File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-04.021, message 46


Date: Mon, 03 Mar 1997 10:22:27 +1000 (EST)
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-I: benighted workers?


 
>> Their petty-bourgeois leaders make every effort to deprive them
>> of the "experience of ruling for themselves, thinking for
>> themselves, acting for themselves." But the workers have other
>> ideas. They don't always win. But their class interest and
>> instinct pushes far ahead of the petty-bourgeois spirit of
>> compromise with capital.
>> 
>
>Louis: The big problem right now is how to construct a leadership that
>will not compromise. Your answer is to recruit cadre to a nucleus of a
>self-declared vanguard. I advocate the path that Lenin took. That is to
>construct a party based on Marxist principles, broadly speaking. This
>would include both people who hold to your "state capitalist" views as
>well as those who differ. If Lenin had tried to build a revolutionary
>party with the same sort of sectarian and rigid guidelines as you and
>every other Zinovievist does, there would have been no revolution in 1917.
>


This is the list at its very best.  There is a question of substance and it
is being debated sharply but with the correct amount of mutual respect and
courtesy.

My heart is with Walter Daum here. I long to see the petty bourgeois
betrayers given their just deserts.  But in all honesty my experience of
left groups has been just what Louis P. has described.  His solution is an
interesting one. He wishes to recover a pre-Zinoviev Lenin.  The magnittude
and importance of this task is truly impressive and it should be acknowedged
publicly.  However I have my doubts about it.  

My  own solution is to atempt to build broad cultural/political solidarity.
I want to try and rebuild the moment of progressivism.  to pour life and
water back into the swamp.  Then of course the hard men of history, and
Lenin was one of the hardest, can come forward and denounce us swampies and
build their revolutionary organisations.  But they do not have the water to
swim in at present.  This they cannot see. The more left they become; the
more discipline they strive for, the harder they make their cadre,  the more
they exacerbate the problem which is one of the total marginalisation of
Left wing ideas, solutions, actions etc.

There is a classic example here in Tony Cliff's turn to Trotskyism in the
80s. Just when he needed to keep the ISO broadly based he responded to the
rise of Thatcher by imposing what Louis P. terms Zinovievism on his
organisation.  This meant the eventual purging of the
liberterian/syndicalist element  of his party.  

Here in Australia it eventually meant that people like me were thrown out
because we were "right wingers" and a seriously disturbed person by the name
of  Ian Rintoul eventually seized control of ISO  with the explicit
connivance of the British SWP.

The truth is that I desperately want to join an organsiation but I  will
continue with what I see is united front work.  Thus in the local Brisbane
Anarchist paper I am doing all I can to get them to call for a vote for the
DSP (ex-SWP - America) in the Brisbane local elections.  But such is the
weight of history and sectarianism that it is a real struggle to unite the
Left in any way.

I will also try and work with Rob S.'s  New Labour Party, but they will have
nothing to do with "Trots".  I  deplore this but the fact does remain that
Trotskyism has a history of raiding and slashing and burning and wrecking
organisations and fronts to get a few members.

I myself have no doubt that eventually the working class will turn.  The
current events in Albania prefigure to my mind the shape of future politics.
However it is only if there is a tradition of radical left progressivism,
that these upturns will take a political route that will lead to a serious
challenge to Capital.

regards

Gary



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