Sigh...all too familiar. In the CPML, we built our factory cells under the banner of 'every factory a fortress.' and some of us had read A, Neuberg's 'Armed Insurrection,' another handbook from this period, of which the cell was a vital component. Meanwhile, new things were happening--deindustrialization, the growth of the 'new working class' from the universities--for which we were ill-prepared. We did have the good sense, however, to form community cells in hard-pressed areas.

But I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I never thought the 'international discipline' made much sense, but I'm still partial to deeply rooted and strong local units among the masses, and that all who can should belong to one.

I find little to disagree with here, however I do find much to add, so I will try only a few things:

1) One of the reasons for some of the 21 conditions was the strong anarchist, left-SR (and their global equivalents) and even radical liberal presence in the first congress of the Comintern. There was a real fear that Marxism would lose out in the Comintern to other strains of revolutionary activity. The Bolshevik revolution was in a sense the Arab Spring of its time - something that appealed to all revolutionists regardless of their actual purpose for revolution. The 21 conditions were a way to say: we are not only revolutionists, we are revolutionists of an specific kind. THis might seem like sectarianism, but it wasn't - it was based on a (perhaps in hindsight incorrect) assessment that the revolution in Russia presented a universal microcosm of how the different tendencies brokedown globally. Given the success of the Bolsheviks in "winning over" large numbers of Mensheviks, left-SRs, anarchists, etc, they thought the prestige of the Bolshevik revolution was enough to win over these people globally. And for a while it worked as planned: many Communist Party of XXX were founded, globally, by people and movements that had not come from Social-Democracy, but from anarchism, radical liberalism, and even revolutionary nationalism. So in this case *form followed function* - and this is very important to distinguish, because it was not an arbitrary thing borne out of ideology, but out of an specific experience that was unique to Russia but was universalized.

2) The model of organization of democratic centralism is not Bolshevik in origin, or practice, but is in fact a long-standing model of organization. The Committees of Correspondence in the USA's own revolution were a form of such organization, as were the politicized Masonic lodges of revolutionaries. Yes they were different from the institutionalized DC of the Comintern, and to an extent artificially universalized, but they are a time proven way to organize in revolutionary contexts. Lets be careful not to develop illusions that diffuse, amorphous, liberal organization can successfuly carry out revolutions. A good recent example is the Arab Spring - in which one must contrast Tunisia's and Egypt's experience. In Tunisia, cadre revolutionary socialist organizations have long existed and organized effectively against the State - while in Egypt it is the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood who plays this role. Yes, the people rose up, but the results - which are still not fully in - reveal the Tunisian experience as more positive from the perspective of socialism than that in Egypt. One has to be careful, when making critiques of the negative aspects of organizational forms, to not throw the baby with the bathwater: just because there teleology in the Comintern experience, it doesn't mean this teleology was it root problem, or that the root problem was an specific assumption of DC.

3) A fundamental unexplored aspect of this critical view of DC, is its adoption by the Left Opposition and eventually the Fourth International, and by the London Bureau (the POUM international). This is extremely important because these were dissidents of the Comintern line - yet exhibited the same problems, without the positive results, like the Chinese revolution or the Cuban revolution or the anti-colonial struggle world-wide. The begs the question: why did the Trotskyist form fail when it was identical? Why did the form prove successful in places and unsuccesful in others? Is organizational form prefigurative (that is, is part of the "recipe" for success)?

4) Another avenue of investigation is the experience of this organizational form outside of State power, and its adoption as a way to exercise State power. This, I think, is the only place where organizational form truly becomes a central question. A voluntary organization like a revolutionary party can and should establish rules for its members, establish discipline and requirements, etc. This is true of a PTA or an amateur sports league or an online gaming clan. Since the organization is voluntary, you can always leave it. Leaving can be complex, but is generally achievable (some sad examples exist of revolutionaries murdering members who want to leave - but these tend to be exceptions, and not linked to organizational form, but other problems). That is not the case in ruling a State over the entirety of society. And this creates and has created the basis for a lot of the negatives in actually existing socialism: you cannot rule a State like you run a revolution. Schizophrenia develops, like China's.


Lastly, Louis Proyect is the prime example of someone who makes great analysis, and the fails in practice: it is not sufficient to critique the negative, but also to identify the positive and to develop new and old methods of more or less disciplined organizational forms. Louis in particular is highly intolerant of opinions that diverge from his - and it is this tendency much more than organizational forms, that actually has generated the less savory aspects of actually existing socialism: bourgeoise politicians differ, and differ strongly, but rarely ban or censor the voices that disagree with them, and when they try (SOPA is a good example) great upsurges of bourgeois resistance emerge. A problem of the culture of the radical left is this culture of intolerance, and this is a much more important aspect than a given form.

In this sense its easy to blame the Bolshevik organizational form, or more correctly the organizational forms that claim to be Bolshevik, but it is much harder to deal with the real problems of messianic enlightment, cultism, sectarianism, etc, which are present in nearly all revolutionary groups - including those, such as anarchists and left-communists, that are explicitly outside the Bolshevik tradition.

In this sense, a look at any successful revolution - bourgeois or "socialist" - in the "modern" period (that is the last 250 years or so), shows that the Napoleon problem is much more stronger than the Democratic Centralism problem. In fact, even if we do not consider China or Vietnam or Cuba etc socialist (another debate) the reality is that their current governments emerged from revolutionary parties, and their power rests on these parties, and these parties are successful in achieving and keeping power, often against great odds and great external and internal pressures. Yet their problems of democracy and ideological stagnation are linked to political perspective in which the great leader is at the forefront, and is used by lesser leaders to beat down the opposition.

I'm rushing out the door as I write this, but I think one of the really significant problems of Marxist organizations in the United States is that democratic centralism becomes a veil that overshadows the scientific aspects of Marxism. Conclusions are drawn long before new party cadres are encouraged to debate, disagree and wrangle with issues. Definitely an example of the dogmatic nature of the pseudo-scientific method used by a lot of leftists in the world.

Very interesting piece here. Louis Proyect's statement about the American party here makes me want to hear a bit about this history from others who have studied it: "The [American] party was re-organized on the basis of factory cells and a rigid set of organizational principles were adopted."

How did this play out in the 30s? These rigid guidelines were laid down in the 20s, and all the communist parties conformed in varying degrees. But it is also my understanding that during the popular front period of the 30s (which was also the height of Stalinism) the CPUSA had its most creative and mass-based period. There is the history of organizing black sharecroppers in the South, for example. How did these creative approaches occur? How did they break with the mechanical policies described above? How did they come to an end?

"There is the history of organizing black sharecroppers in the South, for example."

That actually is one of the classic examples of how the Comintern's approach could sometimes carry short-term virtues alongside of long-term problems. It is not likely that such organizing of blacks would have occurred in the USA if not for a direct Comintern order from Zinoviev. Zinoviev was the original champion of the Black Nation Thesis within the Comintern. Stalin didn't have anything to say about it. Trotsky made some brief casual comments showing his support. But it was really Zinoviev who promoted this thesis.

Even though I concluded years ago that Zinoviev's reasoning was faulty at the time (and is especially out of date today in the age of Wendy Williams & Oprah Winfrey) I think there were some short-term virtues in the way that Zinoviev was able to order the CPUSA to take this up as an issue and treat it seriously. It's just that today a fresh approach is called for.

Good points, Patrick.

There were definitely positive aspects of the Comintern experience. To use the example of China (which is often held up to demonstrate what was bad about the Comintern, and with good reason), the Chinese party might not have started (or at least when and how it did) without the aid of Comintern agents in the country. And the material support from the international movement, and particularly the USSR, for the Chinese Communist Party as they waged war on multiple fronts was undoubtedly critical.

