--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
<< 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? >>>>
Dont you just love that word "masses"? Go out on the street and you see them everywhere "masses". Hey, and they come in three colors now: white, black and gray.
The party-building stage, Yoshie, is about winning over the so-called "advanced elements" to join the party and to situate these "advanced elements" in strategic areas like trade unions and mass-organizations. The role of these party members will then be to recruit other "advanced elements" and to bring that organization under the influence of the party's "correct line".
So, in this stage Yoshie, the role of Leninists is not to build a mass-party (like the eurocommunist parties) but to "win over" the "advanced elements" and extend the party's influence (whether overtly or covertly) amongst the "masses".
Your confusion Yoshie is over the difference between a mass-party and a Leninist party. WWP is not aiming to win over everybody in ANSWER to socialism (mass party building) at this point, it is just looking for a "few good advanced elements (leninist party building).
I apologize for not quoting from "What is to be done" or "One Step Forward Two Steps Back" or something else by Lenin, but I gave away my Collected Works (yes, I had all the volumes at one time) many years ago to the Salvation Army. Who knows, maybe someone from WWP is reading them now. -Thomas
===== <<Be like me! The Primal Mother, eternally creative, eternally impelling into life,
eternally drawing satisfaction from the ceaseless flux of phenomena.>>
-Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy"
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