Re: Local/International Organization

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 11/2/03 4:48:05 AM Pacific Standard Time,
MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

As to the Fourth International, we're discussing an interplay of ideas
unbounded by the pull of comparable kinds of mass constituencies.  In
defense of its founders, they never intended it for such a course.  They
expected that the emerging conflict of World War Two would discredit the
Third International as thoroughly as they believed World War One had
discredited the Second International.  Not only did history show this to
be mechanistic, but it raises question about both the extent to which
the Second/Socialist International had actually been discredited, the
justifications for a Third/Communist International, and the value of
imposing a single form of organization on the struggle everywhere in the
world.

Solidarity!
Mark L.


Comment

My readings of the Comintern documents on organization and Lenin's comments
on the Russianization of the experience called Bolshevism leads me to the
following conclusion: what was sought was not a single "form" of organization 
but a
"single" content of organization. This is easy for me to say as a third
generation communist with some experience as an elected trade union leader and
party leader. I was never a functionary or administrator, except in the sense 
that
I chose to work in the propaganda apparatus.

My own personal belief has always been that the donations given/diven to an
organization should be 90% invested in the organizations purpose and no more
than 10% in administration. Organization is not abstract.

I have J. Peters "The Communist Party: A Manuel on Organization" - 1935, in
front of me and as a historical document it is without peer in America. From my
standpoint the role - function, of each International within the Marx
framework contained its own internal limitation. This internal limitation can be
defined from many points of views, but I tend to view the internal limitation on
the basis of the curve of development of bourgeois property and industrial
society.

We abstracted from the Comintern documents industrial logic and the culture
(small "c") of Bolshevism. Bolshevism arose as a complex of tactics and
strategy employed in the fight to carry out insurrection - not social 
revolution, by
Russian communists. The sum total of the tactics and strategy deployed by the
victorious communist in Russia was called "Leninism."

In America the communist were organized as what we would call a "federation"
without a clear conception of the state, class, revolutionary insurgency and
contained large doses of anarcho syndicalist politics and ideology. Uniformity
or standardization of communist groups in at least the advanced imperial
countries - America at any rate, meant the forced destruction - dissolution, of 
the
language press. This was not bad considering the fact that the forward moving
section of the workers basically spoke English and Spanish as a secondary and
primary language.

What faces the revolutionary is practical questions. From this point of view
the Comintern was an attribute. The down side was not the codification of
doctrine but how individuals and organizations historically applied Bolshevik
culture.

The individual is endowed with gray matter - brains, to come to their own
conclusions - right or wrong, and this must never be forgotten. There exists a
historical context for individual decisions.

I have never understood why some comrades place the history of American
communism in a framework that says we were loyal lackeys of Moscow, wherein 
people
thought out the international alignment of class forces and made decisions
based on their understanding.

I tend to view the context of Marx and Engels fight to form a First
International different from the fight to form a Third International because 
the world
class alignment had changed.

Melvin P.


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