On 2011-12-24, at 11:10 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
> [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.
More to the point, I think, is that Lenin's environment was the Tsarist autocracy.
There has never been a socialist revolution in capitalist countries with parliamentary systems, the universal franchise, and other democratic rights. That's been the elephant in the room for Marxists and others on the revolutionary left; it's an awkward reality which has been mostly ignored.
There has been social protest aplenty, but in every case mass discontent has been peacefully channeled into electoral politics, popular demands have been partially met, and the trade union and other movements integrated into the regulatory framework of the capitalist state. The resilience of capitalist democracy has been mainly attributable to economic growth and a rising standard of living over generations.
The attachment of the working class to capitalism and parliamentary democracy forced the mass social democratic and Communist parties by degrees to the right, abandoning whatever pretence they originally had of transforming the system by peaceful or revolutionary means. The Trotskyist movement never amounted to more than a tiny, fractious sect, with each of its many factions claiming to uniquely understood the Leninist strategy of party-building and the "crisis of leadership" afflicting all of the other political parties and groups and trade unions which collectively comprised the workers' movement.
LP's contribution is simply the latest in a long tradition of seeing the absence of revolutionary politics in bourgeois democracies as owing to the wrong-headed ideas of the many thousands of past and present labour and socialist leaders rather than to much more deeply rooted historical and structural factors.
All of which is not to say, of course, that there could not be a rebirth of revolutionary politics should living standards decline precipitously as the advanced capitalist countries lose their economic leadership and exhaust their corresponding capacity for reform. Maybe we are now on the verge of a new historical epoch. But it's no more possible to foresee what form of organization (democratic or rigidly centralized) or what program would be adopted by a successful mass party in those conditions, than to foresee a terminal crisis of capitalism. I think the only safe speculation is that such a party will emerge from practice and give rise to theory, as Lenin's conception did, rather than the other way round.