RE: [Marxism] Marx and Engels on the need for independent socialistgroups

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

acpollack writes, "The conclusions of this article, which summarizes the
lessons learned from the revolution of 1848, stands in diametric
opposition to the position Joaquin has been arguing based on quotes from
Marx and Engels which in this piece they repudiate."

This is some dialectical leap! According to acpollack's interpretation,
this was a recantation of the approach they took in 1848 as Engels
explained it. The only problem is ... Engels wrote his articles
explaining what they did some three and a half decades AFTER this
supposed repudiation of the political approach he specifically endorses
in the articles.

The more interesting point to ponder is the comrades concluding from a
general argument about the need for the working class to achieve
political independence that *therefore* the dissolution of the Communist
League in 1848 was wrong.

There is an identification, an equal signs, between organizing a group
around a socialist or marxist program and the working class becoming
organized. This is the idealist error that I've been harping on, and is
the core idea of what in the SWP was called "the Leninist Strategy of
Party Building." Organize a group around the correct program and the
masses will come. 

In real life things don't work that way, not on a mass scale. The masses
absorb lessons from having lived *through* an experience. That's why
Lenin proposes the tactic of "critical support" to bourgeois "workers"
parties. And you can see a brilliant application of this concept in the
first months of the Cuban Revolution. The simple fact was that the most
direct way to breaking the illusions of the masses in petty-bourgeois
democracy in Cuba was to put its leading politicians in charge of the
government and then organize the people to demand that they carry out
the revolution.

Joaquín



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