Re: Barnesite Dog and Pony Show

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

One more note for Derrick and those interested, and I understand many
comrades won't be and that's fine. Frankly, some of the more academic
discussions around the TRPF (did I get the acronym right?), anthropology and
so on have the same effect on me, so I certainly sympathize with those who
may express dismay at yet one more SWP post and cheerfully invite you to NOT
do what I do, which is try to slug through the discussion, but just to move
on to the next post.

I wanted to point Derrick and others that might be interested to something I
wrote in 1999, when I first strayed across this list, a long post called (by
Louis, I think, it was in the days when he manually put together the online
"journal" of the list, later replaced by automated archiving) "Reflections
on the decline of American Trotskyism," whch can be found in the list
archives here:

http://www.marxmail.org/archives/July99/reflections_on_the_decline_of_am.htm

That post was written completely from memory --it was only afterwards that I
went back to verify dates and references-- so it is a little less precise
than one might wish. But it was the product of several different attempts to
write essentially that piece, the first ones dating from 1993 or 1994,
before even having any realistic chance of getting at least a handful of
people to read it.

The first drafts were written for myself, mostly, with this sort of idea in
mind: what would I have sent to Fred Feldman, Aníbal Yáñez, Fred Murphy,
Mike Baumann, Tony Thomas, or a number of other comrades if somehow I got in
touch with them by email around that time, found them on compuserve by
chance, or just ran into them in the street?

I reread it just now, and was struck that not just the general thrust of the
argument, but even certain turns of phrase are in the post I wrote back
then, based on things I'd written five or six years before, and they also
appear in what I wrote over the past day or so, not having bothered to look
at the older material at all.

But it also has a fair bit of narrative of what the SWP was like in the
70's, which I alluded to in my new post, and you might want to check it out
for that reason.

The discussion in the thread that follows is also quite interesting.
Unfortunately, some key contributions in parallel threads --Louis's essays
on the Cochran fight in the early 1950s-- have gone 404. I *hope* they
haven't been lost, for as I remember them, they helped me see a side of the
party's trajectory in a much different way.

Together with the post on the SWP's evolution, I wrote at the same time
another essay really on what the SWP called the Leninist Strategy of Party
Building, which reflects overwhelmingly the lessons I drew (eventually) from
my studies of Marx and Engels's political trajectory at the SWP leadership
school in the first months of 1980. It is here:

http://www.marxmail.org/archives/July99/organizational_flexibility_in_bu.htm

Like the SWP post, it was written entirely from memory, and as in the case
of the SWP essay, there are imprecisions. In particular, the history of the
Communist League was a more complicated than I present it there.

I remember writing the post with particular relish, as what I intended to
say was total heresy to anyone trained in any variant of the Communist
movement in the previous half century or more. I *think* I may have been
emboldened by reading between the lines of what Louis had written about the
Cochranites, but I don't believe I realized then, at least not fully, that
Louis and some others had come to very similar views as my own (although
perhaps he has a different take on the similarity of our views on this and
quite a few other questions than I do). I conveniently summarized the main
conclusions in a couple of paragraphs at the end of that post, and I'll
reproduce them here for a reason I'll explain below:

*  *  *

To summarize: the example of Marx, Engels and Lenin, as well as their
writings, teach extreme flexibility in organizational forms, to the point of
maintaining NO organization whatsoever. And they specifically resisted the
temptation to set up "ideologically pure" grouplets, preferring instead to
work in broader formations -- sometimes mass organizations, sometimes big
workers parties, sometimes vanguard workers organizations the majority of
whose members and leaders were not Marxist, sometimes armed formations. For
long years their political work was strictly literary, and --Marx
especially-- resisted all entreaties to become involved in the "practical"
"party-building work" of developing a microscopic nucleus into a miniscule
one. Yet their very first organization -- the Communist League -- certainly
was a small, programmatic nucleus.

You might conclude from this that Marx and Engels, and Lenin, were total
impressionists on the organization question, randomly adopting first one
approach, then another. The opposite is the case. At each and every stage
they examined the question of organization on the basis of fundamental
principle. The important thing for them was NOT what kind of group they
should build, but what organizations was the working class creating as it
groped its way towards political class consciousness. Whatever its form,
That's the organization they joined and tried to influence.

*  *  *

I was moved to quote this especially by the parallel discussion underway on
the list about the Nicaraguan revolution, the Simón Bolívar Brigade, etc. It
is really, from my point of view, the SAME discussion.

And the heart of it is this: are you setting out to build a party? Or are
you setting out to be part of a class movement, and even aspiring to be in
the first ranks of that movement? Traditional "Leninism" (not that I believe
for one second this is genuinely what Lenin thought) says that by doing the
first, you accomplish the second. I believe that history shows otherwise.

The tale of the SWP has been told in a hundred different languages with a
thousand different names. There probably isn't a single country on the face
of the planet where not once but a dozen times at least, leftists haven't
set up party nuclei with the concscious goal of building a party like the
Russian Bolsheviks. And after nearly a century of trying, every single
attempt has failed, save, arguably, for three or four cases in the Third
World where that "Leninist" party became the vital core of a movement for
national redemption -- precisely what Lenin's party was NOT. Because, of
course, Russia was an oppressor, imperialist nation, even if a backward one
that itself was victimized by bigger imperialist powers, and not a colonial
country.

My conclusion was that Engels and Lenin's approach of joining and building
the organizations through which the most conscious elements of the working
people were groping towards political class consciousness was correct. The
post-Lenin "Leninist" fetishization of what people imagine were the specific
forms this assumed in Russia early in the 20th century, the attempt to
replicate the Russian "model," is a mistake.

I'm not sure who said it first (if someone knows I'd appreciate finding out)
but in Spanish there is a saying that goes something like, "Toda revolución,
para que sea genuina, debe ser inédita." (Every revolution, for it to be
genuine, must be unpublished, i.e., original).

José




----- Original Message -----
From: "Derrick O'Keefe" <sankara83@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2002 4:02 AM
Subject: Re: Barnesite Dog and Pony Show




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