Becoming Living Vanguard: Protracted Fusion or Last-Minute Telescoping
Posted by Mike E on May 7, 2008
DWTMI described (within a larger thread) a theory of how revolutionary parties should expect to become leaders of the masses of people — by a process of long patient seemingly fruitless preparation, followed by a short extraordinary mushrooming.. He/she articulates a view close to the RCP’s discussion of how they expect to grow “in a telescoped way,” rapidly in a concentrated period of crisis, from a very small organization to a party leading tens of millions.
With DWTMI’s view it is possible to ignore and dismiss a pattern of political failures: shrinking over decades? not building a stable network of “organized ties”? starting and ending major projects with the same low level of mass influence? None of that matters, it is how political success happens. In the following post two excerpts are counterposed. The first is DWTMI’s argument for a view tht expects rapid telescoping. The second is the argument from the 9 Letters opposing that view of revolutionary development.
From DWTMI:
Mass movements of all kinds (including those led by revolutionary communists to make revolution) arise: a) on the basis of a previous groundwork, both organizational and ideological, laid by small groups of dedicated people acting over extended periods of time; b) on scales that grow and decline in massive numbers, over very condensed time frames.
This is actually counter-intuitive to what most people first think about how movements should develop. Most people initially think that as revolutionary communists, if we do all our work right, we will gradually recruit people, and get larger. And as we get larger, we will become more influential, we will become stronger, we will get closer to and eventually reach our goals. And when that doesn’t happen, if people don’t take a scientific approach, then they become discouraged. However, by taking a scientific approach, we can see that this ‘gradualism’ is not how social and political movements develop in the real world. At one point long ago, much of humanity thought the earth was flat. Then, at different times in the ancient world many different civilizations discovered that the earth is round, and now the whole planet knows the Earth is round (although maybe the theocratic fundamentalists will try to reverse that too). Getting discouraged by the failure of an organization or social movement to gradually grow and become large and powerful is like being a ‘flat-earther’ in the world of social and political activism.
* * * * * *
From Letter 3: Forays, Wrong Turns and Blaming the People
The belief that huge movements will congeal around prefabricated vehicles is no minor or recent problem: The RCP itself has been conceived as such a “vehicle.”
The RCP originally emerged from a political upsurge where revolutionary forces had real, if primitive roots among the people. But those roots shriveled as that upsurge died. In the 1980s, the party correctly stressed its need to have tens of thousands of “organized ties” in each city and established political base areas in order to be able to make an approach to power.
However as those goals were not accomplished, the party seems to have fallen back, more and more, on a mythology – where at some future point the masses of people will come to “the rescue of a few scores” of revolutionaries. Lenin’s poetic phrase is often taken too literally, as if a small stubborn agitation-based organization can have its correctness and leadership suddenly discovered by awakening millions and can then catapult to power “in a telescoped way.”
As if zero-to-60 is possible — if all the gears are clicking, if the moment’s right, and if full appreciation of the “Main Man” is in command.
This is an illusion.
This conception of forging a vanguard has never produced either a revolution or a real vanguard party with deep living roots among the people. It rests on an instrumentalist distortion of the Bolshevik history. [30]
No substantive revolutionary party ever came to have social weight through some magical “telescoping” from a few “scores” of rootless communists — not Mao’s Communist Party and Red Army (who emerged from the earlier Nationalist upsurge), or the German KPD (who emerged with major forces out of the previous Social Democratic movement), not the Naxalites of India nor the Maoists of Nepal.
