>There is, I will admit, even a personal element that contributes to
>my nausea: as a young man I duped myself into wasting a few years of
>my life in one such organization. I'm still somewhat bitter about
>that and will admit that such bitterness lends energy to my vitriol.
>Make of that what you will, but I thought that I should be honest
>about it.
You mentioned you had joined the Communist Workers Party: <http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0205/0491.html>. Max Elbaum, the nicest of men, came out of his experience of the New Communist Movement -- the Line of March, in his case -- without the sort of bitterness that you say you carry with you.
>Democratic centralism, hegemony over the movement (the Party vs. the
>multitudes), and this type of obscene negativity are three
>components of Stalinism/bolshevism that do indeed need to be
>criticized.
In my view, an organization has a chance of becoming democratic if it doesn't pretend that it is leaderless while being governed by an informal clique from which most rank-and-file members are effectively excluded.
As for hegemony, what we have in the USA today is the hegemony-by-default of the Democratic Party over "the multitudes" on the broadly defined left.
***** Science and Society - Alan Wald review [of Max Elbaum's _Revolution in the Air_] A shortened version of this review will appear in the forthcoming issue of Science and Society by Alan Wald
. . . This need for a richer comparative assessment of the New Communist experience will be crucial for comprehending the remarkable patterns of continuity to be found with precursor movements, especially the CP-USA. Like the CP-USA, the New Communist Movement traveled through strikingly ultra-Left periods followed by reform-oriented ones. For the Communists it was the Third Period of "united fronts from below" and the call for "a Soviet America," followed by the Popular Front's demand that independent struggles in general and the socialist struggle in particular be subordinated to unity around a democratic capitalist program. For the Maoists it was the demand to create "anti-imperialist" coalitions followed by submersion into the Rainbow wing of the Democratic Party. . . .
<http://www.revolutionintheair.com/reviews/sciencesociety.html> *****
For all their differences, both members of the CPUSA and activists of the New Communist Movement ended up supporting the Democratic Party.
Other activists do not consciously embrace the Democratic Party, and some of us counsel others against clinging to it, but the politics of serial protests of "the multitudes" -- which is what most social-movement activists get stuck with anyhow, with or without reading Negri -- ends up functioning just as Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward described, raising hell from time to time, in response to which the power elite at best propose mild reforms or at least moderate their most reactionary agenda only to reverse the course once the protests subside . . . in other words, functioning as ephemeral grassroots pressure groups, many of whose organizers eventually get coopted into the Democratic Party, because there is nowhere else to go politically. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>