The Strategy of Attrition

[Hyacinth]

Interesting polemic against insurrectionism and in favour of electoralism as a socialist strategy.

The Strategy of Attrition: Conquest or Destruction of the State? (http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11746)


"It seems obvious that an adroit mixture of the strategies, one which combined the strength of labour, the potential wealth of co-ops and the leverage of mass parties, is the goldilocks of political strategies and indeed that is the position we advocate. However, once we get into the details the obvious quickly becomes very blurry indeed. It’s hardly surprising that socialists have lacked the clarity of the right-wing since they, unlike us, are in driving seat and don’t need to change a whole lot while we are searching for a way to achieve our goals.

And it turns out that a combined arms strategy of unions, co-ops, and political party is not, in fact, the dominant orientation on the radical left, and has not been since 1917, at least in the English speaking world. There are, for example, proponents of an exclusively non-state orientation and there are supporters of political means, but who both deny that co-operatives can play a meaningful role before the working class has seized power and that tightly knit revolutionary groups are the key to success.

In this essay we are going to focus on the political arena and make case for a robust mass party strategy that aims to win political power via democratic elections, and only touch upon the role of trade unions and co-ops.

The Strategy of Attrition: Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus (http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11769)


Organisation enables a sort of alchemy; the transmutation of goodwill into support and practical activity over the long term. Mass parties (and associated organs, co-ops, etc.) are not just admirably suited to achieving this, they are absolutely necessary. For every cadre member who joins a revolutionary party, there will be thousands more who are sympathetic to the basic goals of socialism. An emphasis on the destructive side of socialism, i.e. one which focuses on the necessity to smash the state, makes it harder for these potential sympathisers to participate in the movement in a sustained, long-term way, if only because of its intrinsic lack of plausibility. And even where single-issue campaigns are necessary, which seems likely to be the case for a long time to come, a socialist electoral party has no need to hide its politics in the initial period and then rush to spray them all over the campaign when it looks like it’s coming to an end.

The strategy of attrition is, therefore, compatible with a type of politics that is close to where many people already are. Its radicalism lies in its goals, not in its practice and this makes it easier to interact with non-socialists on an open basis. There is no need to hide its insurrectionary orientation because it doesn’t have one. As long as the party has a programmatic commitment to a co-operative mode of production and uses other avenues, e.g. its media or its public representatives, to articulate that, its mere presence as an ally of campaigns is enough to raise awareness of its goals.

In political terms, it requires genuinely engaging in electoral politics with the aim of winning since that is both the route to democratically gaining power and the best way of achieving large size in the political realm. It’s often argued that engagement with electoralism detracts from the core message of promoting socialism, as more immediate concerns, including the need to get re-elected, crowd out the longer term vision. This is a valid insight, but the assumption that ignoring the immediate ways people interact with politics doesn’t solve it. It just results in even less opportunity to engage with folks about any sort of politics at all.

[Zederbaum]

Thanks for posting a link to this. Both of the co-authors post on this forum from time to time, i.e. myself and Rowan Duffy.

Cheers!

[Die Neue Zeit]

But the argument is very weak on at least three questions on the state: http://www.revleft.com/vb/dave-zachariah-limits-t186181/index.html

[Tower of Bebel]

I quite liked both articles. They are thought provoking and it is strategically speaking common sense not to destroy but to capture your goal. It think much of it mirrors in a well argumented way the strategic vision of pre-Soviet, social democratic Marxism. Yet, I struggle with the following strategic claim: the attempt "to win state power in the advanced capitalist countries through legal means, taking the democratic road if you will".

My contention is: it's one thing to support a radical interpretation of negative claims of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and it's programme, i.e. to do away with the repressive means of the state as much as possible in order to conquer; however, for a socialist it seems an intirely different thing to strive for the fulfillment of the positive claim, i.e. the ability to use bourgeois institutions and its rule of law ("legal means") constitutionalism to capture the state.

[Zederbaum]

I quite liked both articles. They are thought provoking and it is strategically speaking common sense not to destroy but to capture your goal. It think much of it mirrors in a well argumented way the strategic vision of pre-Soviet, social democratic Marxism.

Thanks, a lot of the thinking is an updated version of the 2nd International.


Yet, I struggle with the following strategic claim: the attempt "to win state power in the advanced capitalist countries through legal means, taking the democratic road if you will".