And it was never true of the Bolsheviks either. Early in Lenin’s work he put it this way:
“Only the fusion of socialism with the working-class movement has in all countries created a durable basis for both. But in every country this combination of socialism and the working-class movement was evolved historically, in unique ways, in accordance with the prevailing conditions of time and place. In Russia, the necessity for combining socialism and the working-class movement was in theory long ago proclaimed, but it is only now being carried into practice. It is a very difficult process and there is, therefore, nothing surprising in the fact that it is accompanied by vacillations and doubts.” [31]
The Bolsheviks were occasionally decimated by repression. The links were often broken between their leaders in exile and their activists on the ground. But this was nonetheless a party that emerged with deep connections to social movements against the maddening backwardness of Tsarist Russia and the brutal oppression of working people. [32]
Fusion of socialism with the struggles of the people according to conditions of time and place. |
The Bolshevik Party was not just a few circles of Lenin’s followers who suddenly sprouted political wings “in a telescoped way.” They were a real party carved into the political life of that empire, with lively internal political life and raucous differences, real roots within a real social base (especially from 1905 onward), and an organizational capacity to influence and lead. They grew in both size and influence under that “awful” decade before 1917. [33]
All communist parties that have been able to seriously contend emerged organically, pulling their forces out of larger radical movements and broad anti-system intellectual currents by a living process of fusion and differentiation. To take power, especially if you intend to dismantle the old state — you need more than a line, or a “special” leader, or even a shadow cabinet — you need the organizational wellsprings of a shadow state emerging within the framework of the old order. You need to win over and train thousands of creative and hardened cadre capable of becoming the framework for the new state — a force capable of seizing power, directing the economy and its transformation, creating a new media, and so on.
And imagine how much more true this is now — given the mind-boggling complexity of modern society — than it was in agrarian China or semi-agrarian Russia.
Yes, in periods of intense crisis, many new forces can be attracted to existing revolutionary movements. Some things will have to be “telescoped,” but they can’t all be. As Avakian once knew, a political movement can “come from behind” but it can’t “come from nowhere.” To actually seize and hold power in a major social crisis, a revolutionary party needs to arrive at that crisis with flesh and bone.
So, how is a revolutionary vanguard forged under our conditions?
Seriously attempting this will require something quite different from what we now have. We need a revolutionary current that grows and emerges within the living tissue of today’s wrenching contradictions – as thousands of radical people go through a series of political processes together, under conditions where creative communist politics can seriously contend and transform. There is a necessary process with stages and leaps that you learn more about as they ripen – all as the revolutionary pole works to accumulate and transform organized forces. There are turning points where you either have critical mass and correct methods, or you are not in the game.
For all this, communists need a culture of organizing people to wage sharp struggle over the major questions of society. And we need a deeply creative new sense of how to bring revolutionary understandings to those who want to change the world.
To launch this process we need to criticize incorrect understandings entrenched in Avakian’s new synthesis. But that is only the start. This is a process that will deepen only as we learn more by doing more.
The RCP’s current path will not work. |
In sum: The RCP’s current path and methods have not worked and will not work.
Its recent strategic turn is indifferent to the lessons of its own practice. It is a voluntarist attempt to magically leap over real obstacles and necessary stages in communist work. The assumption that things can come together, suddenly and massively, under communist leadership makes an idealist overestimation of spontaneity. If unchallenged, it will squander the remaining revolutionary communist forces within the U.S.
Footnotes:
[30] This is a distortion that grew over the 1920s, and reduced the living experience of the Bolshevik party to a dogmatic set of universal formulas, structures and forms.
[31] V.I. Lenin, The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement, 1900, marxists.org
[32] You can get a sense of the breadth of the anti-government resistance by the numbers of political prisoners held by the Tsarist government: 86,000 political prisoners in 1905 growing to 170,000 in 1909. (Simon Sebag Montefioer, Young Stalin, 2007)
[33] A few illustrations of the social weight of the Bolshevik party: The party entered the 1905 revolution with several hundred members in St. Petersburg. In early 1907, the Bolsheviks had a membership of over 2,000 in that city (LCW, vol.12, p.400). That year, their national membership is estimated at 46,000. The Bolsheviks often operated within the larger Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) which had a combined membership of 150,000. Around 1910, the Bolshevik apparatus was hit hard by repression, but by 1912, the Bolshevik party was strong enough to launch the newspaper, Pravda, in St. Petersburg. They had the organizational structure to fund, produce and circulate an average of 25,000 copies daily. After the 1912 elections, six Bolsheviks were elected to the 4th Duma (parliament) representing districts with over a million industrial workers. In St. Petersburg, the party led a citywide movement of radicalized workers who, by July 1914 on the eve of war, organized a general strike of 150,000 workers over both political and economic demands. Through the political crisis of 1917, Bolshevik ranks grew explosively. Party membership in the Viborg district had grown from 500 in March 1917, to 7,000 in October. In Petrograd as a whole, it went from 2,000 to 36,000. (Figures are largely from original Soviet sources, in Tony Cliff, Lenin 1, marxists.org)
zerohour said
It just occurred to me that maybe the RCP is using their understanding of the relatively quick rise of the Black Panther Party as a filter with which to view other revolutionary movements.
