Re: [Pen-l] The fight in the SWP, conclusion (What kind of party we need)

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:
> 
> On Christmas day, Joonas Laine, a Marxmail subscriber from Finland,
> raised some interesting issues as a comment in my response to Alex
> Callinicos:
> 
>  [clip] Also I?m not sure how Louis sees the issue of
> ?professional revolutionaries?, i.e. people getting paid by the
> organisation to do political work for the cause.

As various writers have pointed out, this was NOT Lenin's meaning when
he used the phrase (in the Russian language of 1904) "professional
revolutionaries." He did NOT mean full-time revolutionaries. He meant
ordinary workers who kept a job and supported themselves BUT in their
approach to politics, to revolution, adopted a "professional" attitude:
they trained themselves, they took politics as something one had to give
full attention to (during the hours that one was devoteing to it). This
has become distorted to mean what should be called, not revolutionaries,
but "Party Staff," who might or might not be professional
revolutionaries but who carry out technical assignements from the party
membership (like mainatianing maillists.)

Whatever concept of party (or movement) organization we adopt this
distorted sense of professional revolutionary has to be gotten rid of.

Carrol

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