Re: [Marxism] "Leninism" and Scientology [was: Reflections on the “party question”]
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * It takes political conditions that have to ask "the party question" of us. Otherwise, it's entirely an abstraction of dubious meaning shared among a relative handful of people. We should keep the matter in mind, of course, but until there's serious movements (and I don't mean things that fall dead on their face because the Democrats ask them to), nothing is forcing an answer to that question. The American equivalent of the Chartists, the old land reformers merit consideration in this, along with--and, perhaps especially, the political abolitionists. After some initial false starts, these forces combined their efforts in a numerically small but broad electoral effort that denied both the Democrats and Whigs majorities in the wake of the Mexican War. Starting in New York and then in Massachusetts, they began what became an unraveling of the two-party system--that is, the legitimated the idea of not voting for either of the proslavery parties. The strength of raising the question of slavery in a political way became widespread enough that it posed "the party question" in a serious way. ML _ 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
Re: [Marxism] "Leninism" and Scientology [was: Reflections on the “party question”]
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Ooops "Fred's notes, correctly, that Occupy was a modern analogy (my term) to the Chartists. should be "...that Occupy was NOT a modern analogy..." 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
Re: [Marxism] "Leninism" and Scientology [was: Reflections on the “party question”]
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I applaud Fred Murphy's sticking to the political "issues" raised by the Protocol Son of this list (among others I think) and not making this an attack on Joaquin Bustelo usual ... attacks on "The Left". Fred is trying to rise above the obvious broad swash of Bustelo's usual written defecation on every thing and every one that constitutes defenders of building a revolutionary party or just wants to have a civil discussion on that, and other questions of relevance to his always ready target he describes as "The Left". I usually follow that model as well, though for Bustelo I make an exception. Fred's notes, correctly, that Occupy was a modern analogy (my term) to the Chartists. He is of course correct. Bustelo has a history of rejection modern day self-described vanguard parties. Certainly in part, for good reason, no doubt. But of course what Bustelo does is to pass onto everything *he* supports as the latest incantation of Karl Marx as if he is John the Baptist notifying the bewildered mass of the arrival of the Messiah. The theology for Bustelo, of course, is his prismatic view of Marx and Marxism. This was ever so laid at the feet of this lest years ago when he tried to argue that the Green Party US was the modern example of the building of a broad based workers party as Marx would of prescribed. Now once and debate the pros- and cons of any Green Party campaign on it's merits of course, but the real issue was the class nature of the GP in it's many manifestations. Bustelo would rain down his "Marxism" on anyone who disagreed with him as somehow "not getting it" and of course, the Green Party *is* a workers party because, after all, it is made up of wage earners, ergo the working class, ergo the political anointment of the Green Party as modern workers party. There is a history of part of Joaquin's style of polemics. It's basically the "fuck you" approach: be the most rabid and condemning of dissent from his views and one becomes irrelevant. Disagree with John on Jesus and you are heretically condemned. A few months or weeks ago it was his advocacy of working inside the Democrats a la Sanders which was Joaquin's "because that is where the struggle is at this moment" (pardon my channeling of him in paraphrase) and of course with the usually implication that this is where Marx would be as well. Joaquin ended that cute blog entry favoring Sander's quite FAKE "Our Revolution" with "But at any rate, I think that Marxists need to recognize the movement towards something akin to a social-democratic party that the "Our Revolution" faction of the Democratic Party represents, and figure out how to relate to it." -- https://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/04/sanders-make-democrats-party-of-working.html Now with Occupy. A non-party and certainly non-working class (as opposed to the Chartist *recognition* that is *workers* who need to be organized *as workers* in response to the rise of industrial society) inspired by the "Indiganato" movement in the Spanish State (we don't want the trade unions here, they are not important so go away) but nevertheless youthful inspiration of radical opposition to what was happening in society and certainly supportable (as it WAS) by most socialists I know but it was not a "working class movement" of the type Karl Marx talked about! Really, Bustelo, is YOU who needs to read up on the Chartist and stop projecting on to any thing that moves that it is the second coming of Karl Marx. Hats off to Fred...again. 'nuff said ... David Walters _ 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
Re: [Marxism] "Leninism" and Scientology [was: Reflections on the “party question”]
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Your main point is well taken, but the Chartists/Occupy analogy is a big stretch. The Chartists - described by Lenin as “the first broad, truly mass, and politically organised proletarian revolutionary movement” - persisted over more than a decade, presented a coherent program of democratic demands; organized mass strikes, marches and petition campaigns; and published a weekly newspaper, *The Northern Star*. Occupy ... well, not so much. In any case, we would do well to study the Chartists at least as closely as we do Lenin and the Bolsheviks. One place to start - http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2042-the-dignity-of-chartism-on-the-legacy-of-dorothy-thompson Go read about the Chartists which Marx and Engels hailed as the first > workers party and explain to me the difference between them and the Occupy > Movement. > _ 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
[Marxism] "Leninism" and Scientology [was: Reflections on the “party question”]
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * OK, So out of 11,287,933 vanguard parties from 1917 to 2017, four --or was it five?-- actually led revolutions that expropriated the capitalists. Unfortunately they turned into such complete catastrophes that working people acceded to return to capitalism. I wish fucking soi-dissant Marxists would take off a year or ten from braying about "the party" and actually read and study what Marx, Engels and Lenin (but not Trotsky, sorry, Trotsky was a Zinovievist just like Stalin circa 1925) actually said and thought about "the party." Starting with this: When Marx and Engels originally wrote about the workers forming their own party, political parties as we know them had barely begun to emerge and they were NOTHING like what we mean by "party" (even a bourgeois "party"). Go read about the Chartists which Marx and Engels hailed as the first workers party and explain to me the difference between them and the Occupy Movement. Marx and Engels were talking about the development of the worker's movement: a whole bunch of people who shared a similar disfavored position in civil society recognizing that reality and therefore saying, well let's change our status in society. It was a self-and-other recognized SIDE to a dispute or conflict, which emerged organically in the course of the struggle, not something that could be --absolutely the worst abomination of all-- "built." Talking about "the party question" as the Leninist left does is IDIOCY. There is no such question. It is CULTISM. The cult of the organization: "building" the party magically becomes an all-saving formula good everywhere for all eternity. This overarching fetish of "the party" abstracted from all time, place and circumstance, is a religious hallucination, a distilled, ethereal essence that encompasses everything from guerrilla bands to invading armies to national movements and we dump them all into "the party" category on account of in all these countries there are political struggles and that means political sides and political outcomes and if we want our side to win it needs a political expression, "the party." If you REALLY want to understand the ESSENCE of "the party question" as its been practiced in my experience, go look at Leah Remini's series on Scientology and the Aftermath. Because this sort of "Leninism" is RELIGION not Marxism On 5/16/2017 2:27 PM, Ken Hiebert via Marxism wrote: No party is perfect. Nonetheless, in the 20th century parties played a central role in every single liberation struggle and in the revolutions that broke most with capitalism. To be sure, these revolutions became ossified; they gave rise to bureaucratic regimes and then yielded way for the revival of capitalism. This had multiple causes that I can’t go into here. _ 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
