Re: On organisation

[Jurriaan Bendien <j.bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Lou wrote that we should study successes like the Bolshevik Party and the
>Cuban Communist Party, not failures like the Fourth International.

         Louis's attitude makes sense in one respect, in that we should
concentrate on studying what works and what is successful, rather than
studying what didn't work and what didn't succeed.
         But sometimes a "negative example" is also instructive, and anyway
none of the movements he mentions are wholly a success or wholly a failure.
I have mentioned already in a previous mail Trotsky's own assessment that,
without Lenin's presence in St Petersburg courtesy of the German army,
there would have been no insurrection, because the bolshevik leaders would
have stopped it. As it happened some of the bolshevik leaders (Kamenev
etc.) actually betrayed the time of the insurrection.
         The main problem with learning from the success of the Russian
revolutionary process 1917-1923 is that the real course of events is even
today still shrouded in myth. A romantic, sentimental view and stylised
facts persist.
         As regards the Cuban revolution, the Communist Party wasn't even
there at the time of the overturn of power.
         If it had not been for the existence of the Fourth International,
many of the people on this list would not even have known about classical
and revolutionary Marxism, nor about any alternative interpretation to
Stalinism and Maoism.
         The FI was successful in transmitting the Marxist heritage to a
new generation, including to revolutionary groups which became highly
critical of the FI, and which would never have existed, except for the
existence of the FI.
         In order to think in a way that is an alternative to the ruling
ideologies, we need alternative concepts, frames of reference, and
categories. Simply by supplying these, the FI was a success, even if it did
not lead a real revolution yet.

Jurriaan