Charles Brown
^^^^^
Marv Gandall
Wrong. Political consciousness is measured by parliamentary as much as by extra-parliamentary activity. The classical Marxists were as attentive to the shifting vote tallies of the German SPD, Italian and French SP's, the British Labour Party, etc. before the First World War, as well as the parties supported by the Comintern after it, as they were to the incidence of strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of mass action engaged in by the working class.
Lenin's controversial advice to the fledgling British CPGB to "enter" the Labour Party was based on the LP's electoral strength, which he used as a register of the backward political consciousness of militant British trade unionists relative to their continental counterparts. Later Marxists did not assess the level of working class consciousness in the 30's and 40's solely with reference to industrial militancy while dismissing the sharp increase in votes for Communist and socialist deputies as having "nothing whatever to do with political consciousness". Careful attention was paid equally to the electoral fortunes of the established bourgeois parties as a measure of both mass and elite confidence in the bourgeois-democratic political system, notably during the collapse of the Weimar republic and rise of fascism.
Your one-sided understanding of political action is consistent with traditional anarchist and other ultraleft notions of the sort precisely targeted by Lenin in WITBD, a polemic you profess to much admire. You're an equally enthusiastic fan of the Black Panthers, but one supposes, given your remarks above, that your enthusiasm would not extend to Bobby Seale's 1973 mayoralty campaign in Oakland when he garnered nearly 40% of the vote. Presumably, this represented an unnecessary detour into the electoral arena, again a wholly meaningless indicator "having nothing whatever to do with (the) political consciousness" of Oakland's black community at that time.
Those who participate in the mass movements which you support don't draw an artificial distinction between their activity in the streets and political action aimed at influencing or gaining state power; each arena is seen as a means of gauging their popular support and of realizing their demands.