Leninist Ends Re: Hollow ANSWER?

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 10:34 AM -0800 1/25/03, Thomas Seay wrote:
>>Please do us the favor of reading what Yoshie has written before 
>>responding to it.  She never said that that the ANSWER organizers 
>>were not Leninists.  What she wrote was:
>>
>>"I rather doubt that ANSWER organizers, full-time or part-time, are 
>>working toward "hardcore Leninist" ends.
>
>This is ABSOLUTELY wrong.  I dont know whether Jim and Yoshie are 
>naive or dissimulating.  Party-building is a primary task for any 
>Leninist party.  Where is the party to recruit: among trade-unions 
>and mass-organizations (like ANSWER).  They go into or create mass 
>organizations with a view to building up their parties influence 
>among the masses as well as recruiting new members for their party.

Building a political party is only a means to an end; and for 
Leninists, _the_ end is to work toward socialism.  How can any 
socialist party influence masses -- much less win masses of new 
adherents to socialism -- when they don't make a peep about it? 
Socialism has nowhere been on the agenda at any of the IAC- or 
ANSWER-sponsored mass actions.  It seems to me that the predicament 
of all American socialists, not just WWP, has been and still is that, 
in the process of working under difficult material and ideological 
conditions to help build non-socialist mass mobilizations, social 
movements, etc., they end up forgetting to build their own political 
parties and to work toward their own political aims independent of 
Democrats and other liberals.  They become builders of social 
movements (easily coopted by Democrats), rather than builders of 
socialism.
-- 
Yoshie

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