As I see it, part of the reasons that it is crucial to study the Comintern experience is not only so that we can create better revolutionary organizations today, but also specifically so that we can develop and new internationalism that includes levels of unity, coordination etc. We do need that. And to do it well this time around we need to understand how the Comintern imposed dogmatism and organizational rigidity, but also how it is that international coordination (precisely!) can enable creative breakthroughs and the like.

How did this play out in the 30s? These rigid guidelines were laid down in the 20s, and all the communist parties conformed in varying degrees. But it is also my understanding that during the popular front period of the 30s (which was also the height of Stalinism) the CPUSA had its most creative and mass-based period. There is the history of organizing black sharecroppers in the South, for example. How did these creative approaches occur? How did they break with the mechanical policies described above? How did they come to an end?

----

from http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization/lenin_in_context.htm

STALIN AND THE COMINTERN

"Our Party alone knows where to direct the cause; and it is leading it forward successfully. To what does our Party owe its superiority? To the fact that is a Marxian Party, a Leninist Party. It owes it to the fact that it is guided in its work by the tenets of Marx, Engels and Lenin. There cannot be any doubt that as long as we remain true to these tenets, as long as we have this compass, we will achieve success in our work."

What could this be, words from a Maoist sect's leaflet vintage 1967? Actually, the words are by Joseph Stalin, from "Foundations to Leninism". That Stalin could represent himself as the foremost Marxist thinker in the world from the late 1920's to the 1950's does more to explain the current crisis in socialism today than anything else. Not only did this hogwash pass for Marxism during this period, if anybody attempted to present a political alternative they would end up with broken teeth or a bullet to the head.

This type of simple-minded nonsense has pretty much disappeared from the world of Marxism, except for the occasional Maoist manifesto here and there. We can read the following in "World to Win", a theoretical journal started by retro-Maoist Robert Avakian and his co-thinkers in other countries. "By looking at the life and teachings of Mao Tsetung, a new generation who themselves never witnessed the dramatic changes wrought in revolutionary China could begin to understand that the poor and oppressed could indeed rise up and transform the world through revolution; that the imperialists' declarations that 'communism is dead' reflect their hatred and fear of the very class of proletarians that can and will do away with them forever; and that to move forward to all the way liberation, the understanding forged by Mao Tsetung in the Chinese revolution and summed up as Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is the indispensable weapon for victory."

It was Stalin's intention to turn Marxism into this sort of crude dogma. He wrote in 1925 that the 'new type' of Communist leader should be no man of letters; he should not be burdened by the dead weight of social democratic habits; and he should be feared as well as respected.

Not only did Stalin do his best to persuade others to follow this model, he used state terrorism to eliminate those who refused to conform. In August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, Mrachkovsky and others stood trial. In January 1937, Piatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov, Muralov, Serebriakov and others faced charges. Marshal Tukhachevsky and a group of the highest generals of the Red Army appeared before a secret tribunal in June 1937. Finally, in March 1938, Rykov, Bukharin, Krestinsky, Rakovsky, Yagoda and others came before Soviet "justice". All of these individuals were leading Bolsheviks when Lenin was alive. Any one of them had more political experience, theoretical understanding and leadership qualities than any individual Marxist in the United States today. Soviet courts charged them with attempting to assassinate Stalin, restore capitalism, wreck the nation's military and economic power, and murder masses of Russian workers.

Controlling the Soviet Union did not satisfy Stalin. He made sure that every Communist Party in the Comintern obeyed him as well. He made the Chinese Communist Party submit to the strict discipline of the Kuomingtang. Soviet propaganda built up the image of General Chiang Kai-shek as the great leader of Chinese national re-birth. Socialism was not on the agenda in China, just an anti-feudal revolution under his leadership.

Mao obeyed Stalin's orders even after Chiang purged a thousand communists from the Kuomingtang and subsequently had them murdered in 1926. Chiang's forces arrested, tortured and killed over 50,000 Communists and their sympathizers as he consolidated his power in the second great purge in 1927. Mao managed to escape into high grass just over two hundred yards from the wall where the firing-squad was about to shoot him.

Let us take a close look at Stalin's intervention into the American Communist Party in order to understand how unlike Lenin's Bolshevik party these Comintern parties had become. Let us review what Lenin understood as Bolshevism in the early 1900's: simply put, democratic centralism in action and a newspaper that allowed various tendencies within Marxism to contend with each other.

In the initial fervor over the Russian Revolution, radicals all over the world made the decision to form parties on the Bolshevik model. They did not really have a very clear idea of just what such a party should be. They often brought often their own political experiences to bear on the formation of new organizations--as they should have. The American Communist leader, Charles E. Ruthenberg, explained Bolshevism early in 1919 as something that was not "strange and new." Bolshevism was merely the consequence of the same type of education and organization that the Socialist movement had been and was carrying on in the United States. His Socialist-syndicalist background showed in his description of the infant Bolshevik state as a "Socialist industrial republic". His instincts were completely correct.

By 1920, everything changed. A resolution passed at its second convention of the American Communist Party stated, "The Communist Parties of the various countries are the direct representatives of the Communist International, and thus indirectly of the aims and policies of Soviet Russia." Among the people voting for the resolution was James P. Cannon, who went on to form the Trotskyist movement in the United States. He retained the same hierarchical understanding of the relationship between an international center and member parties, except he switched allegiance from the Comintern to the pope-like authority of Leon Trotsky.

Let us examine the case of Jay Lovestone's fall from leadership of the American Communist Party to illustrate how harmful Stalin's heavy-handed interventions were.

(clip)

A usually neglected set of resolutions, in which Lenin had a hand in formulating, of the Third International from 1921, are useful for recovering its original spirit:

Communist (Third) International, "Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of their Work" (resolutions 1921)

http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/3rd-congress/organisation/index.htm

Especially:

Resolution of the 24th Session of the Third Congress of the Communist International; and

http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/3rd-congress/organisation/guidelines.htm

Resolution on the Organization of the Communist International)

http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/3rd-congress/organisation/resolution.htm

It begins with the following 2 theses:

"1. The organization of the party must be adapted to the conditions and purpose of its activity. The Communist Party should be the vanguard, the front-line troops of the proletariat, leading in all phases of its revolutionary class struggle and the subsequent transitional period toward the realization of socialism, the first stage of communist society.

"2. There can be no absolutely correct, immutable organizational form for communist parties. The conditions of the proletarian class struggle are subject to changes in an unceasing process of transformation; the organization of the vanguard of the proletariat must also constantly seek appropriate forms corresponding to these changes. Similarly, the historically determined characteristics of each individual country condition particular forms of adaptation in the organization of the individual parties.

"But this differentiation has definite limits. Despite all peculiarities, the identity of the conditions of the proletarian class struggle in the various countries and in the different phases of the proletarian revolution is of fundamental importance to the international communist movement. This identity constitutes the common basis for the organization of the communist parties of all countries."

-- It is also important, I think, to note that "democratic centralism" (freedom on opinion, unity in action) is not a principle unique to the history of Marxism but is also practiced by ruling-party ministerial cabinets in parliamentary governments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_collective_responsibility

'Democratic centralism,' in theory anyway, is also a trade union principle. Everyone can debate and hold a variety of views on when or whether it's wise to go on strike, but once the decision is taken by a majority, or their representatives, everyone is expected to bracket their critique for a period, and carry it out in a unified fashion. Otherwise, you're justly targeted as a scab.

I will tend to disagree even in theory on the application of DC at the level of a mass organization. I don’t think enough political rapprochements exist. In a mass organization, even working class organization workers are coming from different background politically and ideologically and the unity for the application of DC is simply not present. Of course, method of internal functioning for a mass organization is needed, even if we do find some elements in the application of DC present but systematically not to be confused with DC itself.

The application of DC could be very bureaucratic or democratic, it all have to do in the dialectical relation of two opposites 1] democracy 2] Centralism and in that dialectical relation democracy is to be determinant not in theory but in actuality. When the dialectical relation of these opposites is not dialectically addressed, we will encounter bureaucratic deformation or metaphysical functioning where the process of achieving unity is never ending.

