Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>
> 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:
>
Since _all_ of Lenin's writings concerning secrecy make specific reference to legal conditions which make openness impossible, I have always assumed that those who criticize Lenin for this are either lying or depending on rumor for their information.
Those who want to (a) parade themselves as (1) for democracy and (2) open-minded and (b) want to cite _What Is To Be Done_ really ought to read Draper on that work. When Rosa Luxemberg attacked the work, Lenin did not defend the points she attacked, he pointed out (rather mildly) that he hadn't said them in the first place. And he was correct, as anyone who actually reads WITBD can see for themselves. In other words, the saintly Rosa (a) lied about WITBD and (b) her friends in the SPD refused to print Lenin's rebuttal.
Doug claims he's read Lenin, but all his points about Lenin come from his knowledge (by hearsay) of Third International parties and theoreticians.
One point about WITBD that I have never seen made (and which Draper doesn't make) is that if you read it _not_ as an argument about what _ought_ to be but as a simple empirical description of actual organizations (non-leninist organizations) such as boy scout troops, high school spanish clubs, local rotaries, most local anti-war movements that consist of liberals, it holds up pretty well.
The general assumption seems to be that democratic organization is "natural" to a group unless someone deliberately suppresses democracy. The people who initiated and are doing most of the work in the Bloomington Normal Citizens for Peace and Justice are quakers, liberals, Democrats, all hipped on openness and democracy. It has been impossible to get democracy because no one in the group _except_ those leaders is willing to bother to engage in democratic decision making. They are too busy otherwise or something.
We are having a special (general) meeting tonight mostly to try to figure out ways to have more people participate in decision making. I strongly suspect that the only people who will be there are the ones that have had to do the decision making all along.
Democratic centralism is, actually, an effort to get away from centralism by somehow incorporating the total membership into thinking about and responding to the decisions of the defacto leadership.
Democracy in an organization is so fucking hard to achieve. I wish those who are always yelping for it would recognize that and do some work and thinking about how it can be achieved in practice.
Carrol