mitch said
zerohour, this makes sense considering RCP founders’ exposure to the BPP… mostly, though I never heard anybody mention this example. When it came to “telescoping” the Bolshevik revolution always seemed to be the reference point whether in print or conversation
Nando said
Clearly the sudden growth of the BPP was a formative experience for the whole founding generation of the RCP… especially because many of those core forces congealed out of the movements to support the Panthers from attack (”Free Huey!” “Free Bobby!”)
This was an experience worth summing up — in light of today.
First their growth does confirm that with a politics that resonates you can suddenly emerge as a national force. The Panthers were criticized by BA for eclecticism and pragmatism — and it is hard to deny that (by his ideological standards) they were amorphous and in transition, riddled by conflicted and contradictory trends, and never really developed a single core program or ideology.
(Were they for community control of police? For a single revolutionary seizure? For forcing the system to make radical reforms? “We’re coming for what’s ours” — but what exactly is that?)
But in some ways that complex mess was a key to their dynamism, their appeal, and their collapse.
There was a historical moment (typified by the murder of Rev. King, but really extended over a series of intense years of practice) where a whole generation of black activists realized (a) this is not just about Jim Crow in the South, and (b) this may not be resolved by “speaking truth to power” in a loyal, patient and nonviolent way. A certain kind of illusion (that called itself a certain kind of “hope”) died, and in its place arose a mood and politics of militancy — that would crystalize as a number of different ideological and political trends (and then collapse in 1973 with a suddenness that felt like a guillotine swoosh).
And the Panthers were a focal of that mood. And many forces saw in them their aspirations (picking out real currents and aspects of the Panthers to emphasize).
This “party” emerged from that generation of activists — congealing out of the SNCC-type turn to “black power,” and countless spontaneous local “black power” groups that developed on campuses and in various communities. (In some cities, the BPP was formed by groups of factory workers in huge plants, in some they were developed out of campus groups, etc.)
The appeal was militancy — the symbol of the panthers confronting the police. I was a high school student, deep into the antiwar movement — and their march to the Sacremento state house (their break into national news) took my breath away. And it was (on the surface) about Black people’s claim to second amendment rights — but the challenge of what they represented, in image and tactics, was a deep break with everything previously associated with “the civil rights movement.”
The “Civil rights movement” had been sober, visibly restrained, seizing a high ground by a mix of patience and fearless moral certitude. This new movement was hot. it was impatient. It was bristling with determination. It was not just “ready to suffer,” but visibly ready to die. It had a backbone. It was ready to confront — face to face, toe to toe, inch by inch…. in a way that promised to move everything forward.
Something had changed, and they represented it — visually, tactically, politically, viscerally.
And while the media portrayed them as anti-white “thugs” (and many white people still think that) — the fact was that there was always a heavy intellectual side to Huey — they had a newspaper (SNCC or King didn’t the same way). They read philosophy (Huey would talk about hegel and plato…) They circulated the Red Book — which at that time was daring and sizzling to touch. And they were remarkably the opposite of “anti-white” — from the beginning they had a Bay Area vibe of working with many nationalities and appreciating “white mother country radicals” (and also wealthy celebrities). Some chapters (notably New York) developed a more narrow Black nationalism, with more of the separatism common among Black campus student groups. But the overall approach and practice of the Panthers was broad unity and solidarity among nationalities… even while they (clearly) were seeing themselves as reprresentative of the BLACK community, “relating to” representatives of other potentially allied “communities” (Latino, Asian, poor white, white radicals, Native American etc.)
