Re: SWP

[rahul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rahul Mahajan)]

This is in response to Jim Miller's appalling post on the policies of the SWP.

To have a "Leninist" party in the U.S. today is a travesty of justice and
of common sense. Lenin himself, no great foe of absolutism, consistently
maintained in e.g. What is to be done? that the party structures and modes
of operation he advocated were required by the fact that Russia was a
police state and that sauch measures would neither be necessary nor wise in
a bourgeois democracy. To try to implement the same structures today in a
land where freedom of speech is guaranteed as nowhere else that Lenin did
in an autocratic state like czarist Russia is to abdicate any
responsibility to use your sense or your principles in the service of
Marxism. As a well-known Indian leftist once said to another, "Marxism is
no substitute for intelligence." In fact, all of the ISO members I've met
(they're affiliated with the SWP, right?) seemed quite unaware of this
fact. Nice people, but so naive.

Furthermore, the only possible justification for being able to place
arbitrary limits on one's members (to the extent of making them go work in
the factories) is that it is necessary for the revolution. Since the entire
left is so thoroughly marginalized that there is no prospect, however dim,
of such a thing, such demands are merely tyrannical and pointless, not to
mention that they seem informed by a cardboard version of Marxism that will
certainly never have any chance of success anywhere.

Last, it is clear to me that for any movement to have a chance in the U.S.,
it must have respectr for the rights of its members. To subordinate all of
their life choices , from the greatest to the smallest, to the "democratic"
decision of the party is a usurpation far greater than all those of the
government, GM, and Citibank together. Socialism is about enhancing
freedom, not repressing it.

Rahul Mahajan




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