> Marv, I will read & respond to your post (which I haven't read) later,
> but my response will make no sense to anyone who has not read
> the HM symposium on Lars Lih on Lenin.
Quickly and for the record:
In the mid 1970s, the Argentinean sociologist Juan Carlos Portantiero, in texts that circulated widely among Latin American Marxists, made the point that WTBD and the Bolshevik party design had to be viewed as a translation of Kautsky (and overall Erfurt) to the specific historical conditions of Russia's autocratic conditions. He also argued that Lenin adjusted the WTBD blueprint in his mind more than once and that, of course, things turned out different in practice. So, when Perry Anderson's book on Gramsci (http://mfaishalaminuddin.lecture.ub.ac.id/files/2009/11/anderson.pdf) first became known in Latin America in the mid 1980s, Portantiero had already published work comparing and contrasting the conditions in Lenin's Russia with those of Gramsci's Italy. Others in Latin America, following upon Portantiero's Lenin-Gramsci synthesis, were advocating for notions of the political party that mixed and matched Lenin's war of movements (e.g. in Central America, etc.) and Gramsci's war of positions (e.g. in Mexico, etc.) as required by the shifting conditions on the ground. In the context of Russia's political constraints, Lenin's repudiation of "spontaneity" was well warranted. What I wrote here builds on that background:
http://www.swans.com/library/art11/jhuato01.html
So, when people talk about the need for a political party in the U.S., the caveat applies. To the extent Gramsci and Lenin stand in opposition, we are obviously talking more Gramsci than Lenin. After the Italian and Spanish debates on Eurocommunism (which were closely followed in Latin America, thanks in part to Fernando Claudin's book), all this stuff should have been well digested by now. But the most important thing here is that the specific profile with which the party in the U.S., if it emerges, is to have will surprise us all, since it's to reflect conditions that are yet to appear fully. One way to see how things moved forward in this respect in Latin America by following Marta Harnecker's interviews of Latin American left-wing leaders.
I'm not entirely acquainted with Lih's study, which is apparently very comprehensive and meticulous, but *that* basic point is not new. Unfortunately, most of Portantiero's work is not available in English.