Why We NEED a Vanguard

[Nobody]

Communist parties today require a vanguard if anything is to be done. The very nature of the working class grabbing their rifles all within a short time frame and rioting is as absurd as it is impossible. We know a violent revolution is needed, the Ruling Class will not run away, instead they will throw every thug and mercenary at their disposal at us under their situation is helpless. For this very reason they have protected themselves from a revolution as Marx saw it. Instead it will require a small group of brave persons to spark the powder keg that is the workers.

The reason that the workers will not fight is found within human mind. People but a great deal of weight on what they are guaranteed to have, when they could have a great deal more, but with risk. Under the current system they have food and shelter and a few puny toys to keep them happy. If they were to choose to go the road of Communism and happiness they would be forced to put it all on the line, there toys, their very lives. So they will not fight, it is better to be abused and mocked then dead.

For that very reason their must be a revolutionary vanguard, a group that can start the fight, that can revel the ruling class for what they are. In short we must force the worker's hand. I hate to say this but the workers are so brainwashed that they do not know up from down. They believe they are happy because they are being bombarded from every medium with messages that their lives are good, and after a while they start to believe.

We must strip away the smoke and mirrors, with the blood of the revolutionary vanguard. We must force the CEO's and leaders to fight the workers. Only then will the workers take up their birth right and fight back, only then will the ruling class be toppled.

[elijahcraig]

I agree completely. Finally a logical argument for the vanguard, versus the idealists anarchists spewing nonsense.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

And I suppose you want to be in this elite 'vanguard' eh? Well sorry, I'm not falling for it.
You may 'lead' a revolution with good intentions, but what about your successors or fellow Vangaurd?
I'm sorry but it sounds to me like a potential new boss, same as the old boss.

Remember that russia turned into an oligarchic state capitalism.

[The Feral Underclass]

You talk about a vangaurd as if they where some kind of messiahanic being which will some how guide the ignorant masses into the light. Actually what you're talking about is one form of ruling class directing an under class in order to achieve its objectives. Period. And they are the vangaurds objectives, because the workers, they don't know what Communism is, because their to busy being forced into fighting "In short we must force the worker's hand."

Revolution is not simply about the working class suddenly deciding to give up their "toys" and join a small group of intellectuals who tell them that the world is a bad place and to fight. Which inevitable will put this small group of intellectuals into power so they can "work in their interests". Revolution is about consciousness. There are reasons why we the world is a bad place. There are reasons why workers material conditions are the way they are. Workers must realise this. Once they have they will want to change it. The only way you can fight for a revolution, which is truly in the interests of the working class is if you have an educated working class, leading themseleves. The whole notion of having this "vangaurd" is bordering on the obsurd, or at least an attempt at 1917 nostalgia.

They believe they are happy because they are being bombarded from every medium with messages that their lives are good, and after a while they start to believe.

I dont mean to offend, but this just proves how out of touch you are with the working class. People are really fucking unhappy actually, they simply do not feel empowered to change anything or they do not identify their problems with capitalism. If you go to any working class area they will have a long list of things that they are unhappy about. High taxes, school fees, the poor NHS, high rent, privatized housing benifit offices, phone bills, electricity bills, the fact their kids school is being closed down and they have to move across town, war. These are direct effects of capitalism. What we need now, is not a vangaurd to push them, or some leaders to force them, we need a movement to say "these things happen because of capitalism...this is why you feel alienated...this is why the world developed the way it did....and this is how you fight it".

Once the movement has offered these questions, and begun to work in communities in whatever form to fight for the answers, the working class will change. There perspective will change. They wont all become theorists overnight, but they will identify the problem and they will want to change it, and from that point they will organize themselves and fight. The workers are not stupid, they're not children that need to be led. They just need to understand a few things and then they can do it themseleves. Workers do have degrees occasionally. We are talking about a working class that is made up of nurses, factorty foremen and teachers. These are ecuated people, who wont need a "vangaurd" to tell them what to do. As they fight, they will learn more. As they sit on the barricades they will read 'The German Ideology'. In the midst of revolution the workers will organize forums to discuss 'Kapital' and they will lead and organize themselevs, working in their own interests.

We must strip away the smoke and mirrors, with the blood of the revolutionary vanguard. We must force the CEO's and leaders to fight the workers. Only then will the workers take up their birth right and fight back, only then will the ruling class be toppled.

:huh:

I agree completely. Finally a logical argument for the vanguard, versus the idealists anarchists spewing nonsense.

For a start that wasn't an arguement. It was rhetoric. Secondly there was no logic to it becasue it wasn't objective. Lev was not looking at the world and going how do we do this, he was using words like "workers birth right" and "strip away the smoke and mirrors". What does that actually mean. There was no argument in their, the man has probably never spoken to a working class person in his life.

It is interesting to see how fighting for the consciousness of the working class is deemed idealistic and susquently bad, while fighting for the power of a bunch of cafe shop intellectuals is thought of as the way to enlightenment. :ph34r:

[apathy maybe]

How about,
Why We NEED a Socialist Party in Power!
we NEED a Socialist Party in power to put forward our views, we NEED a Socialist Party in power so that they can
1) increase taxes on corporations forcing them to cut jobs and/or wages
2) create government jobs with higher wages to lure those people to work for us
3) increase funding for social services such as schools, health, roads etc
4) to pay we increase income tax, while we are at it we scrap all other taxes hitting the indervidual
5) once people see how good things are, they never want to go back
6) we ...
7) ....
Gradualy a communist state is in place. With the support of the majority of people. Really a vanguard just doesn't work. Revulutions don't work in Western countries. "Enough of the violence" - French middle class 1968.

[Felicia]

hmm, I remember joking around with someone once about how it would be funny if Nova Scotia had a militia........ ha, and I've recently found out that was actually DO have a militia, and one of my old childhood friends joined it when he was like 14-ish. If he hadn't have moved away before he joined, I probably would've joined it with him..... dang.


but yeah, I think that communist parties should have, maybe, some kind of militant wing.... for carring out certain "actions" :lol:

like kidnapping the prime minister, yeah! But I love Jean Chretien, so we'll have to wait for Paul Martin to come to power, and then........ :D

[The Feral Underclass]

We all understand that capitalism is the cause of the problems which occur in the world. Once you have accepted that you have to look at how you change it.

Capitalism is not simply an economic system it is a social one too. It is reality. Everything that happens, every decision that is made, every routine you undergo is dictated to you by capitalism. Everything from buying your shoes to paying your bills are directly related to the system we live under. Capitalism.

The reason the workers are exploited is because capitalism can only operate with that class distinction. If there is no proletariate there is no capitalism. It simply needs it in order to keep those shiny oiled cogs a' turnin'. So if you take that simple understanding and then look at having to buy a pair of shoes. If you only earn £4.50 an hour working in a factory, the likly hood is your not going to be able to buy that really nice comfy pair of shoes which costs £100. You will have to settle with the £12.99 pair from Jonathan james. That is an example of how capitalism dictates how we live our lives.

What you are talking about is refining, upgrading or reforming the present system which we all agree is capitalism. But is this going to free the working class from wage slavery? Is it going to make the world more democratic? Is it going to stop one class exploiting another for its own objectives? No, it just makes the workers more happier in their exploitation.

You can not reform capitalism. You can make it look prettier, but capitalism will always be capitalism unless it goes away. That is why you have to, for want of a better word, smash capitalism and replace it with a new system. A system where the workers are in control of the means of production and people are provided for. A system where everyone can have a pair of £100 shoes, because if we know how, then we can give everyone a pair. We are talking about profound things here. Consciousness, freedom from want. Being able to live as human beings without having to worry about how your going to pay for your next meal or how you pay for your mortgage, when actually everyone can have a house for free, and food, well, is a must really. The only reason you have to pay for it, is so someone can make a profit. That's what capitalism is. And no matter how much you dress it up and tie a bow around it, it is still going to do exactly the same things as if it was wearing iron boots.

Communism certainly will not come through reforming capitalism. At some point your going to have to fight. Capitialism is not going to want communism to creep in now is it. And although the people might like it, the rich, the bosses and the military are gonna come with tanks and then what do we do. Go home?

Communism or Anarcho-Communism, depending on who ya talk too can only be achieved through the full and absolute overthrowing of capitalism. Unfortunatly, capitalists are not going to hand over their power and wealth, and when the tanks do come, we have to fight. Be it with bricks or bombs, we will have to fight, and watch our comrades die, in order to be free from this insane and brutal system we have developed for ourselves. :ph34r:

[redstar2000]

Instead it will require a small group of brave persons to spark the powder keg that is the workers.

For that very reason there must be a revolutionary vanguard, a group that can start the fight, that can reveal the ruling class for what they are. In short we must force the worker's hand.

We must strip away the smoke and mirrors with the blood of the revolutionary vanguard.

This is actually not traditional Leninist "vanguardism" inspite of the similarity of terminology.

This is a call for conscious and deliberate martyrdom in the hope that the "blood" of the "vanguard" will "inspire" a proletarian revolution.

It's actually, I think, kind of a late 19th century nihilism.

Would it "work"?

Frankly, I doubt it. It certainly didn't work in Czarist Russia. A clarion summons to a "revolutionary death" will appeal to a small number of young idealists...but most people will think that they're wackos.

Looking at "the big picture" of late capitalism, I do think it's kind of interesting that so many 19th century ideas are starting to make a "come-back"...anarchism, Marxism, and--no reason why not--nihilism. A social order in decay produces...grave-diggers!