One of the comments on Part 1 quotes the old Chartist slogan: "peacefully if we can, forcefully if we must" and that about sums up our position. We do, however, have to exhaust the legal means, where such means exist. I am enough of a cynic regarding the security state that I expect that in many cases they will react to a rising socialist movement by restricting its legal room to manoeuvre. As that occurs, more insurrectionary strategies become, once again, viable.

But simply because that is a very realistic possibility, it doesn't mean that we should do the security state's work for it. We need them to make the anti-democratic moves, which will then put us in the position of being the defenders of democracy.

The current situation in the advanced capitalist states, in which most of the radical left are antagonistic to actually existing democracy, ensures that they are the ones seen as the anti-democratic forces.


My contention is: it's one thing to support a radical interpretation of negative claims of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and it's programme, i.e. to do away with the repressive means of the state as much as possible in order to conquer; however, for a socialist it seems an intirely different thing to strive for the fulfillment of the positive claim, i.e. the ability to use bourgeois institutions and its rule of law ("legal means") constitutionalism to capture the state.

I am not quite sure I understand what you are getting at here. I would caution, however, against seeing institutions as purely 'bourgeois'. Some are to be sure, but many aren't. The question really is, what institutions can be used for the socialisation project. It's a pragmatic one, not a moral one.

I am deeply skeptical of the claims for some unique form of proletarian institutions. What matters is the content: who owns the means of production; who owns the products of labour; who controls the state etc.

[Die Neue Zeit]

My contention is: it's one thing to support a radical interpretation of negative claims of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and it's programme, i.e. to do away with the repressive means of the state as much as possible in order to conquer; however, for a socialist it seems an intirely different thing to strive for the fulfillment of the positive claim, i.e. the ability to use bourgeois institutions and its rule of law ("legal means") constitutionalism to capture the state.


I am not quite sure I understand what you are getting at here. I would caution, however, against seeing institutions as purely 'bourgeois'. Some are to be sure, but many aren't. The question really is, what institutions can be used for the socialisation project. It's a pragmatic one, not a moral one.

The problem, though, is not just the institutions, but the processes underlying them. I'll repeat just one criticism of mine below:


One of the comments on Part 1 quotes the old Chartist slogan: "peacefully if we can, forcefully if we must" and that about sums up our position.

[...]

The current situation in the advanced capitalist states, in which most of the radical left are antagonistic to actually existing democracy, ensures that they are the ones seen as the anti-democratic forces.

If the party-movement commands majority political support from the working class (partly overlapping with electoral support, but partly overlapping elsewhere as well), and all the other criteria for a revolutionary period are met, what happens if said support still isn't enough to use two-thirds or three-quarters constitutional amendment processes?

I definitely think that institutions charged with interpreting constitutional law can't be used. The old Chartist slogan is inaccurate because it is framed between peace and violence, as opposed to legal vs. extra-legal, including relatively peaceful but "unconstitutional" seizure of power.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

DNZ actually raises a good point. Electoralism is a dead end, because it is not the workers who set the goal-posts in bourgeois democracy. The clue is in the name; we may fight fucking hard for our gains, but ultimately we are fighting to force the bourgeoisie to give up some things to us - the 8 hour working day, trades union laws and so on. They are the ones who actually make the laws.

It is likely, therefore, that if we utilise an electoral strategy, we could have a situation where, party or not, there is mass support amongst the working class for a revolutionary destruction of bourgeois institutions, yet said institutions themselves simply move the goalposts, i.e. change the voting laws, change the electoral laws etc.

Anyway, i'm not sure why we want to capture bourgeois institutions for any period of time. Again, that has been shown historically to be a dead-end strategy: once 'we' start managing bourgeois institutions, however nice as people we may be and however committed we may have been as socialists, once we become them, we obviously stop being us.

It's this problem that has been shown since the failure of Marxism-Leninism across much of the world: it is almost impossible to manage the tools of the state without delegating its day-to-day machinations to a small group of people. Once this happens, the class interests of those people tend to become disparate to those of the rest of the class. Bureaucratic structures such as monolithic national-level bourgeois institutions and mass parties only create more distance between the average worker and the tools of the state.

