a first principle of genuine communist work to support the struggles of the workers and masses for better conditions.
(2) What is a workers’ party?
You assert that the Bolseviks were not a mass party. But the term “mass party” may mean something different to you than to me or to someone else.
I cannot see how we can overthrow the system of bourgeois rule without a mass party. And this mass party would also be a workers’ party.
In the sidebar on the history of working class parties I say that the Second International encouraged the formation of mass workers’ parties. Is this accurate in your view? If it is–was this wrong? Was this related to how and why the Second International collapsed into opportunism–or was there another reason for this collapse?
Was the Chinese party a workers’ party? What does it mean to be a “workers’ party”? One definition holds that a party is a workers’ party if most its members are workers. By that definition both the Democratic and Republican parties are workers’ parties. I use a different defintion. A party is a workers’ party if it represents the material interests of the working class. These interests are not compatible with bourgeois rule and the economic system of capitalism. A workers’ party represents the deepest aspirations of the working class and is a vehicle for these aspirations.
Your method (ie: defining the character of the party on the basis of marxist-leninist ideology) can create a lot of problems. I do not support “marxism-leninism” (which I consider a revisionist religion) and neither did Marx or Lenin.
If the Chinese party was a workers’ party–then how could it create a society that was not controlled by the working class? You could answer that this or that bad thing happened or that this person or that person betrayed (I call this the “shit happens” excuse). But this would be a form of evasion. If the working class controls a party–then how can the party suddenly degenerate? And why can’t the working class intervene to oppose this degeneration–or create an alternative party that has not degenerated?
I look forward to further comments from you. Most readers here (it would appear) find topics like these to be outside of their comfort zone. They are more comfortable tackling issues that are easier to think about. But every day we ignore the more important issues–is a victory for Avakianism and (in a small way) as defeat for the interests of the working class.
– Ben
SeriyVolk said
At first I found the assumption that the organization would be a “revolutionary news service” to be complete speculation, but you clarified your position in one of your comments. However the point is still rather vague. Every socialist or communist organization that I’ve encountered, big and small, has a newspaper. Therefore each could be considered a “revolutionary news service”. You go into more detail here:
This reminds me of Indymedia, and it sounds great (especially because I’m a Linux user). However the mainstream news medium is TV, and that particular “press” is essentially beyond our grasp. How do we attack the TV news monopoly?
Back to the organization itself, I’m more inclined to think that a network of groups has the most potential, and I’ve come to believe that these groups should not be parties. We need to concentrate on bringing the struggle to people, not recruiting them to parties. (The parties, as your article demonstrates, should develop of their own accord.)
I’m not saying it isn’t a political struggle, but in the same way you’re suggesting that we compete with bourgeois news sources, I’m saying we also should compete with the bourgeois government. Forming grassroots organs of power – the functions of which would include “revolutionary news” – in our cities.
Joseph Ball said
Ben Seattle has asked me to comment on his project and I will try to answer.
Ben’s idea seems to be to create a mass party, organised on more or less loose principles, basically a network of different organisations that coalesces into a party. There is then a sort of left-right struggle, which Ben apparently believes the left will win.
This sounds a bit like the British Labour Party. It was a coalition of various socialists and reformist trade unionists. It contained a left that tried to take over but ended up miserably defeated.
The whole project is reformist! A communist party is trying to make revolution. A revolution is not a matter of organising electoral campaigns or strikes or mass protests. It is the overthrow by force of one class by another. Therefore, a communist party must be a fighting party. It requires unity and discipline. You can’t build it by designing in reformism and disunity into its very founding principles.
Projects like Ben’s arise from the material conditions created by living in an imperialist nation. The stark class contradictions that exist in Third World nations are not terribly obvious in imperialist countries. A minority may experience serious repression (e.g. immigrant communities) but the majority do not. Therefore people trying to create revolutions in these countries tend to end up tailing the reformist tendencies of the majority population.
Ben writes of Stalin
‘However, by the early 1930’s, the Russian party had degenerated. In particular, Stalin was frightened by the installation of Hitler into power in Germany in 1933–and understood that Western imperialism (ie: Britain, France, the U.S., etc) intended to use Hitler as their tool to invade and lay waste the Soviet Union. (This was the real logic behind the Western policy of “appeasement” to Hitler–this was a policy of giving Hitler the resources he would need to carry out his invasion of Russia.)
Desperate to “make a deal” with the Western imperialist countries (ie: so that they would pull back on Hitler’s leash) Stalin used his considerable influence (beginning with the 7th Congress of the Communist International in 1935) to lead the communist parties worldwide into the reformist sewer under the flag of Dimitrov’s “united front against fascism”.
In the years that followed nearly all of the communist parties in the world degenerated–and the working class movement has never recovered from this treachery.’
This is really subjective and incorrect. Stalin was ‘frightened’ by Hitler because Hitler intended to devastate the Soviet Union which he did in the 1940s with the loss of the lives of 27 million Soviet citizens. Whatever mistakes were made by Stalin the fact is that he won and saved the existence of the Soviet Union and prevented the world being plunged into Nazi barbarism. Describing this as ‘treachery’ is foolish. Pretending that the Labour aristocrats of Western Europe would have all made socialist revolution if Stalin had not adopted the ‘united front’ is fantasy.
The fact is that the world proletarian movement just doesn’t need a mass party of labour aristocrats in the First World (to be honest even the labour aristocrats of the First World don’t really need it, they’re looked after just fine as it is). The Third World is the centre of revolution and they need unified, disciplined, fighting organisations to lead their struggle.
Ivy said
A FEW BRIEF COMMENTS ON AVAKIAN’S “METHOD AND APPROACH”
Much work needs to be done needs to analyze and unravel the “New Synthesis.” Here, I would like to speak to one aspect of it: “method and approach.”
The “New Synthesis” and the Question of “Method and Approach”
At times, it has seemed as if the key element of the “New Synthesis” is the “method and approach,” of Bob Avakian, at least according to enthusiastic Party supporters. This was clear to me and others when I was told over and over and over that the main thing to study in Avakian’s writings was his “method and approach.”
One can quickly see the “cult of personality” implications for this. Suddenly, every writing—or at least every post-Conquer the World writing—takes on a new importance because there’s “method and approach” to be gleaned from all of it. So now A Horrible End—a book by Avakian not strongly promoted over the last few years because of the incorrect WW3 thesis—gets new life because of its section on the cult of personality. This is flawed logic since some conclusions that are drawn are clearly, demonstratably wrong. This outlook even applies to his memoir.
For those of who thought a memoir was a collection of observations, reflections, and remembrances looking back on one’s life, you’re wrong. It’s actually a study in method and approach. And so everything in the memoir has value. That’s right, there’s value to the Froggy the Gremlin story. There’s value to that story about that kid who says “fuck” a lot in one sentence. It is a study in “method and approach.”
