Re: [Marxism] Class, Party, and Organization

[Ben Courtice <benj2006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joaquin Bustelo wrote:

"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."

And then he wrote:

"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."

I think there is an implicit contradiction between these two statements.

The first point is put incorrectly: Lenin's approach was not as blunt as 
"engage and then we'll see" but that was certainly an important part of 
it. This is because Lenin recognised, as events unfolded, the validity 
of the second point Joaquin makes. Obviously we shouldn't be blind to 
taking advantage of every turn the struggle takes and every new 
invention of the workers in struggle. Nor should we ignore the theory of 
examining the overall tasks for the working class of our given 
nation-state and theorising the best way to move forward either. In 
other words, you can't guarantee you will unite [with] the masses just 
by building an organisation, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't build 
an organisation! It just means you have to be flexible.

I think there's a danger for a small group of socialists to get stuck on 
the basic accumulation of cadre, and the ABC-of-Marxism politics 
necessary to train new socialist activists, and testing out that 
training and ideas, without turning their new activists outward beyond 
history and historically generated theory such as the rather 
metaphysical theory of party-building. On the other hand, those outside 
a group can easily ignore that bread-and-butter educational work and get 
carried away with looking at the big picture, or at least with trying to 
see it. You can't do one without the other else you drift into abstraction.

Ben Courtice


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