Re: [Marxism] Rosa Luxemburg on present-day sects
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. * Interesting. Rosa herself was not about the sectarian squabbles herself. She exhibited the same straitjacket nonsense she accuses the PPS of. The latter of which had a far bigger and wide ranging discussion as one sort of issues. If you tried to raise the issue of an independent Poland, you'd be out on your ass quick enough from her group. Moreover, when the Iskraists and others were trying to form an All-Russian (which included Poland) workers party (this became the RSDWP) she infamously kept her sect out of this important formation to remain isolated from the working class she claimed to be part of. Just say'n she was not about sectarianism herself... David Walters _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Rosa Luxemburg on present-day sects
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. * For the most part, this does not conform to my experience in Canada, in the League for Socialist Action (beginning for me in 1967) and later the Revolutionary Workers League. I can think of rare instances when we were discouraged from buying the paper of another group or attending the public meeting of another group. But these were exceptions. A few summers ago I was chatting with a comrade who was in the LSA with me. After a glass of wine she confessed to me that in the branch meetings decades ago, whenever I stood up and remarked on what another small left group was saying or doing, she would roll her eyes. But that was it. No one approached me to ask me not to make these remarks. ken h _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Rosa Luxemburg on present-day sects
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. * Rosa Luxemburg's words back in 1906 remind me of today's Leninist sects: ‘The PPS went to great lengths never to expose themselves to a discussion with their adversaries before the working masses, making every effort to avoid it, so that the masses would not hear any criticism of their program. Indeed, as such critique only led to factitiousness, then it was lost time. Workers who were members of the PPS were not allowed to bring the publications of other parties into the organization. They were supposed to believe what the PPS said, just as devout Catholics are supposed to believe what the church teaches. Just as churches expect their “little sheep” to believe in the shepherd’s words and not talk back, so the PPS instills in the masses certain ideas, as articles of belief, using every means in its power to prevent members of the party from encountering the arguments of adversaries, denouncing every difference of opinion in the ranks of their party as disorganization and factitiousness, and attempting to form not a cadre of conscious, critically thinking workers, but a church of believers. They made fanatics of their supporters, enveloping their minds with a cloud of beliefs so dense that no light could shine in. Their work was not to raise workers’ consciousness, but to distort their minds.’ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