I am not trying to claim that memoirs don’t have lines, obviously they do. My point is that Avakian’s memoir serves an instrumentalist purpose. Its main purpose is to “inspire” people, especially youth, in these analogously tumultuous times to dedicate their lives to communism just as Avakian did, which is, of course, not at all a bad thing (though the analogy doesn’t hold up very well). It is because of this that the memoir has a very selective, shall we say, history. If the events don’t serve the narrative then they are not in the book. Here’s just a few events not in the memoir: Avakian’s SDS days, that the RU was originally conceived of as a group to organize white revolutionaries (while the Panthers and other groups organized other nationalities), Avakian working in the Peace & Freedom Party for Eldridge Cleaver’s presidential run, Avakian’s own electoral run in Berkeley, and perhaps most surprising of all—there is nothing in the book about the trial of the Mao Tsetung Defendents even though there was extensive coverage of it in Revolution and The Revolutionary Worker. Why are these events not in the book? It can’t possibly be that the RCP thinks that youth new to politics aren’t interested in SDS. A memoir is different from an autobiography but one isn’t simply supposed to ignore major aspects of one’s life in a memoir.
Now just to be clear I think methodology is very important but as I understand it method flows from ideology. And our ideology is not ‘finished’—to use a rather crude term—by any stretch of the imagination. How it is that the RCP can claim that BA has come up with the end-all-be-all in terms of method, I don’t know. One that can supposedly get us all the way to communism.
In a sentence, it is the position of the RCP that Avakian’s “method and approach” is never wrong. Ask representatives of the line and you’re likely get responses like “you have to engage Avakian’s new synthesis to get to communism” and “no one on the planet is wrangling with the type of questions he is”, etc. but if you listen clearly they will essentially say that Avakian’s method and approach is always right. It is only people misapplying that method and approach—like, say, new RCYBers—that are wrong. Now to be clear, just because a leader puts forth ideas and directives doesn’t mean that they are being carried out or being ‘represented’ accurately. There are many examples of this in the history of the communist movement. This is true not only of revisionists but even well-meaning enthusiasts. Mao’s need to launch the Cultural Revolution is perhaps the most famous example. But that’s not the issue here. The issue is that the RCP has come to the position that Avakian’s method and approach is the most thoroughly communist that has ever existed and so they’ve gotten themselves tied up in a knot where to reject even pieces of it would logically mean having to throw the baby out with bath water. After all if the most advanced “method and approach” flows from the New Synthesis that gets us ‘all the way to communism’ then the failure of Avakian would be the failure of communism. Fortunately, Avakian’s New Synthesis is not communist ideology putting its ‘best foot forward.’
This “method and approach” is what won’t allow the RCP to swim in the waters of critical thinking, as much as it might want to or think it actually is. Revolution Books is the perfect metaphor in this regard. While the store carries a wide array of authors who should be “engaged with”, really the most important thing in the whole store, is the memoir—soon it’ll probably be Away with All Gods!—and really, there’s only time to read Avakian’s works so all those other books are for people who aren’t actively carrying out the Party’s various campaigns. I suppose the implication could be steep yourself in Avakian’s “method and approach” and then read this other stuff in the bookstore from that ‘correct’ framework (a wrong approach even if it the New Synthesis was what his supporters claim it to be) but really that’s just semantics because one never really ‘gets there’ and there’s almost always a new Avakian piece in the newspaper every week that needs to be studied in depth, so later (read: never) for that.
Jaroslav said
Joseph, I agree with the overall spirit (as I understand it) of what you’re saying. However a point in response:
You said ‘The Third World is the centre of revolution’; I’d say that it’s currently the centre of revolution (& also, I would never use the term ‘third world’ but that’s a different topic). We shouldn’t be mechanical about the ‘2 roads to revolution’ but still I think it’s true that revolution anywhere must be in ‘revolutionary situation’ which has those 3 conditions described by Lenin; so in imperialist country this will be rare, but when it does occur the military seizure-of-power portion of revolution will happen much faster than elsewhere. There could also be ‘domino effect’ so the global centre of revolution could conceivably be in imperialist countries for a time. Speaking of the US specifically, I think there are two main possibilites: that revolution will occur in many neo-colonies so much so as to destabilise the US & leading to revolutionary situation within its borders, or that for other reasons a revolution occurs in the US which then leads to many revolutions in the (former) neo-colonies.
JJM+, I also agree with what you’re saying. Keep in mind that Ben is not — & does not claim to be — a Maoist. The party in China (& in Russia) (& in many many other countries) did not suddenly degenerate. This is a question of dialectics, which Matigari has in other threads correctly called for focus on. It is not a question of ‘allowing’ different lines in the party — different lines will exist, they will objectively serve different classes. A properly functioning revolutionary party will maintain the line serving international proletariat as the primary aspect of the contradiction. The Bolsheviks’ outlawing of factions was misinterpreted by Stalin (it reinforced together with his wrong views on similar things) to produce theory of ‘monolithic unity’ type of party; the truth however is that factions were outlawed as a matter of organisation, that collectivity should be primary over competition, that ‘democracy’ part of ‘democratic centralism’ does not mean bourgeois electoral scheming democracy, much less reality TV type ‘factions’ & ‘alliances’. The only ‘faction’ should be that the communist party as a whole is a faction within society. Back to ‘degeneration’ though. These parties ran into problems which caused the primary aspect to be the bourgeois line. Some of this is of the ‘failure’ variety, i.e. their own fault by incorrect line; & some of this is of the ‘defeat’ variety, i.e. overpowered by objective conditions of global capitalism &/or subjective forces of
new & old bourgeoisie. The ‘failure’ category further splits into two, in terms of things which were conceivably avoidable, & things which are likely to be gotten wrong given that it’s the first try & we don’t know any better. All of these failures & defeats are more likely to add up to ‘degeneration’ — or more accurately counterrevolution — if enabled by factions.
Marx said long ago that it is through the process of revolution that the proletariat becomes fit to rule. I still agree with this statement completely. So, first, the proletariat as a whole is currently not fit to rule & therefore should not ‘control’ the vanguard — & after all what would the mechanism of this control be? If the class already has some organised way of controlling social events, what is that if not a vanguard party anyway? In such case what’s the thing in question that they’re trying to control? Rather, the vanguard keeps itself in on the right path by constantly applying the method of mass line. This takes a qualitative upon seizure of power, since there are significantly less (i.e. not disappeared 100%!) capitalist socio-economic forces acting on the people, & large sections have just participated in the revolutionary seizure of power. Socialism allows for enormous freedom in figuring out how to increase the extent to which the proletariat actually runs things as a class. But not just that, to do away with class distinctions altogether. This, as the reader has likely predicted by now, has to do with Leninist theory of withering away of the State. Suffice it to say that the socialist State & the socialist vanguard Party are qualitatively different from the capitalist varieties, but nonetheless they are a State & a Party. They are still forms of representative rule, not direct self-rule. This intermediate stage is necessary because we (both as communists, & as humanity) don’t know yet how to do self-rule. We have to figure it out, & we have to learn through practise which is impossible to conduct without socialism.
