Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 19:49:13 -0500
From: dhenwood-AT-panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: Re: Vanguards?


At 7:20 PM 7/2/96, Louis N Proyect wrote:

>This means that a group of several hundred in a nation of over a
>quarter-billion citizens claims that it will lead this nation to socialism
>on the basis of some correct ideas it has right now. This is not
>Marxism. It is petty-bourgeois idealism.

While I agree with Lou's general evaluation of the grouplets, here's what
Hobsbawm said in The Age of Extremes (p. 72):

"The total number of these [Communist] soldiers in the necessarily ruthless
and disciplined army of human emancipation was perhaps no larger than a few
tens of thousands; the number of the professionals of the international
movement, 'changing countries more often than pairs of shoes,' as Bertolt
Brecht put it in a poem written in their honour, was perhaps no more than a
few hundreds in all. They must not be confused with what the Italians, in
the days of their million-strong Communist Party, called 'the communist
people....' Yet though their numbers were small, the twentieth century
cannot be understood without them."

Doug

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