So to return to the point of this thread:
The Black Panther experience shows that rev forces can come from behind suddenly, and congeal in new, unanticipated, shocking new forms that grab imagination and broad support.
But they (precisely) did not emerge from a small, dogged propaganda group with a highly defined (and non-eclectic) ideology and program that was (suddenly, in a telescoped way) “discovered” by the Black masses (and by others inspired by the upsurge of black people). In fact, I can’t imagine they COULD have emerged that way…. because the lines of demarcation emerged WITHIN their movement over time, in a living way, driven by sharp contradictions of their practice (and the enemy’s response). To have pre-carved most of those dividing lines in stone (as a price of entry into their party/movement) would have been to prevent exactly that “congealing” (which inevitably came in the forms of thousands of people, coming from very different places, with fluid and developing conceptions of what they and the BPP were about.)
It was the summation (of the RU) at the time that those who were attracted to a small, dogged highly ideological group (CLP) — and who dedicated themselves to cadre development based on its arcania — were often those in retreat from the real problems of the moment, hoping to find solutions in ready made prescriptions. In the collapse of the movement amid a million unanswered problems and a dissipating rev climate, the attraction of such grouplets and those kind of dogmatic assumptions (about the relation of theory and practice) grew in some areas.
The looseness of the BPP organization (the structure of rather diverse “chapters” in unity-and-struggle with a tight Oakland based “central committee”) was also part of the problem and part of the dynamism. It allowed a Bunchy Carter to emerge in LA, and a Fred Hampton to emerge in Chicago — and those things ended as they ended, but it raises (in my mind) a number of “what might have beens.”
And, it should be added, they were also inspired by international rev forces — China, Vietnam, Cuba, African liberation — that gave a powerful hopeful “dignity of actuality” to revolutionary nationalist movements around the world. And they were inspired by Mao’s remarkable work of popularizing core ideas of rev thought, organization and reliance on the people — which some of them took up, wielded AND MODIFIED as they developed their own conceptions and organizational methods. (While the RCP talks about the taking up of Mao, it is also worth noting that some in the BPP took up Kim Il Sung in opposition to Mao — and that this was one of the ideological struggles within their ranks, and between some of the BPP and their more Maoist supporters.)
It is a matter of “bar too high? bar too low?”
And while the BPP is an experience of sudden rocket-like growth…. it also showed the incredible problems of that kind of growth — because they had no core to hold it together…. and no time to develop one. And so they shattered as fast as they emerged (in fact were in some ways shattering even as they grew…)
BA’s conclusion from such experiences is that you need to form the core, and work out the program in great detail, and then promote the leader and his work as the unifying point for a telescoping.
But that approach (upheld in a sketchy way by DWTMI above) leaves out two necessary dynamics: ( a ) coming organically from within a new generation, and both learning from them, and that moment in the development of forms, styles and programmatic specifics, and ( b ) the necessity to build both a core and those organic links over time in creative ways (that can’t be reduced to indefatigable agitation that “we know the way out, get down with us and our main man”).
In short: the BPP experience shows both possibilities and problems BA seeks one resolution to that contradiction. And the debate on this thread is whether a different resolution — involving a flexible-but-focused rev core that connects organically with “the next event” that is emerging — is not actually the correct one.
redFlags said
Here’s a situation where the RCP’s position, I think, can only be understood in comparison to what else is going on.
Incremental approaches, in the strategic sense, were the pathway out of revolutionary politics. What Huey called “survival pending revolution” became more or less “suvival through grants and Democratic Party patronage”.