That's a good sign.

http://www.sawu.org/redgreenleft/YaBBImages/smoking.gif
___________________________

U.S. GET OUT OF IRAQ NOW!
___________________________

"...a disgusting and frightening website"
The RedStar2000 Papers (http://www.sawu.org/redstar2000)
A site about communist ideas

[Saint-Just]

Originally posted by [email protected] 10 2003, 07:26 AM
And I suppose you want to be in this elite 'vanguard' eh? Well sorry, I'm not falling for it.
You may 'lead' a revolution with good intentions, but what about your successors or fellow Vangaurd?
I'm sorry but it sounds to me like a potential new boss, same as the old boss.

Remember that russia turned into an oligarchic state capitalism.
Do you think we just want to become leaders and rulers? I would suggest that most of us do not care about such things; what we want is a revolution and a functional socialist society.

I must be pretty poor at history since I don't remember Russia turning into oligarchical state capitalism.

[stonerboi]

Urban Guerrilla warfare is a useful tool for workers emancipation, but is has to be used in conjuction with OTHER revolutionary activites such as street riots, strikes (both official and illgeal 'wildcat ones), and anti-war/anti-capitalist demos.

Urban Guerrillas on themselves will be cut down to nothing by the vastly superior military might of the capitalist system. The idea of rebels storming the presidential/royal palace is more of a coup than a guerrilla war.

But Guerrillas can be used to create a state of tension in which the capitalist state reacts to the guerrillas by becoming more oppressive and less democratic. This will lead to protests from the people demanding the defence of democracy and so the population will become more politicised and more aware of the capitalist system. While the guerrillas keep the pressure on the system, political instability will grow and a pre-revoltuionary situation will develope. This is needed for the final showdown, revolution!

This happened in Czarist Russia, were urban guerrillas attacked the state and lead to state reppression, this in turn led to the people becoming political and the eventual revoltuion.

But as I said Guerrillas on their own with no other support will fail!

Guerrillas should work towards having revolts like the on in LA in 1992 and carry out attacks while these revolts happen.

[The Feral Underclass]

YOU PEOPLE JUST DONT FUCKING GET IT DO YOU!

[Vladimir]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 10 2003, 11:13 AM
How about,
Why We NEED a Socialist Party in Power!
we NEED a Socialist Party in power to put forward our views, we NEED a Socialist Party in power so that they can
1) increase taxes on corporations forcing them to cut jobs and/or wages
2) create government jobs with higher wages to lure those people to work for us
3) increase funding for social services such as schools, health, roads etc
4) to pay we increase income tax, while we are at it we scrap all other taxes hitting the indervidual
5) once people see how good things are, they never want to go back
6) we ...
7) ....
Gradualy a communist state is in place. With the support of the majority of people. Really a vanguard just doesn't work. Revulutions don't work in Western countries. "Enough of the violence" - French middle class 1968.
A socialist party in power, I would love to see it however. It cannot work effectivly. Taxing corporations? You think you can get away with that? Or any other extreme action that will upset their country.


[/B]Gradualy a communist state is in place. With the support of the majority of people. Really a vanguard just doesn't work. Revulutions don't work in Western countries.[B]

It is not as easy as that. The ruling class will not just go away. They must be forced out and 'killed off'. Even winning the 'majority' is a near imposssible task, they [the bourgeoise] control the media and every other way of informing the population of anything. Revolution is the only thing that will work and the only thing that will bring the fall of capitalism.

[Morpheus]

Party and Working Class
by Anton Pannekoek (1936)

We are only at the very earliest stages of a new workers' movement. The old movement was embodied in parties, and today belief in the party constitutes the most powerful check on the working class' capacity for action. That is why we are not trying to create a new party. This is so, not because our numbers are small -- a party of any kind begins with a few people -- but because, in our day, a party cannot be other than an organization aimed at directing and dominating the proletariat. To this type of organization we oppose the principle that the working class can effectively come into its own and prevail only by taking its destiny into its own hands. The workers are not to adopt the slogans of any group whatsoever, not even our own groups; they are to think, decide and act for themselves. Therefore, in this transitional period, the natural organs of education and enlightenment are, in our view, work groups, study and discussion circles, which have formed of their own accord and are seeking their own way.

This view directly contradicts the traditional ideas about the role of the party as an essential educational organ of the proletariat. Hence it is resisted in many quarters where, however, there is no further desire to have dealings either with the Socialist Party or the Communist Party. This, no doubt, is to be partly explained by the strength of tradition: when one has always regarded the class war as a party war and a war between parties, it is very difficult to adopt the exclusive viewpoint of class and of the class war. But partly, too, one is faced with the clear idea that, after all, it is incumbent on the party to play a role of the first importance in the proletarian struggle for freedom. It is this idea we shall now examine more closely.

The whole question pivots, in short, on the following distinction: a party is a group based on certain ideas held in common, whereas a class is a group united on the basis of common interests. Membership in a class is determined by function in the production process, a function that creates definite interests. Membership in a party means being one of a group having identical views about the major social questions.

In recent times, it was supposed for theoretical and practical reasons that this fundamental difference would disappear within a class party, the 'workers' party.' During the period when Social Democracy was in full growth, the current impression was that this party would gradually unite all the workers, some as militants, others as sympathizers. And since the theory was that identical interests would necessarily engender identical ideas and aims, the distinction between class and party was bound, it was believed, to disappear. Social Democracy remained a minority group, and moreover became the target of attack by new workers' groups. Splits occurred within it, while its own character underwent radical change and certain articles of its program were either revised or interpreted in a totally different sense. Society does not develop in a continuous way, free from setbacks, but through conflicts and antagonisms. While the working class battle is widening in scope, the enemy's strength is increasing. Uncertainty about the way to be followed constantly and repeatedly troubles the minds of the combatants; and doubt is a factor in division, of internal quarrels and conflicts within the workers' movement.

It is useless to deplore these conflicts as creating a pernicious situation that should not exist and which is making the workers powerless. As has often been pointed out, the working class is not weak because it is divided; on the contrary, it is divided because it is weak. And the reason why the proletariat ought to seek new ways is that the enemy has strength of such a kind that the old methods are ineffectual. The working class will not secure these ways by magic, but through a great effort, deep reflection, through the clash of divergent opinions and the conflict of impassioned ideas. It is incumbent upon it to find its own way, and precisely therein is the raison d'être of the internal differences and conflicts. It is forced to renounce outmoded ideas and old chimeras, and it is indeed the difficulty of this task that engenders such big divisions.

Nor should the illusion be nursed that such impassioned party conflicts and opinion clashes belong only to a transitional period such as the present one, and that they will in due course disappear, leaving a unity stronger than ever. Certainly, in the evolution of the class struggle, it sometimes happens that all the various elements of strength are merged in order to snatch some great victory, and that revolution is the fruit of this unity. But in this case, as after every victory, divergences appear immediately when it comes to deciding on new objectives. The proletariat then finds itself faced with the most arduous tasks: to crush the enemy, and more, to organize production, to create a new order. It is out of the question that all the workers, all categories and all groups, whose interests are still far from being homogeneous, should think and feel in the same way, and should reach spontaneous and immediate agreement about what should be done next. It is precisely because they are committed to finding for themselves their own way ahead that the liveliest differences occur, that there are clashes among them, and that finally, through such conflict, they succeed in clarifying their ideas.

No doubt, if certain people holding the same ideas get together to discuss the prospects for action, to hammer out ideas by discussion, to indulge in propaganda for these attitudes, then it is possible to describe such groups as parties. The name matters little, provided that these parties adopt a role distinct from that which existing parties seek to fulfil. Practical action, that is, concrete class struggle, is a matter for the masses themselves, acting as a whole, within their natural groups, notably the work gangs, which constitute the units of effective combat. It would be wrong to find the militants of one tendency going on strike, while those of another tendency continued to work. In that case, the militants of each tendency should present their viewpoints to the factory floor, so that the workers as a whole are able to reach a decision based on knowledge and facts. Since the war is immense and the enemy's strength enormous, victory must be attained by merging all the forces at the masses' disposal -- not only material and moral force with a view to action, unity and enthusiasm, but also the spiritual force born of mental clarity. The importance of these parties or groups resides in the fact that they help to secure this mental clarity through their mutual conflicts, their discussions, their propaganda. It is by means of these organs of self-clarification that the working class can succeed in tracing for itself the road to freedom.

That is why parties in this sense (and also their ideas) do not need firm and fixed structures. Faced with any change of situation, with new tasks, people become divided in their views, but only to reunite in new agreement; while others come up with other programs. Given their fluctuating quality, they are always ready to adapt themselves to the new.

The present workers' parties are of an absolutely different character. Besides, they have a different objective: to seize power and to exercise it for their sole benefit. Far from attempting to contribute to the emancipation of the working class, they mean to govern for themselves, and they cover this intention under the pretence of freeing the proletariat. Social Democracy, whose ascendant period goes back to the great parliamentary epoch, sees this power as government based on a parliamentary majority. For its part, the Communist Party carries its power politics to its extreme consequences: party dictatorship.

Unlike the parties described above, these parties are bound to have formations with rigid structures, whose cohesion is assured by means of statutes, disciplinary measures, admission and dismissal procedures. Designed to dominate, they fight for power by orienting the militants toward the instruments of power that they possess and by striving constantly to increase their sphere of influence. They do not see their task as that of educating the workers to think for themselves; on the contrary, they aim at drilling them, at turning them into faithful and devoted adherents of their doctrines. While the working class needs unlimited freedom of spiritual development to increase its strength and to conquer, the basis of party power is the repression of all opinions that do not conform to the party line. In 'democratic' parties, this result is secured by methods that pay lip service to freedom; in the dictatorial parties, by brutal and avowed repression.

A number of workers are already aware that domination by the Socialist Party or the Communist Party would simply be a camouflaged supremacy of the bourgeois class, and would thus perpetuate exploitation and servitude. But, according to these workers, what should take its place is a 'revolutionary party' that would really aim at creating proletarian power and communist society. There is no question here of a party in the sense we defined above, i.e., of a group whose sole objective is to educate and enlighten, but of a party in the current sense, i.e., a party fighting to secure power and to exercise it with a view to the liberation of the working class, and all this as a vanguard, as an organization of the enlightened revolutionary minority.