Rosa Luxembourg, as a referral for initially addressed some of the deformation, is positive read on that subject.

DC is only applicable at the level of a revolutionary level organization in which maximum level of unity in the process of political rapprochement could be reached. DC is an internal political line, not simply a list of principles; a dogmatic approach guiding the process of political rapprochement to achieve maximum unity inside a revolutionary organization, so this organization is not transform into a head without a body or with a body with no direction.

Carl,

Of course!

But I would argue that voluntary political organizations -- parties -- perhaps require at least slightly different principles than collective-bargaining organizations in economic struggles like labor unions. Or at least it complicates the issue of compulsory solidarity or unanimity of action: towards what ends, and hence with what means? Political parties and labor unions are irreducible to each other, to my mind.

'Compulsory Solidarity'? sounds like an Oxymoron to me. 'Expected as the norm' perhaps--but one can always break it, and deal with the consequences.

I think some folks here are confusing DC with a 'party' notion smuggled in by Stalin and mushed up with it, called 'unanimity of will', which is very problematic indeed.

DC is fairly straightforward, and no big mystery, until the metaphysical stuff gets throw into the stew.

Principles outside a political line guiding these principles are quite bureaucratic to me. The political line needs to be collectively constructed and out of that process principles will emerge guaranteeing in actuality the determinacy of democracy in the dialectical relation with centralism for the reproduction of the revolutionary organization…

@JM

<blockquote>...principles will emerge guaranteeing in actuality the determinacy of democracy in the dialectical relation with centralism for the reproduction of the revolutionary organization…</blockquote>

What, for goodness sake, are you talking about? You've turned 'political line' into 'The Tao.'

I'd set it aside in favor of concrete analysis, core values, decent working hypotheses about strategy and tactics, and an adjustable line of march. If that contingent package is what you mean by 'political line,' fine. Otherwise, it's a mystery or dogmatic coda better to be dumped.

Oh shit Carl, been some time since you last served like that

More seriously, I do like your description of DC as analogous to the trade union principle around strikes.

However, that is a description of how it should be, not the actual practices of the sects (or trade unions for that matter).

The actual experience in trade unions is one of alienation of the membership from leadership at all levels, and a domination of the line by the staff and high-level leaderships. Even those unions in the USA that elect officials competively - which are not many - entrenched lines dominate all discourse, and those who do not belong to the top level leadership or have deep control of staff are irrelevant to the direction of the union. Not to mention that what passes for a "strike" in the USA in the last few decades is nothing but unpaid vacations and picket lines, with zero effort into actually stopping production and scabbing.

In the sects, all of them. political internal struggle has given way to entrenched personal leaderships and little with united actions. This is specially true in paper membership organizations. And those who actually have high levels of activism, have nearly zero internal democratic life.

How to break with this is complex, but to solve something lets not delude ourselves and others with the real state of things.

(Carl, you're right, I should have written "obligatory solidarity," that is, obligatory for participation towards the purposes at hand.)

Let me put a finer point on my point:

I think that the organizational principles of "democratic centralism" for political parties meant something different from the principles of united-front strategy or from collective bargaining struggles through labor unions. The goals/purposes are different, and therefore the means/instruments are different, according to different criteria for success and hence difference principles.

Also, I don't think the principles for any of these -- unions, political parties, united front actions (or governments!) -- are based on working-class as opposed to capitalist forms of social being, but are rather continuous with them. Capitalists have their collectivism, and sometimes workers' collectivism is indistinguishable from that of capitalism.

This is why, I think, the issues become so muddled, because they are conflated and confounded.

For instance, physical coercion against scabs is an unfortunate necessity that would be alleviated by organizing unemployed people in ways that must go beyond immediate labor strike actions, demanding different forms of organization beyond labor unions. Such actions must go beyond themselves in order to truly have social-emancipatory content. Organizational forms must facilitate such transcending of immediate struggles, and in a variety of ways.

Also, all sorts of compromises are inevitable in the course of struggle. The key is to recognize them as such, which can only happen as a function of trying to overcome rather than naturalize them.

There are no organizational principle panaceas for the problems of emancipatory politics -- all forms can serve other ends. Rather, there are problem about which people must become more aware, but can only do so in practical experience.

Why the Communist International degenerated is complicated: there was no original sin, but rather a poorly organized/effected retreat within a few years of the revolutionary wave 1917-19 that made the later resumption of offense problematical, carrying within it important seeds of further failure.

We have been so entrenched into principles that the path to reach principles is overlook or dismiss. In fact, political line is not a dogmatic code; it is the anti- thesis of a dogmatic approach since it is different from a program and in constant mode of consolidation and rectification. Mao contributed to the concept of DC the concept of Mass Line and dialectically attached it to DC: a political line confirming the dialectical relation of an organization with the masses.

DC needs to allow the individual development for the consolidation of the collective, since the revolutionary organization is the embryonic of the society we aim to construct. So principles needs to come from a line that is collectively construct, through internal struggle and if there is no political unity principles are not applicable. So, since democracy is determinant it does mean something in actuality. Militant should no be followers but active participant in constructing a line. This is not Taoism a metaphysical variation but materialism.

It is all about reproductions. So far, what we have seen is the degenerateness of an organization as soon as the head is gone or the autocratic functioning of an organization where power is concentrated in the hands of a central committee and the base becomes foot soldiers. In my case, we need to have a line where the line is collectively construct and the organization as a whole, with all inherent contradictions and pertinent effect, is defining a form of internal functioning guaranteeing a collective participation.

I think JM is onto something here, most especially with his approach of voiding apriori priciples regarding DC and noticing the path, concretely, specifically, and contextually.

What is the bumber-sticker version of DC? A line arrived at via democratic discussion amongst the ranks, this discussion synthesized by the leadership, the crystallized line "sent down" and carried out unswervingly into practice. That practice initiates another spiral up and another spiral down. I suppose in more desperate conditions of repression the leadership plays the role of summing up practice and determining line of action (though the dangers here are obvious: leadership cut off from varied practice of cader and masses so the line has the potential to be either determinist (disregarding countervailing experience and evidence) or wildly idealist (equating the thoughts of leaders with reality).

What I agree with JM about is that shouldn't specific conditions/environment determine the principles of organization, including the dynamic form something like DC might take? Do we need a previous (read: experiences from the past) template or can we be inventive, creative, on the basis of analysing present conditions and the changiness?

Lastly, if you think DC does not conjure metaphysical thinking and acting, then you have not analysed it problematically. If we take the physical to be the nuts and bolts of DC (who reports to who, who is responsible to who, etc). then there is an entire psycho-political reality that goes deeper and beyond (meta) the physical.

Some of these metaphysical notions revolve around: leadership/led; fear of being wrong/making mistakes; resistance to carrying out summations/resistance to listening to varied practice; etc. These are not problems with the physical -- they are instead problems first and foremost with human consciousness (or lack thereof) and require the utmost attention and mindfulness every single moment. We have history to take note of when this awareness slips.

@JM

If your 'correct line' isn't metaphysical, JM, simply tell us what it is. Or provide us a link as to where it is, so we can read and study it. If there isn't any such link because no organization exists that can produce it, because it hasn't be organized yet, then how and where is it being organized? But wait a minute--it can't be organized, because none of the organizers has the 'correct line'--they can't, because they are not organized yet.

But still to proceed, we need the correct line FIRST, before we can talk about the best way to organize.

So you see what a tangled mess you leave us with here? A correct line grounded in practice and the mass line, but it exists nowhere. It has not come into being yet.

That's why its like the Tao.

I'll stick with the straightforward trade union rule-of-thumb for solidarity, and leave it at that. Believe me, I've been in several DC organizations, and if they could just operate on that rudimentary basis, it would have been a huge advance.

