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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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