Marv, Thanks for this. I want to take your last post seriously, as it expresses the most honest sentiment in this thread, and I agree we've narrowed the differences. The attrition is real. Far more have passed through our organizations than stayed. The confident forecasts were wrong, repeatedly, and a tradition that cannot say so plainly deserves the marginality it has earned. So there is no dispute about that fact. The dispute is over what the fact means.
Your explanation is that the cadres who left encountered objective reality in the unions and workplaces, recognized the workers' necessary caution before an adverse balance of forces, and adjusted. The turn away from the vanguard party was not accommodation to backwardness but an appreciation of constraint. I think this explanation proves too much. If exit were a rational adjustment to the balance of forces, the adjustment would look like sustained socialist activity at a lower temperature: reform organizing, union work, and patient education carried on for decades at the class's actual pace. Some of your comrades did exactly that, and I honor it. But that is not what the drain mostly looked like. Mostly it looked like an exit from organized socialist politics altogether, into private life, careers, and, at best, a ballot every few years. If the workers' caution were the lesson, the lesson would have produced cautious socialists. It produced ex-socialists. That pattern points not at the cadres' discovery of objective truth but at the sect form's inability to metabolize defeat. An organization built on the expectation of imminent vindication has nothing to offer its members when vindication does not come. The conclusion is not that the organization was refuted. It is that a particular form of it was, and that we need a form built to survive long unfavorable periods rather than one that promises they are about to end. That has been my argument throughout this exchange, and your attrition point strengthens it rather than answering it. Second, the threshold theory. You write that historical materialism convinced you the working class revolts only when it has nothing left to lose and is otherwise indifferent to calls for revolution, especially from outside. The second half of that sentence is true and important, and I will come back to it. The first half is empirically false as a general law. Run the cases. Russia in 1917 was not the immiseration of 1892 or 1921; it was war, state breakdown, and dual power, with the Petrograd metalworkers among the best-paid workers in the empire. Germany in 1918 was military collapse, not starvation alone. Spain in 1936 began as a defensive response to a coup. Portugal in 1974 came amid rising wages and a disintegrating regime. France in 1968 was the largest general strike in history at the peak of the postwar boom. Revolutionary situations are produced by the breakdown of the state's capacity and coherence meeting a class with organization and rising expectations far more often than by absolute destitution. Destitution alone, history shows, produces despair as reliably as revolt. And notice what the threshold theory does for the person who holds it. It is unfalsifiable in advance and exculpatory in retrospect. The class did not move; therefore, it had not yet reached the threshold; therefore, nothing was to be done; therefore, those who did nothing were right. The balance of forces becomes a fact of nature one reads off and defers to, rather than what it actually is: a variable partly constituted by organization itself. The German workers of 1918 faced a different balance of forces than they would have faced without the USPD and the shop stewards. Organization does not conjure revolutionary situations. It determines what a class can do when one arrives and whether anyone recognizes it as one. Related to this: you define revolt as implying taking up arms. That collapses the revolutionary process into its final insurrectionary moment. The mass strike, the workplace occupation, the soldiers' committee, the dual power organ, and the land seizure: most of the revolutionary process is not armed, and in the successful cases the armed moment was brief precisely because the unarmed process had already hollowed out the state's authority. Define revolution by the barricade, and you set the bar at a place workers almost never visibly stand, which then confirms that they never revolt, which then confirms the quietism. The definition is doing the argumentative work. Now the part of your sentence that is true. Workers are indeed indifferent to calls for revolution from outside and responsive to struggles for reform. Agreed without reservation. But then look at what you concede next: that reform struggles have sometimes proven to be steps along the way to the system's overthrow. Marv, that sentence gives away the store. If the reform struggle can become a step toward rupture, then everything turns on what carries the continuity between the two moments. What preserved the lessons of the last defensive fight, trained the militants, and kept the strategic horizon open so that when the reform struggle hit the limits of the system, somebody was there who had prepared for exactly that? Not the mood of the class, which is discontinuous. Not the spontaneous movement, which subsides. The answer is the organized socialist current inside the class's own movement. That is the party question, restated in your own words. You closed the door on it in the first paragraph and reopened it in the last. On your reply to Mark about entryism: here I think we are close. You are right that the expelled Trotskyists faced no good choices and right that the entryists who stayed were mostly absorbed. But the lesson cuts deeper than tactics. Both wings of the Fourth International withered, the entryists and the independents alike, because the tactical question was standing in for the strategic one that neither could answer: how a small propaganda current merges with the actual movement of the class rather than orbiting it. Entry versus independence was an argument about where to stand while remaining a sect. The problem was being a sect. That is not a criticism of the men who faced the choice. It is a reason not to treat their dilemma as the permanent horizon. We can only speculate about the future and act on our understanding. Agreed. My understanding is that the class will move again, on its timetable, around its own immediate concerns, and that whether the next opening becomes 1974 or 1919 or merely another entry in the ledger of defeats will depend in part on whether anything was built in the interval. Your experience tells you the builders mostly leave. Mine tells me they leave sects. The conclusion I draw is to stop building sects, not to stop building them. Best, Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42325): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42325 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119987077/21656 -=-=- 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