I agree with Mike’s point elsewhere that we shouldn’t be using labels like ‘economist’ & ‘Menshevik’ etc, rather get into things concretely. So Ben I agree that fighting for higher wages is an economic struggle but not inherently economist. However looking at this as a general metaphorical shorthand, JJM+ is correct in his comparison of Ben’s conception to the economists in Russian history who tailed behind the masses instead of leading them.
There is not a ‘level playing field’ in capitalist society, neither economically nor in realm of ideological struggle. One can’t assume that a collection of ‘progressives’ or ‘activists’ or ‘masses in struggle’ will automatically arrive at the correct line if this line struggle is simply left to spontaneity. This plan represents a squandering of previous work & knowledge. While we should be cautious to uncritically repeat things we hold to be correct approaches, neither should we just start from scratch, as though we’ve learned nothing. For example people who think capitalism works just fine with a few tweaks have no business being in communist party. They should not have the right to form a faction or waste comrades’ time with their stupid arguments. Real revolutionaries have better things to do & talk about.
I said elsewhere that I think the communist party is a vanguard of the oppressed masses, not for it. This was in the context of refuting the conception of cadre as some kind of separate entity, with the masses always ‘out there’. That line in fact is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby the group’s view of the masses contributes in its further isolation, thus reinforcing its view of the masses as completely separate. I see the vanguard as being part of the masses. It is still however a distinct entity, a group of people who are providing leadership, who are united a particular line of making revolution, why & how this needs to happen.
The kind of general left vs right debate — which revolutionaries should of course assist the oppressed masses broadly in seeing, understanding, & participating in — does not have to take place within the party, it can be between different parties, between the party & the class enemy, etc.
A revolutionary party should have a basis of unity. It should have key questions which individuals must agree upon in order to obtain & continue membership. This doesn’t mean they are ‘revisionist enemy saboteurs’ or anything just if they disagree on these key questions, but really if one doesn’t think that communism is the goal, that revolution is the path, etc — & more specific things like that Afro-american people are an oppressed nation (not just a high percentage of poor people or whatever), that revolutionary defeatism regarding ‘our own’ ruling class is the correct approach, etc — then they just don’t belong in a revolutionary party. They can go do something else, we can continue the debate, we can work together on various actions, even during the revolution, they might change their position later & (re-)enter the party, etc. But to borrow a phrase from RCPUSA, yes there is should be an ‘ideological litmus test’ for membership. The fact that many parties have not properly designed or interpreted results of this test does not mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Ben’s how-to plan basically puts this type of standard onto a group within a party. I think it’s much better — especially even from the standpoint of making the ideological struggle clearer the oppressed masses in general, which is supposedly Ben’s goal — to make a firm line of demarcation, that the folks with the correct line are the communist party & those without it are not communists. Else what are they? What kind of respect should a proletarian have for a party that says, ‘these guys here are full-fledged communist party members but actually they’re reformist fools that are standing in the way of revolution’, that ‘moreover we want it that way, we have these reformist fuckers running around doing their shit under the name of communism & of our party, but don’t worry it’s all part of the revolutionary plan’, that ‘this plan will in fact be all the more successful because of their factional intrigue’? What is this, like in Pulp Fiction (which is a horrible movie, but anyway this scene is a good metaphor) where Travolta says ‘It would’ve been worth him keying my car, just so I could catch the guy & kick his ass’? Wouldn’t we rather just not have our car keyed in the first place? If it does get keyed we can kick his ass or otherwise resolve the situation, not cry over spilt milk, but really are we then gonna proceed to invite somebody else to key our car again next week? So, in short, there’s no shortage of reformist leadership to argue against or vie for leadership of masses with. But we don’t need to be in the same party for this struggle to occur.
Can a small group grow into a mass party? Yes, obviously. Mass movement organisations, whether or not they aspire to be vanguards of communist revolution, all start as ’small’ groups. Can an isolated sectarian group grow into a mass party? No, & neither can they play the role of vanguard, even in objectively revolutionary conditions. The correct line which Ben mockingly puts in quotes — what, man, don’t you want the vanguard to have a correct line? — however cannot be arrived at without many deep ties with the broad masses. This is a major theme of the 9 Letters. We must apply Mao’s 4 step method to the dialectic between practise & theory in the pursuit of truth. The work of the revolutionary vanguard (which under capitalism is part of the masses no matter what) attains actual status worthy of its name only by integrating itself with sections of the oppressed masses which are outside the organisational framework of the vanguard. Do all these masses need to be redefined as party members (& would they all want to anyway)? No.
Well sorry to all for this incomplete & not very well-edited post, but hopefully you all get something out of it. One last point I don’t want to forget. Revolutionary groups should be aspire to form/develop/grow into a vanguard party, but should be careful to not proclaim itself as being one before the fact. There’s nothing wrong with openly acknowledging that at the moment it’s a ‘group’ or ‘organisation’ or ‘league’ or what-have-you.
JJM+ said
In this sense, I mean ‘economism’ when you talk of a worker’s party. The underlying thing here is that it brings out the politics of ‘worker identity.’ It is a very narrow and revisionist world view. It does imply and has been the case with all the ‘worker’s parties’ in the U.S. that they call themselves workers parties and tail the masses in the form of focusing on their day to day demands. This is what is really meant with these “workers parties.”
The Bolshevik Party nor Mao’s CCP were workers parties, and they never referred to themselves as such. I don’t think they would have been able to lead liberating revolutions if they were aiming from some abstract ‘worker-run society’.
Parties like the CPUSA and today’s PSL were revisionist parties, and their main focus was on the trade union struggle, not revolutionary communist struggle.
Also, Marx and Lenin were of course not Marxist-Leninists. ML is a fusion of the communist theories of Marx and Lenin.
Making the focus of your work – or the defining feature that will somehow create communist consciousness – as workforce organizing for higher wages, is dillusional. Proletarian consciousness arises through political struggle within mass issues.
The Chinese party was not a workers party. It was a communist vanguard that led to the highest form of socialism in human history, most notably, the Cultural Revolution.
What I call for is a communist party. One that can lead the masses and the proletariat in liberating humanity from capitalism- not attaining higher wages.
Quorri said
Thank you, Joseph Ball, Jaroslav, and JJM+ for clarifying all of this! I really appreciate it :)
Ben Seattle said
Hi folks,
Creating a mass revolutionary organization must be the primary focus of every serious revolutionary activist. All of our work and everything we say and do in the political world must revolve around this goal.
So first–I would like to thank everyone for their responses. Most of those who posted have opinions that are different from mine. But discussion must start somewhere.
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Climbing the stairway from text to video
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SeriyVolk (March 9) asks how groups on the left could combine their news service efforts to attack the bourgeois monopoly on TV news.
My view is that we should initially focus our efforts on what I call “low-ratio” media such as text. In this case, “ratio” refers to the ratio between the total labor minutes required to create an article and the number of minutes required to consume (ie: read) it. The text sector, for many reasons, is the most strategic–and once we have done well there–we will be in a position to attract more volunteers and climb, so to speak, the stairway to “high ratio” media such as video.