[ckaihatsu]

I'll only add, as a sidenote, that the key word in this thread's title is 'strategy' -- anyone on the hard-left would be 'going out on a limb' by stretching / reaching to the extent of what's basically *radicalism*, by 'platforming'.





(The objective hierarchy is politics --> platform --> strategies --> tactics --> logistics.)


[3] Ideologies & Operations -- Fundamentals

http://s6.postimage.org/cpkm723u5/3_Ideologies_Operations_Fundamentals.jpg (http://postimage.org/image/cpkm723u5/)


The Meanings of Spatial Relationships

http://s6.postimg.org/rciywyagd/130927_Meanings_of_Spatial_Relationships_aoi_xcf.j pg (http://postimg.org/image/rciywyagd/)

[Tower of Bebel]

A response in defence of the "insurrectionary path" (http://internationalsocialistnetwork.org/index.php/ideas-and-arguments/analysis/323-mark-h): Is there a new left reformist strategy today?


The left reformist argument [of Mendel-Gleason and O’Brien] dismisses the “insurrectionary path” of popular assemblies in favour of a struggle for control of the already existing state — but in doing so they reveal themselves to be in favour of a far less democratic path than we are. We want popular democratic control which goes beyond the narrow confines of parliament and the state, even one run by a left government with mass support. The revolutionary approach wants to create the conditions in which people emancipate themselves through forging as much direct control of their own lives as possible. The electoralist approach ultimately reduces all questions of power down to the question of the vote for a government (every five years? every year? We are not told). Which is a superior method in terms of overcoming our self-alienation?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Comrade, that IS article only affirms my position of revolutionary centrism, in between Mendel-Gleason/O'Brien and Hardy.

Indeed the "left-reformist" article poses caricatures of the "insurrectionary path."

I must agree with Richard Atkinson's critique of "memory form, deriving from the minimalist nineteenth century state, not a real analysis of the contemporary state." This article shares the same problems with the "left-reformist" article on two or three questions regarding the state! It ignores the "all-encompassing system of taxation" (Atkinson), and it ignores constitutional obstacles!

On the party question, the IS article tends to lump together campaigns and "permanent organizations" in its evaluation of the strategy of attribution. Why? Because there's an avoidance of a certain b-word, which campaigns don't need much of but "permanent organizations" need lots of.

Bureaucracy is a process. Without mastering bureaucracy-as-process, the worker-class-for-itself isn't ready to rule politically. The very use of the word institutions instead of "permanent organizations" suggests authoritative and fundamental concessions on the question of bureaucracy-as-process. In short, I love bureaucracy-as-process as much as Winston came to love Big Brother. Comrades who are serious about adapting the pre-WWI SPD and USPD models to modern circumstances should, too.

[ckaihatsu]

DNZ, Rakunin, all -- I'll juxtapose 'organic centralism' here either combined-with, or as-a-replacement-for, your worker-class-for-itself bureaucracy-as-process:





Avoiding internal dissent is not an end for the Party, but a means: this means is constituted in "every last member eliminating from his ideology any concession to democratoid, pacifist, autonomist or libertarian trends", [Amadeo Bordiga, When the Party's General Situation is Historically Unfavourable, 1965] or more broadly, any revision of the revolutionary doctrine and thus scientific socialism and history; it can organically achieve its end — i.e. unity of action around a programme which expresses the revolutionary doctrine, the proletarian historical mission — because the revolutionary doctrine — i.e. the necessary theoretical conclusions of scientific socialism, of history — itself, affirmed by each and every Party member, instructs each and every Party member to do so. The revolutionary doctrine thus declares that any Party characterized by internal democracy or hierarchy — insofar as they constitute means of suppressing internal dissent — necessarily accommodates underminers of a pure and invariant communist programme.


In place of social production for surplus-value, there will be "social production regulated by social prevision" — I cannot predict the precise fashion in which production will be regulated, but I can tell you that the formal structure of scientific communism will express the historical, social and economic conditions inherited from the overthrow of capitalist production under the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. In any case, the fretting over the administrative role of workers in scientific communism (as opposed to those who will not work? Who are they?) generally belies a broader dogma which I will respond to here: workers' control is not a principle of the communist movement — its only principle is aligning itself with the proletarian historical mission, and to this end it excludes no means.

[Tower of Bebel]

Chaikatsu, could you rephrase or explain that? I don't know what it means.

