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On 5/12/2010 5:46 AM, Virginia Brown quoted: > The fundamental reason that there are many socialist organisations is > that there are many different ideas about how to achieve socialism. Although it comes from Australia, I think the article's assertions aren't meant to illustrate some peculiarity of that country but rather to explain a general phenomenon. And as such, it is simply a statement saying that these "socialist groups" are sects that represent an idealist deviation from Marxism. Socialism cannot be achieved by the application of correct ideas; as Engels explains in an article he wrote while working with Marx on the Communist Manifesto, "Communism is not a doctrine but a *movement*." Or as Marx put it almost three decades later, "Every step of real movement is worth a dozen paper programmes." The program comes FROM the movement, it is a reflection or expression of the movement. All the rest of the argument presented is hogwash, and quite demonstrably has nothing to do with what is claimed, that this is an application of the same approach successfully used by Lenin & Co. Take, for example, the issue of what comrades should do in the unions raised by Allen Myers as justifying different groups. Can anyone cite ONE SENTENCE by Lenin before the October Revolution aimed at having the RSDLP or the Bolsheviks adopt a given tactic or measure in a given union situation, or explaining which candidates in a union election to back? Or a single RSDLP central committee or Bolshevik leadership discussion about what was going on inside the railroad workers or metalworkers or some other union? If Lenin and his friends didn't feel a need for the party to "INTERVENE" in unions and tell party members what they should do or not do, when they actually were an organization with a mass following whose views might REALLY have influenced what the union did, why do our micro-sects with literally several people who might even have heard of them in a given union local feel compelled to make medicine as if someone was taking them seriously. There's tons of stuff by Lenin on how social democrats should behave in the unions in general, their overall policy or approach, but *nothing* trying to cram tactics down people's throats, dictating what is to be done here or there. And this was a REAL party with hundreds of thousands of supporters able to win elections even under conditions of complete illegality during the deepest troughs in the movement. And it did not occur to ANYONE to think that there could be one and only one position on some practical issue among the RSDLP members in a given plant, union or other situation that had to be dictated or enforced from above. And mind you, their most influential leader wasn't the "Lenin of our times" that our groups suffer from. He was the real thing. And yet he didn't get unanimous votes in support of his position, not even in his own faction. Lots of times he even lost the vote. And sometimes he didn't even get to a vote. Like when he tried to have Zinoviev and Kamenev expelled for scabbing in October 1917 for writing in a Menshevik newspaper a criticism of an unpublished Bolshevik Central Committee decision which was obviously a decision to take power by force (since all other CC decisions were published). He said outing the CC decision that way was scabbing. But so strong was the Bolshevik norm (the REAL Bolshevik norm) that people were free to speak and write their mind, in private and in public, including criticisms of party decisions, that Lenin could not get a single other soul on the CC to back him. Our wannabe Lenins look into the mirror in the morning, ask themselves what Lenin would do, and then proceed to get unanimous support for even the most incredibly outlandish or stupid proposals. And then, once in a blue moon, the comrades realize the gen sec is a jackass, or the Pope in New York or London or even Buenos Aires attacks the local leader, and then 100% support turns into 100% opposition. Do I need to point out that something other than independent, critical and intelligent thought is involved here? And that the positions of a given group can and do change, and what is even more typical, simply drift as it reacts to the currents of bourgeois public opinion? That's one reason why all the stuff about "military discipline" and hard-ass Bolshevism is bullshit. Another is that it is simply a fabrication. Lenin and his friends never expelled ANYONE from their party before 1917. There was no need to, because they didn't have all sorts of "rules" and "discipline" that folks could violate. Even when Stalin went a little crazy and started knocking over banks and stuff, the RSDLP let him off the hook with a vague reproach for having misunderstood party interests or something like that. The case of Bogdanov, leader of the "ultimatist" wing of the Bolsheviks after 1905, is cited as an expulsion but this, I have become convinced, is a misunderstanding. Bogdanov was excluded from positions or leadership or influence in the Bolshevik faction by an ad-hoc body called something like the expanded editorial board of the publication Proletary, a Bolshevik