@ Carl
“it would have been a huge advance”. I have and still am.

Nowhere in my posting do I pretend my line is correct, it would be very presumptuous of me to affirm such things. In fact, I am insisting and arguing constantly the political line is in constant mode of rectification and further none of us is immune from bourgeois ideology and bourgeois ideology will manifest itself into the proletarian organization.

I think there is a fundamental difference between abstract, metaphysical and obscure. The interpretation of the abstract is a process where materialism is in constant struggle with idealism.

I will argue forcefully that DC is a line guiding the internal functioning of a higher-level political organization and we need to learn from the past, the different experiences so we can construct our own. We, in my political current, did systematic analysis of past experiences of the Bolsheviks, of the CP of China, listen to the critics of the Anarchist, discuss Rosa’s piece on DC to learn and to construct our own. If you are in the middle of a pool and complaining about getting wet, first you need to get out of the pool. We did not want to reproduce the same bureaucratic practices of previous experiences we first rupture with them and constructed our own conception of DC.

One central point in our conceptualization of DC is the collective participation. Militant submit to what we agree on and what we agree is collectively construct. Not to the desire of individuals and this process create 2 aspects decentralization: individual initiative, individual creativity and centralization: a common objective. Do we need a centralized coordination? YES.

Again, to impose discipline [principle] is to define what is indiscipline [line]. To impose the principles of minority and majority is to define these concepts. [Line] Mao’s thesis on liberalism is to lay the groundwork for discipline. To impose discipline, outside the definition of a line, is, for me, bureaucratic. Political line is determinant and will define principles. Let me take our example, you and I, DC is inapplicable due to the simple reasons we are fundamentally politically far apart, I will have to convince you or you will have to convince me. Until than you will need to develop your own conception of DC and for me to tell you what it is we need to enter a process of political rapprochement: a key element in our definition of DC and you will participate in the construction of our internal line guiding our internal functioning. I will tell you one thing if you convince me of your line, any specific aspect of your line, I will go back to “my” organization and enter a process of political rapprochement, and your line will possibly becomes our collective property, as well.

As you could see our approach to proletarian theory is not to quote dead revolutionaries but to construct for the consolidation of our theory

To RW
I do agree with you on your interpretation of “mine” definition of DC. But before we even conclude on our agreement, I will insist and argue on one more things. For DC to be really applicable we need emancipation, individual development for the reinforcement of the collective a line in itself, an aspect of the general line guiding the internal practice. In order to do it, we do need to break with the mentality those past revolutionary’s contributions are cast in stones, untouchables and scriptures.

We need to develop our own capacity, liberate ourselves of the bourgeois mentality to follow a leader, but a collective group of leaders unify by a common and centralized objectives defined by us.

We systematically criticized Lenin, Mao and Anarchism not for their demise but to consolidate their contributions, even if our contributions are simply footnotes. For example, we did think Mao’s thesis on contradictions is a contribution but we weren’t satisfied, we strive to consolidate it by deepening it. We wage a tremendous struggle on Lukas; we taught some of his contributions were mechanical. Our line was do not follow, be critical and follow by collectively agreeing. It really develops an internal democratic dynamic. We are still dealing with our flaws ideological flaws: remnants of feudalist ideologies and capitalistic ideologies; what I called dealing with the problematic of our movement. I am certain of one thing if we reproduce the elitist practice of Lenin, the autocratic practice of Stalin we are bound to get the same result...

We need to construct a new breed of communist organizations, the embryo of our new society where the democratic participation for our emancipation is guaranteed, IT IS ALL ABOUT REPRODUCTIONS

@JM

OK, this is a better level of discussion.

In my group, we have centralism--in that we have national committees and task forces/projects/teams--and we have democracy. But the only discipline we have is self-discipline--except if you want to have voting rights at national meetings, you have to pay your dues. That one we enforce.

You might say this is largely for historical reasons. Those who split with the CPUSA, the event that brought us into being, were simply sick of the old bureaucratic centralism with democratic verbiage. Others of us who came from different traditions had a variety of views on DC, some not so negative, but still worldly wise.

That means there is no such thing in our group as a 'directive' from the center, like the old days (for better or worse!). Instead we make recommendations and statements, then we, the national leadership, work to win over the chapters to carry them out in various ways, listening to and adapting to their concerns. If we don't win over the local folks, too bad for us. Maybe we need to reflect a little.

Our biggest and most protracted internal debate is the same one everyone else has--what to do about elections. Some of us work in the Greens or Peace and Freedom or the Socialist Party (we allow dual members, so long as it's open), and this grouping often wants little to do with Democrats except to oppose them. Others work with groups like PDA building an inside/outside option, but for real, not just the lip service of the old Gus Hall days. The other debates are over historical matters, for the most part. When we do concrete analysis of current conditions, we can usually find a good majority, if not a consensus.

We don't have a 'Program', but we do have a statement of 'Goals and Principles' which are modified at Conventions. We define ourselves as both Marxist and pluralist. That means we don't try for ideological unanimity. People can hang on to a variety of historical views--Trotskyist, Maoist, pro-Soviet, or something else, but the touchstone for dealing with disputes is to refer to the G&amp;P statement. Otherwise, you're free to form a faction, organize debate and so on. Just be open and above board about it.

This works for now. Mainly for the reason that we see ourselves as transitional. We are only one piece of the puzzle. Ideally, we would find a good number of other organizations and projects on the left, all of which would subordinate themselves to something new and larger and better organized that could far more effectively bring the left to a scale that the times demand of all of us, We're both serious and persistent about it these days.

JM writes: "We need to develop our own capacity, liberate ourselves of the bourgeois mentality to follow a leader, but a collective group of leaders unify by a common and centralized objectives defined by us." And "We need to construct a new breed of communist organizations, the embryo of our new society where the democratic participation for our emancipation is guaranteed, IT IS ALL ABOUT REPRODUCTIONS"

I agree with this and it is a most serious ideological war that must be waged. It is about reproductions (as in we are the embryo that will reproduce what serves our conditions) and it is about NOT reproducing the old problems by making them canons we must follow or die.

I really enjoyed Louisproyect's ''The Comintern and the German Communist Party'' , but I cannot understand how Louis will not accept the conclusions of his own analysis:

Namely that it was under Lenin's leadership that the bureaucratic nature of the Comintern was established. One should recall here the objections of Gorter and Pannekoek.

Nobody seems to have a good word for Zinoviev, Mao criticises both Bukharin's and Stalin's leadership, but thinks things got a lot better under Dimitrov. Borodin, the Comintern plenipotentiary in China, did not know anything about the country, not even the language.

I tend to agree with Zhou Enlai, when he points out that after the dissolution of the Second International we got the Russian Revolution, and after the dissolution of the Third we got the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban Revolutions, none of which were a result of 'fraternal' advice. As for democratic centralism, my own experiences have always been of anti-democratic centralism, and in talking to trotskyist acquaintances they readily affirm the same. It is quite simplistic of Louis to conjure up Stalin as a kind of diabolus ex machina to explain the tragic fate of 20th. century revolutions. Bogdanov in a letter to Lunarcharsky is warnig him as early as 1917 about 'the crude chess player Lenin' and'the dilettante Trotsky'. Bogdanov was put in prison! okay he wasn't shot in the head, but that came a lot later.

A simple factual point:

Jlowrie writes:

<blockquote>"Mao criticises both Bukharin's and Stalin's leadership, but thinks things got a lot better under Dimitrov. Borodin, the Comintern plenipotentiary in China, did not know anything about the country, not even the language. "</blockquote>

I don't think that is true.

Mao wrote that after 1935 the Chinese party no longer obeyed Moscow. And 1935 is the date of the conference that brought Mao to top leadership.