As for the subject of this thread, I wonder whether "attrition" is the correct word to describe this strategy. Attrition is the act of wearing away or the state of being worn away. Attrition was used during WW1 and WW2 to outfight the opponent by destroying as many troops as possible while retaining huge reserves behing the front in case of a general collapse in the enemy camp. Attrition was used by the US in Vietnam when it wanted to destroy as many guerillas as possible with the use of superior firepower.

The strategy of attrition as described by Rosa Luxemburg in her 1910 polemic against Kautsky "consists of the legal exploitation of the given state groundwork", i.e. in Kautsky's words the "development of proletarian organizations and the proletarian class struggle on the given state groundwork [which] would bring the proletariat farthest forward in the situation". It was a strategy of building ever bigger workers' organisations and to oppose this to the policies of an internally devided bourgeois opponent.

Alas, the repressive means of the bourgeoisie tend to grow stronger in times of crisis. In such a way that the bourgeoisie can even lose control over it, i.e. in the case of bonapartism or even fascism. The downfall of capitalism, it's tendency to plunge into crises, does not only lead to socialism but also to barbarism.

The "strategy of attrition" seemed to suggest that in case of crisis (war, economic crisis, etc.) the bourgeoisie would have to depend on support from the workers' movement to save civilization (as pointed out by Engels in his German correspondences concerning a German-Russian war), that when crisis comes the bourgeois institutions could collapse while the socialist "state in a state" remains in position to take over the leading hights of the economy and of politics (as happened on a smaller scale during the Franco-Prussian war when the French gouvernment and the bourgeoisie fled from Paris).

Is this attrition however? Is this strategy wearing away the bourgeoisie and/or the bourgeois state? Part of the argument is based on the idea that democracy (i.e. control over the state by the people) gets achieved by the working class. Yet, there is only so much that the capitalists and their state can allow to be gained. And the strongests of all state institutions are formed by the army, the police and intelligence services. How are Marxists able to shape these institutions when there's no revolutionary period or revolutionary crisis?

In conclusion: is this a strategy or genuine attrition or is this a strategy of "building" [a workers' movement] in the context of an economic system that, at times, suffers from systemtic crises and collapse?

[Q]

Is this attrition however? Is this strategy wearing away the bourgeoisie and/or the bourgeois state? Part of the argument is based on the idea that democracy (i.e. control over the state by the people) gets achieved by the working class. Yet, there is only so much that the capitalists and their state can allow to be gained. And the strongests of all state institutions are formed by the army, the police and intelligence services. How are Marxists able to shape these institutions when there's no revolutionary period or revolutionary crisis?
What about the state bureaucracy? Or what about supra-national institutions that play a big part in the international hierarchy of states? There are indeed limits to what we can do within the context of the state.

More importantly, I felt that the articles undervalued the central question of democracy. Sure, sortition was mentioned in passing by, but only that. No focus was put on the oligarchic nature of elections. And this was, in my view, the central weakness of the articles. The strategy of the Second International is something I look positive to myself, and the articles bring out the need for a large mass movement quite well, but we're living in 2014, with over a century of experience regarding elections behind us and with much more known about ancient Athens and other places where sortition was practised.

I strongly feel we need to incorporate these insights into our strategic vision or run a big risk in making the same mistakes all over again.

[ckaihatsu]

Chaikatsu, could you rephrase or explain that? I don't know what it means.


Yeah, it means 'Toe the line' -- the main idea is here:





[I]ts only principle is aligning itself with the proletarian historical mission, and to this end it excludes no means.

[Tower of Bebel]

Here's a critique from someone who's an IBT supporter:

http://revolutionaryprogramme.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/a-warning-for-all-class-struggle-militants-interested-in-the-left-forum/

[Die Neue Zeit]

Here's a critique from someone who's an IBT supporter:

http://revolutionaryprogramme.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/a-warning-for-all-class-struggle-militants-interested-in-the-left-forum/

Indeed:


O’Brien and Mendel-Gleason might also want to reflect on the research of Lars Lih about the views of Kautsky before he had begun his flight from Marxism (Lih is here referring to a 1904 document)

[Zederbaum]

More importantly, I felt that the articles undervalued the central question of democracy. Sure, sortition was mentioned in passing by, but only that. No focus was put on the oligarchic nature of elections. And this was, in my view, the central weakness of the articles. ].

