For most aspiring vanguard party builders, the Bolshevik Party serves as a kind of gold standard worthy of emulation, even if the actual historical experience of that party remains far removed from contemporary versions of that history which tend to project back into the early 1900s patterns of behavior that would Lenin himself would have never recognized.
Perhaps nothing is more essential to the task of building a new “Bolshevik” type party than a newspaper that will promulgate the party “program”. When James P. Cannon returned from Moscow in 1928, he resolved to create a new communist party that would be true to Lenin’s vision. Nothing was more necessary in that process than creating a newspaper based on a revolutionary program. Wasting no time, Cannon launched the Militant. That newspaper was seen as in the tradition of the Bolshevik press but the actual living history of the Bolshevik press had little to do with Cannon’s idealized version. As is so often the case, idealized versions of Bolshevik history can get the contemporary left in all sorts of trouble. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/07/16/bolshevik-newspapers-myth-and-reality/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
