From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox) Subject: Re: M-I: Comments on Ben Seattle's organizational ideas Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 19:22:40 -0500 (CDT) Louis (P) For the most part your polemic against "vanguard" parties has been carried on in response to list members who represent such parties, and in the present all such "parties" are in fact isolated grouplets, which leads to an extreme intensification of all the real and possible defects of such vanguards and a nearly complete dissolution of their real and possible strengths. (Wow--that sen- tence got away from me.) It follows that you have been unable to test your ideas against principled opposition that shares funda- mental unity with you. A number of things follow from that, but one is that you begin (gradually) to write dialogues between hypothetical spokespersons for "the true way" and "the false way." There is a related problem in the "debate" as so far carried on--a certain detachment from history, in that the parties thathaps history offers us have always been either mass parties which became bureaucratic (anti-worker) machines for gathering votes or vanguards which either became grouplets as history got away from them or governing elites in a would-be socialist nation under seige from imperialism. (Sorry--I keep producing paragraph- length sentences today: that probably says something about the inchoateness of what I'm trying to develop here.) The result is that both the "vanguard" you speak of and the "mass movement" to say is needed tend to become platonic essences. Perhaps that is simply another unavoidable manifestation of the present weakness of the left: we have no choice but to speak in such essences. In any case an awareness of the possibility/certainty of such platonic discouse might temper its ill-effects. I stop arbitrarily, not seeing quite where this goes next. Carrol --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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