The subject of "Re: the contribution of the communist party" brings out a lot of thought in all of us. I want to use what others have written to strengthen my own thoughts on the subject matter.
Charles Brown, Thursday, August 6, 1998 Of course the Party's "official weaknesses" should be honestly faced. But it would be a mistake to romanticize the party rank and file, and ignore the strengths, courage, commitment, dedication and correct thinking of the leadership as well.
Doyle More closely reflects my attitude than Doug’s toward lefties.
Louis Proyect Not only did Stalin do his best to persuade others to follow this model, he used state terrorism to eliminate those who refused to conform. In August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, Mrachkovsky and others stood trial. In January 1937, Piatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov, Muralov, Serebriakov and others faced charges. Marshal Tukhachevsky and a group of the highest generals of the Red Army appeared before a secret tribunal in June 1937. Finally, in March 1938, Rykov, Bukharin, Krestinsky, Rakovsky, Yagoda and others came before Soviet "justice". All of these individuals were leading Bolsheviks when Lenin was alive. Any one of them had more political experience, theoretical understanding and leadership qualities than any individual Marxist in the United States today. Soviet courts charged them with attempting to assassinate Stalin, restore capitalism, wreck the nation's military and economic power, and murder masses of Russian workers.
Doyle I think here Louis Proyect romanticizes leadership. The idea that the experience of people who lived through the Russian Revolution puts them above Marxist in the U.S. puts leadership above the movement. Brain talent exists everywhere, all the time and the development of individuals is specific to their historic place. If conditions were right here we would have the leaders. I am not sure that the term leader means anything here at all as Louis Proyect uses it, because we can’t discern how a party creates the leader, therefore we can’t step back from that practice and be critical in a more universal sense. One cannot mention Stalin without also seeing other Communist leaders who similarly have failed. The structure of leadership does not lend itself to insurance against such failures, and this is well worth tinkering with in this debate here and elsewhere.
Louis Proyect
Let us take a close look at Stalin's intervention into the American Communist Party in order to understand how unlike Lenin's Bolshevik party these Comintern parties had become. Let us review what Lenin understood as Bolshevism in the early 1900's: simply put, democratic centralism in action and a newspaper that allowed various tendencies within Marxism to contend with each other.
Doyle I am sure that if we could have more open expression of different thoughts the level of the debate over time would rise too. However, the level of the debate hardly reflects the practical nature of forming organizations. Organizations create the mechanisms which allow real activity to exists. Debate tendencies by themselves like so-called democracy in the U.S. do not insure power to the people.
Louis Proyect (subject: Re: Oct. 2-4 Conference Information) Thursday, August 6, 1998: This is a point that has been on my mind very much lately. Left-wing radicals and Marxists in the US have been saying for years that we are isolated because the US economy has been performing so strongly since WWII. If there was economic misery, workers would listen to us. This is a point that has been on my mind very much lately. Left-wing radicals and Marxists in the US have been saying for years that we are isolated because the US economy has been performing so strongly since WWII. If there was economic misery, workers would listen to us.
Doyle My own view is this is an exceptional time not just for us in the U.S. but for the world wide movement of the working class. We have the means to see that underlying forces in the working class to which Jim Heartfield mentions in my next quote can be harnessed to new organizational forms. If there is economic misery workers will listen to us. What have we got to say to them. Certainly not dogma will do. But what do we offer? What forms to suit their needs?
Jim Heartfield Thursday, August 6, 1998: The CPGB was central in promoting the policies of the post-war Labour governments amongst workers, forever drawing up plans for British Industry (again with the chauvinistic emphasis upon the British). This attempt to tie workers' interests to those of the national capital generally led to labour fighting with one hand tied behind its back, as the employers could always appeal to a strong reservoir of class collaboration - all courtesy of that peculiarly national-minded institution the Communist Party of Great [I'm not making that up] Britain.
The failure to relate to the new left in the sixties led to defections in droves. (I think you will find that homosexual communists in the US were kept in the closet, too, forming the Mattachine society as a respite.) In embarrassment the leadership created a grotesque parody of the politics of liberation that had passed them by. All through the seventies and eighties the CPGB conducted this grim charade of 'identity politics' which was a mediocre celebration of middle class consumption habits, leavened within utter hatred of the working class membership that they viewed as holding them back.
Doyle One of the primary ways we define working class is as a universal class. The Universalism of the working class is mainly a content empty means of describing how human beings currently relate to each other. We seem not to be able to go into consciousness as yet as a political movement. Anyway it seems to me that the mind is the next barrier for the left to go past. I cannot see how such concepts as a single human leader can survive in a system of world computer order in the human social system. Such things seem to me irrelevent to constructing society. Defies as it were what I think of as the network principles of human society. Regards, Doyle