Re: [Marxism] KUCINICH

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

mlause@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
>
> Bonnie's again assumes that contributing positively to politics requires not 
> only purity in one's present positions (which it doesn't) but a purity in 
> one's political past.

Part of the problem is an inability to draw a line between what can be
theorized (i.e., what remains fairly constant over different times &
places) and what requires responding to contingencies within a given
place and time. The Party can NOT be theorizied; a different party
formation and a different set of relations to "non-party" elements (e.g.
left bourgeois politicians, petty producers, other left parties) must be
worked out in each period in each nation. There simply is no model, even
a rough-and-ready one, of The Revolutionary Party. Lenin's WITBD makes
far more sense and is far more useful if one translates "revolutionary
theory" into "Revolutionary Thought adapted to conditions in Czarist
Russian in 1904." That will wipe out the temptation to borrow formulae
from it but still leave it as a document worth reading and thinking
about in terms of our own conditions.

Possibility: We support a given politician electorally depending on
whether or not she/he offers us enhanced opportunity to talk to an
enlarged circle of people. If the answer is it doesn't, then he/she is
no good regardless of how good his/her program is; if the answer is yes,
then the campaign is worth joining even if the particular politician is
90% a jerk.

Carrol


Carrol


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