File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-04-13.095, message 69


Date: 11 Apr 97 21:21:52 EDT
From: neil <74742.1651-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-I: parliaments , "democracy" and SPGB


dear Lew,

Lew, you cannot "gain  control of the machinery  of
state" thru voting majorites in bourgeois election
circuses.
Yours is a social democratic view left over from a 
pre monopolists capital and pre-imperialist epoch.

This issue has been well addressed by marxism
in light of actual experience of workers from the 
Paris Commune  of 1871 to Russia in 1918 to 
 the Allende-ist  disaster in 1973.
You don't  like the lessons of the Paris Commune 
mainly because it showed how bankrupt the SPGBs
electoral-pacifism really is (30 years before the
SPGB was formed in 1904!).

It was of key imporatnce that Marx and Engels (M-E) and 
the vanguard of marxism  they   helped to build 
wrote so much on the Commune of 1871. The proletariat
led other forces in the seizing of Paris  and tried
to build a egalitarian  society thru activation of
the organizational and political/military energies
of the ordinary masses.  M-E praised most their 
efforts to the skies. But they also pointed to 
fatal flaws /mistakes that led to the bourgeois 
reaction of France (helped by German reaction)
to stifle the workers gains , isolate the revolutionaries etc. 
A couple of the main issues they correctly dwelled on
was the need of the workers to spread the struggle
outside Paris as far as possible to keep the rulers
off balance ,etc

They also  pointed to the fact that after arming the workers
and valourously seizing the armories and key  supply
of cannon/ammo at  Mountmarte, the workers army should have
" marched on the bourgeois state in Versailles'" a laid siege
 to it  immediately after securing Paris. This hesitation was key
for after a few weeks the bourgeois had re-organized their forces 
and had cut  a deal with German reaction.  This mistake 
was quite costly for the communards.
Engels ( combat veteran of 1848-9) was trenchant in pointing to the
 cost of NOT being militarily  aggressive enough  in smashing the main
 bourgeois forces in Versailles  and the bourgeois machinery
of state in totality. 

M-E also drawing from the delays in workers taking effective 
control  of the state apparatus  in Paris, emphasized in numerous
works on the lessons of the Commune's fight , the KEY one being
that "the working class cannot merely take hold of the ready made
state machinery and wield it for their own purposes." They showed
that the workers must smash the existing state and construct
a new  temporary transitional workers state. 

But Lew and the SPGB will have none of this marxism from M-E .
Nor has the numerous other electoralist-socialist disasters had any
effect on them in the 20th cent., whether these come in France,
 Germany, Indonesia,  or Chile. 
The SPGBs worship of  one of the major bourgeois methods of 
political/social  domination-  the modern  politcal shell game called
 elections leads them  to also claim the fake "democracy" of
the capitalists is something the proletariat should  worship,and so 
by promoting  workers power thru parliament today , they help
to confuse workers and stultify class consciousness thru illusions..

Neil


  



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