It's clear that Professor Lane is no practical Leninist; he studies what he thinks is "Leninism" -- "a dead fact from the past" in his hands -- as a scholar.
At 1:43 PM -0500 3/27/03, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Important elements that our resident Leninists didn't feature in
>their definitions are: the centrality of The Party (singular, with a
>capital P - i.e., not the importance of organization or parties, but
>the importance of a single vanguard organization - is that what Lou
>Paulsen means by following the lead of 1917?), and the view of the
>metropolitan working class as bought off, and the Third World
>proletariat as the leading force of revolution (which is problematic
>for political activists in the U.S. to embrace too tightly).
I firmly reject "the view of the metropolitan working class as bought off," more firmly than any of the political tendencies represented here -- anarchism, autonomist Marxism, liberalism, market socialism, participatory economy, etc. -- does, which should be clear from my posts on the burdens of the empire on the metropolitan working class (also from my posts on the burdens of racism on white workers). As a corollary, I also reject the view that "the Third World proletariat" are "the leading force of revolution." At a height of revolutionary struggle, however, there is a virtuous dialectical feedback between what happens in imperial powers and what develops in objects of their assaults; in any case, the empire won't collapse unless attacked on many fronts, here and elsewhere -- even merely rolling it back takes such multi-front international actions: Cf. <http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0303/2059.html>. I've already discussed my view of political organizations: <http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0303/2479.html>. -- 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/>