Re: [Marxism] Class, Party, and Organization

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dave Riley interprets my advocacy of a fundamental re-examination of what
tasks a political organization of the left should play and what it should
look like as follows: 

"Which I take to mean that we should all move to cyberspace and talk about
it. Just don't do that in real time under banner of being Marx(mail)ist. And
don't seize upon the tools you have already created. Dump those. Junk Green
Left Weekly. Forget about all the hard yards of experience earnt through
bitter struggle  ...and simply wing it while pondering the really really big
questions.

"The main thing is don't do a fucking organisational thing until you get the
formula just so (at least in your head)."

Curious that Dave Riley would feel so threatened by what I raised that he
responds with this kind of outburst. 

But just look at the figures presented by comrade Peter Boyle. The net gain
over the past 20 years of party building has been on the order of two
members a year. That is hardly a convincing case for a political strategy
that has as a central if not the central justification the accumulation of
cadre.

The point is not just to "do something" but to do things as effectively and
with as much impact as possible.

Dave adds: "Lenin's precept --taken from Napoleon --was "s'engage et puis on
voit'"(start fighting and then see)."

This was not Lenin's approach -- "engage and then we'll see." When everyone
was talking about the need to create a real party organization for the
class-political movement that was emerging in Russia around 1900, it was
Lenin who sat down to work out a detailed plan of how you could organize a
workers party under conditions of tsarist repression. 

Moreover, when the class party had shown itself to have become its opposite,
cover for the domination of the "bourgeois labor party" within social
democracy, it was Lenin who charted the course forward and worked out the
political and theoretical implications of the problem.

Political organization is a function of political tasks. What are the
political tasks in countries like the United States and Australia today? 

Dave Riley adds: "And the challenge confronting all certified Marxist groups
is to see beyond  the dead hand of the Trotskyist fetish with programatic
detail and propaganda."

I have no idea what Riley means by "the dead hand of the Trotskyist fetish,"
nor by "programmatic detail or propaganda." At any rate, I don't think
specifically "Trotskyism" is the problem but so-called "Leninism," the idea
that there is this universal recipe for political success, all you've got to
do is get yourself a Leninist Party, and if you build it, the masses will
come.

That is radically and fundamentally false. If you build it, the masses will
not come. The masses will throw up completely unexpected vehicles and forms
as they go into motion. The job of Marxists is NOT to explain which are the
wrong forms and provide the right ones. 

Joaquin



________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism