Thanks for the reply, Marv. There are five points, and they deserve five answers, but I want to begin with your second one because I almost entirely agree with it and because you will need it again before we have finished.
On point 2: agreed, and for the record I, too, find your description of the Leninist model as conjunctural. The tight centralization and programmatic discipline correspond to moments when power is posed and to conditions of repression. A loose structure, decentralization, and full freedom of public expression for dissenting factions characterize open bourgeois democracies. Your comment about the sects getting ready for the revolutionary crisis, like fundamentalists getting ready for judgment day, is funny because it is true. And that is why it is exactly against the combat-party form, which is adopted out of season. It does not contradict my proposal, which is a political center, precisely because the form of the combat party is unjustified under present conditions. You have described the reason for the center form better than I did. I would also like to borrow one of your sentences. You write that even in its degraded incarnations, the model provided you and other young radicals with “the sustained activity, political education, and organizing skills so sorely needed today.” Hold on a second. Back to point 5, where it matters again. Regarding point 3: I am a member. The facts dissolve this incomprehension. I am a member of Solidarity and an editor for Tempest, so the case for a political center is being made there, not in opposition to them. The proposal is not a competing storefront on the fractured left; it is addressed to the existing collectives as its potential components. Regroupement is the opposite of sectarianism. A new sect subtracts. A center should be added by combining. So if it fails, it will fail within the organizations that you are telling me to join, where I am already a member. Point 1: History confirms the analysis. Two corrections and one observation. The little one, first. Shachtman and Joe Carter spelled out the Workers Party position, bureaucratic collectivism. The Johnson-Forest tendency, and later Cliff, took the position of state capitalism. These were rival theories inside and outside the third camp, not synonyms. It matters only because the history you tell is the one you say you have outgrown, and it demands exacting handling. Second, the bigger one. The irony is that Shachtman later went over to the American camp, but this irony is fatal to the third camp position. It's the reverse. Shachtman’s trajectory provides the best evidence for the tradition that campism is a failure mode in both directions, pulling defectors to Washington just as it pulls defenders of Moscow. That is why the Draper wing exists, the wing that didn't follow him. Nor do I regard Shachtman’s endpoint as an embarrassment to be explained away. We think it a proven forecast of the method: if you give up independent class politics as your criterion, you will end up in some camp. You didn't stop being a communist, on your admission, when the Soviet Union fell. You were caught by the other habit of the same method: reading every conflict off the map of blocs and then calling it class analysis. And that brings me to the amalgam. You accuse me of backing the “Ukrainian/NATO axis.” Campism never meant supporting one side of a war. It is the name for deriving one's position from a map of geopolitical blocs, rather than from class analysis and the national question. Solidarity with the resistance of an invaded nation on grounds of self-determination is a class position with a pedigree older than NATO. It commits me to nothing about NATO: no political confidence in the alliance, no endorsement of its war aims, and no illusions in the Ukrainian state, whose treatment of its own workers and conscripts I have criticized on this list. I can hold all of that at once since the criterion is class independence, not bloc selection. Your last post can’t. You summarized your position in four points: the first was a declaration of symmetry between two capitalist states; the next three were heavily biased in favor of one of them, on the buffer zone, on Minsk, and on who sabotaged what. The roof is the equilibrium. The load is on the camp wall. Nothing in the present post has shaken the wall. Regarding point 4, you have debunked your previous post. It was sectarian in the final round, because it would have probably excluded a majority of the anticapitalist left. The criterion appears to be faulty for this round, as it would include Mark B., David W., Charles A., and Hari K., comrades with various Trotskyist and ML persuasions. It can’t be too narrow or too broad. That flip is instructive in that it shows what the criterion really is, a threshold for common internationalist work, not a complete program. It allows for a politically heterogeneous membership, of course. This is the definition of a center, not a sect. The goal was never to make everyone the same. The goal is an organization whose members refuse to give political support to rival capitalist states and refuse to treat workers organizing under those states as regime-change assets. Disagreement beyond that line is fuel. On the DSA as a safety valve: There’s no binding, so the DSA hasn’t torn itself apart. Their factional freedom works in tandem with practical incoherence and with electeds who answer to no collective line. I have written at length elsewhere about that record. The key difference is between freedom of debate—which I affirm, and which your own point 2 affirms—and consensus in action on the questions that define the organization. DSA has the first and declines the second. The sects strangle the first; the second has none. The central tenet is that they are separable. Your point 2 already grants the premise. Point 5: you are arguing with someone else. You say, “No doubt, I subscribe to the crisis of leadership thesis. I don't, and this list has the receipts: my side of the exchange with Pröbsting is an extended argument against exactly that voluntarism, the wager of the Transitional Program, that the objective conditions are ripe and only leadership is missing. My premise is almost the reverse. Objective conditions set the upper limit. There is no organizational scheme that can create a revolutionary situation, and the Bolsheviks in Brooklyn are not going to stage a revolution tomorrow. Fully agreed. But the conditions are set from the top, not the bottom. If, when conditions move, there is anything else but a milieu with a treasury. What the organization says is the floor. And the witness to the proposition that organization is important below the revolutionary threshold is you, in point 2, giving credit to the party form for the sustained activity, political education, and organizing skills you yourself say are sorely needed today. That sentence is false. Suppose an organization produces nothing without a revolutionary crisis, then it cannot be said to be effective. If the sentence is true, point 5 does not work. Your fifth point will be answered by your second. The Bolsheviks of Brooklyn were not going to outdo their imitators in making a revolution. They would be good at all the rest: education, cadre formation, international solidarity, and the slow definitional work that cannot be done under fire. That work is the full content of the proposal. There is no day of judgment on the calendar. The floor is wet. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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