The very expression 'revolutionary party' is a contradiction in terms, for a party of this kind could not be revolutionary. If it were, it could only be so in the sense in which we describe revolutionary as a change of government resulting from somewhat violent pressures, e.g., the birth of the Third Reich. When we use the word 'revolution,' we clearly mean the proletarian revolution, the conquest of power by the working class.

The basic theoretical idea of the 'revolutionary party' is that the working class could not do without a group of leaders capable of defeating the bourgeoisie for them and of forming a new government, in other words, the conviction that the working class is itself incapable of creating the revolution. According to this theory, the leaders will create the communist society by means of decrees; in other words, the working class is still incapable of administering and organizing for itself its work and production.

Is there not a certain justification for this thesis, at least provisionally? Given that at the present time the working class as a mass is showing itself to be unable to create a revolution, is it not necessary that the revolutionary vanguard, the party, should make the revolution on the working class' behalf? And is not this valid so long as the masses passively submit to capitalism?

This attitude immediately raises two questions. What type of power will such a party establish through the revolution? What will occur to conquer the capitalist class? The answer is self-evident: an uprising of the masses. In effect, only mass attacks and mass strikes lead to the overthrow of the old domination. Therefore, the 'revolutionary party' will get nowhere without the intervention of the masses. Hence, one of two things must occur.

The first is that the masses persist in action. Far from abandoning the fight in order to allow the new party to govern, they organize their power in the factories and workshops and prepare for new battles, this time with a view to the final defeat of capitalism. By means of workers' councils, they form a community that is increasingly close-knit, and therefore capable of taking on the administration of society as a whole. In a word, the masses prove that they are not as incapable of creating the revolution as was supposed. From this moment, conflict inevitably arises between the masses and the new party, the latter seeking to be the only body to exercise power and convinced that the party should lead the working class, that self-activity among the masses is only a factor of disorder and anarchy. At this point, either the class movement has become strong enough to ignore the party or the party, allied with bourgeois elements, crushes the workers. In either case, the party is shown to be an obstacle to the revolution, because the party seeks to be something other than an organ of propaganda and of enlightenment, and because it adopts as its specific mission the leadership and government of the masses.

The second possibility is that the working masses conform to the doctrine of the party and turn over to it control of affairs. They follow directives from above and, persuaded (as in Germany in 1918) that the new government will establish socialism or communism, they get on with their day-to-day work. Immediately, the bourgeoisie mobilizes all its forces: its financial power, its enormous spiritual power, its economic supremacy in the factories and the large enterprises. The reigning party, too weak to withstand such an offensive, can maintain itself in power only by multiplying concessions and withdrawals as proof of its moderation. Then the idea becomes current that for the moment this is all that can be done, and that it would be foolish for the workers to attempt a violent imposition of utopian demands. In this way, the party, deprived of the mass power of a revolutionary class, is transformed into an instrument for the conservation of bourgeois power.

We have just said that, in relation to the proletarian revolution, a 'revolutionary party' is a contradiction in terms. This could also be expressed by saying that the term 'revolutionary' in the expression 'revolutionary party' necessarily designates a bourgeois revolution. On every occasion, indeed, that the masses have intervened to overthrow a government and have then handed power to a new party, it was a bourgeois revolution that took place -- a substitution of a new dominant category for an old one. So it was in Paris when, in 1830, the commercial bourgeoisie took over from the big landed proprietors; and again, in 1848, when the industrial bourgeoisie succeeded the financial bourgeoisie; and again in 1871 when the whole body of the bourgeoisie came to power. So it was during the Russian Revolution, when the party bureaucracy monopolized power in its capacity as a governmental category. But in our day, both in Western Europe and in America, the bourgeoisie is too deeply and too solidly rooted in the factories and the banks to be removed by a party bureaucracy. Now as always, the only means of conquering the bourgeoisie is to appeal to the masses, the latter taking over the factories and forming their own complex of councils. In this case, however, it seems that the real strength is in the masses who destroy the domination of capital in proportion as their own action widens and deepens.

Therefore, those who contemplate a 'revolutionary party' are learning only a part of the lessons of the past. Not unaware that the workers' parties -- the Socialist Party and Communist Party -- have become organs of domination serving to perpetuate exploitation, they merely conclude from this that it is only necessary to improve the situation. This is to ignore the fact that the failure of the different parties is traceable to a much more general cause -- namely, the basic contradiction between the emancipation of the class, as a body and by their own efforts, and the reduction of the activity of the masses to powerlessness by a new pro-workers' power. Faced with the passivity and indifference of the masses, they come to regard themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. But, if the masses remain inactive, it is because, while instinctively sensing both the colossal power of the enemy and the sheer magnitude of the task to be undertaken, they have not yet discerned the mode of combat, the way of class unity. However, when circumstances have pushed them into action, they must undertake this task by organizing themselves autonomously, by taking into their own hands the means of production, and by initiating the attack against the economic power of capital. And once again, every self-styled vanguard seeking to direct and to dominate the masses by means of a 'revolutionary party' will stand revealed as a reactionary factor by reason of this very conception.

[Durruti]

I'm just wondering, but have any of you read the first chapter of Guerrilla War?
"It must be always kept in mind that there is a necessary minimum without which the establishement and consolidation of the first [geurrilla] center is not practical. People must see clearly the fuitility of maintining the social goals within the framework of civil debate. When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law peace is considered already broken."
That means you CAN'T force the hand of the working class.
Revolt is reactionary, not proactive. However, you can increase the demands of the workers beyond that which the state can conciede at which point the state will resort to violence (riot suppression) which will lead to military occupation and it's opposite guerrilla war. Sparking the revolution is impossible; creating the situation which could spark the revolution is possible.
The reovlutionary must be a social revolutionary first. I greatly suspect that you Communists are middle class "proletariat" leader (as I may be myself, as was Che), and that my Anarchist comrade may be the only true (quasi?)proletarian here. Instead of seeking a violent revolution, seek first the social revolution through sub-political means. Collectivize, help build and organize community gardens in the name of the (communist/anarchist) party. Show the people who you are and they will want to learn more.
The Guerrilla warrior is PRIMARILY a social warrior, for he relies on popular support for his SURVIVAL. The Guerrilla must prove first that his social agenda is better than that of the State.

Social action and a social agenda lead to mass action. With the help of affinity groups mass action leads to riot suppression, which, if key strategic points can be taken, leads to riot suppression on a grand scale: military occupation. In the past in America military occupation has been the last step because the resistance wasn't ready to respond. Each time the state steps up, the people must step up. The level of violence must be maintained at the point of military intervention in order to keep the occupation in place. This requires HIGHLY ORGANIZED groups carrying out targeted hit-and-run strikes.
The longer the occupation is kept in place, the more popular resistance grows. Immediately there will be little resistance, but eventually (with the help of underground press espeically) resistance will grow to a critical mass forcing the military out of the city.

What I'm describing is an urban geurrilla movement. This is something that has NEVER worked before. We need people trained to escilate riots (affinity groups) which can master both police tactics and military tactics. We're talking about affinity groups which turn into geurrilla bands of 3-5, trained physically and mentally for at least 4 years for this SPECIFIC task, and we're talking about a groups that will need a HIGHLY developed underground network with a highly developed above ground network. We need collectives ready to make shoes, bullets, bombs, etc. for soldiers...and we need these things before we even CONTEMPLATE armed revolt.
Read Sun Tzu's The Art of War and you'll begin to understand what I mean. The outcome of a battle will be determined in the weeks and months preceeding it. The outcome of a war will have already been decided in the preceeding years.
Your goal now is to estalibsh self-sustaining collectives who's primary function is the betterment of all involved, which will later be adaptable to a military function.
Read, learn, think, but most importantly adapt.
http://www.radio4all.org/anarchy/coll2.html

[rcpnz]

Don't have time to discuss the matter. But here is an extract from a pamphlet on the issue of leadership:
"Not Through Leadership: Clause 5"

"That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself."

It is obvious that the working class, as the exploited class, have an interest in achieving emancipation, and equally obvious that capitalists as a class have no such interest, and indeed are bound to react against it even though, as Marx pointed out, it is sometimes possible for enlightened individuals in a ruling class to throw in their lot with a revolutionary movement.

The question does arise , however, whether the working class can leave the achievement of emancipation to leaders. All of the other political parties, including those calling themselves socialist, accept the principle of leadership. The disciples of Lenin, for example, subscribed to his fallacious view that Socialism can be achieved by an educated leadership, an elite composed of professional revolutionaries drawn from the 'intelligentsia', leading a mass of followers.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain wholly rejects the concept of leadership. The movement that is to be capable of achieving Socialism has an absolute need of members with understanding and self reliance. Even if we could conceive of a leader ridden working class displacing the capitalist class from power such an immature class would be helpless to undertake the responsibilities of democratic socialist society. Socialism cannot be imposed from above.

The point was well put by Fredrick Engels, Marx's life long friend and co-worker for Socialism:
"THE TIME IS PAST FOR REVOLUTIONS CARRIED THROUGH BY SMALL MINORITIES AT THE HEAD OF UNCONSCIOUS MASSES. WHEN IT GETS TO BE A MATTER OF COMPLETE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIAL ORGANISATION, THE MASSES THEMSELVES MUST PARTICIPATE, MUST UNDERSTAND WHAT IS AT STAKE AND WHY THEY ARE TO ACT. THAT MUCH THE HISTORY OF THE LAST FIFTY YEARS HAS TAUGHT US. BUT SO THAT THE MASSES MAY UNDERSTAND WHAT IS TO BE DONE, LONG AND PERSISTENT WORK IS REQUIRED...."
(1895Introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France, 1848-50)

When the working class understands and desires Socialism it will elect delegates, not leaders to do its bidding. In the words of the principle the emancipation of the workers "must be the work of the working class itself"."

