Revolutionary wishes for the Great October Revolution day.

If someone is considering a new push for power (or an insurrection) — that can’t be done from a “cold start.” There have to be rehearsals.

For one thing, the revolution’s leadership needs to gauge whether large numbers of people will answer their call, whether their own forces are mobilized and confident, and what the mood of all kinds of other forces is (the police, the middle forces etc.)

And also the apparatus of an insurrection has to be tested — do the street level cadre understand where the key government and military centers are, can they navigate the (often strange) city with numbers of forces, etc.

And there is also a process of testing the unity of the party — which might be united in one period around one program, but reveal major cracks if there are new risks and shifts in tactic.

It has struck me how many of the YCL organizers are former PLA commanders — apparently shifted from the cantonments to the capital.

And one of the things that might be learned from a “dress rehearsal” is that the forces are ready (or not ready). It is part of the decision and timing process. In 1917 there were three waves of Bolshevik street actions — in April (right after Lenin returned), in July (when there was a major mood of insurrection among the advanced in Petrograd), and then in October (when the insurrection actually happened). The first two were not that successful. But in September the major Kornilov crisis (and the later polling for the Soviets) convinced Lenin that the middle forces were swinging his way, and a new opening for insurrection was coming.

There is a bit of naive voluntarism in how such things are sometimes looked at: as if insurrection is just a decision of the leadership, and they are either for it (and therefore planning it ASAP) or they are against it (and therefore stalling). But there are real material factors to be weighed, measured, and transformed. And it all interpenetrates with the inevitable line struggle that accompanies any life-or-death leap.

“The new communist movement, for the most part, seems to stand in distinction to these groups though, in having drawing a clear line that the CPUSA was never really a revolutionary party.”

Brief factual note: I don’t think this captures the position of the NCM (new communist movement). However diverse the various forces were, they generally held that the CPUSA had been revolutionary — and then often disagreed from there.

In fact, there was a bit of a trend to pick a favorite early period of the CPUSA to emulate. (The October League and the RU generally embraced the 1930s CP — which was itself sharply divided into an early 30s period and a late 30s CIO period.) The Communist League (today LRNA) echoed back to the late forties left turn (the anti-browder days) as did Harry Haywood. PLP made the Flint Sitdown famous with Walter Linders widely read history of that CP-led unionization action.

In fact, my thought is that this approach to the CPUSA (which was overly imitative, not blanketly dismissive) was part of the problem: You couldn’t solve the real and mounting probllems of the 60s upsurge by going back to 1930s politics — both because the CP’s politics in those periods was not that great, and also because the solutions were not to be found through fidelity to an old event.

I also think there has to be a distinction between seeing the CP as “revolutionary” and seeing it as a model communist party with a correct strategy. The forces closest to the Panthers in the NCM (including Avakian) were often the least infatuated with the early CP, and the forces who had their own roots within the CP (Leibel Bergman, Mickey Jarvis, Michael Klonsky, Nelson Perry) were most mechanical in their “return to my favorite CP” reflexes.

It was one thing to say that the CP had a revolutionary period (which it did, especially before 1934), and to say it was a model to be imitated.

I wrote the main historical piece the RCP produced on the CP of the 1930s (posted here on Kasama as “Slipping Into Darkness: The Last Revolutionary Years of the Communist Party (1929-35)“). The very name “Slipping into Darkness” implies a periodization — i.e. the earlier revolutionary period, and the rising patriotism and social democracy of the post 1934 Browder/Dimitrov Popular Front years.

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”