> On Jan 11, 2025, at 7:09 PM, David Walters via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> You missed my point Mark. Yes, the 10th Party Congress about the same time as
> the Kronstadt rebellion. My point is that neither the Workers Opposition nor
> the DCs had any sympathy for them despite similarities between what the
> Kronstadters were fighting for and the WO/DCs were advocating. Yes, both the
> WO/DCs were IN the Communist Party (no longer called Bolsheviks) and the
> Ksronstadters even included some of the Bolshevik Red Army cells, were
> basically outside the CP.
I didn't understand why you would ask me about the DC and WO. I agree that they
did not want to be associated with a movement that was outside the party, which
seems to have adopted a "them versus us" frame of reference where the "them"
were non-party and independent-minded workers. I think the reaction to the
Kronstadters from the RCP leadership, notably Lenin, resulted in a new type of
"Leninist" party that was based on a top-down command structure, internal
suppression of speech, membership purges, politically-motivated trials, and
executions.
>
> I think the ban on factions, supported by Trotsky, was a mistake.
In retrospect, he was building his own scaffold.
>
> The key thing, I think, in the telling of the program of the Kronstadt
> rebellion was over the monopoly of politics over the working class that was
> key, especially in hindsight. At the 10 Congress, Trotsky in one of his
> speeches, noted that it would be "insane" (his term) to advocate ending this
> monopoly.
Pirani wrote that "Marx’s phrase, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’,
stripped of its context, was misused to justify the drastic expansion of state
power." Marx used "dictatorship of the proletariat" as an historical category
rather than a particular type of government structure. It somehow came to mean
having a state run by a single party, the one and only vanguard party, which
was, more often than not, led by a single individual.
>
> The historical question is how did it get this way? From soviet democracy (of
> which there many issues in and of itself, another thread for sure) to one
> party state and the fusion of the party and state. I think this is important
> to discuss because of an issue I learned from scanning the 5 volumes of
> Trotsky's military writings for the MIA.
What issue is that?
I think this is a crucial question for us. We witnessed the organizational
failure of Trotsky's US party, the SWP. I wonder how much of the sorry state of
the US left today is due to bad organizational precepts and how much to
unfavorable historical forces?
Mark
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#34560): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34560
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/109913252/21656
-=-=-
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.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