(Socialist Principles Explained)

[elijahcraig]

Although this isn't a Stalinist writing this article, he still defends the party, I take his hits against Stalin out of my mind, and just look at his defense of the revolutionary vanguard.:

Duncan Hallas
Building the revolutionary party
(June 1975)

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From International Socialism (1st series), No.79, June 1975, pp.17-22.
Transcribed & mrked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


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Duncan Hallas reviews Tony Cliff’s book on Lenin

THIS BOOK [1] is the most important work on the theory and practice of building a revolutionary socialist organisation that has appeared for some time. As a biography it has its faults. It would be no very great exaggeration to say that it might well have been called Building the Party – Illustriated from the Life of Lenin. No matter. A manual for revolutionaries – and that is what we have here – is needed more urgently than a fully rounded biography. This is a work whose lessons can and must be applied to the practical tasks of party building.

However, a word of caution is needed. Towards the end of his life Lenin said of a resolution on the organisation of Communist Parties, adopted by the Communist international:

The resolution is an excellent one, but it is almost entirely Russian, that is to say everything in it is based on Russian conditions. This is its good point but it is also ist failing ... it is too Russian ... if by way of exception some foreigner does understand it, he cannot carry it out ... I have the impression that we made a big mistake with this resolution, namely, that we blocked our own road to further success. As I have said already, the resolution is excellently drafted; I am prepared to subscribe to every one of its fifty or more points. But we have not learnt bow to present our Russian experience to foreigners. All that was said in the resolution has remained a dead letter. If we do not realise this, we shall be unable to move ahead. [2]

It is the spirit, not the letter, of the Bolshevik experience that is valuable. The differences between the Russia of 1910 and Britain – or Germany or the USA or wherever – in the 1970s are enormous.

It is simple-mindedness to believe that the answer to today’s problems can be found by an “appropriate” (actually, often highly inappropriate) reference to Lenin’s life and works without consideration of the circumstances of the time.

One of the great strengths of Cliff’s book is that it sets Lenin’s changing and developing ideas in the context of the struggle, of the living movement and the concrete yet ever-changing conditions in which it fought to exist and to grow. Nowhere is this clearer than on the nature of the revolutionary party.


The “authoritarian” party
IN 1902 Lenin proposed that the revolutionary party should be a highly centralised and “professional” organisation. A critic (Rosa Luxemburg) described it, not too unfairly, as follows:

... the party Central Committee should have the privilege of naming all the local committees. It should have the right to appoint the effective organs of all local bodies from Geneva to Liege, from Tomsk to Irkutsk. It should also have the right to impose on all of them its own ready-made rules of party conduct. It should have the right to rule without appeal on such questions as the dissolution and reconstitution of local organisations. This way the Central Committee could determine, to suit itself the composition of the highest party organs as well as of the Party Congress. [3]

And this stable organisation of leaders ensuring continuity’ as Lenin put it,

... must consist chiefly of people professionally engaged in revolutionary activity; that in an autocratic state, the more we confine the membership. to people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity and who have been professionally trained in the art of combating the political police, the more difficult it will be to unearth the organisation. [4]

Professionally engaged means, of course, full-time.

A worker-militant considered a suitable candidate for party membership should be pulled out of industry and turned into a professional revolutionary.

“A worker-agitator who is at all gifted and promising,” wrote Lenin in What is to be Done, “must not be left to work eleven hours a day in a factory. We must arrange that he be maintained by the party.” [5]

The party and the full-time apparatus, the “committeemen”, are pretty much the same thing on this plan. The great bulk of those we would accept as members are kept as sympathisers. Of course the whole machine is useless without the broad circles of sympathiser without them it has no leverage, the paper that serves it as organiser has no sale or influence, there is no money. But the sympathisers have no rights in the party and the (largely full-time) local committeemen who make up the organisation are directed by the “centre”, they do not direct it. Indeed, the political centre was almost always outside the country.

Is this a good organisational model or a bad one? The question is meaningless unless you consider the aims of the operation and the circumstances. The first thing to be said is that, in spite of later myths, it was not unique or specifically “Bolshevik”. Cliff notes that early in his political career Lenin had eagerly questioned survivors of the “populist” (narodnik) terrorist organisation Narodnaya Volya about their organisational methods, and in What is to be Done, he wrote that they “should serve as a model”.

This model was not even specifically Russian. The contemporary Macedonian “populist” party, the IMRO, which led the national Macedonian rising against Turkish rule from 1902, had the same centralist and “authoritarian” structure. Indeed the IMRO guerrillas were popularly known as “Commitadjs” – committeemen. And this is one example of many. Under a despotic regime no other sort of organisation has much prospect of survival, let alone growth. A more or less “military” structure is imposed on the organisation by force of necessity.

What was new in Lenin’s version was the emphasis on “an all-Russian newspaper issued very frequently”, around which the organisation would be built, and on the central role of factory committees; an emphasis which flowed from the marxist belief in the central role of the working class (although it was not the only potentially revolutionary class in the Russia of the time) and upon mass action, rather than small group terrorism, as the means to break the autocracy.

In passing, there are two misunderstandings about the What is to be Done? type of organisation which require brief comment; one is comic, the other is tragic. The comic misunderstanding used to crop up every now and then in disputes about recruitment. It is that the reason Lenin favoured a restricted membership was to ensure “a high political level” amongst that membership so that everything could be most democratically decided and the leadership subject to more effective control by the membership.

A more absurd proposition would be difficult to imagine. Police repression was what necessitated the party being a military organisation of “agents” (Lenin’s words) and ensured that the greatest obstacles were placed in the way of a democratic internal life.

A veteran Bolshevik activist – writes Cliff – estimated that, owing to police intervention, the average life of a Social- Democratic group at the beginning of the century was only three months ... Similarly, Lenin wrote in November 1908 “the average life expectancy of the revolutionaries during the first period of our revolution 1905 – TC] probably does not exceed a few months.”

The Tsarist police ensured that party members had a high level of commitment; the “high political level” is a myth, if it is taken to mean – as it usually is – a knowledge of the marxist texts and the history of the movement.

The tragic misunderstanding has more respectable antecedents. When, after Stalin had gained power in Russia, Trotsky was struggling (before 1934) to influence the policy of an existing international organisation which he believed was still potentially a revolutionary international (the Comintern), he naturally sought to build an international faction. He was tying to operate around an international which commanded the support of hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the world. After 1933 Trotsky was forced to conclude that the Comintern was degenerated beyond all hope of reform. He then fell into the error of believing that a new centralised international party could be created without serious working class support in the first instance. Many of his latter-day followers compound this error by arguing that real revolutionary organisations cannot be built “outside the international”’ which, however does not exist in any serious sense. An “international leadership”, a “world leadership” is essential we are told. That must be the starting point.

No marxist was more consistently internationalist than Lenin, but fortunately it never occurred to him that the building of the Bolshevik party was impossible except under the direction of the International Socialist Bureau, the leading body of the Second International. Indeed when it seemed likely that the ISB might attempt to impose “unity” between the Bolsheviks and their Menshevik and other opponents in Russia (at its Brussels Conference, July 1914), Lenin wrote:

What procedure is desirable, from our point of view, for the conference in Brussels?... Clearly we, in any case shall not accept the proposals of the liquidators, the Bund, Rosa [Luxemburg – DH] and Plekhanov (as well as of Kautsky and Vandervelde) ... Our only task is to make our terms clear, make a note of “their terms” and walk out.

... According to the liquidators’ newspaper, Vandervelde threw out a feeler in St Petersburg as to whether we would agree to the Executive Committee [of the ISB – DH] acting, not as mediator but as arbiter, that is, as supreme judge in our disagreements.

The answer is this. When Bebel proposed this in 1905 our congress rejected it with thanks, declaring that we were an autonomous party. I think today our congress will give the same reply. (Such, at any rate, is the opinion of the Central Committee.)

... Conciliatory formulas should be carefully recorded (this is most important), then slightly criticised, and – everything rejected. (Lenin’s emphases) [6]

Now Lenin did not take this line because he had “seen through” the leaders of the Second International and knew them to be opportunists. Far from it. The very article just quoted contains the most respectful references to Vandervelde, secretary of the ISB and soon to become one of His Belgium Majesty’s ministers. The betrayal of socialism by these leaders, especially the Germans, in August 1914 came as a shattering blow to Lenin. In this respect he was less perceptive than Rosa Luxemburg.

No, it was simply that, as he says in his Report on the subject, he knew that the Bolsheviks had the only serious revolutionary marxist organisation inside Russia and if the International tried to “unite” it with its opponents, then the authority of the International must be disregarded. No “world leadership” could replace the organisation on the ground.

Later on, after the October revolution, he was to argue the opposite case, the case for the “world leadership” of the Executive of the Comintern (although never in the mechanical fashion that later developed). The “inconsistency” reflected different political conditions, different needs and above all different possibilities. To fail to change, and change again, if need be, under changing conditions is to confuse form with content; a rigidity which, unless quickly corrected, leads to sterility. So too with the nature of the party. Within a few years of publishing What is to be Done, Lenin was struggling against his own followers for a very different form of organisation.


The mass party
MUCH OF the argument of What is to be Done was directed against “economism”. A great deal of nonsense has been written about “economism” by people who imagine that the fault of the “economists” was that they failed to raise political slogans in every industrial dispute and that this sin is avoided by tacking on some “political” demand to whatever particular issues are in dispute.

