organization of rev/

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>CB: Yes, the problem to be solved for the Next Socialism is the 
>ability of the bourgeois to force socialism down to the lowest 
>common denominator, upon penalty of annihilation.  I mean the 
>bourgeois war(s) on the SU were the biggest in the history of the 
>world.  Our failure to make revolutions in Germany or the U.S. were 
>the critical failures.
>
>In the total picture , it was not at all proven that vanguardism or 
>democratic centralism was the critical cause of failure of socialism.

The practical problem has always been that those who should have been 
the vanguard for socialism -- workers in developed capitalist nations 
-- have been the rearguard, so to speak, with American workers being 
probably the most backward among the rearguard.  Perhaps it is 
against today's leftist decorum to speak of anyone being politically 
backward, but it doesn't help us either to pretend not to notice what 
we are up against.

One naturally wishes that we were all on the same page politically, 
as it were, but that's not the case.  In any social movement -- be it 
abolitionism, trade unionism, civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, 
feminism, GLBT liberation, disability rights, environmentalism, or 
whatever -- it's been always a minority who spearheaded organizing 
for progressive social change, gradually expanding the movement from 
the core of committed organizers ("cadres" if you will) outward to 
the (as yet unorganized) masses as much as possible.  In no case the 
majority of the proverbial general public simultaneously jumped to a 
political cause.

Yoshie