I guess we disagree on what constitutes democracy. It would require a separate article, I feel, to tease out the issues at play. My view is, however, that you overplay the issue of democracy as many who have come from the Trotskyist tradition tend to do, given the often stifling nature of the internal regime of these organisations.

We, on the other hand, are coming from an anarchist background in which an absence of democracy was not a problem and, consequently, also not a panacea.

Furthermore, In Part 1, we give an argument as to why the mode of production exerts a much more significant impact on social life than anything else, including the form of democracy in which politics is conducted.

The mode of production should be the focus of attack. I feel the detail of which democratic procedures are to be utilised are of a secondary nature provided there is room to articulate dissent and criticism.

Also, I think you may underestimate the problem of complexity involved in running large organisations (see again, Part 1). If sortition is to be a help in creating higher functioning institutions it has to be experimented with in advance of taking state power. This is why we mention the possibility of an internal party parliament or some other such body being constituted in this way. We can learn what works and what doesn't work.

The last thing we want is to be trying out sortition on a mass basis for the first time when we take power and are attempting to socialise the economy.

Until I have more evidence in its favour I am going to tend towards conservatism on this issue. Gavin is probably more favourably disposed however.

[Zederbaum]

Here's a critique from someone who's an IBT supporter:

http://revolutionaryprogramme.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/a-warning-for-all-class-struggle-militants-interested-in-the-left-forum/

My reply to that re-articulation of standard fare Trotskyism is contained in the comment section of the original North Star article. Gavin debated him on Facebook.

DNZ quoting our Sparticist Comrade:

/O’Brien and Mendel-Gleason might also want to reflect on the research of Lars Lih about the views of Kautsky before he had begun his flight from Marxism (Lih is here referring to a 1904 document)

Or, indeed, we might already have reflected on it and concluded that the quote is shorn from its context and, when presented in that way, not representative of Kautsky's thought.

As should be reasonably clear from my previous posts on this forum, I can point to any number of references of Kautsky's from any period of his life that talk of the need for a democratic republic based on universal suffrage. In fact, as early as the 1890s, Kautsky explicitly critiques more 'direct' versions of democracy and comes down in favour of party based representative democracy. That never changed.

He is also quite clear that the bureaucracy is a necessary factor in mass organisations, see The Agrarian Program and his work on Christianity as well the correspondence to Alder (I think it was). The question is how to subordinate them. For Kautsky, as us, the best method is via a mass, socialist-labour party winning a majority via universal suffrage.

Where Kautsky is concerned about the higher officials, military officer corps etc, he is specifically referring to states of the time, which were still in the middle of throwing off their absolutist remnants, including, in Kautsky's view, France, a state he likened to an Empire without an Emperor.

In fact, as is clear from one of the later sections of Part 1, the issue of the senior civil servants and the security apparatus is also a concern for us to and we address the issue directly.

It would be a pity if Lars Lih's fine work in rescuing Lenin from an utterly simplistic historical narrative was at the price of reducing Kautsky to such a narrative (Kautsky prior to 1910 = good, afterwards = bad). I fear the habit of looking at everything through Lenin's eyes exerts a distorting effect, including on posters of these august boards.

Even Lih's framing of the references by Lenin to Kautsky in the historical database has the title of "when he was a Marxist". Although Lih himself makes no pronouncement, as far as I am aware, on Kautsky's Marxism, his way of framing it lends itself to less critical minds constructing their simpleton narrative.

[Tower of Bebel]

Indeed, sortition itself seems to me more like a tactical or technical question than a strategic one.

[Q]

I guess we disagree on what constitutes democracy. It would require a separate article, I feel, to tease out the issues at play.
Likewise, I think it would require more explanation in favor of democracy (that is, sortition) to get the point across.


My view is, however, that you overplay the issue of democracy as many who have come from the Trotskyist tradition tend to do, given the often stifling nature of the internal regime of these organisations.

We, on the other hand, are coming from an anarchist background in which an absence of democracy was not a problem and, consequently, also not a panacea.
It's interesting how different backgrounds result in different views. But I think we misunderstand eachother here: I don't view democracy as a magic bullet. I do however view democracy as a much more central question than the SoC'ers might. Again, this might need more explanation which I don't have time to give here.