Mao's work (and his subsequent discussions of that history) is a very sharp and stinging rebuke of the whole Comintern experience (including the idea that you can create a revolution through orders and emmisaries from abroad).

The bitterness of this experience is one reason (among several) of why Mao never formed his own international.

So while Mao is very aware of the negative experience of the 1920s comintern directives (which under Bukharin and Chen Duxiu led to the disasterous events in Shanghai and elswhere) -- he hardly argues that "things got a lot better."

The famous long march was made necessary by the disastrous policies imposed by the Comintern's Third Period (with their corresponding emissary in the base areas, Otto Braun (Li De). And Mao came to power on that Long March (at the Tsunyi conference) as a reaction and a rejection of such policies (both the specific policies of the Third Period, but also the Comintern's commandist methods).

<a href="/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Dimitrov" rel="nofollow">Dimitrov</a>'s line (i.e. the Comintern's popular front line concentrated in the 7th Congress of 1934-35) had many fundamental problems. Its rightism was disasterous (even fatal, imho) to revolutionary movement in Europe and North America. But Dimitrov's line did include the important theme that communist parties and revolutionary movements needed to develop their own paths.... And (needless to say) this was very popular among the Communists in China (after the repeated disasters of the Comintern's 1920s rightist line and its early 1930s adventurist lines).

By the time you get to the late 1940s, Stalin is telling Mao Zedong (and the CCP) <em>not</em> to launch a second civil war and try to seize power -- and Mao is simply and openly ignoring that advice.

@JLowire:

How were the Chinese, Vietnamese or Cuban revolutions any less "bureaucratic" in outcome than the Russian?

Lenin's (and Trotsky's) Bolsheviks' leadership of a workers' revolution in 1917 Russia, I think, was a qualitatively different kind of thing than leading a guerrilla army in overthrowing a state, as with Mao, Ho, Fidel and Che.

After 1918, the struggle for socialism was conditioned by the German and Entente military invasions and civil war in Russia, which certainly affected things. Certainly the Bolshevik Party was something different by 1920-21 than in 1917. And it became something different yet after that. Was Lenin really all that like Stalin? If so, why did Lenin oppose Stalin at the end?

A political party is not an army. Wasn't the Chinese Communist Party in 1927 a completely different thing than in 1949 and subsequently?

Why the sympathy for Mao et al. and not Lenin?

Or am I misinterpreting you?

Chris writes:

<blockquote>"How were the Chinese, Vietnamese or Cuban revolutions any less “bureaucratic” in outcome than the Russian?"</blockquote>

One of the most debilitating habits in some corners of Trotskyism is the historical assumption that all communist movements after 1924 are simply some <em>subset</em> of "Stalinism."

So you elaborate a specific historical verdict on Stalin's Soviet Union (a critique of its supposedly bureaucratic and anti-revolutionary nature etc.) and then (often by simple extension and the sketchiest deduction) have a pre-made verdict to apply to China, or Cuba, or Vietnam. So you have the experience of many trotskyists who have a sophisticated analysis of Soviet history (and who can identify Radek, and Tukhachevsky, and the policies of Preobrazhensky), but whose hard verdicts on China are unaccompanied by much actual analysis (or any knowledge of Zhu De or Kuai dafu or the dozens of key players of that revolution, or who adopt a blank look if someone mentions the ten major line struggles of the Chinese Communist Party.)

And it becomes particularly acute when someone asks a question like how the Chinese revolution was "less bureaucratic" than the Soviet experience -- when the Chinese revolution culminates in the profound wavelike experiences of the 1950s, 60s and 70s which (whatever our opposing summations might be) were <em>precisely</em> attempts to stir waves of mass uprisings <em>under socialist conditions</em> and increasingly against the conservative elements of the party and state themselves. Apparently that can be dismissed or ignored with an exasperated demand for how any of this was different or less bureaucratic than the Soviet experience -- as if the answer is obvious and doesn't even need any examination of any real (and seemingly obvious) differences.

This (forgive me) seems part and parcel of some old Euro-Marxist assumptions of Asia as a permanent periphery in a Europe-defined world, and the people of Asia as "a people without a history" (in the notorious phrase of Marx himself). [Marx's unfortunate phrase comes from a rare moment when he did not, himself, apply a Marxist method well, and he assumed the lack of knowledge, in Europe, of any complex Asian history reflected the absense of such history.... in ways also tied to Marx's brief but erroneous elaboration of an "Asiatic despotism" theory to describe particular modes of production based on state-maintained irrigation and infrastructure.]

The casual use of threadbare analogy (from Stalin's USSR to Mao's China to Ho's Vietnam to....) implies and embodies an assumption that basic verdicts can be passed without much actual knowledge or engagement of the "other" great socialist revolution of the twentieth century -- China (where a quarter of humanity went through profound waves of revolution -- both agrarian and socialist).

A stark example of this has been virtually anything written by the ISO on revolutionary <a href="/http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=12785" rel="nofollow">China</a> -- where I have been struck by how uninformed it is factually, how mechanically it schlepps over Soviet-era assumptions, and how much it is marked by mainstream <a href="/http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=6711" rel="nofollow">anticommunist analyses</a>. Talking to their folks, you get the impression they believe that key questions of world revolution and history were coiled up within the European socialist debates of 1914-1924 -- and everything since then can be understood through <em>uncoiling</em> all that (again and again).

Particularity fades away. The mass movements and accomplishments of literally millions of people (over literally six decades of complex revolution and creative thought) are analyzed mainly by awkward analogy.

<blockquote>"Lenin’s (and Trotsky’s) Bolsheviks’ leadership of a workers’ revolution in 1917 Russia, I think, was a qualitatively different kind of thing than leading a guerrilla army in overthrowing a state, as with Mao, Ho, Fidel and Che."</blockquote>

And? Why shouldn't new waves of socialist revolution be qualitatively different from the previous ones?

Put one way: The 19th century saw the rise of a large, radical movement among European workers -- and one of its outcomes were a series of attempts at power (Paris commune, Russia, Germany, Budapest, etc.), especially after the devastation and social collapse following World War 1.

A generation later, that Euro-workingclass revolutionary movement had ebbed (never to return!)

But a new wave had emerged on a world scale:

The groundpounding anti-imperialist movements of the colonized world. That wave too had (among its diverse outcomes) a radical socialist expression that was manifested on quite a large scale by the 1949 Chinese revolution (and then its Korean, Vietnamese, Naxalbari etc epiphenomena)

It reverberated around the world for two more decades until the mid 70s (and ended with the final defeat of colonialism in Africa and Southeast Asia, and the Cuban victory over U.S. domination).

And among its many different currents, that great anti-colonial wave evincing its socialist/communist component in the unprecedented attempts during the Cultural Revolution to reverse precisely those conservatizing trends that reversed revolution in the USSR.

And why shouldn't our next <em>wave</em> of socialist/communist revolution also be quite different from both those <em>previous</em> waves (including in its forms, its trigger points, and its demographics)?

<blockquote>"A political party is not an army. Wasn’t the Chinese Communist Party in 1927 a completely different thing than in 1949 and subsequently?"</blockquote>

ON one level, surely, a party is not an army. And yes, the revolutionary parties of the past were very different out of power than in power -- and went through many changes of form and politics. How could it be otherwise.

But in other ways, in China, the army emerged as the main form of revolutionary organization -- in a protracted war led (through mediations) by a political (i.e. party-like) communist leadership.

The Chinese revolutionary army was a political school for liberation and state power. It established base areas and new forms of governance. It merged the features of party and army and state in many ways. What's wrong with that?

And its army veterans (returning home from revolutionary war to rural areas in the 1950s) led the Chinese agrarian revolution -- probably one of the largest and most successful revolutionary mass movements in history (and a movement that was profoundly grassroots, in the sense that it was far too large and tumultuous to control by organizational means).