What else do we gain, by the way, when we aggregate together the articles from a large number of revolutionary (or pseudo-revolutionary) groups?
** We gain greater political transparency: it becomes much easier to scan, compare and contrast the political lines (and practice) of all participating organizations.
** We gain an easy start-up ability for small groups that believe they have a unique perspective and want to create a news feed which expresses and illustrates their point of view. A large, copyright-free database of current articles on topical and theoretical subjects from a radical perspective makes it easier to do this–and it also makes it easier to do serious analysis of what is going or what needs to be done.
** We also gain something else: all of the articles could be on the web in formats that allow readers to post comments–and the technical and moderation duties (which require labor to rate or filter comments) could be more easily shared in such a way that this all becomes more practical. Along with this–criticism of any given article would be easy for readers to see (ie: another way in which political transparency would be increased).
I partially agree with your formulation. We will be bringing news of struggle to a large audience. We will also, over time, be bringing the audience closer the common mass organization that contains within itself various competing organizations. Competing groups within this organization will also attempt to recruit readers to their grouping (or at least to their views) but most readers will probably consider this to be incidental, or secondary, to the purpose of the news services (and would certainly perceive this to be less obtrusive than commercials are on mainstream television).
I’m not sure what you mean by “grassroots organs of power”. Many activists have attempted to create so-called “dual power” organizations. Other than very tame 501(c)3 tax-exempt (and liberal) institutions I do not think that much has ever come (or is likely to come) from this. Or maybe you are thinking of something else–but then it would help if you were to better explain your thinking and the experience on which your thinking is based.
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HOW are we going to get from here to there?
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Joseph Ball (March 9) replied to my request for comment with his opinion than creating a mass organization as I have outlined would be fundamentally reformist.
Joseph compares my proposal to the British Labor Party–but does not challenge my assertion that the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) was such a mass organization and that this led to the creation and development of Lenin’s bolsheviks.
Joseph says that we need a fighting party with genuine unity and discipline.
Right.
But how are we going to create such a party?
That is the question at issue.
I have given my view on how this party may emerge. I have asserted that a mass organization which included reformists, revolutionaries and the non-aligned served as the foundry where the bolshevik party was tempered.
Does Joseph give some alternate method by which a fighting, disciplined party will emerge?
No, he does not.
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Third-worldist assertions deny the need to
organize the working class in imperialist countries
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There are various particles of truth in what Joseph says. But his conclusions are wrong.
Joseph’s views look to me like garden variety third-worldism which holds that the working class in the imperialist countries is supposedly so privileged that it shares more interests with the ruling imperialists than with the working class in the rest of the world or the oppressed nationalities at home. Therefore (according to this form of third-worldism) efforts to organize the working class in the imperialist countries are bound to collapse into reformism.
This kind of third-worldism is common among many (but not all) Maoists. This kind of third worldism overlooks the historical role and destiny of the working class in the imperialist countries. For example, it is the working class in the U.S. that is destined to overthrow U.S. imperialism.
I will not respond to Joseph’s views on Stalin other than to note that non-Stalinists (including Trotskyists) would likely make contributions to the mass organization on a par with the Stalinists. Does Joseph propose that Trotskyists be excluded from the party? Probably. He just doesn’t say this explicitly.
This really sums up the bankruptcy of third-worldism: We (supposedly) cannot organize the working class here (where we live) to fight for its material class interests and for the overthrow of U.S. imperialism. We (supposedly) cannot organize workers in opposition to the labor aristocrats (because, according to third-worldism, the working class in the imperialist countries supposedly are labor aristocrats). So if U.S. imperialism wants and needs a stable home front–we must consent to this (according to this third worldist view) because there is nothing we can do other than to cheer on the fight against US imperialism elsewhere.
Lenin, by the way, had another view: real internationalism is organizing the working class and oppressed against the ruling bourgeoisie in the country where you live:
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Ban on factions means absence
of internal democracy in party
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Jaroslav (March 10) says he agrees with the “overall spirit” of Joseph’s views although what he actually says is not nearly as bad. Jaroslav appears to recognize that the working class in the U.S. will eventually overthrow U.S. imperialism.
Jaroslav says he disagrees with Stalin’s insistence on “monolithic unity” but, at the same time, argues that factions within the party should not be allowed and compares factions to bourgeois democracy and the scheming alliances on certain “reality TV” shows. If the party had sufficient internal democracy for factions to exist, according to Jaroslav, this would not make it easier for revolutionary forces within the party to link up with (and enlist the help of) the healthy instincts in the working class to correct the errors of the party–but instead would simply speed the path to degeneration and counter-revolution.
Jaroslav concludes that the proletariat, as a class, should not control the vanguard party. (Jaroslav is correct about this. The proletariat will control the workers’ state–not the party. And the workers’ party, or parties, will do its best to influence the proletariat.)
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Do we fight for higher wages? (part 1)
——————————————————————————–
Jaroslav appears to take both sides of the disagreement concerning whether fighting for higher wages is reformist. On the one hand he says this struggle is not necessarily reformist–and on the other hand argues that in “general metaphorical shorthand” (whatever that means) it amounts to tailing the masses instead of leading them. By this logic, of course, any time the revolutionary party assisted the spontaneous struggles of the masses–it would supposedly be tailing them.
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Better visibility provides better conditions
for successful struggle
——————————————————————————–
Jaroslav also argues against my proposal for a mass organization that includes both reformist and revolutionaries. He says that we cannot assume that the correct line will automatically win. This is quite true, of course. The correct line will only win by means of conscious and skillful struggle. If this is lacking it will lose.
Jaroslav does not deal with my argument that the correct line will have better opportunities to win when it is more difficult for reformists to isolate the revolutionaries and keep the mass of activists unaware of the arguments of the revolutionaries.
It is to the advantage of the working class and the revolutionary movement if this struggle takes place in conditions of maximum visibility. In the present circumstances the reformists trends have a hundred times or more the size and visibility of the revolutionary trends. In these conditions–the reformist trends do their level best to ignore criticism from revolutionaries (ie: pretending critics do not exist is the most common tactic that reformists use). It would be more difficult to do this in the context of a mass organization which requires its member organizations to reply to criticism and challenges of various sorts.
The advantage of such agreements can be seen in the current dispute between readers of this site and the RCP. The RCP denounces the Nine Letters but is afraid of giving the readers of its newspaper the URL of the Kasama blog. It would be much more difficult, in the context of a mass organization as I have outlined, for a corrupt organization to hide its betrayals.
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How do we avoid reformist time-wasters?
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I think part of Jaroslav’s confusion comes from his considering the mass organization to be a “communist party”. I think it would be more accurate to call the mass organization something more like the “Mass Organization for Activists with Revolutionary Aspirations” (MOARA). (I am not, by the way, proposing this as its actual name since I would think that the name that develops would be more focused on the common work of creating a revolutionary news service.)