Furthermore, In Part 1, we give an argument as to why the mode of production exerts a much more significant impact on social life than anything else, including the form of democracy in which politics is conducted.

The mode of production should be the focus of attack. I feel the detail of which democratic procedures are to be utilised are of a secondary nature provided there is room to articulate dissent and criticism.
Yeah, we definitely disagree here. I put democracy at a central place for several reasons I succinctly wrote out before (http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=11278):


5.The binding factor, really the alpha and omega, in all this is the question of democracy. It is through the fight for democracy that we can point out the lies and hypocrisy of the capitalist class, it is through democracy that we can build a genuine mass movement of millions where there can exist “unity in disagreement”, it is through democracy that the working class can be lifted out of its slave status and be educated as a potential ruling class and it is only through democracy that the working class can seize power and build towards a communist future.

5a. The true democratic form has, as an aside, nothing to do with elections (which is an oligarchic form of rule, not a democratic one), but has everything to do with ancientAthens, where lottery decided which people ruled for a short amount of time. This was the form Aristotle once despiced as the “rule of the poor”, since it was the masses that swayed the scepter. This is nowadays more commonly known as demarchy (as it would just confuse everyone if we kept the name of “democracy”, despite the bourgeois lie).

5b. Since the actual “revolutionary moment” is the toppling of the capitalist constitutional order and since the party-movement is the actual constituded working class as a class-collective, this implies that the party-movement comes to power as a whole. So, demarchy has to be an integral part of the party-movement. Every party member has to be able to rule and be ruled.


Also, I think you may underestimate the problem of complexity involved in running large organisations (see again, Part 1). If sortition is to be a help in creating higher functioning institutions it has to be experimented with in advance of taking state power. This is why we mention the possibility of an internal party parliament or some other such body being constituted in this way. We can learn what works and what doesn't work.
I completely agree, see 5b in my quote.

[Die Neue Zeit]

This is why we mention the possibility of an internal party parliament or some other such body being constituted in this way. We can learn what works and what doesn't work.

The last thing we want is to be trying out sortition on a mass basis for the first time when we take power and are attempting to socialise the economy.

Until I have more evidence in its favour I am going to tend towards conservatism on this issue. Gavin is probably more favourably disposed however.

Why not go further and replace the idea of non-party workers councils and assemblies with internal workers councils and assemblies?

[Tower of Bebel]

"Central Committees" are internal party parliaments, no?

James' second contribution to the North Star called "Three types of revolution (http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11854)" needs to be included in this discussion about the strategic principles of the Center. I see comrade Richter already gave his opinion in the commentary section.


In this article we will outline three basic types of revolution, which although not mutually exclusive, do carry their own logic in terms of informing their adherents of their strategic orientation. Before we plunge in, however, we should say that we won’t be addressing that favourite of Anarchist vs Marxist debates: direct democracy vs. party rule.


The three types of revolution are: insurrection against the capitalist state, socialistion of production, and communisation of consumption. Note that a group may support any one, two, or three of the above and call itself revolutionary.

...

It is not the point of this essay to pronounce one way or the other, although as readers of this site will have realised, our sympathies lie with the Marxist Centre.

[Die Neue Zeit]

"Central Committees" are internal party parliaments, no?

Not exactly, comrade. They don't meet enough, certainly not enough when there's the telecommunication means to do so.

A Central Workers' Council would meet regularly to sufficiently hold other party institutions to account.

Names-wise, it aims to steal the thunder from spontaneist, non-party, and anti-party interpretations of "organs of workers' power," from Pannekoek's (councilism) to Arendt's (radical post-WWII liberalism).


James' second contribution to the North Star called "Three types of revolution (http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11854)" needs to be included in this discussion about the strategic principles of the Center. I see comrade Richter already gave his opinion in the commentary section.

That opinion was stated before. It's not new.

[Tower of Bebel]

So JR, since you're proposing inner-party councils, do you think that there has always been a problem with the structure of Marxist parties? Has the leadership always been unaccountable? Btw, this discussion is diverging from the original topic.

[Die Neue Zeit]

So JR, since you're proposing inner-party councils, do you think that there has always been a problem with the structure of Marxist parties? Has the leadership always been unaccountable? Btw, this discussion is diverging from the original topic.

To answer your first question: yes. Lower-level branch and committee meetings tend to behave more like functioning workers' assemblies and councils by meeting more often, which is one reason why I suggested the nomenclature change.

