On Wed, Jul 8, 2026 at 10:11 AM, Mark Baugher wrote: > > We might write pamphlets in a code to avoid certain words or phrases. > Lenin referred to it as "Aesopian language."
The conflict between principles and tactics has always been an issue in politics and organizations in general, and not only on the left. I admire Lenin as a superb tactician who was prepared to temporariy retreat from his policies and principles in the interest of his ultimate revolutionary socialist objective. This would explain his recourse to “Aesopian language” when circumstances demanded it. It is the meaning I attach to “two steps forward, one step back". I seem to recall also that he somewhere wrote that “the only principle is that which moves the revolution forward”. Thw abandonment of War Communism in favour of the NEP and“state capitalism” was perhaps the most striking example of his tactical flexibility. As for Cannon, was it opportunism when he, Foster, and other leaders of the fledgling CPUSA decided to “Americanize” the party by shifting the focus from the Russian Revolution and Communism to the American revolutionary tradition and Thomas Paine as a means of connecting with the mass of workers who could more readily identify with it? It's well to remember that Lenin and Cannon were writing in the glow of the Revolution which drew a growing number of workers in the US and globally to Communism. That period has long since passed, and today both Communism and the USSR have been widely discredited by the victors of the Cold War and rejected by the mssses. Invoking that tradition is now plainly an obstacle rather than a bridge to transforming class consciousness. I learned to allude to public ownership under workers control when trying to persuade liberal and social democratic workmates and other interested parties to socialism. I employed Marxist and Leninist terminology in groups where it was understood and accepted by like-minded comrades and close contacts moving in that direction. More than a century following the Russian Revolution and 35 years since the collapse of the Soviet experiment and the withering away of Communist parties in the advanced capitalist countries, I’m even more hard pressed to understand why some small left-wing groups still persist in publicly identifying their organizations as “Communist” and prominently feature the hammer-and-sickle on the masthead of their publications. Those who regard it as a matter of principle to declare their affiliation so openly to a cause now widely percieved as alien would not IMO have won the approval of Lenin and Cannon and their comrades. I believe they would have seen the practice as an example of left-wing sectarianism further isolating these groups from the the working class and preventing them from acquiring influence at all stages of its struggle as a necessary prerequisite to leading it in a revolutionary crisis. This mattered less when there were mass Communist parties, as in Europe and elsewhere. The Trotskyist, Maoist and other splinter groups could comfortably reappropriate the name as did the the Ligue communiste revolutionaire, the FI's section in France. I now better understand why the Canadian section, the League for Socialist Action, and the US Socialist Workers Party, despite belonging to the same tradition, balked at following suit because of the stronger anti-Communist animus in North American society during and after the Cold War to which their labour movements were not immune. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42378): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42378 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