The MOARA would not be a “party” in the sense of being able to run society.
Also–I am not in favor of using the word “communist” at this time for the same reason that Lenin opposed the use of the phrase “Social-Democracy” after the great betrayal of 1914 (when nearly all the social-democratic parties supported their national bourgeoisies in the first world war). The revisionist betrayal in Russia and China is fully comparable (to say the least) with the betrayal of 1914.
However Jaroslav raises an interesting question. Does the MOARA allow into its ranks people who want to do nothing more than make minor adjustments to capitalism? And at what point does dealing with trends that promote these kinds of illusions amount to nothing more than a waste of time?
Before addressing this–let’s take a look at another passage by Jaroslav:
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What is our “ideological litmus test” ?
——————————————————————————–
Yes, there must be some limits or standards concerning who can be part of MOARA. But what will these limits be?
If we exclude everyone with reformist ideology–then it would be necessary to exclude people like Jaroslav and other RCP supporters who promoted the
reformist “World Can’t Wait” campaign which ended up promoting various imperialist illusions and strengthening the influence of the imperialist Democratic Party.
So I don’t think it would be useful to exclude from MOARA everyone that has some degree of reformist illusions. Rather–the “litmus test” would be determined by the state of the movement (ie: it would change over time–becoming more strict and exclusive as the consciousness of the movement developed). Activists recognize that not all reformists are the same. There is a difference between someone like Ralph Nader and someone like Jaroslav. Activists recognize that there is a need for the more serious and radical people to work together on practical projects as well as carry out principled debate and discussion with a view of clarifying and resolving their differences.
——————————————————————————–
How do we deal with reformist fools?
——————————————————————————–
(1) First, as I mentioned above, it would be clear to proletarians that not everyone in the MOARA was a genuine revolutionary and that the MOARA was open to people who entertained a certain amount of reformist foolishness.
(2) Second–this would not undermine the prestige of the MOARA–because proletarians and activists recognize (as I have noted) that there is a need for forms of practical cooperation between reformist fools and the revolutionaries who (hopefully) are less foolish.
(3) Third–the revolutionary core organizations within the MOARA would have increased prestige (and visibility) because they would be able to give accurate criticism of the reformist fools.
(4) Fourth–Jaroslav’s argument assumes that it would be relatively easy to make a clear distinction between “full-fledged communists” and “reformist fools” and that the self-styled “revolutionaries” who make this distinction will not make serious mistakes or indulge in various kinds of self-deception. The problem is that, in the real world of the class struggle, the reformist fools do not necessarily carry around bright yellow flags that say: “I am a reformist fool” (some do–but many do not).
I have already outlined how the RCP’s “World Can’t Wait” campaign included a great amount of reformist foolishness. We want an organization that makes it easier for us to work with people like Jaroslav (who supported this reformist foolishness) and to help these people overcome their foolishness and recognize that hatred of opportunism is the beginning of all wisdom.
(5) Fifth–making use of a mass organization that suffers a certain number of fools helps to guard against a practice that we must recognize as a big problem: the tendency of sectarian groups to cut off communication with critics as part of an attempt to shield and isolate their supporters from valid criticism of corrupt practices.
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Can a small group grow into a mass party?
——————————————————————————–
That all sounds logical until we consider how this thinking is usually applied in practice. The RCP is exhibit A. It can never integrate itself with the masses because it is a cult and its need to defend its existence as a cult will always stand as an insurmountable barrier between itself and the masses.
We need to find ways to break down the barriers between the revolutionary core and the masses–without giving up the necessary struggle for a correct line. Part of the value of a mass organization such as the MOARA is that it makes it more difficult for god-building sects (again–the RCP is exhibit A) to isolate their supporters from arguments and challenges that would puncture the quasi-religious mysticism that is used to glue a cult together.
As far as the contention that a small group (self-defined on the basis of a narrow “correct” line) can grow to become a mass party–where has this ever happened? This is not how the bolshevik party was created. The bolshevik party was incubated in the context of a large mass organization. If the bolsheviks had withdrawn from the RSDLP at the beginning of this process they would not only have separated themselves from the mensheviks–they would have cut themselves off from the overwhelming majority of worker activists who were non-aligned in the struggle between reformist and revolutionary ideology and tactics.
In the context of the national liberation struggles–it may be the case that small groups grew to become large parties–and liberated their countries from foreign domination. But this is not the same thing as creating a party that can fully represent the material interests of the working class. (Clearly, some of the Maoists on this site will disagree with this.)
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Are we for or against working class consciousness?
——————————————————————————–
JJM+ (March 10) asserts that politics which encourage workers to think of themselves as “workers” is part of a narrow and revisionist world view. I find such an argument amazing.
There are only two main contending classes within U.S. society. Our work revolves around assisting the workers to see themselves as a class and to struggle as a class.
I will leave aside the Chinese Party for another day and address Lenin’s view of the bolshevik party. The bolsheviks originated from the League for the Emancipation of the Working Class. Lenin saw the party, above all, as representing the class interests of the working class. And that is the kind of party that we need today.
Here is Lenin in 1905 (source: http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/ROP05.html):
Lenin worked for a party that was based on “professional revolutionaries” but this phrase did not refer to full-time party workers–but rather meant workers who considered their revolutionary activity to be the center of their life and who devoted most of their spare time to revolutionary work.
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Do we fight for higher wages? (part 2)
——————————————————————————–
The CPUSA and PSL are indeed revisionist parties. But they did not become revisionist because they paid attention to the trade union struggle. Such an assertion would be extremely shallow. Lenin certainly paid a great amount of attention to the trade union struggle. Did this make Lenin a revisionist?
The decisive factor in the degeneration of the CPUSA and the PSL is class-collaborationist politics.
The CPUSA and the PSL have made their peace with the left wing of the imperialist Democratic Party and the strata of liberal-labor politicians, trade union bureaucrats, religious misleaders, poverty pimps, “progressive” media personalities and professional “opinion leaders” who are in orbit around the Democratic Party.
The CPUSA and the PSL try to serve both:
(a) their masters in the Democratic Party and
(b) the working class and masses.
But the class struggle penetrates everything and does not make that possible: so the CPUSA and PSL end up betraying the working class and oppressed.
So the struggle for higher wages is supposedly not a mass issue?
What is amazing is that self-styled “communists” spout off nonsense like this.
The key to genuine communist work is a marriage between our current struggles today and our future revolutionary goal. It is not one or the other. You need both. Just like you need two legs to walk. Just like you need theory and practice.
The party of the working class assists all the spontaneous mass struggles of the class and gives guidance to these struggles. In this way the party earns the respect and attention of the workers and oppressed who learn that the party knows what it is talking about. At this point the workers are ready to listen to the views of the party on the necessity of the overthrow of bourgeois rule.
That is the correct relationship between the struggle for partial demands and the revolutionary goal.