In fact “economism” was the specifically Russian form of the “revisionism” (in fact the abandonment of marxism) that was developing as an extreme right wing in the various European Social-Democratic parties. As Lenin himself noted:

... the English Fabians, the French Ministerialists, the German Bernsteinians and the Russian Critics [Economists – DH] – all belong to the same family, all extol each other, learn from each other, and togetber take up arms against “dogmatic” Marxism. [7]

The particular form that Russian revisionism took around the turn of the century was denial of the need for an illegal party – the only kind possible under the conditions of the day.

The talk about an independent workers’ political party – stated the economists Credo – merely results from the transplantation of alien aims and alien achievements to our soil ... For the Russian Marxist there is only one course: participation in, i.e., assistance to, the economic struggle of the proletariat, and participation in liberal opposition activity. [8]

By 1903 the struggle against the “economists” was won (although not permanently – the Menshevik “liquidators” after 1906 were a new form of the same trend). The “professional” party was being built. But the 1905 revolution brought out the characteristic vices of this form of organisation, vices that are not accidental but the consequences of its virtues. Tenacity, singlemindedness, concentration on maintaining the organisation in the most difficult conditions; these, in addition to the necessary courage and devotion to duty, were the virtues of the “committeemen”. The other side of the same coin proved to be a strong trend towards conservatism and organisational sectarianism.

A military historian wrote of the training provided by the old German General Staff College, “It was designed, above all, to cultivate inflexibility of will; too often it also produced rigidity of intellect.” So it was with most of the “committeemen”, trained in the school of Tsarist repression. They found the greatest difficulty in adapting to the radically different requirements of an actual revolution.

When Soviets, workers’ councils, “spontaneously” sprang up in 1905 (i.e. sprang up without the call of any party), the typical Bolshevik committeeman viewed the development with the utmost suspicion. The revolution must be led by a party of professional revolutionaries – Lenin had said so – and anything outside party control must be, at best, a diversion and very probably dangerous. The problem of how party influence was to be established was approached in an “ultimatist” spirit.

Trotsky recalled:

Under Bogdanov’s influence, the Petrograd Bureau of the CEC (Bolsheviks) passed a resolution in October 1905: to submit before the Petrograd Soviet the demand that it recognise the leadership of the party; and in the event of refusal – to walk out of the Soviet. Krassikov, a young lawyer, in those days a member of the CEC (Bolsheviks), read the ultimatum at the plenary session of the Soviet. The worker deputies, among them Bolsheviks also, exchanged surprised looks and then passed on to the business on the order of the day. Not a man walked out of the Soviet. Shortly after that Lenin arrived from abroad, and be raked the ultimatists over the coals mercilessly. [9]

There were some Petrograd “committeemen” who had a more “flexible” approach. They wanted to participate in the Soviet – so as to wreck it from within! It was not a party organisation you see, and whatsoever is not of the party must be of the Devil.

It is always easy to smile at such absurdities with the benefit of hindsight. But it must be remembered that these same “committeemen” were dedicated, self-sacrificing revolutionaries whose experience had led them to confuse particular forms of organisation with the revolutionary content of the struggle. Organisational sectarianism, clinging to party methods and structures that events have made obsolete (sometimes very quickly) is a permanent danger for revolutionaries.

In the same spirit most of the “committeemen” were strongly opposed to opening up the party to the flood of new recruits made possible by the revolution. The party must not be “diluted” by a host of “raw workers”. In What is to be Done Lenin had quoted with approval (and too uncritically) Kautsky’s well-known statement:

But socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other; each rises under different conditions. Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge. Indeed, modern economic science is as much a condition for socialist production as, say, modern technology, and the proletariat can create neither the one nor the other, no matter bow much it may desire to do so; both arise out of the modern social process. The vehicle of science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia: it was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduce it into the proletarian class struggle where conditions allow that to be done. Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously. [10]

This highly abstract, partial and oversimplified position, which Lenin had, characteristically, exaggerated even further in the heat of polemic, was now used by his disciples to defend the “purity” of the party against the menace of dilution by militant but politically uneducated workers. All the arguments the “committeemen” needed – “the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology”, “a fierce struggle against spontaneity is necessary” and so on-could be, and were, quoted from the master’s own writings.

Lenin was driven to assert: “The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic” [11] (meaning, of course, revolutionary); a statement so one-sided as to be seriously misleading if taken as a general truth, but an emphasis absolutely necessary in the situation of 1905.

The whole question is an extremely complex one. Icautsky was, of course, right in saying that Marxism had been formulated by bourgeois intellectuals. He was wrong in implying that its development was not profoundly influenced by the actual class struggle (“side by side and not one out of the other”) indeed would have been impossible apart from working class action. Marx and Engels learned from the English working class, as even a cursory examination of their writings shows; they learned from the French working class. It was only after the experience of the Paris Commune that Marx came to fully understand the nature of a workers’ state – just as it was only after soviets had been created by nameless Russian working men that Lenin came to grasp their central importance.

So too, with the party. The theory, the tradition, the accumulated experience, that are indispensable do not arise anew at each working class upsurge. If they did there would be few defeats. Theory, experience, are indeed carried by “intellectuals” – although these may be workers who have been trained by a revolutionary party. The party is irreplaceable. But the accumulated experience only too often becomes sterile, worthless, unless it is related to the actual class struggle. Otherwise it becomes a dead dogma; dead and dogmatic because it is not even understood by those who parrot it, indeed it cannot be understood apart from practice. To stand a saying of Lenin’s on its head: Without revolutionary practice, no living revolutionary theory.

And the practice must relate to present opportunities in the class struggle. The Bolshevik committeemen of 1904-1905 had learned yesterday’s lessons very well, too well even. To adapt to the methods of open work new forces were needed and forces of a different kind. Not professional revolutionaries but workers in the shops, leading there and remaining there are the backbone of a revolutionary socialist organisation operating under legal or semi-legal conditions. And not as sympathisers but as members and leading members at that. Of course the professionals are still indispensable. But the nature of the committees is totally different. Workers in the plants must play the leading role.

Elsewhere I tried to express this, not very adequately, in these words:

The job of socialists is to connect their theory and aims with the problems and experiences of militants in such a way as to achieve a synthesis that is both a practical guide to action and a springboard for further advance. Such a synthesis is meaningful to the extent that it actually guides the activities of participants and is modified in the light of practice and that change in circumstances which it itself produces. This is the real meaning of the “struggle for a programme” that is so often turned into a fetish. [12]

What is weak about this formulation is that it does not say, emphasise and reemphasise that this is also a process of inner-party struggle, that through it the militants must come to lead the party units, that this is what is meant by “building a worker-leadership”.

The national direction of any serious revolutionary organisation is necessarily in the hands of party professionals. They may be a-workers or ox-intellectuals but they become professional revolutionaries, concerned, amongst other things, with political assessment, theory, analysis, maintaining the organisation, finance and a host of other matters. But each £ leadership is always in danger of reproducing the negative features of conservatism and organisational fetishism – as are the “professionals” in the districts – unless it is indissolubly linked with party units that are saturated with the experience of the day to day struggle and dominated by workers who are engaged in it. The necessity for inner-party democracy arises from this relationship.

Cliff gives an excellent statement of the position:

There is a dialectical relationship between democracy within the party and the party’s roots in the class. With out a correct class policy and a party composed of proletarians there is no possibility of healthy party democracy. Without a firm working class base all talk of democracy and discipline in the party is meaningless verbiage. At the same time, with out constant self-criticism, development of a correct class policy is impossible. [13]

A party of this type cannot, of course, be built under all circumstances. Cliff rightly stresses that Lenin’s 1902 “authoritarian” party model was correct, essential at the time it was propounded (as opposed to some of the dubious arguments Lenin borrowed from Kautsky to justify it). And after the defeat of the December 1905 armed rising in Moscow, the Bolsheviks were, slowly at first, driven back to the professional cadre type of organisation.

In the summer of 1905 the Moscow district bad 1,435 members. The figure rose in mid-May 1906 to 5,320. But by mid-1908 it bad dropped to 250 and six months later it was 150. By 1910 the organisation had ceased to exist, when the District Secretaty s job fell into the bands of one Kukushkin, an agent of the okhrana, the secret police. [14]

December 1905 was the decisive turning point of the first Russian revolution, in spite of the fact that the Bolsheviks continued to grow for a while longer. This, however, was not so obvious at the time.


Tactics, unity and splits

THE QUESTION that stood before the party in 1906 was: what now then? – wrote Lenin’s close associate, Zinoviev – Has the revolution ended? ... are we going through our 1847 or our 1849? ... an 1847, the eve of the 1848 revolution, or an 1849, the period following the half-victoty, half-defeat of the 1848 revolution ... Put another way, was 1906 merely the herald of new battles or were the major battles already behind us and the movement on the wane? [15]

The Bolshevik leaders, Lenin included, said firm1y – 1847, the new wave of revolutionary upsurge lies in the immediate future. Events proved this view mistaken. The Menshevik leaders, or most of them, said firmly – 1849, what lies ahead is a long period of non- revolutionary development. Events proved this view more correct, although the period was to be much shorter than that following 1849.

In short, the Bolsheviks had a mistaken perspective and the Mensheviks a more correct one. But this does not exhaust the question. The Mensheviks were moving rapidly to the right after the defeat of the Moscow rising: their perspective was, in part, a consequence of, and justification for, this rightward drift. The Bolsheviks retained their revolutionary will and optimism: their perspective was, in part, an expression of this fact. They were not willing to give up the tactics appropriate to the period of actual revolution – including armed struggle – until every possible opportunity had been exploited to the limit of the possibilities.

They were not willing to order a retreat until they were clearly being driven right off the field. Because of this they retained the morale and cohesion of their cadres much better than did the abstractly more correct Mensheviks. There were, of course, underlying political reasons for the different views- the Menshevik belief that the Russian bourgeoisie could be induced to lead the overthrow of Tsarism and the Bolshevik certainty that they could not, matters which Cliff explains clearly and at length.