organ at the time (1909). I mention it was an ad-hoc body to stress the largely unstructured character of the Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP. He was NOT expelled from the RSDLP, which the Bolsheviks were still part of at the time, nor really from the Bolshevik faction, as I don't think that is a meaningful statement since the Bolsheviks were not a membership grouping or caucus (and did not "officially" split until 1912 and only really fully became a separate, distinct membership organization from the Mensheviks after the February Revolution). All the sorts of issues that Myers cites to justify the maintenance of separate sects, or most of them, at any rate, are real issues. The problem is that nearly 100 years of experience (and in reality more, but let's stick just to what's been done in the name of "Leninism") has shown that founding your very own Church of St. Leon the Good, Martyr, or whatever other saint or pope your religion reveres, in whose services only the purest ideological incense may be used, does not solve the issues. Issues or problems cannot be solved merely ideologically, by stating or adopting "correct positions." They have to be worked through or overcome by going through actual experiences. And "correct politics" abstracted from real flesh-and-blood protagonists might make fascinating reading or powerful polemics. But when these are what passes for politics in some group, it is important to not forget that, at a very core level, such "politics" are simply not political. Politics is about social forces and layers in motion, not about "positions" as such, not even "principled" ones. Take, for example: is electing socialists the main or decisive thing? Myers raises it as one of the split-provoking issues and "traditionally," the answer of Trots, Maoists, Castroists & similar currents had been, no way. It should be pointed out that this was a *revisionist* answer that *directly* contradicted the position held by Marx and Engels. But that was the position. Well, it turns out that history has now shown pretty conclusively that Marx and Engels were right: It is a question with no a priori answer. Consider, for example, the case of Venezuela, where the main person elected, Chávez, wasn't even a socialist at the time he was invested with the presidential sash. Or the case of the Bolivian indigenous leader who came to the presidency utilizing the ballot status of the MAS, a split off from the Bolivian Falangists. Or the case of Ecuador, a third country in Latin America generally considered by those intimate with the region to belong to the "far left" of the continent. What is going on in those countries is a process of political evolution and maturation, not just of a top figure like Chávez, but of a social movement. [The character of these movements I've discussed extensively at other times and repeating those points here would take us too far afield.] For Marx and Engels, it was inside the expressions of the workers movement when it became a real social and political movement and through its experiences that the program of the proletarian revolution takes shape. That's why Engels was so critical of the socialist German emigres in the United States who stood aside from the Knights of Labor and the Henry George campaign in the mid-1880s. See, for example, his letter to Sorge: http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/marx/works/1886/letters/86_11_29.htm The problem NOW in the United States --and my impression is, also in the other imperialist countries, though perhaps not as acutely or completely-- is that there is no workers movement in any real social or political sense of the word "movement." Nor has there been one in my entire political lifetime spanning more than four decades. The history of the post-WWII labor movement in the United States is the story of it losing all attributes of a social movement and uninterrupted decline even just as a bureaucratic apparatus resting on a passive and atomized membership. Over the year, there have been various specific struggles and circumstances that went counter to the trend and pointed towards the reconstitution of a real labor *movement*. But invariably these have either dissipated or been diverted or defeated. Most left groups have refused to think deeply or at all about this reality. Quite common are facile formulations like waging a counter-hegemonic struggle or denunciations of the baneful influence of Stalinism and Social Democracy. But at some point this needs to be said without beating around the bush: the working class of the United States is not a revolutionary class. It does not cohere as a class. It does not demonstrate any tendency towards political independence. This is not some grand new theory. These are simply descriptive statements summarizing the post-WWII experience. And I believe the same sort of trend has been manifest in the other imperialist countries. Compared to THIS reality, the differences in positions between various groups are trivial, and given this reality, their insistence on maintaining separate mini, micro and pico sects is absurd. Joaquín ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
