Lenin's idea was not to have a revolutionary movement composed solely of wage workers, and you would know that if you actually were familiar with his thought and practice as you claim:
***** ...The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population. Those who concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon itself alone are not Social-Democrats; for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding -- or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding -- of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society, acquired through the experience of political life....
...Economism, mostly content themselves, namely: "To go among the workers." To bring political knowledge to the workers the Social Democrats must go among all classes of the population; they must dispatch units of their army in all directions....
...We must "go among all classes of the population" as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators, and as organisers. Noone doubts that the theoretical work of Social-Democrats should aim at studying all the specific features of the social and political condition of the various classes. But extremely little is done in this direction as compared with the work that is done in studying the specific features of factory life. In the committees and study circles, one can meet people who are immersed in the study even of some special branch of the metal industry; but one can hardly ever find members of organisations (obliged, as often happens, for some reason or other to give up practical work) who are especially engaged in gathering material on some pressing question of social and political life in our country which could serve as a means for conducting Social-Democratic work among other strata of the population. In dwelling upon the fact that the majority of the present-day leaders of the working-class movement lack training, we cannot refrain from mentioning training in this respect also, for it too is bound up with the Economist conception of "close organic connection with the proletarian struggle". The principal thing, of course, is propaganda and agitation among all strata of the people....
("What Is to Be Done?" <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/what-itd/ch03.htm#03_E>) *****
As for secrecy, it was not what Lenin and Russian revolutionaries desired -- it was what was imposed upon them as a condition of physical and political survival under an extremely repressive state, with no political rights and freedoms to speak of:
***** The work of the West European Social-Democrat is in this respect facilitated by the public meetings and rallies which all are free to attend, and by the fact that in parliament he addresses the representatives of all classes. We have neither a parliament nor freedom of assembly; nevertheless, we are able to arrange meetings of workers who desire to listen to a Social-Democrat. We must also find ways and means of calling meetings of representatives of all social classes that desire to listen to a democrat; for he is no Social-Democrat who forgets in practice that "the Communists support every revolutionary movement", that we are obliged for that reason to expound and emphasise general democratic tasks before the whole people, without for a moment concealing our socialist convictions. He is no Social-Democrat who forgets in practice his obligation to be ahead of all in raising, accentuating, and solving every general democratic question.
("What Is to Be Done?" <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/what-itd/ch03.htm#03_E>) *****
At 4:33 PM -0500 3/26/03, Doug Henwood wrote:
>loupaulsen at attbi.com wrote:
>
>>>"Don't be surprised if in the coming hours or days we go to Code Red,"
>>> Hart said this morning in Washington. "It is almost inevitable."
>>
>>Isn't Code Red where they fucking shoot you if you step outside your house?
>>I'm not joking. I read stuff from New Jersey and Connecticut where they said
>>if it goes to Code Red, everyone stay inside - the only one outside is the
>>terrorist.
>
>Yup that's what they said. The upside is - no more antiwar demos.
>The downside is - economic collapse.
>
>Doug
Just out of curiosity, how do you intend to survive physically and politically if conditions in the USA begin to resemble what revolutionaries in the past had to, and in many poor nations still have to, work under? There is no need to be alarmist and paranoid, but we can't say that's never gonna happen, as the USA is at least clearly heading into that direction. Anti-war protests in the USA have been sometimes big enough to be encouraging, but protests against immigrant detention, racial/ethnic/national profiling, the USA Patriot Act, and other attacks on civil liberties have been tiny and ineffective. What if, for instance, more terrorist attacks are to happen on the mainland USA? What would Bush, Ashcroft, Ridge, & Co. do? What would you do? -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * 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://solidarity.igc.org/>