But mistakes, even “necessary”, unavoidable, mistakes have also to be paid for. Will-power has its limitations. In a still fluid situation, stubbornness and determination can sometimes reverse an adverse tide. In the full flood of reaction they cannot, and persistence in inappropriate tactics leads to isolation and ruin.

The faulty perspective which leads to such tactics has to be corrected. This can be a costly process. In the Bolshevik case it produced a serious split in the party’s cadres.

Two closely interrelated questions, Boycottism and guerrilla activities, were central to the disputes around the reorientation of the party. Boycottism first arose in connection with the Duma, the “parliament”, that the Tsar’s ministers had conceded in an attempt to head off the revolutionary threat to the regime’s survival. The Duma was largely a fake parliament but that was not the main issue. In an 1847 situation it should be possible to sweep such a body aside along with all the institutions of the old regime. In an 1849 situation it will not be possible and the need is to utilise the opportunities, however limited, that it may present for agitation and propaganda.

The problem was very succinctly outlined by Trotsky:

It is permissible to boycott representative assemblies only in the event that the mass movement is sufficiently strong either to overthrow them or to ignore them, But when the masses are in retreat, the tactic of the boycott loses its revolutionary meaning. Lenin understood that and explained it better than others. As early as 1906 he repudiated the boycott of the Duma. After the coup of 3 June 1907, (the Tsar dissolved the first Duma and some of its liberal members held an illegal meeting which issued a manifesto calling for a refusal to pay taxes – DH) be led a resolute fight against the Boycottists precisely because the high-tide had been succeeded by the ebb-tide. [16]

The Boycottists, holding firmly to an 1847 perspective that had less and less connection with reality, developed into a consistent ultra-left tendency. Not only the Duma but also the legal trade unions (which were hedged in with all manner of police regulations and restrictions) should be boycotted because they were “Tsarist institutions”. As the party became less and less a mass organisation and more and more an organisation of party professionals, the necessary “feedback” from activity diminished, ultra-leftism flourished and Lenin found himself a minority in his own party.

At one point the upper band was gained by people who said: Why go into trade unions? Our concern is the party. – wrote Zinoviev – We will go underround and work there and as far as the unions are concerned the Mensheviks can sit tight. This was a major error for which we paid a high price. [17]

It had become absolutely essential to break with the ultra-lefts. They were serious and self-sacrificing revolutionaries but these policies would destroy the party as an effective organisation if they were persisted in. Unfortunately, in the conditions of the post-1905 repression, their ideas had a great appeal to the “steel-hard” cadres of the underground. Cliff sums it up beautifully:

When revolutionaries are isolated from any real support in the working class the conditions are ripe for ultra-leftism. The more isolated they are, the less they are open to correction from workers in struggle, and the greater the attraction of extreme slogans becomes. Since practically nobody is listening, why not use extreme revolutionary phrases? In at void, the pressure to adjust to a new situation is minimal. [18]

Lenin forced a split in 1909, lost some excellent revolutionaries in the process, and brought into being a rival “true Bolshevik” organisation which was a serious competitor for a period. Yet this hard decision was necessary. Splits are not the sovereign remedy for all internal party ills as some would-be disciples of Lenin imagine. The costs in terms of confusion and demoralisation of supporters can be high – they were in Russia. But faced with irreconcilable tendencies living under one “party roof”, and without the corrective that substantial participation in a real mass movement can bring, the split is unavoidable if paralysis is to be avoided.

So it was too with the final split (or rather break-down of unity negotiations) with the Mensheviks. The dominant trend in Menshevism after 1906 – the “liquidators” – were a reincarnation of the “economists”, a reformist current. There were indeed “party Mensheviks” and there was Trotsky, advocate of an all-embracing unity of all the factions. But the “party Mensheviks” proved to be an inconsistent, “centrist”, grouping and Trotsky’s “all-in” party a recipe for disintegration. Its brief realisation in 1912 (minus the Bolsheviks), the August Bloc, fell to pieces almost at once.

Boycottism was one aspect of the failure of many of the Bolshevik machinemen to adapt to new circumstances. Continuance of the armed struggle was another. The Bolshevik “fighting detachments” were originally armed units intended to serve as shock troops in the course of the revolution, not a substitute for, but as a supplement of, the mass struggle. At critical moments such units could play a key role in breaking the morale and discipline of the police – though they could hardly shatter the army, that was a question of mass agitation and the disintegration of discipline from within.

After the defeat of the December rising the fighting detachments were reduced to guerrilla actions. On an 1847 perspective this could be seen as an aspect of the preparation for the next round. The Bolsheviks were not alone in maintaining guerrilla warfare. For example, Pilsudski’s “revolutionary fraction” of the Polish Socialist Party (the extreme right wing nationalist tendency), the Armenian Dashnag terrorists (a “populist” organisation) and a number of other groups followed the same course. But; for marxists, guerrillerism could only be a viable course of action on the assumption that the defeat of the rising was temporary, that a new mass rising was on the agenda. Otherwise it was a self-defeating, self-isolating substitutionalism of the Narodnaya Volya or Baader-Meinhof type.

In the event Lenin himself was much slower to abandon armed action than boycottism. Yet the two policies were inextricably connected. If it is necessary to abandon the boycott then, by the same token, the armed struggle is inappropriate. Lenin did not immediately draw this conclusion. He was influenced by financial need – the contributions from sympathisers (notably from bourgeois sympathisers) fell off sharply as the reaction gained ground. The fighting detachments increasingly concentrated on “expropriations” – bank robberies to finance the underground apparatus.

Trotsky was right in saying that “there was an element of adventurism, usually foreign to Lenin’s policies” in this. Under conditions of increasing reaction the fighting detachments inevitably degenerated. The Mensheviks, of course, made much of this and denounced Lenin’s “irresponsibility”. But that does not alter the facts. The continuation of armed struggle under the new conditions did not injure Tsarism. It injured the Bolshevik organisation.

A typical picture of how even the most disciplined detachments degenerated is given in his memoirs by ... Samoilov, the former Duma deputy of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk textile workers. The tietachment, acting originally “under the directives of the party centre”, began to “misbehave” during the second half of 1906. When it offered the party only a part of the money it had stolen at a factory (having killed the cashier during the act), the party’s committee refused it flatly and reprimanded the fighters. But it was already too late; they were disintegrating rapidly and soon descended to “bandit attacks of the most ordinary criminal type”. Always having large sums of money the fighters begun to occupy themselves with carousing, in the course of which they often fell into the hands of the police. [19]

Or again,

Olminsky, one of the more noticeable of Lenin’s comrades in arms, shed critical light on that period from the perspective of Soviet times. “Not a few of the fine youth,” he wrote, “perished on the gibbet; others degenerated: still others were disappointed in the revolution. At the same time people began to confound revolutionists with ordinary bandits. Later, when the revival of the revolutionary labour movement began, that revival was slowest in cities where expropriations bad been most numerous.” [20]

The point has been emphasised because this is one of the very few areas in which Cliff does not draw the lessons of the experience as sharply he might have done.


In conclusion
THIS REVIEW has only touched on a few aspects of the rich material presented in the book, which takes the story up to 1914. The whole question of the nature of the Russian revolution, the role of the peasantry and its relationship to the working class, the utilisation of loopholes for legal work under illegal conditions and many other important matters, which are discussed by Cliff, have had to be passed over. There are not many books of which it can be truly said that they are indispensable handbooks. This is one of those few.



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Notes
1. Lenin, Volume 1, Building the Party by Tony Cliff, Pluto Press. £3 paperback.

2. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 33, p.430.

3. Luxemburg, Selected Political Writings, p.96.

4. Lenin, CW, Vol.5, p.464.

5. Ibid., p.472-3.

6. Lenin, CW, Vol.20. pp.534-5.

7. Lenin, CW, Vol.5, p.352.

8. Lenin, CW, Vol.4, p.174.

9. Trotsky, What Next?, in Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, p.167.

10. Lenin, CW, Vol.5, p.383-4.

11. Lenin, CW, Vol.10, p.32.

12. Towards a revolutionary socialist party, Party and Class, p.18.

13. Cliff, Lenin, p.269.

14. Ibid., p.240.

15. Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party, p.140.

16. Trotsky, Stalin, Vol.1, p.152.

17. Zinoviev, History, p.153.

18. Cliff, Lenin, p.283

19. Trotsky, Stalin, p.151.

20. Ibid., p.153.

[redstar2000]

A critic (Rosa Luxemburg) described it, not too unfairly, as follows:

"...the party Central Committee should have the privilege of naming all the local committees. It should have the right to appoint the effective organs of all local bodies from Geneva to Liege, from Tomsk to Irkutsk. It should also have the right to impose on all of them its own ready-made rules of party conduct. It should have the right to rule without appeal on such questions as the dissolution and reconstitution of local organisations. This way the Central Committee could determine, to suit itself the composition of the highest party organs as well as of the Party Congress."

Well, was she wrong or was she right?

Does this kind of organization make any kind of sense from a revolutionary standpoint in advanced capitalist countries?

Would you want to be in an outfit like this? Why?

The party is irreplaceable.

So we have been told...ad nauseam. But the reasons for this ritual utterance always turn out to be something along the lines of "the workers need leadership".

"Leadership", like the "grace" of "god", is one of those mystical attributes that descend from the heavens...to the astonishment and awe of common humanity.

It is always recognized in hindsight...Lenin was a "great leader" because he "won". Martov, for example, was dogshit because he "lost".

Stalin was a "winner"; Trotsky a "loser".

Prior to "the final score", it's always a matter of assertion..."our party" is the "revolutionary party" because only we provide "revolutionary leadership".

I submit that this fundamentally superstitious blatherskite has nothing in common with Marxism other than a few scraps and tatters of terminology.

