>You can make an argument for a libertarian communism, but you
>cannot make Marx make it.
You can make Marx make whatever argument you want, Jim, as I'm sure you well know (he wrote and said different things at different times, and you don't have to be a Derridaean to allow for polysemy). And Engels wasn't Marx (as you've often had occasion to remind us in the past) - what about Marx's speech to the Den Haag convention in 1873 (?). Nothing there about the 'rifles, bayonets and cannon' so beloved of Fred the general.
>And this is all really that Lenin means by the party. The party is the
>highest level of consciousness in the proletariat. It necessarily must
>abstract itself from the mass as a party, to hold up a mirror to the
>masses. And all this is so because the ruling ideas of each age are the
>ideas of the ruling class, and working class consciousness, by contrast
>is fragmentary and differentiated.
For Marx, it was clearly the party which rejected the capitalist/proletarian relation altogether that was at 'the highest level of consciousness' - but, I suggest, this is coherent only while that relation pertains. You're not in a revolutionary moment until a synthesis arises from the fragments and differences within the proletariat that decisively recognises that party as 'highest' (and with this process the party is crucially engaged, of course). So the apparently revolutionary moment is ripe only when a decisive slice of the proletariat becomes one with the party. Which means the party dissolves in the moment of revolution - as the proletariat does upon its accession to the means of production. This particular Marx is not, I submit, a Leninist at all.
This reading is consistent with your proposition that:
>Working class spontaneity, by contrast, will always
>tend to reconcile the movement to capitalism, only a rational will to go
>beyond wage bargaining makes working class revolution possible, and
>that, as Marx explains, is why 'Without parties no development, without
>division no progress'
insofar as we presume an opposition internal to a decisively capitalist society. After this moment (and Marx leaves 'after this moment' well enough alone) the party is a barrier to development as it can only manifest as a perpetuation of the fundamentally alienating state/individual dichotomy.
>Equally wrong-headed is the desire to make Marx into an anti-
>authoritarian. Marx was an extreme authoritarian, in his actions and in
>his theory ... It was Marx, after all, who first coined the phrase
>>'Dictatorship of the Proletariat', not Lenin.
Here we have to be a bit historical, no? What did 'dictatorship of the proletariat' mean to Marx in his time and place (all we know is that it can not apply to the post-expropriation era, as there's no proletariat then, is there?), and what did it mean to Lenin in his - and what does it mean now, perhaps as a consequence of what it came to mean by the time of Kronstadt and the 1922 famines (and the degree to which we've come to assign responsibility to one man's administration, of course)?
Marx's 'authority', and the party in which it is vested, logically derives from the status of the proletariat as the universal class, and is equally contingent upon a dangerously opposed pro-bourgeouis force (the contest is definitively between the force which pursues the end of class and the one that seeks its continuation - no middle is excluded here as there is no logical middle - I could go on to argue that this rebuts Leninism, too, as there's a case to be made that Leninism is precisely about inhabiting some middle ground, but no need to get into state cap arguments, eh? And yeah, I realise there were fearsome historical constraints, too.).
This being the case, there's nothing necessarily authoritarian about Marx at all - the contest at hand is a fight to the death between logically opposed, mutually incompatible social forces. If classlessness prevails, class dictatorships go with it, and Marx, biographer of capital, leaves the rest of the story to those who'll have to write it - in very anti-authoritarian fashion, he decides that that of which he cannot speak, he should pass over in silence.
Does that make sense? And have I just spent half an hour trying to make the bleeding obvious look like something else? (It didn't feel like it when I wrote it, but it seems it now that I read it.)
Cheers, Rob.