[lbo-talk] Louis Proyect on Party Building

[Wojtek S]

[WS:] So what does this piece advise in practical terms?  There are
plenty of references to the "glorious past" which in my view miss the
forest among the trees.  Lenin faced a very different task than we do
- in his environment, there were plenty of troops on the ground
already, and the task was to organize them for a revolutionary action.

 In our environment, the troops on the ground are few and scarce, and
they are disorganized as well - so the primary task is the
mobilization of troops rather than simply organizing what is already
there.

Furthermore, dwelling on Lenin while disregarding Gramsci seems like a
grave error to me.  Gramsci had similar goals to Lenin, but he had the
benefit of the hindsight (failed revolutions in Germany and Italy) and
the first hand experience of the reality of Western countries where
civil society acted as walls and trenches for the status quo (his
metaphor) - which was a very different situation from that in Russia.
Trotsky makes a similar observation in his Results and Prospects, btw.

 In practical terms, this means that in Russia the revolutionary
project could succeed with capturing of the state apparatus, whereas
in the West not just the state apparatus but the civil society would
have to be captured as well.  Hence the importance of "organic
intellectuals" in Gramsci's thought.

If Gramsci is correct, what we need now is not just a party of
revolutionaries (however conceived) acting like commandos (another
Gramsci's metaphor) but a standing army.  What Cde Proyect et al. seem
to be focused on is how to organize commandos (party) while being
seemingly oblivious to the fact that they do not have an army to back
them up.

In my view, Gramsci has much more to offer in practical terms to those
living in Western-style democracies than Lenin does.  But the main
task is not to relive battles of the past, but to carefully analyze
the battles we face today and determine what kind of forces are needed
to win those battles.  It makes little sense to focus on the WW1 style
war of position (another Gramsci's analogy) in the era of the
blitzkrieg - as the tale of the Maginot line tells us.

Wojtek

On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 10:25 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Dec 24, 2011, at 9:42 AM, Angelus Novus wrote:
>
>> I've been enjoying Proyect's contributions on this question recently
>
>
> Yeah, good piece. I've been liking Lou's recent stuff a lot.
>
> Doug
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