> But if you read WITBD carefully, and with some
> awareness of Russian political history in the 1890s, it becomes clear
> that Lenin's emphasis on revolutionary theory _presupposed_ an upsurge
> of "spontaneous" political activity on the part of the working class.
That's how I read it too - a point often lost on voluntarist revolutionaries in non-revolutionary periods.
> As I have frequently argued over the last 6 years on this list, the
> timing and the nature of the "punctuations" in the political equilibrium
> are quite unpredictable.
Yes, but, as a matter of curiousity, why do you use Gould's language to describe what appears to simply be the Marxist concept of a revolutionary period dressed up in scientific jargon. Is there a difference?
This does not represent a politics of mere
> quietism or "attentisme," however, but rather calls for constant efforts
> by leftists of various tendencies to push various forms of resistance to
> capital. Whether the current struggles around Bring the Troops Home Now!
> will develop into such a punctuation remains to be seen, but currently
> it's the best game in town as it were.
Yes and no. In periods where there is no "spontaneous political activity on
the part of the working class", this just strikes me as substitutionism,
often very frenetic and unproductive. We've all done this in the past, a few
still do. In these cases, it's a harmless matter of personal choice - mostly
whether you like spending your time meeting, polemicizing, and demonstrating
in small groups. Where there are genuine mass campaigns around military
intervention or attacks on social programs and rights, there is arguably a
political obligation to get involved at some level with your friends and
neighbours, depending on one's energy and commitment. Of course, these are
never purely "spontaneous" developments, but the tiny left's problem has not
been in recognizing this but recognizing the opposite: that it's
interventions have to correspond to real motion from below, not motion it
beleives it can somehow conjur up by dint of optimism of the will, which
strikes me as pure idealism. In these circumstances, there is no harm done
in just being "attentive".
>
> But Social Democracy is surely as dead as a road to the future as is
> Third-International Communism.
Not true. It is very much alive in Latin America and other parts of the developing world seeking the contemporary equivalent of a more equitable distribution of the spoils with global capitalism such as marked the great battles of yesteryear in the advanced capitalist countries between the workers and the bosses. Social democracy or whatever other name it goes by is the ideological instrument of those reform efforts.
MG