[lbo-talk] "Diversity of Tactics"

Julio Huato juliohuato at gmail.com
Sat Feb 11 07:12:28 PST 2012


Carrol wrote:


> It seems as though almost everyone in this debate
> is treating OWS as though it were a unified Party with
> a Central Committee -- and within that unified Party an
> internal struggle has been launched among tendencies
> each desirous of making _its_ program the program of
> The Party!

Symmetrically, one could say that you are imagining that a party with a central committee is some sort of perfectly oiled machine with cogs and wheels rather than thinking individuals involved. A party is viewed as a pre-cooked, pre-designed organization with roles perfectly stipulated and people just following them to the letter, like the running of some algorithm, but apart and independently of the mass movements in its environment.

No. Actual political parties are organic social formations and, in their midst, the struggle of their self-conscious elements to endow the movement with coherent direction and organization, the better the more the direction and organization couple with the organic turbulence bubbling at its base. In this sense, political parties are like mass movements. Or, rather, political parties are *an aspect* (a moment) of the mass movements, their *self conscious* aspect. The internal lives of political parties, of their apparatus, are not self-sufficient. They reflect and respond to what goes on at the grassroots level, one way or another.

Let me push this a bit further: Insofar as *you* are trying to consciously digest what's going on in the Occupy movement, you are effectively proceeding as a *responsible* element of the yet to be recognized and structured political party. It's hard not to see the embryo of a political party unfolding within and through the Occupy movement. That's why talking about "we" makes a lot of sense. Hello, comrade Carrol.



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