It is "communist" in name only.

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[elijahcraig]

A critic (Rosa Luxemburg) described it, not too unfairly, as follows:

"...the party Central Committee should have the privilege of naming all the local committees. It should have the right to appoint the effective organs of all local bodies from Geneva to Liege, from Tomsk to Irkutsk. It should also have the right to impose on all of them its own ready-made rules of party conduct. It should have the right to rule without appeal on such questions as the dissolution and reconstitution of local organisations. This way the Central Committee could determine, to suit itself the composition of the highest party organs as well as of the Party Congress."

Well, was she wrong or was she right?

Twisting the words she was right, but in reality, no she was wrong.


Does this kind of organization make any kind of sense from a revolutionary standpoint in advanced capitalist countries?

Yes. It is for the most militant marxists.


Would you want to be in an outfit like this? Why?

Yes, to enlighten the masses as to their situation. Sitting around on our asses waiting for the entire working class to become simultaneously enlightened is utopianism.



The party is irreplaceable.

So we have been told...ad nauseam. But the reasons for this ritual utterance always turn out to be something along the lines of "the workers need leadership".

No, the reason for the party is for the most militant marxists. You anarchists sure do love to take things and run with them.


"Leadership", like the "grace" of "god", is one of those mystical attributes that descend from the heavens...to the astonishment and awe of common humanity.

That's just nonsense, my above replies can go here too.


It is always recognized in hindsight...Lenin was a "great leader" because he "won". Martov, for example, was dogshit because he "lost".

...


Stalin was a "winner"; Trotsky a "loser".

Trotsky was a "loser" because he factionalized the communist party. Stalin was a "winner" because he fought opportunism.


Prior to "the final score", it's always a matter of assertion..."our party" is the "revolutionary party" because only we provide "revolutionary leadership".

...


I submit that this fundamentally superstitious blatherskite has nothing in common with Marxism other than a few scraps and tatters of terminology.

Yes, we know you believe that. Unfortunately, I disagree and see the difference between your vision of "the grace of god party" and the "militant party". One is a new ruling class, the other a portion of the workers who have become militant and advanced in their understanding of the system. One is a totalitarian ruler, the other the most reasonable way to get the news out to the workers. I think you are exaggerating things, and it is very annoying that you do so, because your conception of a "new ruling class" is all wrong.


It is "communist" in name only.

No, it is "communist" in totality.

[Durruti]

The middle class sees an oppritunity to exploit the working class and siezes on popular ideologies to motivate the working class against the aristocracy. After the overthrow of the ruling class, the revolutionary middle class moves up to the position of the ruling class and everything else remains the same.
The language of the popular movement is not new... it's prevelent in all authoritarian and oligarchic movements.
It was used to win the American revolution for the "worker" and it was used in the Russian "worker's" revolution... and still middle class militant "Communists" believe that a dictatorship is exactally what the workers need. Trade invisable chains for invisable chains....

"How do we motivate the brainwashed masses" they say... "They're too lazy to motivate themselves!"
"How," they ask, "do we make them move?"
"We need a hero!," they cry as dreams of wagging dogs float through their heads.

Have they ever stopped to ask, "Would I trust George Bush with the dictatorship?"

[Vinny Rafarino]

Originally posted by [email protected] 11 2003, 12:33 AM
A critic (Rosa Luxemburg) described it, not too unfairly, as follows:

"...the party Central Committee should have the privilege of naming all the local committees. It should have the right to appoint the effective organs of all local bodies from Geneva to Liege, from Tomsk to Irkutsk. It should also have the right to impose on all of them its own ready-made rules of party conduct. It should have the right to rule without appeal on such questions as the dissolution and reconstitution of local organisations. This way the Central Committee could determine, to suit itself the composition of the highest party organs as well as of the Party Congress."

Well, was she wrong or was she right?

Does this kind of organization make any kind of sense from a revolutionary standpoint in advanced capitalist countries?

Would you want to be in an outfit like this? Why?

The party is irreplaceable.

So we have been told...ad nauseam. But the reasons for this ritual utterance always turn out to be something along the lines of "the workers need leadership".

"Leadership", like the "grace" of "god", is one of those mystical attributes that descend from the heavens...to the astonishment and awe of common humanity.

It is always recognized in hindsight...Lenin was a "great leader" because he "won". Martov, for example, was dogshit because he "lost".

Stalin was a "winner"; Trotsky a "loser".

Prior to "the final score", it's always a matter of assertion..."our party" is the "revolutionary party" because only we provide "revolutionary leadership".

I submit that this fundamentally superstitious blatherskite has nothing in common with Marxism other than a few scraps and tatters of terminology.

It is "communist" in name only.

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U.S. GET OUT OF IRAQ NOW!
___________________________

"...a disgusting and frightening website"
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A site about communist ideas
For someone who thinks the working class does not need leadership you sure act like you are "all knowing" when it comes to what the "working class" needs. By your mere presence here constitutes you as being further along then the basic man on the streets. Face it RS, with all the rhetoric you speak, you are just like us. Developing strategies for revolution on what you consider best for the proletariat. So please spare us your "down with the man" bullshit mate.

[redstar2000]

For someone who thinks the working class does not need leadership you sure act like you are "all knowing" when it comes to what the "working class" needs. By your mere presence here constitutes you as being further along then the basic man on the streets. Face it RS, with all the rhetoric you speak, you are just like us. Developing strategies for revolution on what you consider best for the proletariat. So please spare us your "down with the man" bullshit mate.

No, I am not "just like you".

What's the difference? I neither seek nor require "disciples". If what I say to people "makes sense", then they are free to take it and use it as they will.

The "fate" of the revolution does not "depend" on me running the show. In fact, no small group of people, no matter how "brilliant", can be depended on to "run the show". Whenever that's been tried, the outcome has sucked!

Yes, I have ideas and opinions. Yes, I advocate them as vigorously as I can. Yes, I really do "think I'm right". I do not confuse that conviction with the idea that I am "therefore" entitled to be placed "in charge"...people should just "follow me" and "I'll set them free".

That's bullshit!

You Leninists sincerely believe that your "correct ideas" give you the right to run post-capitalist society. You borrow Marx's phrase--the dictatorship of the proletariat--to "justify" the dictatorship of you and your party.

And you "justify" that by frequent and often blunt assertions that the working class is fundamentally incapable of self-government...in your own words, they are "sheep" that need to be "herded" and "protected" from imperialist "wolves".

No, I am not "just like you" at all.

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U.S. GET OUT OF IRAQ NOW!
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A site about communist ideas

[Vinny Rafarino]

Originally posted by [email protected] 11 2003, 02:02 PM
For someone who thinks the working class does not need leadership you sure act like you are "all knowing" when it comes to what the "working class" needs. By your mere presence here constitutes you as being further along then the basic man on the streets. Face it RS, with all the rhetoric you speak, you are just like us. Developing strategies for revolution on what you consider best for the proletariat. So please spare us your "down with the man" bullshit mate.

No, I am not "just like you".

What's the difference? I neither seek nor require "disciples". If what I say to people "makes sense", then they are free to take it and use it as they will.

The "fate" of the revolution does not "depend" on me running the show. In fact, no small group of people, no matter how "brilliant", can be depended on to "run the show". Whenever that's been tried, the outcome has sucked!

Yes, I have ideas and opinions. Yes, I advocate them as vigorously as I can. Yes, I really do "think I'm right". I do not confuse that conviction with the idea that I am "therefore" entitled to be placed "in charge"...people should just "follow me" and "I'll set them free".

That's bullshit!

You Leninists sincerely believe that your "correct ideas" give you the right to run post-capitalist society. You borrow Marx's phrase--the dictatorship of the proletariat--to "justify" the dictatorship of you and your party.

And you "justify" that by frequent and often blunt assertions that the working class is fundamentally incapable of self-government...in your own words, they are "sheep" that need to be "herded" and "protected" from imperialist "wolves".

No, I am not "just like you" at all.

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A site about communist ideas
You sure skirted around that issue RS. I've never in my life seen someone blow so much hot air without ever actually speaking a word.


Good dodge mate, you have a career in politics after all.

[elijahcraig]

No, I am not "just like you".

What's the difference? I neither seek nor require "disciples". If what I say to people "makes sense", then they are free to take it and use it as they will.

Really? You seemed to have planned out religion's death under communism pretty well the other day under "Communism and Religion". Talk about a vanguard. :lol:


The "fate" of the revolution does not "depend" on me running the show. In fact, no small group of people, no matter how "brilliant", can be depended on to "run the show". Whenever that's been tried, the outcome has sucked!

I've never said that was the way, though it is an option in hard times.


Yes, I have ideas and opinions. Yes, I advocate them as vigorously as I can. Yes, I really do "think I'm right". I do not confuse that conviction with the idea that I am "therefore" entitled to be placed "in charge"...people should just "follow me" and "I'll set them free".

If it was you and Farmer Joe worker, you'd convince him, hence the vanguard.


That's bullshit!

:lol:


You Leninists sincerely believe that your "correct ideas" give you the right to run post-capitalist society. You borrow Marx's phrase--the dictatorship of the proletariat--to "justify" the dictatorship of you and your party.

No, that is not what "us" Leninists do. You like to twist words though.


And you "justify" that by frequent and often blunt assertions that the working class is fundamentally incapable of self-government...in your own words, they are "sheep" that need to be "herded" and "protected" from imperialist "wolves".

In some cases, yes. There are better phrases to use for that. I've never used those words, I don't think of like that.


No, I am not "just like you" at all.

Oh, yes you are my friend. Yes you are indeed. :lol:

[SonofRage]

Am I the only one that finds it annoying as hell when people paste long articles in their post? Why not just give the link instead? :angry:

Anyway, here my is my take on things:

Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.

