From: "David Bedggood" <dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz>
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 14:11:19 1200+
Subject: Re: M-TH: Wall street pathognominics


> Date:          Thu, 18 Sep 1997 20:16:05 -0400 (EDT)
> From:          Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
> To:            marxism-thaxis-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> Cc:            marxism-general-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> Subject:       Re: M-TH: Wall street pathognominics
> Reply-to:      marxism-thaxis-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU


Louis Proyect wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Sep 1997, David Bedggood wrote:
> 
> > This immediate  discussion arose out of Louis Proyect's 
> > rubbishing of Trotsky and Trotskyists as incapable of preventing 
> > fascism in Germany. He put this down to Trotsky's Zinoviev-like 
> > conception of the revolutionary party.  What Proyect is actually 
> > doing is denying the need for a Bolshevik party which acts as a 
> > vanguard. He condemns Trotsky for issuing an order calling on the 
> > German working class to rise up in 1923.   What Proyect means is that 
> >  the German workers were not ready, and Trotsky substituted for 
> > German workers. 
> > 
> 
> This is all wrong. I advocate a revolutionary party. What I disagree with
> is the notion that your are a Bolshevik. You have a sectarian
> misconception of Bolshevism that you received from Zinoviev. As I have
> pointed out repeatedly, the "Bolshevization" Comintern of 1924 codified a
> version of the revolutionary party that had little in common with Lenin's.
>
And you are wrong.  Trotsky was not a passive victim of the 
"Bolshevisation" of the Comintern but its active opponent. Read 
the stuff he wrote at the time instead of parrotting the boring 
line that he succumbed to Mr Z on and on. You have a menshevik 
conception of the party in which you can coexist with other petty 
bourgeois intellectuals without having to discipline your political 
behaviour. Calling this revolutionary doesnt change anything.

 
> What we are left with are pathetic shards of the Trotskyist movement like
> your own LCMRI that can fit into a school-bus. Each of these "nuclei of
> the Vanguard party" has a program with all the i's dotted and t's crossed.
> The notion that you have is that you will accumulate raw material in the
> form of recruits until you are large enough to lead a revolution.

There are quite a few school buses around Louis. And they are already 
io the road. Unlike your own political tendency which is mainly
electronic, gastronomic,  and can be fitted into one shower box. 

> Revolutionary parties are not built this way. When a profound working
> class radicalization in the United States begins to take place, tens of
> thousands of workers and intellectuals will begin to find a way to unite.
> The basis of their unity can not be Trotskyist ideology going back to
> 1917. There will be trade union militants who are Marxists politically who
> will never be convinced of the wisdom of the LCRMI position on a host of
> historical questions. There will also be intellectuals like Doug Henwood
> who want to be a working-class revolutionary party but reject the claims
> on truth of someone like yourself. (I leave the clowns Rodwell and Malecki
> aside for the moment because they have never really functioned in a
> serious revolutionary organization.)

And you and Doug will be there waiting for this upsurge to happen so 
you can take over the reins of leadership. But where 
will you lead them?  You programme will be a clean slate will it? No 
reference to the past struggles, what it took to make the Bolshevik 
revolution, and what caused the degeneration of that revolution. 
Perhaps you dont want to bore the workers with past lessons. Will you 
relate to late capitalism as if it has no history, no record of class 
struggle, defeats and victories? Yes you probably will,  because you 
have  a menshevik conception of history as an evolutionary process 
which throws up struggles out of its bowels, so that all the 
leadership has to is steer it in the right direction.

> 
> One of the reasons I can't take small groups like the LCMRCI seriously is
> that even on the basis of Trotskyism it is pathetically weak. When I write
> a challenge to Trotsky, it simply will not suffice to type in a few
> paragraphs from his self-justifications over the German fiasco. My
> analysis was much more deep-going. I stated that Trotsky foolishly
> directed Brandler, the leader of the German Communists, to commit to a
> date for an insurrection that was timed to the anniversery of the Russian
> Revolution. Trotsky was a great revolutionary but this was a disservice to
> the German working-class. They should have decided on such a date
> themselves based on the tempo of the class-struggle.

Your analysis was more deep going than Trotsky's? Well I can see why 
you don't need to join a party. You have a great man theory of 
history. Lou's words and deeds. You are not even in a party, or an 
international tendency, but the wisdom of one man can transcend that 
of one of the leading Bolsheviks who was a key actor in the events 
you are talking about. You are a chauvinist at heart because you 
cannot tolerate the idea of someone outside the country issuing 
orders. You have no conception of how a Bolshevik party functions as 
a disciplined international in which the international leadership 
call the shots, over the narrow, limited experience of a national 
leadership. It is because we regard this history as our own history 
that we don't have to do an academic skim on these events when they 
are already well documented in the archive. 

>
> Trotsky never really understood what was wrong with this type of
> functioning. As part of the Comintern leadership, he directed the French
> Communist Party what should go on the front pages of its newspaper. After
> he started his own international movement, he showed the same sort of
> insensitivity. If we are to construct an authentic world-wide
> revolutionary movement, we must have respect for the ability of other
> people to follow their own path.
>
The "authentic" movement you are talking about will never transcend 
the nationalist consciousness of each country, if you object in 
principle to an international leadership "directing" what should 
happen in a national section.  "Respect" as you call it is not a 
bourgeois conception which is concerned not to tread on the national 
pride of one or other national leader,  say a Cannon.  "Respect" for 
Bolsheviks is earned as the result of the exercise of authority as 
delegated by workers congresses.  Trotsky has "respect" because he 
earned it as a great leader in two revolutions and during several 
counter-revolutions. I do not "respect" your revolutionary 
credentials because they havnt been earned.

> Finally, when you use the word Menshevik, you are using it in a different
> way than it was used prior to the formation of the 3rd International.
> Before the 3rd International, it was a term that had no particular stigma
> attached to it. Lenin considered breaking with the Bolshevik leader
> Bogdanov in 1910 and fusing with the Mensheviks. Today the word is just a
> curse word. It is a synonym for liberal. You don't consider me or anybody
> else on the Spoons lists--except Rodwell and foam-at-the-mouth Malecki--as
> revolutionaries. You know something, I think it is probably a good idea
> that people like you have your own movement. The fact that you will act
> like a magnet for people just like yourself is beneficial for the left.


As I explained in my post to Doug,  Menshevism is more than an 
historic group, or set of positions, but a method which preceded the 
historic mensheviks and outlives them to this day. It is not a 
synomyn for liberal at all.  Liberals do not claim to be marxists 
that is why they are relatively harmless. Nor is it a curse 
word. Mensheviks claim to be marxists, posing as the rational 
embodiment of marxism against the Leninist "substitutionists" [or in 
your language "sectarian" though I bet our tendency has  got a lot  
more workers in it than you have in your shower box].  Their method 
and programme can be explained fundamentally by their petty bourgeois 
class position, where they are balanced between the struggling 
classes as mediators and reconcilers all in the name of democracy. 
That is why mensheviks as more dangerous than liberals, and why I 
continue to bother listening and reponding to your politics on this 
list. 

Dave.


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