Seeing the danger in this, in the shop stewardization of militants and the rise of advocacy politics made the encapsulated error of proto-vanguard much more attractive than it would be in its own right.
The overwhelming error among communists and radicals has not been left sectarianism, but right opportunism.
Taking it even further, the strength of the RCP has been in not tacking to the prevailing winds through long periods of mass quietude and reaction, but keeping eyes on the prize.
Problem is, when the ideas becomes that it’s “all there for the taking” – the supposed duty of revolutionaries is to convince “the masses” to “take up” this ready-made structure without any material reason for them to do so. It’s disconnected from any understanding of politics as such, beyond creed and ideology. This is the basic meaning of the term sectarian… not just shoddy, shady behavior towards others.
When Lenin talked about fusing socialism with the workers movement, it wasn’t just a matter of convincing them that they had “a Lenin” – but that the goal of struggle and organization was to advance the socialist revolution and not merely win the incremental improvements in life that a capitalist system may (or may not) be able to deliver. It’s a change in the relations of production – work – and the relations of reproduction, which is to say culture, politics proper and all the way we administer our society.
All this “truth” talk the RCP puts out is secular gnosticism, a damning of the world that awaits deliverance through the one true path.
But let’s not gang up on the RCP for this error without putting it in the context of a larger communist movement that gave in to revisionist methods and abdicated their responsibilities. Avakian argued to keep on track, until sadly he decided the track just led to appreciation of his own self.
These twin, related errors are built into revolutionary politics. Even those who are aware of them will find themselves pulled one way or the other (and often both ways at once!).
Anon said
Yo Mod(s), correction needed:
“From Letter 3: Forays, Wrong Turns and Blacking the People”
TellNoLies said
I think Redflags is correct to regard these two types of error as profoundly related to each other. I think its a mistake to simply say one is the “main danger” or that one is the price that we pay for the other.
Both errors are predictable subjective responses to a previous failure to “fuse socialism with the workers movement.” It is hardly surprising in the wake of such a failure that a larger fraction of the movement would eventually throw in with the default reformist politics of the workers (and other) movements than with an increasingly isolated revolutionary posturing.
Indeed the simple characterization of these approaches as “errors” assumes that there was a more correct path there for the taking that everyone just failed to see. I think our approach should be more ecological: a recognition that in periods of retreat, functions that need to be coordinated within a unified revolutionary movement get divided up as things fracture, resulting in an ecology of simple organisms each with its own specialty (WWP does big national demos, ISO does campuses, the RCP talks to itself about revolutionary scenarios, etc…). What is needed is not simply to combine all of these functions in a single organism, but a genuine new synthesis that brings them into a new relationship with each other and, more importantly, with new forces.
Any revived revolutionary movement will take its energy primarily not from either of these two types of remnants from the past, but from something new. At the same time we should expect, encourage and welcome veterans from the last wave to bring their skills, experience, contacts and other resources to the next one. And we should expect folks who committed both types of “errors” to be part of this.
The people who became union officials, and non-profit staffers, who were to varying degrees drawn into the orbit of the Democratic Party, are neither homogenous nor immutable in their perspectives. Many are, no doubt, lost to any resurgent revolutionary movement, but we should be careful not to assume that this will occur automatically. When things jumped off in the 60s there were old CPers who responded defensively and others who became valuable resources for a younger movement.
For folks who were largely schooled politically within the RCP there is a profound danger in not being able to really see the potential that exists in folks that come from organizations that took a more reformist path. So what is the “main danger” for the movement as a whole may not be the main danger for the particular knot of people attempting to reconceive as they regroup coming out of the RCP.
I think the observation about the ecelecticism or incoherence of the BPP being an important part of its appeal as well as a reason for its failure is right on. This is not an experience we want to repeat, but we must become much more comfortable with unashamedly operating within a looser and more eclectic milieu and not knowing exactly how what we want will emerge from it.
Nando said
I have a question:
Does DMTMI literally mean to imply that “nothing more is possible right now” within the U.S. I.e. that the level (or non-level) of influence by the RCP over twenty years was “all that could have been done”? And that this is simply what “groundwork” looks like in a country like this?