- Ernesto Che Guevara

[Vinny Rafarino]

Originally posted by [email protected] 11 2003, 10:07 PM
Am I the only one that finds it annoying as hell when people paste long articles in their post? Why not just give the link instead? :angry:

Anyway, here my is my take on things:

Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.

- Ernesto Che Guevara
And who gauges how long until "the last possibilities of peaceful struggle" are over? You? Me? Fucking Redstar?

[SonofRage]

read that Che quote again and think about your question

[Vinny Rafarino]

Don't worry mate, I'm very familiar with the quote. So you feel as long as a a party is being "elected" into power then armed struggle is not necessary? This ONLY applies to third world nations under the control of dictators. You have taken the meaning out of context.

[Durruti]

If you think it's out of context than you have no involvement with the movement what-so-ever. Resistance is futile, if our people see nothing to resist. If you try and make an example, you'll just be called a terrorist by the people you're fighting for.
It's not so much as a matter of elections as a matter of popular support.

Now let me ask all of you supporting this call for a Vanugard action: Is this call a statement of intent, or a call for others to act?

[elijahcraig]

Does it have to be one or the other? I choose both.

[peaccenicked]

This is as good a dence of bolshevism as I have seen.
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/399/reality.html

[Vinny Rafarino]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12 2003, 08:34 AM
This is as good a dence of bolshevism as I have seen.
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/399/reality.html
But what do you have to say about it peacce?

[Durruti]

lol... and the patriot act was forced on america by 9-11 and is necessary in order to protect the people. I believe hitler said his powers were necessary for defending the people too...
How high would you have to be to believe eithor of those stories? Do you yet blieve this one?


OHHH... wait wait! so if I get what he's saying, Communists who turned to fascism were ok because to allow their people freedom would have been surrendering but anarchists who "supported" the war instead of surrendering (which would have led to greater despotism) were betraying their values? How exactally does that work comrade? And does he have a crystal ball that he can predict exactally what would have happened had the Anarchist forces lead?
As I see it, had an Anarchist state emerged America would have been next (being both radically anti-state and socialist)... then there would have been a global revolution.
Do you really believe Anarchists were terrorists? Anarchists in the USSR were terrorists just like the Jews of Nazi Germany...
It should also be realized that those syndicalists who rejected so called "Communism" did so because they realized that if the dictatorship of the proletariat went bad it would be a lot harder to overthrow than the mock democracy of the Capitalist world. Turns out they were right...

[redstar2000]

The link that peaccenicked posted is interesting and worth reading, though I think there are some inaccuracies.

But it is also another exercise in "what if"...with all the drawbacks of that approach.

What if there had been no civil war and invasion? Would the Bolsheviks have slowly or quickly yielded more and more power to the soviets? Would they have "permitted" the emergence of a kind of proto-communism?

Or, what if the anarchists had been a major force in the urban proletariat...could their methods have successfully won the civil war and driven out the invaders?

We have no way of answering those questions; history does not allow us to "re-run" our experiments while changing the variables.

What we can say with certainty concerns the kind of parties that have been built on the "Bolshevik model" and what they have actually done...throughout the 20th century.

When and where have any of these parties shown any tendency--even a weak one--to yield real political power to the working class itself?

There may actually be a few, here and there...but it seems to me the general track-record is quite clear and the evidence is overwhelming.

I do not see how anyone can plausibly deny the fact that the Leninists firmly believe in their right to govern "in the name of and on behalf of" the working class.

When they speak of "working class democracy", they mean the "right" to vote for them. When they speak of "freedoms for the working class", they mean the "right" to follow and obey them. When they invoke the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat", they are not speaking of an actual class situated in historical reality with actual political power; instead they are speaking of a Hegalian, mystical "cloak of world history" that they and they alone are entitled to wear.

Sometimes they are more diplomatic about this sort of thing; sometimes they are quite blunt. We are actually fortunate on this board that some of our recent pro-Leninist postings have been very blunt indeed--"the workers are sheep that need to be herded".

No one can say they were not warned.

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[Nobody]

Sorry my response is late, no internet, and I'm only addressing the earlier posts for now.


And I suppose you want to be in this elite 'vanguard' eh? Well sorry, I'm not falling for it.
You may 'lead' a revolution with good intentions, but what about your successors or fellow Vangaurd?
I'm sorry but it sounds to me like a potential new boss, same as the old boss.
Remember that russia turned into an oligarchic state capitalism
NoXion, I would happily serve in the vanguard because I feel a comintement to the workingclass, to try and improve their lives. I would hope once the revolution is in full swing the vanguard would become redundent and they would aid the revolution with the skills they have developed.

You talk about a vangaurd as if they where some kind of messiahanic being which will some how guide the ignorant masses into the light. Actually what you're talking about is one form of ruling class directing an under class in order to achieve its objectives. Period. And they are the vangaurds objectives, because the workers, they don't know what Communism is, because their to busy being forced into fighting "In short we must force the worker's hand."

Libertarian Commie

Revolution is not simply about the working class suddenly deciding to give up their "toys" and join a small group of intellectuals who tell them that the world is a bad place and to fight. Which inevitable will put this small group of intellectuals into power so they can "work in their interests". Revolution is about consciousness. There are reasons why we the world is a bad place. There are reasons why workers material conditions are the way they are. Workers must realise this. Once they have they will want to change it. The only way you can fight for a revolution, which is truly in the interests of the working class is if you have an educated working class, leading themseleves. The whole notion of having this "vangaurd" is bordering on the obsurd, or at least an attempt at 1917 nostalgia.

They believe they are happy because they are being bombarded from every medium with messages that their lives are good, and after a while they start to believe.

I dont mean to offend, but this just proves how out of touch you are with the working class. People are really fucking unhappy actually, they simply do not feel empowered to change anything or they do not identify their problems with capitalism. If you go to any working class area they will have a long list of things that they are unhappy about. High taxes, school fees, the poor NHS, high rent, privatized housing benifit offices, phone bills, electricity bills, the fact their kids school is being closed down and they have to move across town, war. These are direct effects of capitalism. What we need now, is not a vangaurd to push them, or some leaders to force them, we need a movement to say "these things happen because of capitalism...this is why you feel alienated...this is why the world developed the way it did....and this is how you fight it".

Libertarian Commie, the vanguard actions are about an education. A handful of intellectuals can not topple a first world government, it has to be about mass action. When someone takes action against their enemy does it not make you wonder why they did it? When the Palastinians were blowing themselves up rather then blindly calling them terrorist or idiots I looked at their grivences and their religon to learn what motivated them to do such extreme action. I'm hoping a vanguard would cause the working class to look at this vanguard and their beliefs and learn why they are fighting for them.

I know the working class is upset, but at the wrong people. Black people blame white people. Whites blame hispanics, the fact is they are blaming the wrong poeple. And while I agree they are unhappy, theyare not so unhappy that they do much of anything.


apathy maybe
How about,
Why We NEED a Socialist Party in Power!
we NEED a Socialist Party in power to put forward our views, we NEED a Socialist Party in power so that they can
1) increase taxes on corporations forcing them to cut jobs and/or wages
2) create government jobs with higher wages to lure those people to work for us
3) increase funding for social services such as schools, health, roads etc
4) to pay we increase income tax, while we are at it we scrap all other taxes hitting the indervidual
5) once people see how good things are, they never want to go back
6) we ...
7) ....
Gradualy a communist state is in place. With the support of the majority of people. Really a vanguard just doesn't work. Revulutions don't work in Western countries. "Enough of the violence" - French middle class 1968.

apathy maybe, you are joking right? You thing we can work through a system that was created to make the ruling class, the ruling class? Revolution is the way the workers must be heard. Ask yourself, if a Communist were elected president, would the army let him take office, or would there be a coup? Also, it is nice to know that the middleclass does not like social upheavel, who would have guessed.

Felicia, you are right on the money my dear.

RedStar2000

This is actually not traditional Leninist "vanguardism" inspite of the similarity of terminology.

This is a call for conscious and deliberate martyrdom in the hope that the "blood" of the "vanguard" will "inspire" a proletarian revolution.

It's actually, I think, kind of a late 19th century nihilism.

Would it "work"?

Frankly, I doubt it. It certainly didn't work in Czarist Russia. A clarion summons to a "revolutionary death" will appeal to a small number of young idealists...but most people will think that they're wackos.

Looking at "the big picture" of late capitalism, I do think it's kind of interesting that so many 19th century ideas are starting to make a "come-back"...anarchism, Marxism, and--no reason why not--nihilism. A social order in decay produces...grave-diggers!

That's a good sign.


Redstar, I don't think you understand my point, please take no offense. I'm not calling people to go to their 'revolutionary death'. Yes, people would die if we take this road, but I'm not looking for matryrs. It is the action that would spark the revolution, no the deaths of the vanguard.

[the SovieT]

the vanguard is to the people.. like the sex is to the porno actor....



ok sorry for the spam just had to say it...


admit it im right...
no need for big ass posts and all that shit just common "SovieT" sense....


K´mon admit it im tupper...


ok im on drugs i admit...

[Nobody]

Soviet, that is what I'm trying to say, these people are so damn cynical.

ps I'm currently listening to the 1947 Soviet national anthem, good stuff.

[Vinny Rafarino]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12 2003, 03:52 AM
If you think it's out of context than you have no involvement with the movement what-so-ever. Resistance is futile, if our people see nothing to resist. If you try and make an example, you'll just be called a terrorist by the people you're fighting for.
It's not so much as a matter of elections as a matter of popular support.

Now let me ask all of you supporting this call for a Vanugard action: Is this call a statement of intent, or a call for others to act?
You are kidding me right?


Kiud, you could not even fathom the things I've done for the movement. Get back to your shine-box Tommy.


"resistance is futile"


Good grief. Where did Captain Picard here come from? I think you need to re-think your assessment of comrade Guevara's works.