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You can’t go to the moon
if you can’t tie your shoes
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You can’t do one without the other.
If you do not have an organization that can lead the struggle for higher wages–then you don’t have an organization that has the ability to lead the working class in the overthrow of bourgeois rule and the development of a world of peace and abundance for all. The latter is immensely more complex and difficult than the former. If you can’t tie your shoes–then you certainly cannot build a rocket that can go to the moon.
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Can we think for ourselves?
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I would like to conclude with a few observations. I wrote my essay on “How to Build the Party of the Working Class” as part of my reply to a young activist named Edward. I also thought it might be useful to readers here on Kasama who have broken from the cultism of the RCP and want to build an organization which is more than a cult and which does not recoil from the immensity of the tasks which the proletariat in the imperialist countries must face today.
I believe that there may be such readers here on Kasama. But I have, unfortunately, seen limited evidence of them. What I have seen (so far) is a high level of interest in the latest gossip about the RCP and a low level of interest in building a genuinely revolutionary organization. It is not the high level of interest in the RCP that bothers me–it is the low level of interest in building an alternative that is real.
And the political level of most of the discussion on this thread (I must be frank) is very low.
Maybe this is the result of years (or decades) of RCP supporters allowing Avakian to do their thinking for them? They cannot think for themselves.
I am not trying to insult anyone–I am attempting to get your attention.
We can (and must) do better than this.
If we can’t–then we might as well go back to the clown prince himself and tell him that we need him to do our thinking for us–because the real world is too complicated and scary to face on our own.
He will welcome anyone back, I am sure, as long as they promise never to doubt him in the future.
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As simple as 1, 2, 3 …
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I mean, come on folks, how complicated can this be? There are two main contending classes in U.S. society. Being a genuine communist means that:
(1) you oppose the bourgeoisie and support the proletariat.
(2) you recognize the necessity of a marriage between our current struggles today and our future revolutionary goal.
(3) you recognize the need, above all, for a party that can unite everything that is healthy in the working class and progressive movements so that it can overthrow the system of bourgeois rule and bring forth a world of peace and abundance for all.
These things should be basic.
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Is anyone going to help clarify the basics?
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I would have hoped that others would have joined in on this thread to clarify some of these basic issues and to advance living ideas for what our revolutionary alternative will look like and how we may bring it into existence.
If I am the only person here who is able and willing to defend the idea that our revolutionary party must be based, above all, on the working class–then not much of real significance is going to develop here.
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Why we need improved navigation on this site
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I have had an ongoing dispute on this site with Mike Ely concerning how this blog is organized and the difficulty that readers face in navigating to those threads which are most directly concerned with the nature of our revolutionary alternative to the kind of cult that Avakian has built.
There is a tendency here to dwell on the past rather than face the problems of the present. This tendency is certainly understandable considering that many readers here are emerging from a cult. All the same, this tendency must be fought–and improved navigation of this site must be part of this fight.
Mike’s response, to date, has been to create a “vanguard party” category as one of 187 categories that readers may be able to find if they dig hard enough. Presumably those readers who want to create a revolutionary alternative will find this category and click on it.
This is inadequate for two reasons:
(1) The link to the section of this site dealing with our revolutionary alternative must be in the top navigation bar–as one choice among a relatively small number of choices–rather than half-hidden as one choice among 187 entries.
(2) Describing this section as “Vanguard Party” will never get us anywhere. Who is going to click on such a link?
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Who can have enthusiasm for
a dysfunctional organization?
——————————————————————————–
It is a safe bet than when the working class creates a vanguard party here in the U.S. it will not call itself a “vanguard party”. The phrase “vanguard party” has been abused for too long and by too many cults to have any value left.
More than this, the prevailing conception here of a “vanguard party” is that of a cult. That can be seen from Jaroslav’s response to me above. The “vanguard party” will supposedly “protect” itself with “ideological qualifications” that will exclude most serious critics and restrict the flow of “internal” information to “outside” where it can be seen by the “class enemy”. And, oh yes, those activists who “make the cut” and are inside the party will not have the democratic right to organize internally on the basis of their common views (ie: because to do so would be to engage in forbidden “factionalism”) or to publicly discuss (ie: because of the bullshit requirements of supposed “democratic centralism” and the supposed “security culture”) their opposition to principles, policies or people that guide the party and which they consider mistaken or corrupt.
So because the prevailing conception here of a “vanguard party” is that of an organization that would be utterly dysfunctional — most readers here have little enthusiasm for creating revolutionary organization.
Such are the fruits, in the real world, of cargo-cult Leninism.
But without enthusiasm for creating revolutionary organization–what can we do?
One reader who (like me) found something lacking here expressed himself (March 23) as follows:
Mike responded to this person and to me by urging patience and saying that it takes time to get something started and that theoretical and political work is being prepared that has not yet been publicly announced.
I guess time will tell. Maybe (or maybe not) it is true that I am impatient. But while we are waiting–the navigation on this site should be improved. And just to make this as clear as possible I would like to spell out my “program” for Kasama:
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Ben’s three point program for Kasama:
Make it easy for readers to navigate to topics
directly related to our revolutionary alternative
——————————————————————————–
(1) Kasama needs a topic page for threads directly related to these three questions related to our revolutionary alternative:
(a) what kind of organization do we need?
(b) What principles must guide this organization?
(c) How can we take action today to help create this organization?
(2) Posts should be added to this topic page at least several times per month to help readers focus on these difficult but important questions.
(3) The link to this topic page should be in the top navigation bar and the label should reflect the content to readers in a meaningful way, such as:
(a) “Our revolutionary alternative” or
(b) “How will we reconceive as we regroup”
rather than something lame like “Vanguard Party”.
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This issue will not go away
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So far no one has supported (or even commented on) my suggestion for improved navigation and a topic area for our alternative that can grab the attention of readers.
But the issue of creating revolutionary organization that is real is not going away.
We can ignore this issue, of course, but it will still be there. And if we are too lacking in political consciousness or backbone to confront the needs of our time–then other activists will march forward while we wander around in circles.
Ben Seattle
blackstone said
Ben, what do you think of a website that was stored all currently published papers/newsletters from the revolutionary work around the world.(RCP Revolution, South Africa Zabalaza, etc,etc).
I think a project like that would be very interesting. Especially if it was done on a blog like platoform. Imagine being able to subscribe to the website and your feed being updated when a new Zabalaza or Revolution comes out.
I know personally i subscribe to many different sites from different trends. I may not necessarily agree with their platform, strategy or ideology, but they usually have good articles nontheless.
I think warehousing these magazines can provide a big resource to those wanting a different source for their informatin. They may not have to agree with RCP, Zabalaza, or etc platform or strat, but they may appreciate the newspaper or newsletter article on Katrina, or Zimbabwe strikes, etc.
JJM+ said
“JJM+ (March 10) asserts that politics which encourage workers to think of themselves as “workers” is part of a narrow and revisionist world view. I find such an argument amazing.”
When did I say this? I’m assuming you took it out of context.
