Your reply is thoughtful, Mark, but... 1. It underestimates the allegiance of the peasants and workers to their homegrown Communist parties in suggesting that the assistance provided by the Soviet Union was the decisive factor in their liberation.
2. Except for the social democrats who were ideologically opposed to Leninism, all of the controversies you mention were debated by factions within the overall framework of support for the Leninist party and state. 3. They were also specific to the historical period when the prestige of the Russian revolution, the Great Depression, and the growth of industrial unionism combined to give rise to mass Communist parties, putting the issue of class power and the revolutionary overthrown of capitalism on the agenda. Given the stakes, they were inevitably bitter and often bloody. 4. These factional struggles are now mainly of historical interest following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of encouragement and support for revolutionary movements by the PRC. The present controversies which cross these old factional lines are now about regaining the confidence of the most politically advanced workers who support the bourgeois left-centre parties and incidentally whether a pre-party Leninist caucus would advance or retard this objective - the subject of the present thread. 5. What is most lacking in the spontaneous and episodic outbreaks of protest by today’s radicalizing young workers and students is the opportunity for sustained political activity and political education that many of us received in one or the other of the competing vanguard organizations a half century ago. 6. The drawback of these groups was that their internal regimes and program were still based on the earlier interwar period. They had limited appeal for the student New Left and organized workers during the more stable postwar period which contributed to their decline. 7. Hari’s pre-party Leninist model, as he described it above, impresses me as a more open and less rigidly dogmatic one suited to the current level of class struggle. As on marxmail, I see no reason why it could not allow its members to discuss the Trotsky-Stalin dispute, the DSA, Ukraine etc. without provoking the vicious and violent splits of the past. Unlike an email list, these differences could be tested in practice. At least, I think it would be worth giving it a try on the understanding nothing to lose and a world to gain. Charles complains: " All this commenting on Leninist parties ... but no one has grappled with Lenin's arguments in What Is To Be Done? *He* lived what he wrote.” No need to grapple with his arguments since no one here AFAIK disputes what he wrote or how he lived, only how his legacy was later used and abused by the factions which claimed it. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40833): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40833 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117948992/21656 -=-=- 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
