File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9705, message 125


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


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