Lou, You are a very fair-minded fella. I wish I could say What Is To Be Done. I don't know. I haven't a recipe for what organizational forms and vocabulary we should use. I am sure it's nothing like the WWP or any Marxist or quasi-Marxist organization that I'm familiar with. That embraces a lot of territory. But virtually all of them in this century have some family resemblances. To start with, they call themselves Marxist. (My group, Solidarity, doesn't, which is one reason I can stay in it at this point in my political development.) Since the October Revolution and the split with the socialists, the Marxist groups have tended to organize on models they believed deriived from the Bolshevik experience, e.g., so-callede democratic centralism. They put themselves in the tradition of the October Revolution. They have overlapping sets of characteristic reference points: Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, mayby Trotsky, maybed Stalin, maybe Mao; they conduct discussions in those terms, positionin
g themselves according tow here they stand on debates that were important in that tradition. There's a lot that was valuablke in that, and it is unfortunate that we, the last generation to grow up in a context where that sort of thing made sense, grow older and die, that that will be lost. In many ways it will be much harder for our successors to reinvent things that have been obvious to us. But that is what has to be done, however it is done.
LouPaulsen <LouPaulsen at attbi.com> wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "andie nachgeborenen"
"You have to be careful to not to stuff me into an incorrect narrative frame. You are answering Sidney Hook or Max Eastman, someone who used to be a Marxist, and has given up on histotical materialism, socialism and the working class. That's not me. I haven't."
All right, fair enough, but....
> But what are you really talking about? "Look and feel issues"? Red flags?
Phrases like "dictatorship of the proletariat"? Pictures of Lenin?
All those things. Look and feel may sound fuzzy to you, but it's crucially important, and people like me are paid a whole lot of money to litigate those matters because so much depends on them. The red flags, pictures of Lenin, and the "dictatorship of the proletarit" have to go.
> Suppose you want to use this argument to demonstrate to me that WWP's "organizational forms" are doomed to irrelevance.
I don't care to argue about the WWP, about which I know little, but I don't think that any Marxist grouplet of that general sort matters politically. That is not to take away from the good work that groups like that do.
> So, why don't we turn it around, and you tell us, or give us examples of,
what organizational forms and vocabularies would or could be relevant in the
21st century for historical materialist theory and for fighting capitalism
using that theory - and then explain how you think those differ from
"characteristic Marxism"?
Wish I could.
jks
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