And again, isn't there a bit of mechanical thinking here. A party isn't an army isn't a state isn't a popular movement -- but are these really quite such discrete categories? Didn't the Chinese party form and lead an army that prefigured a new state and gave form to a profound mass movement?

<strong>And more:</strong> One of the advantages of the Chinese revolution was both its protracted character (which in several base areas gave the Maoists years of experience with different revolutionary strategies and leadership approaches), and the fact that its army was developed "from scratch" and over in many ways. (This was very different from the "telescoped" nature of the Soviet revolution and civil war -- and produced a different kind of army.)

In the Chinese socialist period (1949-1976) the Peoples Liberation Army was a relatively radical institution within society, serving at times as a base area for egalitarianism and ongoing revolution in important ways. And it eshewed many of the characteristics of bourgeois armies (in its approach to rank, privilege, integration with the people, soldiers doing productive labor, a strategy of relying on the people and "bring the enemy in deep to be drowned in a sea of the people." etc)

By contrast in the Soviet Union, the Red Army (which had been formed very quickly and had assimilated a large Tsarist officer component) was a relatively conservative force within society and maintained rather traditional military doctrines and hierarchies (in ways that became clearer during the nationalist turns and socially conservative extremes of before and during WW2, and then the rightward movement of the1950s).

Even today, to call China a "police state" is to not really know what a police state is, and to completely misunderstand how fundamentally different the Chinese experience is and was from the Soviet experience - one of the resons for the longevity of the CPC's State. Yes, China is basically State capitalism, but that is immaterial to that point. In China, common people do not leave in fear of the repressive police knocking in their door - and feel empowered enought to do 10,000+ strike actions a year, including the now yearly ritual of villages that throw out the government. The handling of these contradictions

Tianamen Square is even an example of this: it is clear that the repression that allegedly happened there was not as different than other States facing similar challenges. And even its more iconic image, that of a man standing in front of a tank column, stopping it, amplifies this difference: in Czechoslovakia, the Soviets simply ran over the people who stood in front of the tanks, to the point that a significant number of the casualties in the invasions came precisely from this.

That is not to say the PRC are saints uncapable of repression, but there is something to be said - none of it good - about the theoretical model that lumps together, say, North Korea and Cuba. And this is something done left, right, and center, and all of it is wrong, dead wrong.

Cuba, for example, has performed less State executions in the last 45 years than Texas (and only Texas) last year. And this in spite the death penalty being in the books for a much wider range of crimes than in Texas. Shall we call Texas totalitarian?

On the Red Army, Mike's point is extremely astute and important: the Red Army in the Soviet Union was not a revolutionary army. It was an army defending a revolutionary state. Besides the very correct points Mike raises, lies a history of the imposition of the Red Army over the actual revolutionary armies in what became the Soviet Union - Krotovsky's Red Guards, Makhno's Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, etc. The Red Army was Trotsky's invention - born out of the necessity to fight not only a civil war, but a war of national liberation against a 20+ nation invasion led by the British, US, and French. Has this invasion not happened, which to a great extent inflamed nationalist sentiment, it arguable that the revolutionary military formations would have matured on their own in a "pure" civil war - rather than being forced, sometimes violently, to integrate into a Red Army that was basically the same as the Czarist army, in many cases retaining even the "colors" and "pomp and circumstance" of their units. That this strategy proved to be a military success would later have nefarious consequences in Spain, were turned into a fetish, the forced centralization of the Republican militias into a Republican Army would lead to the internal fragmentation and strategic weakening of the Republican forces, ultimately spelling defeat.

Interestingly, the same thing happened to the White Army: initially formed of informal militias and private armies, it became an army of Czarist units who defected to the White side. The success of absorbing formerly White unites into the Red Army that the multinational coalition enabled came at a cost of depolitization, something that the bolsheviks tried to solve by introducing political commissars (an invention that goes back to the French Revolution). This setup the basis for what would become an infamous, and infamously repressive and corrupt, institution.

So, the road to hell is paved with good intentions - in this case, the pressure to save the fledgling Soviet State put survival over politics. And the result was the result.

@Mike:

I was responding to JLowrie's "council communist" (Gorter, Pannekoek, et al.) attack on Lenin for already being (the worst of) Stalin. I wasn't attacking the Chinese Revolution, etc. I was trying to address the issue of this article/thread: the question of the political party as such.

Elsewhere, I've already written out my thoughts on Maoism and Marxism, if anyone's interested:

http://platypus1917.org/2010/08/05/chinoiserie-a-critique-of-the-revolutionary-communist-party-usa%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cnew-synthesis%E2%80%9D/

In short, I think that Stalinism in the USSR and Maoism in China were successful at transforming peasant social relations into bourgeois social relations. Not in itself a bad thing! But that issue, especially with respect to the struggle for socialism, needs to be addressed *dialectically*.

I think that successful struggles for socialism (workers' revolution) in the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, etc. could have saved the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese etc. people a great deal of unnecessary suffering in attempting to "build socialism" that did not succeed -- but could have been helped to succeed by the struggle for socialism elsewhere.

In the absence of this, I don't think that Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. give us much in terms of models for the struggle for socialism today and moving forward.

At the same time, I think that there is something, however minimal, to learn from the experience of the revolutionaries in the 2nd Intl. (including figures such as Luxemburg and Trotsky -- later Trotskyism is another matter), first and foremost Lenin.

I won't touch on every point that Chris raises (though others might want to)....

But he touches on an issue that many people raise for very understandable reasons:

<blockquote>"In the absence of this, I don’t think that Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. give us much in terms of models for the struggle for socialism today and moving forward."</blockquote>

On one level, I am not a fan of <a href="/http://kasamaproject.org/2009/10/14/focoism-vs-peoples-war-problems-of-exaggerated-universality/" rel="nofollow">exaggerated universality</a> (and an exaggerated use of "models"). So it is hard to disagree.

Historically some communists thought that Russia was more of a model for the United States (the so-called October Road of urban insurrection followed by countrywide civil war) than China (with its road of "protracted peoples war" in which the countryside encircles the city).

I tend to think that major revolutions will be marked by a startling degree of particularity and uniqueness, <a href="/http://kasamaproject.org/2009/07/07/on-socialist-democratic-forms-snowflakes-the-restoration-of-capitalism/" rel="nofollow">like snowflakes.</a>

But even if our revolution forges radically different <em>strategic</em> outlines -- there are things that are profoundly relevant from previous revolutions.

There is (for example) a great deal to learn from the Bolshevik internationalism. Or from the Maoist method of mass line (a leadership method of "from the people, to the people").

Further the Chinese revolution had a unique development that is worth paying attention to: A section of their leadership attempted to have a new revolution "under the dictatorship of the proletariat" -- i.e. waves of new revolution <em>within the revolution</em>. This was a major break with the assumptions of Stalin-era socialism which assumed the state was the guaranteur of socialism and which was (frankly) suspicious of mass movements and the criticism of officials. All you have to do is read the bewilderment and hostility that Albania's leader Enver Hoxha expressed as the Cultural Revolution unfolds (recorded in his diary "<a href="/http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=enver%20hoxha%20%22notes%20on%20china%22&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CCMQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.enverhoxha.ru%2FArchive_of_books%2FEnglish%2Fenver_hoxha_reflections_on_china_volume_I_eng.pdf&amp;ei=LnUgT76KOeevsALAstTNDg&amp;usg=AFQjCNFLNLYO3kNLyPY8w5EryBZkAoPDRg&amp;cad=rja" rel="nofollow">Reflections on China</a>") to get a sense of how new and daring all that was.)

And certainly, any movement imagining a socialist transformation (in the future) has to discuss how <em>ongoing</em> revolutionary change will be carried out and led.

In addition, Mike (and you might disagree), I think the Chinese experience also shows something interesting, which is that consciousness is a genie that is hard to put back into the bottle.