If so, it raises some other questions:
1) Why did the RCP itself say differently in the 1980s, when they explicitly talked about “accumulating forces for the coming showdown.” Was that approach (of “accumulating forces”) wrong? If so how? Was it wrong to seek to develop thousands of organized ties in periods of relative quiet? Was the perspective of developing political base areas (which was elaborated in their theoretical work, including BAs, and a focus of their practical work) the same “flat earth” thinking that the 9 letters is accused of? And if so, where is that summation?
2) What about other countries where even under difficult conditions, a mass base had been developed for rev (and even rev com) politics? If revs from Turkey can build a mass rev movement among immigrants in Germany, why cant such a movement be build among immigrants in the U.S. from Mexico?
3) If it is wrong to expect anything but slow “groundwork” — how does that jibe with the RCP’s own view — that BA can be made a household name? Which is it? Is nothing more possible — or is much more possible?
It seems like DWTMI wants it both ways: Past failures are not really failures… but a great deal more remains possible just ahead, if c’s adopt the correct appreciation of BA.
My view is that objective conditions were very tough (and overall defining) but within that framework much more accumulation of forces and support was possible and is possible than is achieved by the RCP’s method and approach. (And that is, of course, the view of the 9 Letters too.)
chegitz guevara said
I find that with many of the generation of ‘68, their understanding of how social movements appear is totally rooted in that moment of time. And why not? It was an amazing, exhilarating moment. It was a time when, as one comrade told me, they could call a demonstration in the morning, thousands would show up in the afternoon, announce a meeting for the evening, have dozens attend, and by night, have four or five new members of the SWP. It spoiled them.
These comrades are so fixated on what happened then that they are unable to adapt to a different reality. Just like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, these comrades carry on a fantasy of returning to greatness.
Nando said
Well, that experience can seem misleading and useless in quiet times (including long decades of quiet times)….
But it can also seem like valuable experience to sum up, especially if things suddenly pick up in a new upsurge.
Getting too used to lack of response can leave you unprepared for those crisis when people suddenly show up in thousands and say “Ok, what’s next?”
[By the way that four new people would be in a party by nightfall, suggest a very low standard of admission -- to those unfamiliar with the SWP and its habits.]
Sean S. said
I really like what Nando and TellNoLies wrote, especially this bit in TellNoLie’s post (which connects, I feel, with his emphasis on the ecological, and connects with my own personal love of spontaneity);
“…with unashamedly operating within a looser and more eclectic milieu and not knowing exactly how what we want will emerge from it.”
I think this is where things should be going, even in this “down-time”, but especially when/if things do turn around, which will probably see a sprouting of a multitude of organizations and groups. The existence of such a multitude, I believe, expresses the kind of ideological and political interest necessary to get large segments of the population into the conversation of radical politics. I don’t believe any one organization can encompass this conversation, let alone moderate it, but radical progress will be strengthened by the inclusion of more voices, not weakened by it, even if things can get quite muddled at times.
Nando said
let me ask you a question about that:
Radical politics is not just a self-clarification process — it is also a politics of conflict with a powerful enemy.
I suspect we all have sympathy for the creative bubbling of “let many flowers bloom, let many schools of thought content.”
But the “quite muddled” can “at times” weaken not strengthen — in moments of test of strength, when actually grasping for something.
That was a fatal problem of the Paris commune — it was an acute and obvious problem in France May 1968 — because at some point radical politics is not just “this conversation” but a movement for power — facing a counterpower.
I see the need for both a “multitude” but also (through a process of sorting out, testing, winning over and the emergence of dividing lines) a fusion into a focused (if still complex) movement. One organization? well we know from history that even “one organization” (lenin’s? Mao’s? Prachanda’s) contain within them several organizations (one divides into two) — that unite, and then jump out, then unite again (or not)…. but that doesn’t mean that you don’t need “a center” at key moments (”general staff”?) — and that in turn has implications all along (not just at key moments).