What communists are after is not some sort of ‘worker’s revolution’, it is a communist revolution, and there is a world of difference between the two.
Your politics seem to be after some sort of ‘worker identity’ which will neither lead us to revolution, much less communism.
Ben Seattle said
Hi Blackstone and Jim,
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To Blackstone
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I think it might be very useful–but what would probably be easier to do, as an initial step, is to simply have a web page, wiki or blog that contained a common index and web links to these articles (assuming that they are online).
One possible next step (after the above) would be a common comment/discussion system where readers could post public comments on any of the above articles. This would require some thought regarding moderation and the principles that would be used to hide or filter comments from clueless people and trolls.
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To Jim
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My summation is based on your opening comments:
What is wrong with the politics of “worker identity”?
If there is a difference between these two things–then maybe you could do a little work and explain (as best you can–with an appropriate example or two) what this difference is for me and for other readers here?
Sincerely,
Ben
Hekmatista said
Criteria of a mass organization like MOARA (on Revleft the same concept is called United Social Labor, but you can call it Goulash if you like, the name will emerge as the organization does) for members (lines of demarcation, who’s in who’s out, outer boundary of minimal agreement, whatever) would likely be considerably less stringent than the criteria of a vanguard party. But that is part of the point, isn’t it, to construct a looser movement that can become the incubator of a future communist party (or parties). During the incubation period, several different lines will emerge and contend, probably organized around protoparty formations within the larger whole. A good line will attract people within the movement to the grouping proposing it while simultaneously drawing the previously uninvolved into the movement. A bad line will wither and die or maintain itself as a factional sect at best. It is not impossible that different tendencies within MOARA will have different strong suits (areas in which they excel theoretically and in practice) without necessarily having enough points of unity to coalesce into one protoparty for some time into the future. That need not be a tragedy if they can remain united on a minimal basis within MOARA (someone PLEASE find a better name for the concept). What would be a preliminary minimal basis of unity? We want to exclude CONSCIOUS reformists, I assume. Everyone has his own take on who is or isn’t OBJECTIVELY reformist, but broad unity can be achieved by taking the announced positions of subjectively revolutionary groups and individuals at face value, at least at first, to provide a fairly big tent. For minimal unity, one could do worse than accepting some parts of the preamble of the IWW: the working class and the employing class have nothing in common; wage slavery and all institutions that maintain it must be overthrown; solidarity toward workers in struggle against capital, including those belonging to tendencies I myself think are mostly wrong. Obviously this is just a first shot. Apologies for the USA-centric viewpoint, hopefully others can broaden it out.
Jacob Richter said
“United Social Labour”: The Merger of Political Socialism and the Workers’ Labour Movement
Returning to the subject of Russian Marxism, Lenin proposed that the local circles consolidate into one Marxist organization for the entire country. This was eventually done, even while some reformist-minded circles here and there were kicking and screaming together during the consolidation process. Note here Lenin’s willingness during this time to work with reformists within an overall organization, not just within some “workers’ united front.” The then-success of the German Social-Democratic Party, in spite of its formation during a relative lack of class struggle (not unlike today, but due to German nationalism over unification), inspired this willingness. Unknown to even a significant number of Marxists today, What Is To Be Done? contained two central arguments, not just the usual one concerning the vanguard party. The second argument revolved around the need for a singular national newspaper replacing the various local-circle newspapers. One of the opponents to this was quoted in the work:
Undoubtedly this is an extremely important matter, but neither a newspaper, nor a series of popular leaflets, nor a mountain of manifestoes, can serve as the basis for a militant organisation in revolutionary times. We must set to work to build strong political organisations in the localities. We lack such organisations; we have been carrying on our work mainly among enlightened workers, while the masses have been engaged almost exclusively in the economic struggle. If strong political organisations are not trained locally, what significance will even an excellently organised all-Russia newspaper have?
To which Lenin replied:
We have emphasised the passages in this eloquent tirade that most clearly show the author’s incorrect judgement of our plan, as well as the incorrectness of his point of view in general, which is here contraposed to that of Iskra. Unless we train strong political organisations in the localities, even an excellently organised all-Russia newspaper will be of no avail. This is incontrovertible. But the whole point is that there is no other way of training strong political organisations except through the medium of an all-Russia newspaper.
[…]
Under these circumstances, it is possible to “begin” only by inducing people to think about all these things, to summarise and generalise all the diverse signs of ferment and active struggle. In our time, when Social-Democratic tasks are being degraded, the only way “live political work” can be begun is with live political agitation, which is impossible unless we have an all-Russia newspaper, frequently issued and regularly distributed.
[…]
The mere function of distributing a newspaper would help to establish actual contacts (if it is a newspaper worthy of the name, i.e., if it is issued regularly, not once a month like a magazine, but at least four times a month). At the present time, communication between towns on revolutionary business is an extreme rarity, and, at all events, is the exception rather than the rule. If we had a newspaper, however, such communication would become the rule and would secure, not only the distribution of the newspaper, of course, but (what is more important) an exchange of experience, of material, of forces, and of resources. Organisational work would immediately acquire much greater scope, and the success of one locality would serve as a standing encouragement to further perfection; it would arouse the desire to utilise the experience gained by comrades working in other parts of the country. Local work would become far richer and more varied than it is at present. Political and economic exposures gathered from all over Russia would provide mental food for workers of all trades and all stages of development; they would provide material and occasion for talks and readings on the most diverse subjects, which would, in addition, be suggested by hints in the legal press, by talk among the people, and by “shamefaced” government statements.
Especially in this day and age, with the Internet and the proliferation of blogs and atomized Internet news services but with an Internet “market” of millions of working-class people (and not just a few thousand within the emerging Russian working class), it is crucial to have a singular revolutionary news service encompassing news coverage, analysis, and both bulletin and video discussions. According to one “Ben Seattle,” the maintenance of this revolutionary news service would involve the maintenance of an equally singular database of copyright-free articles (in the common domain), and the different tendencies (currently the various sect-circles) could freely modify contributed material for their own distribution. This would be the initial basis for the creation of one mass “United Social Labour” (USL) organization by the working class, of the working class, and for the working class (to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln), and ultimately the revolutionary Marxist mass party itself – since it would force more coordination of information distribution amongst the different tendencies, be they revolutionary, pseudo-revolutionary, or even outright reformist (but in the non-economistic sense).
Why would there be the inclusion of non-economistic reformists like pareconists and their French-socialist obsession with egalitarianism (as pointed out by the market-socialist David Schweickart)? Well, this is all because of the need for political transparency for all the working class to see, as part of the initial merger between political socialism and the workers’ labour movement (hence the name “United Social Labour”). As Lenin remarked in 1907:
For there can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organisations of the Party are pursuing this or that line. Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built, and we are building it.
