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On 30/11/2014 17:01, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: > Our job as Marxists is simply to form the left wing of new formations > like Syriza or Podemos to keep them honest. As I said to someone on FB > complaining about Podemos moving to the right, there are 900 constituent > local organizations of Podemos. If only a third were ready to break with > the group because of such compromises, that would be a much more > significant opposition to the neoliberal state than the sects. You keep singing the same song about anglo trot sects, which is completely inapplicable in the spanish political context. Far be it from me to tell people whether they should form the left wing of Podemos or not, but there's a perfectly functional communist party on offer. > If you are determined to be protected from reformist germs, the best > thing to do is declare yourself as a vanguard party and hand out > leaflets denouncing the existing movement. No-one, or no-one of note, is doing this in the Spanish context. These proxy fights about whether Canon or whoever was sectarian or not played on foreign political orgs are really useless imo. > opportunity for Spanish > Marxists to challenge the two-party system. From everything I have heard > from Marvin over the past decade or so, he would be oriented to the > PSOE. No thanks. How is it unprecedented? I'll point out the last elections that have taken place in Spain, this would be the European ones a few months ago, IU rose very significantly and obtained more votes, and seats, than Podemos, for which it is hard to extrapolate actual likely electoral results given how they have, essentially, no history. The two-party system is fatally wounded in any case (not that it ever was a proper two-party system as such) and whether Podemos existed or not is of questionable relevance to this fact. The national foundational myth of the democratic transition is leaking all over the place under the weight of corruption scandals from top to bottom affecting all possible magistratures of the state and the inequity of people without homes and homes without people, supermarkets and restaurants throwing food to the garbage and people in hunger, and actually being fined for resorting to thrown away food. Podemos starts with an advantage that contains its own disadvantage: it has no history. There is no organisation, no past errors to apologise for or explain away, no people with decades in institutional positions or potential corruption scandals. By the same token, there are no experienced cadre, no significant local organisation and all but a skeleton national one; no institutions, no party discipline, no clear boundaries on the party's policies or programme. It is also a completely electoral platform (while IU/PCE do significant work in the anti-eviction struggle, or carry out expropriations of food from supermarkets). This is not necessarily to say that Podemos is useless or bad or any such. But it's not the first time that there's a leftist mass party in the country, and it's to be seen to what extent it can effectively fill this role. --David. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
