Re: [Marxism] Re: Should socialists call for democratic structuralchange?

["rrubinelli" <rrubinelli@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

OK I lied.  I do that sometimes.  Last on this and I really mean it this
time.

Notice how Brian refers in Russia to what the working class parties
called for, and then uses that to justify similar demands in exactly
conditions where, by his own admission, NO Working class party exists.

And indeed, that is the issue, how exactly to create that working class
party:  that party that specifically raises the issues, explicitly poses
labor vs capital in its very existence.  No such party exists?  Maybe,
maybe not.  There is a Labor Party, largely dormant, but certainly it
exists and it has the beginnings of a network within the working class.
But that to one side, what's the point of creating mechanisms that have
an "implicit" working class content if there is not working class party
that it, the mechanism, advances?  If, in reality, those actions obscure
the antagonism of capital and labor, subsuming it under pre-existing
(and classically, in all senses of the word) bourgeois reformist
verbiage.

We do not again have to struggle for one person, one vote.  We won and
lost that.  And that is exactly what happens when class does not become
the explicit focus of the struggle.

The entire point of the history of the African American movement for
emancipation and the women's movement is not the demand for more or real
democracy, but that these are class based movements, at their origin, at
their unrecognized, unself-aware birth and development.

Its class vs. class.  Not truth vs. power.  Not "real" democracy vs.
bourgeois democracy.

I do not propose a maximalist program at all.  One simple step forward
is all I ask:  a party based on class, a labor party.  What Brian
proposes is one-step backward, which will inevitably be followed by two
steps backward, and the second step is the inevitable popular front.

rr


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