Or?
TellNoLies said
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing against the importance of having a center. I think that revolutions always involve a dynamic interplay between multiple organizations, huge groupings of loosely organized folks and one or more centers.
I agree that on eof the big lessons of experiences like 1968 is the importance of having such a center. But it can’t simply be willed into being. It has to be forged out of a real upsurge. The 68ers (or at least some of them) sought to forge such a center for the next upsurge. Tragically, they failed. We need to hope that the rhythm will be different this time and that we’ll have an opportunity to build such a center before things play out. This is a critical task. But it is embedded in another task of nurturing a broader and looser milieu from which such a center might be coalesced when conditions permit. We can’t just assume such a thing will appear any more than we can assume a center will be organized. It is a voluntarist error, I believe, to think that the center can be created now, and one that will tend to replicate features of the RCP that many here find so troubling.
Sean S. said
Radical politics is not just a self-clarification process — it is also a politics of conflict with a powerful enemy.
I don’t disagree, but the individual self-clarification, to me anyways, is the only way the individual resolve can be shaped such that people do not become “fair-weather friends”, or only tangentially connected to a larger movement. I fear that people, in tumultuous times, become isolated very quickly and thus collapse under the strain.
But the “quite muddled” can “at times” weaken not strengthen — in moments of test of strength, when actually grasping for something.
I disagree, because I don’t see ideological coherence, or even a more centered planning apparatus, as equaling a resolve towards defeating reactionary forces. It MIGHT, and certainly it seems on the surface that tight-knit cadre organizations can present a seemingly intractable foe to conservative powers, but whether the threat it poses is REVOLUTIONARY or a mere nuisance/never ending stalemate is another question.
A real life example of this would be to me groups like the FARC and the ELN (without getting into their politics), which obviously have a well-organized military arm, but present no realistic threat to government power in Colombia, and haven’t for a very long time. Bourgeoisie groups like the ETA or the IRA are similarly structured; they probably won’t disappear anytime soon, but whatever every goals they have are effectively neutered.
So in that sense, I view the collapse of things such as May 1968 or other similar ventures like the Commune (be it any city) as better than the “grasping” of power that dominates many of the stalemated cadre organizations.
I probably also disagree insomuch as
Sean S. said
(got cut off)
I probably also disagree insomuch as to what, exactly we are talking about when we say “Grasping for something”. Are we talking about state power? Are we talking about the means of production, and thus the means to defend a revolutionary movement or deny reactionary forces the use of such things?
Jacob Richter said
The mere mention of the classic merger formula combining revolutionary socialism and the worker movement, as implied by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels but clarified in a “profoundly true and important” manner (and also in a rejected capstone manner) by Karl Kautsky in 1892, then taken to permanent memory and Russian application by Lenin, is a huge step forward for those acknowledging the power of this formula:
“In order for the socialist and the worker movements to become reconciled and to become fused into a single movement, socialism had to break out of the utopian way of thinking. This was the world-historical deed of Marx and Engels. In the Communist Manifesto of 1847 they laid the scientific foundations of a new modern socialism, or, as we say today, of Social Democracy. By so doing, they gave socialism solidity and turned what had hitherto been a beautiful dream of well-meaning enthusiasts into an earnest object of struggle and [also] showed this to be the necessary consequence of economic development. To the fighting proletariat they gave a clear awareness of its historical task and they placed it on a condition to speed to its great goal as quickly and with as few sacrifices as possible. The socialists no longer have the task of freely inventing a new society but rather uncovering its elements in existing society. No more do they have to bring salvation from its misery to the proletariat from above, but rather they have to support its class struggle through increasing its insight and promoting its economic and political organizations, and in so doing bring about as quickly and as painlessly as possible the day when the proletariat will be able to save itself. The task of Social Democracy is to make the class struggle of the proletariat aware of its aim and capable of choosing the best means to attain this aim.”