As the United Social Labour organization matures, there will be a consolidation of tendencies within into two distinct groups, just like in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (and to a lesser extent the German Social-Democratic Party): a revolutionary tendency and a reformist tendency. Ultimately, after years of momentous class struggle outside and transparent struggle between the two tendencies inside (thus giving workers, as Ben put it, “bitter experience with the treachery of reformism”), the two tendencies will part ways and form their own separate parties, with the former forming the revolutionary Marxist mass party itself.
In regards to the class struggle itself, [b]this class struggle must not be carried out within parliamentary organs[/b]. Material developments have closed the door to the parliamentary option, contrary to Kautsky’s parliamentary reductionism. This chapter section was written shortly after the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. In his time, the development of the media came to a point wherein minimum demands (to be revisited as a concept later) could be achieved from outside (most notably through publicized civil disobedience). Today, even more non-parliamentary channels have emerged (for the benefit of even genuine reformists), in the form of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and of course the Internet. Of course, the only form of “parliamentarianism” that would be acceptable is the kind that would exist in the emerging organs of workers’ power themselves, akin to soviets, workplace committees, and non-bourgeois communal councils. Building these alternative organs – a common task for both revolutionaries and genuine reformists within the United Social Labour organization (the Mensheviks did indeed help to build the soviets in 1917) – is not just for the post-revolution environment, but also for reminding working-class people everywhere of the class struggle: that things are changing for the better.
As for the prospects of parliamentarianism, which should be treated by workers with utter contempt through coordinated mass spoilage (as opposed to abstention, which reinforces the bourgeois notion that abstainers are either stupid or content), even bourgeois-oriented academics are increasingly worried about the state of bourgeois “democracy” sliding into authoritarian capitalism. Over the past several decades, more and more power has accumulated within factually non-accountable sectors of the executive branch. In the United States, this would be the “imperial presidency”: a shift in subordinate executive power from the Cabinet to the president’s “Executive Office” (headed by the Chief of Staff). In Westminster-model countries, the legislative power has become increasingly one of a rubber-stamping function of the executive policies (even under minority-government scenarios), and there has been a similar shift in subordinate executive power from the Cabinet to the “Prime Minister’s Office.” Nowadays, there is no difference between parties in opposition and parties outside parliament, save for the fact that non-Marxist opposition parties receive electoral funding from bourgeois elements.
In regards to one mass organization by the working class, of the working class, and for the working class, it is crucial indeed that this mass organization of revolutionaries and non-economistic reformists be comprised solely of working-class people (that is, manual, clerical, and professional workers). Ironically, it was the petit-bourgeois Engels who said this in The Strategy and Tactics of the Class Struggle:
It is an unavoidable phenomenon, well established in the course of development, that people from the ruling class also join the proletariat and supply it with educated elements. This we have already clearly stated in the Manifesto. Here, however, two remarks are to be made:
First, such people, in order to be useful to the proletarian movement, must bring with them really educated elements. This, however, is not the case with the great majority of German bourgeois converts. Neither the Zukunft [fortnightly Berlin magazine] nor the Neue Gesellschaft [monthly Zurich periodical] has provided anything to advance the movement one step. They are completely deficient in real, factual, or theoretical material. Instead, there are efforts to bring superficial socialist ideas into harmony with the various theoretical viewpoints which the gentlemen from the universities, or from wherever, bring with them, and among whom one is more confused than the other, thanks to the process of decomposition in which German philosophy finds itself today. Instead of first studying the new science [scientific socialism] thoroughly, everyone relies rather on the viewpoint he brought with him, makes a short cut toward it with his own private science, and immediately steps forth with pretensions of wanting to teach it. Hence, there are among those gentlemen as many viewpoints as there are heads; instead of clarifying anything, they only produce arrant confusion — fortunately, almost always only among themselves. Such educated elements, whose guiding principle is to teach what they have not learned, the party can well dispense with.
Second, when such people from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first demand upon them must be that they do not bring with them any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but that they irreversibly assimilate the proletarian viewpoint. But those gentlemen, as has been shown, adhere overwhelmingly to petty-bourgeois conceptions. In so petty-bourgeois a country as Germany, such conceptions certainly have their justification, but only outside the Social-Democratic Labor party. If the gentlemen want to build a social-democratic petty-bourgeois party, they have a full right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, conclude agreements, etc., according to circumstances. But in a labor party, they are a falsifying element. If there are grounds which necessitates tolerating them, it is a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in party leadership, and to keep in mind that a break with them is only a matter of time.
In any case, the time seems to have come.
The “time” was in 1879! In the time since, petit-bourgeois elements within the various Marxist parties – revolutionary and otherwise – had the tendency to “serve” in a leadership capacity, leaving the working-class rank-and-file to do all the grunt work. The Bolsheviks were no exception!
References:
What Is To Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/]
How to Build the Party of the Working Class by Ben Seattle [http://struggle.net/Ben/2008/222-HowTo.htm]
Michael Albert’s Parecon: A Critique by David Schweickart [http://orion.it.luc.edu/~dschwei/parecon.htm]
But Who Are the Judges? by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/nov/05b.htm]
Parliamentarianism: why Bolshevik participation??? [http://www.revleft.com/vb/parliamentarism-why-bolshevik-p1115293/index.html]
Why abstention and not spoilage? [http://www.revleft.com/vb/why-abstention-and-t77658/index.html]
The Imperial Presidency by Arthur Meier Schlesinger and Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr. [http://books.google.ca/books?id=zbLO9aNL6ncC&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0]
Strategy and Tactics of the Class Struggle by Frederick Engels [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/09/17.htm]
Linda D. said
Note to the moderator: if you think it is worth it, or has some relevance to the above, how about putting Mike’s last few comments (and mine and few others) here?? Some similar “stream” of discussion on that “thread”???
Was thinking this especially after reading through Jaroslav’s comments above, especially:
“I said elsewhere that I think the communist party is a vanguard of the oppressed masses, not for it. This was in the context of refuting the conception of cadre as some kind of separate entity, with the masses always ‘out there’. That line in fact is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby the group’s view of the masses contributes in its further isolation, thus reinforcing its view of the masses as completely separate. I see the vanguard as being part of the masses. It is still however a distinct entity, a group of people who are providing leadership, who are united a particular line of making revolution, why & how this needs to happen.”
Linda D. said
Sorry moderator…meant to add that the comments I’m referring to are some of the latest in the Rogouski Maoist Family Values post.
JJM+ said
What is wrong with the politics of ‘worker identity’ is that we are out to transform the conscious of the people towards communism, not a set of narrow economic interests, or ‘worker pride.’ Only the farsightedness of communism can get us to…communism.
So, the difference between a ‘workers revolution’ and a communist revolution is that the latter seeks to radically transform society at all levels, and the former seems to be, and ultimately is, factory-floor complaints. Once against, the shortsightedness of this tendency appears. It is not all about workers, or even individual workers. It is about the proletariat as a whole, as a class, and how it must fulfill its historic mission.
As Mike said somewhere else, what about the peasants, intellectuals, lumpen, students, etc? Is this not their revolution too? Do they not have a stake in communist revolution?