>>> "rc-am" <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 09/02/99 08:42AM >>>
(this was what i'd written, but perhaps lew got there first already.)
Chaz cites the _manifesto_ further:
" The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other had, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletariat movement. "
and reads it as:
>This is a direct statement of their conception of the Party which is
similar to Lenin's, contra yours, on this thread. The party is
"theoretically" or intellectually the leadership of the class as a
whole.<
Angela: "most advanced and resolute" and "clearly understanding" is indeed a reference to 'consciousness',
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Charles: You don't address the word "theoretically" . It directly implies intellectual leadership.
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but they do not say, as Lenin said in _wtbd_, that the party is a group of "ten wise men" who are petty bourgeois intellectuals.
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Charles: You must be pulling my leg. Please cite passage in _witbd_ that uses these exact words. This is your misinterpretation. Give me a break. "Ten wise men". You must be thinking of the Biblical story of the Magi.
Secondly, Lenin does not say that the party is entirely composed of petit bougeois intellectuals. Ask Gus Hall. In fact , Lenin says the goal should be about 20 workers per intellectual.
The problem or puzzle that this whole issue is trying to get around is the gap in consciousness of the working class that is the result of the ancient antagonism between mental and physical labor must not be allowed to prevent the working class from carrying out its historic mission. So, there has to be an ongoing part of the revolutionary process that makes up for this gap, a rapid transfer of the important elements of consciousness that communist intellectuals such as Marx and Engels became conscious of first because they are in the intellectual section of the division of labor to masses of people. The working class must be made class and socialist conscious. The idea is not a permanent petit bourgeois composition to the party. Actually carrying this out in fact is frought with all the difficulties that subsequent history has demonstrated and all that one might expect from any trial and error process, including enormous failure, as has been reached at this point in the strug! gle for this.
Lenin never promised you a rose garden.
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this would be to render null and void, as lenin did, the insistence that only the working class can emancipate themselves. and, nor do they say that the communists are the leadership of the class as a whole, they say they are a "section which pushes forward all others", and the difference in the practical implications of the two can be, and has been, immense.
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Charles: If the class has leaders at all, would they be leaders of "part of the class" ? Of course , leaders of the class means leaders of the class as a whole. Otherwise you invite a disunity that is exactly the key to the tiny elite of the ruling class continuing to rule over the working class: divide and rule.
You don't think the class should have leaders, petit bourgeois intellectuals or otherwise.
you accused me of slandering vlad when i wrote of his theory of the party. here's the citation again: "The history of all countries shows that the working class, *exclusively by its own effort* is able to develop *only* trade-union consciousness... The Theory of Socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by *educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals*... in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social Democracy arose *altogether independently* of the spontaneous growth of the working class movement; it arose as a *natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought* amongst the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia" (my emphases).
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Charles: So what ? The passage you quote does not support your characterizations of Lenin in your previous posts. You have not refuted the idea that full socialist consciousness cannot be spontaneously developed by the working class without it being brought to the working class by intellectuals such as Marx, Engels and Lenin. Seems to me that Lenin did a good job of that. Marx and Engels did not do a better job of that than Lenin, as your whole argument implies when you claim Marx and Engels had a different, better, more democratic, non-intellectual theory of the Party than Lenin. I say Lenin followed Marx and Engels teachings on the Party, a locus of interaction between intellectuals and workers, and creatively developed them (the opposite of a dogmatic approach) ,and was more successful than they in making masses of workers working class and socialist conscious, not only in Russia, but all around the world. Given this, your whole rap about Lenin having an elitist version and!
practice of the Party is slanderous.
Charles Brown