I have been considering the obvious organizations such as FRSO or PSL. However, an article really made some points that stood out to me:

https://cosmonautmag.com/2018/10/from-workers-party-to-workers-republic-2/

“What made the “Leninist party of a new type” different was not democratic centralism. Rather than simple centralism, Comintern parties had a form of ‘monolithism’ to use the phrase of Fernando Claudin.14 In other words, Comintern parties emphasized centralism over democracy or often just disregarded democratic norms entirely. While this wasn’t absent in the Second International, the Third was born as a sort of militarized civil war organization rather than a political party in the sense of a mass workers association as envisioned by Marx. While this may have been justified at a time when an actual global civil war against capitalism was on the table, this is not the case right now – we are not living in the same era of ‘Wars and Revolutions’ as the leaders of the Comintern were. When modern Leninists claim the secret of their parties’ road to success is ‘democratic centralism’, it tends to mean an overly bureaucratized group that puts heavy workloads on individual members to make them more ‘disciplined’, and a lack of actual democracy in favor of a more militarized party structure. Factions are forbidden, ideological centralism (rather than programmatic centralism) is imposed from above, and groups aim to build an ‘elite’ cadre that tails existing mass struggles, hoping to bank in on them to recruit members. The Comintern model is simply a recipe for failure in today’s conditions, just another guide to building yet another sect that will compete for the latest batch of recruits. How this actually works in practice is exemplified by the state of actually existing contemporary Leninism in the USA.

Take PSL, FRSO-FB and the ISO as case studies. Alongside schemes to take over union bureaucracy, these organizations essentially form front groups that hide affiliation to any kind of communist goals and aim to mobilize students around the latest liberal social justice issues and work in alliance with NGOs to throw rallies of mostly symbolic value. Through these activities, the cadre (or inner group) of the Leninist organization hopes to recruit parts of the liberal activist community in order to grow their base of support and garner more influence in these social movements. The organizations themselves proclaim democratic centralism, but in reality, there is no public debate about party positions allowed between congresses. At the congresses debate, takes place as little as possible and is usually led by an unelected central committee that composed of full-time staffer careerists. By using their “militant minority” tactics to act as the “spark that lights the prairie fire” in popular struggles, the modern Leninists (with some exceptions of course) tend to tail these struggles instead of fight for a class-conscious approach to issues of civil and democratic rights. One tactic often used is to hand out as many of their signs as possible to appear larger in number, when in reality this is often protesting street theater backed by NGOs connected to the Democrats who are simply using leftists as useful idiots for “direct actions” against the Republicans. Usually, the rationale for this activism is to raise consciousness among liberals. Theoretically, by ‘riding the wave’ of spontaneous activism, the militant minority group will build up enough influence to launch an insurrection. This is a delusional hope. It leads to chronic involvement in activism that takes up time and energy but doesn’t build working class institutions that can actually offer concrete gains for working people through collective action. One could describe this general strategy of tailing social movements as ‘movementism’.”

I have definitely observed this within FRSO’s seeding of cadre in “front” “mass” organizations such as New SDS, anti-war groups, or various NAARPR chapters to recruit other cadre.

There is also a strange divide and turf war between otherwise similar programmatic unity between PSL, FRSO, and WWP. Like, UNITE!

Open to feedback and thoughts, need to talk it out with other comrades.

  • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
    15·
    7 days ago

    While the Second International primarily made rightist political errors, the Third International primarily made ‘ultra-left’ political errors. From this observation, we can come to a sort of center, where the positives and negatives of both Internationals can be learned from. This overall position, of building a mass party around a program for revolution through patiently consolidating the organized forces of the proletariat, could be described as “Centrist Marxism” or “the Marxist Center”. While the term ‘centrism’ is often used by Trotskyists as a term of derision, we use it here in this sense of a strategy that would mean patiently building up the forces of the revolutionary proletariat into democratically organized institutions, rather than trying to build a small “vanguard” or “militant minority” that will either intervene in a spontaneous movement or spark a revolution through armed struggle.

    I don’t know, the article seems to be making some pretty big leaps in reasoning based on limited data. I might be being unfair, I’ll be honest, I’m struggling to get through it. Trying to universalize based on a couple of examples of going too far in one direction or another to find a goldilocks zone seems a bit absurd for the scale and particularity of communism on a world and local level.

    What we need is to move beyond an attempted systemization of the Comintern and Lenin in particular, but rather continue the systemization of Marxism as a whole based on the entire history of class struggle. This is what Lenin did. Lenin didn’t see himself as a “Leninist”, creating a new stage of Marxism, but as an orthodox Marxist applying a system of thought to his own conditions. This doesn’t mean we should reject the most vital contributions of Lenin, for example, his views on revolutionary defeatism and imperialism. What it does mean is that much of what made Lenin great was already in Marx, Engels and even Kautsky. It means, much in the same way that Marx critically learned from the failures of the Communist League in developing his theory of the party, that we must critically learn from the failures of all past Internationals, especially the Second and Third (which historically had the most impact on mass politics).

    I don’t get this. An “orthodox Marxist”? This is from a publication that says it wants to do scientific socialism, so I’m assuming they mean for things to develop and they imply such with “applying a system of thought to his own conditions”, but that’s not orthodoxy.

    The forces of the proletariat are weak and divided, it will take a long-haul approach to develop a party that can be a vehicle of independent political action. This doesn’t rely on any kind of ‘get rich quick’ scheme, where the party uses a mass line or transitional demands to attract the working class without actually convincing and winning them over to revolutionary politics. It means actually having to develop the actual organizational strength to put the working class into command of society. One has to essentially build a ‘state within a state’ which stands in opposition to the bourgeois order and command the loyalty of proletarians in their majority against the capitalist state. We cannot hope that crisis simply accelerates the working class into such misery that it has no choice but to go on mass strikes to form workers councils and then try to insert our militant minority into the movement to guide it on its proper track. Building a real alternative to capitalist rule requires, as Lenin pointed out, a principled core that is able to stay politically consistent while utilizing every tactic possible. No space left open in civil society, where we can agitate and educate, should be left unutilized. A class-independent workers party which does not neglect this fight is a necessity.

    The workers’ party itself should be a prefiguration of the workers’ republic, in the sense of its internal governance. This means it should practice a form of democracy distinct from and beyond the democracy of liberalism. This means experimentation, investigating new forms of collective decision making and seeing what works. The party should be economically organized (as all parties are firms) on a cooperative basis with no salaries that allow for careerism. The Central Committee should be directly elected by the membership and recallable. Open debate and tolerance of factions, rather than the imposition of an ideological monolithism are key if the party wishes to demonstrate to the class that communism, not capitalism, is the truly free society.

    Those who hope for a “democratic road to socialism” don’t desire a new revolutionary state that is backed by the masses. They treat the liberal state as a neutral site of class conflict that the proletariat can transform to its own ends over time, slowly enough to avoid a period of social conflict where a rupture in the class nature of the state will occur. This idea assumes we can sneak a revolution pass the bourgeoisie and ignores problems like capital flight that crash attempts at social-democratic reforms. This can’t simply be combated by a hope in pressure from “mass action in the streets”. And it ignores that the capitalist class will happily resort to breaking with democratic norms in face of a government that seriously threatens the rule of property if need be, even if socialists have a democratic mandate.

    I’m not seeing where they address the issue of the state doing everything in its power to destroy what you do before it can even get started, beyond the article paying the point lip service that you can’t do it all peacefully.

    They seem to focus on the US, but I can’t find a single mention of the Black Panther Party, which seems like a pretty important piece of data to leave out in past attempts at building political power and trying similar things to what they are talking about.