[lbo-talk] It's a Long Road to Tipperary

[Carrol Cox]

Actually, it can be theoretically established that a mass movement 
cannot, regardless of what its "leadership" desires, be guided by a 
strategy that goes beyond a handful of what onemight call "highly 
important banalities." It can also be empirically demonstrated that no 
mass movement in history, including the Russian Revolution, has been 
governed by anythng that could be called a strategy (except, of course, 
for those highly important banalities. And finally, it can be 
historically demonstrated that all Parties or other would-be general 
staffs of Revolution that have attempted to organize a mass movement (or 
Revolutionary Movement) through the "application" of a Strategy have 
ended up as hole-in-the-corner sects endlessly muttering to themselves, 
but we are right; those others are "uttra-lefts" or "opportunists." 
Dean's proposed strategy (as summarized by shag) is almost a reductio ad 
absurdum  of such pathetic failures of the past.

Carrol

On 10/29/2011 10:54 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Oct 29, 2011, at 11:35 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>> shag wrote: Not that i disagree with what you said, per se. Just that it's important not to let this bet get by because this entire discussion is dominated by a repeated claim: there's no strategy, oh the humanity! blah fucking blah blah. as if repeating it a gogangajillion times makes it true.
>>
>> And Ian wrote: I want my revo and I want it now!
>>
>> And a friend in the '60s quoted Lenin as saying: "There are three revolutionary virtues: 1) Patience 2)  Patience 3) Patience  (Whether he dis say this or not, he should have)
>>
>> And someone ought to have said: Strategy shmategy.
>
> So how many OWS meetings have you guys attended?
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