The GPCR might have not been ultimately (that is, in the sense of deepening socialist control of the State), but it was successful, and to this day it is evident, in telling the State: there is a limit to what you can do. The lessons of self-activity and self-organization that the GPCR taught are obviously not lost on the Chinese masses - who struggle constantly, much more than the masses in the USA and with much more success, against the State.

For example, the much vaunted Great Firewall of China and the 50 cent Party are paper tigers in front of the creative self-organization of the Chinese masses. If you want to bypass both, you can, with little difficulty and little chance of being caught.

Now, this is uneven - but I think that when China reaches the level of contradiction we have in the USA today, the result will be much different and positive.

In this sense, and only this sense, objective conditions are in the forefront: the Chinese masses by and large agree with the current course of the country, and when they don't they do something about it, with a great deal of success.

Take for example, the earthquakes in Southern China, which were a kind of Katrina moment - the indignation was the same as in the USA, but the actual actions - but political and concrete - were much more deeper, to the extent that public self-criticism had to be done by the entire party leadership, at all levels.

What did W do with Katrina? "Heck of a job, Brownie" In China, today, he would have been defenestrated by an angry crowd, at best.

Which takes us to Cuba - one of the most starling discoveries done by many of my comrades (and I come form a tradition whose historic leader most infamous action was calling Fidel a dictator to his face), is the fact that most of the "popular organizations" - the unions, the women's groups, the youth groups etc, have a great degree of autonomy and even contradiction with the Party and State at the base level. This leads of a politics of defending the revolutionary gains *in spite* of the problems of democracy and more importantly, economic and bureaucratic corruption. This is quite different from the Soviet model - and an experience worth looking into.

The same leader that called Fidel a dictator has argued that the height of the Cuban revolution was the period of the Bay of Pigs invasion, when 80% of the adult population had arms and formed part of an organized militia, most of them semi-autonomous and not centralized to the FAR. It is in the dismantling - urged by the Soviets - of these militias and the substitution of these forces by a conscript army and what are now called the CDR, were the socialist and popular character of the revolution transformed.

That is also an important lesson.

So, again, I agree with Mike is that it is incorrect to "flatten" the experiences of actually existing socialism - and to stress that even in the living examples there is much that in the context of the USA is extremely radical.

IN terms of what Chris brings - I agree that looking at the revolutionaries of the Second international is important, even vital, but I think it is also fraught with danger. One of the primary dangers is that while they were operating in an environment of world revolutionary ferment, one that had last been seen in the Paris Commune, there was zero experience of what revolutionary power meant, in reality. The closest they had was the Saint Petersburg Soviet of 1905 - which was nothing compared to the Paris Commune.

In that sense, there is a lot of wishful thinking and pure abstraction in a lot of what they wrote - including Lenin. Another problem is that this was a period of crystallization of the matrix formed by the contradictions of internationalists vs social-patriots and revolutionaries vs reformists, a matrix that defined the revolutionary experience in the 20th century. As such, this is a period of polemics, not construction, and the writing in necessarily angular and divisive, concentrating on the points of difference rather than the points of unity, and even when not, concentrating on a need of unity over principle.

So these two problems - the unproven, abstract, nature of what is being said, and the polemical method of saying it - can often obscure the nature and create many of the pitfalls we should struggle to overcome.

In this sense, it is necessary to study this history, but one should be careful not to over-extract lessons, in particular, one should see what the concrete outcomes of these ideological struggle was.

A good example is Kautsky, who created the basis for both revolutionary social-democracy and the internationalist tendencies, yet when these contradictions sharpened, took the opposite political stance, arguing for reformism and the defense of democratic institutional legitimacy and for social-patriotic war participation. So lets read Kautsky, but lets be careful were that road leads us to...

Much more important, in my view, is the nuanced examination of the path walked by actually existing socialism, and of the Marxist mass organizations outside of power - things like CPC and the Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal, not to mention the Nepalese experience etc - these are more relevant as teachers, because they are concrete experiences with a wealth of theoretical and practical development with a lot of positive and negative lessons within.

The elevation of the Second International period above these experiences is not very useful, in my estimation, as a way too look at lasting solutions to the problems of politics and ideology. They are important in the way all history is important, but not very relevant to the task of building a mass revolutionary movement.

@SKS

<blockquote>One of the primary dangers is that while they (2nd International Reds) were operating in an environment of world revolutionary ferment, one that had last been seen in the Paris Commune, there was zero experience of what revolutionary power meant, in reality. The closest they had was the Saint Petersburg Soviet of 1905 – which was nothing compared to the Paris Commune. </blockquote>

They might have studied the Reconstruction governments in the South and learned a thing or two. There were a product of revolutionary struggle as well--and there is also a lesson in their defeat. I would put them on a par with the Commune.

But yes, I've been reading Kautsky--along with Gramsci, Togliatti, Dimitrov, Tito, even some of Browder. Read it all carefully and with a grain or two of salt. Our view of history tends to be one-sided if we only read what was written in periods of revolutionary insurrection and civil war. We need to study the theory developed in periods of reaction, and other non-revolutionary conditions. In some ways, it might even be more helpful to us.

@ Mike:

Thanks, I would be interested in your response. But it might be tangential/off topic in this discussion.

* * *

I was thinking further about the question of Mao's Long March and politicization and development of the Chinese Communist Party.

The precedent to consider that seems apposite to me is Cromwell's New Model Army in the English Civil War, in which the protracted struggle was itself the revolutionary transformation from peasant to bourgeois social relations.

* * *

The issue, I think (which is what I elaborate in my article "Chinoiserie" linked above), is the status of the democratic revolution in the 20th century.

I don't think that the problem of Stalinism was that of a maniacal (even psychopathic) dictator (there's a problem with the pejorative vs. analytic meaning of the word "bureaucracy"); I see Stalinism -- especially in the Third Period, but also in the 1930s Popular Front -- as a democratic movement, but whose politics was inherently compromised by "socialism in one country"/"national roads to socialism." I see this as a lowering of horizons. As Trotsky put it, Stalinism was the "great organizer of defeat," meaning an adaptation to the failure and retreat of the world revolution.

I think that the post-colonial situation was also this, the democratic revolution under conditions of continued (global) capitalism, including for its most radical ("Communist" and even "Marxist") exponents such as Mao et al.

I agree with Mike, that this is complex matter. Not least it is complicated to judge what we can regard in retrospect as "advance," what was needed to move forward.

Going back to JLowrie's objection to Lenin earlier in the thread above, I'd like to point out that there are inevitable defeats/failures, retreats and compromises, but that the key is not to make a virtue of necessity.

I distinguish between Lenin and Stalin on this basis: Lenin was less apt to make a virtue of necessity, or to call a defeat or compromise a victory or success. Lenin stands out to my mind among the Bolsheviks (including Trotsky) for trying to avoid making virtues of necessity.

Disentangling the history in these terms is difficult, not least because most of the written record is not neatly distinguishable from (or was simply) propaganda. A great deal of reading between the lines and reliance on private records becomes required, which is always tricky.

@MikeE

<blockquote>But THEN to say that the whole thing (the society itself!) is successfully passing over from socialism into communism and classlessness (as Stalin announced in the late 30s) injects a whole other layer of problems (which, among other things, contributes to a profound disorientation or marginalization of precicely those people who are needed for the next advance of revolution).</blockquote>

Exactly. The main product in matters of thought becomes deep cynicism.

Now for the harder part. Apply this same criticism made of Stalin here likewise to the leaders of the GPCR, some of whom were also prematurely declaring 'communism' and 'classlessness,' but using a different lens.

I had in mind the short-lived 'Shanghai Commune,' particularly its 'down with all heads' moment, the earlier back-yard steel mills of the Great Leap Forward, and much of the critique of the ;theory of productive forces' and much of the campaign against 'bourgeois right.' I'm no expert on the period in any detailed way, but these seemed to me to running ahead of what the times really required--and when they failed, a good deal of cynicism about Marxism as a whole emerged, rather than of one twist and turn in a direction that didn't turn out to well.

I see the difference. That's why I said 'a different lens.'

Until the working class has power, our communist tasks in this country are largely theoretical and matters of propaganda. That does not mean we set them aside for later--we work on them now, and seriously. Likewise for our socialist tasks, save for those moments when cracks in the ceiling and the relation of forces makes a deep structural reform possible--and if we can formulate and organize a fight to win it. Or through a protracted 'war of position' counter-project, like the Mondragon Cooperatives.

Our democratic tasks, however, are both urgent and matters of mass action now.

Of course, should the moment become insurrectionary, set that progression aside. All bets are off. We'll have to be a lot faster on our feet. At the moment, unfortunately, we're hardly prepared at all

Carl,

You and I both seem to be students of the Mondragon Cooperatives (they have popped up before here and in other forums in discussions we have been both in), however, I think your usage of them as representatives only serves to amplify and underline the point of difference that Mike raised, which I share.

The Mondragon Cooperatives have to do with socialist revolution what an assault rifle has to do with socialist revolution:

Learning to operate them might be useful, and this knowledge might be needed to be executed, but their existence is not revolutionary in itself. So to call the Mondragon Cooperatives a counter-project in a war of position is like calling a gun club a boot camp for revolution: it is idealizing the objective over the subjective. There are socialists even among the leadership of the Mondragon empire, but they are a minority. The immense majority of the people who work (and hence own) Mondragon are doing it not because it is a counter-project, but because it makes them better money than a comparable job elsewhere. It is a capitalist business with an uncommon, yet not unique, ownership and management structure, that nevertheless

By this logic, the Google executives that have a wage of 1 dollar a year are the vanguard of socialist revolution - not the stalwart defenders of capital they actually are.

So this brings me to the point of subjective embrace of socialist revolution as needed in any strategic outlook and any tactical work:

The most successful socialist revolutions do have something in common: they rose the red flag from the very beginning. Yes - like the Bolsheviks in the Czar's Duma - they swam the currents of the objective, but they did so explicitly advocating for socialist revolution regardless of "objective" conditions, numerical capacity, mass reach, or other factors.

You often talk about strategy, but significantly missing in this strategy are explicitly revolutionary socialist politics - and this is what Mike and Chris are speaking about when they talk about a "lowering" of expectations. When the Koumintang and not the CPC became the Komintern's darling in China, there was something wrong in the strategy and the politics - regardless of the objective conditions.

I appreciate your personal differences with classic Stalinism - a willingness to engage on debate based on reasoning is a stand-out, a willingness to innovate tactically by using the internet medium is another - but these politics are at best Stalinist in form at worse much older Bernstenianism: both paths that have proven, historically, to be bankrupt as a way to develop socialist power beyond a few infant steps. And certainly, Bernstenian politics have bequeathed us 20th century imperialism, in its American New Deal version, and then in the "Responsibility to Protect" of the blue helmeted stormtroopers (or do I need to mention the support for the Vietnam war of some of Bernstein's inheritors to further drive the point?).

Both politics have in common the arguing that socialism and even communism are great, noble goals, which are not mere utopia. That is their difference with the liberals and the right. However, they do something worse, they use this understanding to then develop real and imagined hurdles to revolutionary advocacy and propaganda, dressed up in vulgar Marxist language of "objective conditions". In these efforts, even when some symbolic connection is still made to socialist aspirations or even revolution (in logos, party names etc) the actual politics are one of administrative competency and to a lesser degree reformism. The idea becomes "we can be better at the job than the right" or even "we can build better compromises with the liberals to benefit us now". In essence, this method - world wide - not only has become demobilizing politically, but bureaucratic/technocratic in form. No, socialists do not run on trains running on time - socialists run on radical structural revolutionary transformation. Or they cease to be socialists and become something else.

There is nothing wrong, per se, with feeling that politically the objective situation is such that you want to spend your time and energy advocating for reforms or better management or stopping a right that is only a few degrees different than the liberals. I do think there is plenty wrong when these politics are misrepresented as somehow being the best representation of socialist politics in the current period. They are not. They are a liquidation of socialist politics, objectively and subjectively.

Above a part got snipped by accident:

"yet not unique, ownership and management structure, that nevertheless" supports capitalist relations.

I think you miss a great deal about Mondragon. At the same time, I don't make as much of them as you imply.

I see them as only one arrow among many in our 'war of position' quiver, There are many other organizations to build as well--political, economic, social, cultural, in addition to the revolutionary organization itself.

Your 'gun club' metaphor is instructive. Suppose the gun club was made up all of workers, with politics from left to center, Suppose it chose its chief organizers from among the left. Suppose it secured its own weapons and ammo in good supply under their control, and also saw fit to train those close to them as well as themselves, for the sake of solidarity vs a crumbling neoliberal order.

Then such a gun club would be very useful indeed. in a 'war of position,' no?

One core principle of Mondragon, and a key to its success, is the 'sovereignty of labor' in regard to capital, ie, it owns its own capital, which its subordinate to its cooperative values, aims and mission. 'Sovereignty of Labor' can imply many things--everything from self-management on your part of the assembly line, electing your managers, all the way to the dictatorship of the proletariat. I'm not claiming the latter for Mondragon, only that it's a bridge to a wider vision.

MCC is itself nonpartisan, but not anti-partisan. The workers in them belong to several parties of the left, and a few of the center, mainly those of Basque nationalism. The level of class-consciousness is rather high, and even the younger workers who like MCC simply because they have a higher-than-average salary, security, and a vote, are often also very active in politics outside the plant--from third world solidarity, to eco-causes, to Basque independence.

Think through Father Azimendi's 10 principles, and ponder which you would exclude from a new socialist or communist order.

<blockquote>It is quite simplistic of Louis to conjure up Stalin as a kind of diabolus ex machina to explain the tragic fate of 20th. century revolutions. </blockquote>



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That's not really the point. My emphasis is not on identifying some bad guy to blame. In fact, my closest political ally until his death was Mark Jones, a self-described Stalinist.

My interest mainly has been to debunk the conventional versions of "Leninism" found in Trotskyist and Maoist groups alike. Speaking of which, here's Binh on Tony Cliff:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/mangling-the-party-vol-1-of-tony-cliffs-lenin-by-pham-binh/

Mike,I endorse your praise of the democracy within the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army and the praise of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution towards the realization of a Communist State.However I feel you are disjointing these achievements or movements from Leninism and almost treat them as innovations independent of Leninist theory.

Without Leninism Comrade Mao could never have developed his theory of Continuous revolution under the dictatorship of the Proletariat,or his theory of new-democratic Revolution for the semi-colonial countries.Even Mao's military doctrines were based on Lenin's works.It was Lenin who developed the concept of the proletarian party and Imperialism and the modern era is that of Leninism.True,in Lenin's period there was a bureaucracy within the Bolshevik party and insufficient democracy within the Soviets but remember the problems the U.S.S.R was facing in that period being encircled by enemy imperialist capitalist powers.China's red army fought in the pre-revolutionary stage while Russia's Red Army fought in the post-revolutionary stage.Mao could launch the Cultural Revolution only after mastering the Leninist dialectics and even in that period he emphasized the role of the vanguard party in the 2-line struggle against the revisionists. Mao never made any open criticism of Lenin and only was critical of the gross errors of Stalin who failed to initiate movements from below.Remember Mao also praised Stalin as a Marxist -Leninist and but for the support of the U.S.S.R the Chinese revolution would not have succeeded.

Louis proyect fails to grasp the actual polemics so needed in Lenin's time.Lenin's teachings are like that of a spinal chord to a body for the building of a revolutionary party and movement.Such essays undervalue the principle relationship of Lenin with the later innovations of Comrade Mao.