To answer your second question: it's mixed, because there's always the party congress.

[bill]

Srečko Horvat wrote an op-ed recently in the Guardian on Alexis Tsipras: "Some on the left would rather wallow in impotence than support the Syriza's leader's bid to be president of European commission".

Would the authors of these articles then be in agreement with Srečko?

[Tower of Bebel]

To answer your first question: yes. Lower-level branch and committee meetings tend to behave more like functioning workers' assemblies and councils by meeting more often, which is one reason why I suggested the nomenclature change.

To answer your second question: it's mixed, because there's always the party congress.
Hmmm, I think this tends towards "structuralism": structures become determinant. Aren't you ignoring the importance of principles, training and tradition and the fact that a large variety of forms or structures can result from this? I.e. that structures adapt themselves to the conditions necessary rather than structures are set up to create favourable conditions.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Hmmm, I think this tends towards "structuralism": structures become determinant. Aren't you ignoring the importance of principles, training and tradition and the fact that a large variety of forms or structures can result from this? I.e. that structures adapt themselves to the conditions necessary rather than structures are set up to create favourable conditions.

Comrade, isn't "structuralism" an improvement? I mean, when you've got crude economic determinism and other schools of thought claiming to be the One True Materialists (and painting everyone else as Voluntarists or other Idealist heathen), and some of those on the other side who focus too much on philosophy and culture, something's not right.

I think there's a dyna-mat (dynamic materialism) (http://www.revleft.com/vb/dynamic-materialism-dyna-t146970/index.html) relationship between the two. Structures are set up to maximize favourable conditions and minimize unfavourable conditions, yet they can neither create favourite conditions nor eliminate unfavourable conditions. Favourable or unfavourable conditions can exist, but the absence of structure means no maximizing of the former and no minimizing of the latter.

[ckaihatsu]

Comrade, isn't "structuralism" an improvement?


I'll emphatically second this conclusion, and will go even further, to suggest that objective reality is *already* objectively structural -- if only we choose to acknowledge it. (It can be viewed from the perspective of historical / reality *magnitude*, or scale.) (See the conceptual frameworks, below.)


philosophical abstractions

http://s6.postimage.org/i7hg698j1/120404_philosophical_abstractions_RENDER_sc_12_1.j pg (http://postimage.org/image/i7hg698j1/)


[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

http://s6.postimage.org/zbpxjshkd/1_History_Macro_Micro_Precision.jpg (http://postimage.org/image/zbpxjshkd/)

[Zederbaum]

Srečko Horvat wrote an op-ed recently in the Guardian on Alexis Tsipras: "Some on the left would rather wallow in impotence than support the Syriza's leader's bid to be president of European commission".

Would the authors of these articles then be in agreement with Srečko?

Basically, yes. I think the nomination of Tsipras is a minor but nevertheless useful step in refocussing politics away from the national level to the European level. Here in Ireland, almost all politics is focussed on the national parliament, government etc, despite the fact that they have little more power than a moderately sized province.

The illusion of sovereignty is a barrier to progress. And nor is this illusion a result of the country going bankrupt in 2010. It is a result of having a very minor productive capacity and, as the 20th century showed, all the notional independence in the world is never enough to trump material reality.

On this side of the pond, only a European Republic has the capacity to take on capital itself. Refocussing politics on that stage is a step in the right direction.
-----

On a side note: why is that modern continental writers are much harder to understand than old lads like Kautsky or Kropotkin or Lenin? If anything, simple language drift should mean that it would be harder to understand the old timers.

These days I'm constantly thinking that I'm in danger of reading a philosophical tract instead of a simple journalistic article.

Something seemed to change midway through the 20th century. There's a PhD in there for someone :)

Naturally, I exclude our Nederlandish comrades (Flemings included!) from the sins of verbosity.

[Zederbaum]

I've a new article on the general subject of socialist organisation which fleshes out a couple of points left undeveloped in the Strategy of Attrition.

It's called Catholic Marxism, which I hope isn't too off-putting for our Calvinist colleagues from the Netherlands :)

http://spiritofcontradiction.eu/bronterre/2014/06/28/catholic-marxism

[Die Neue Zeit]

If we're going to compare the social outreach and other party-building aspects of orthodox Marxism to some religious denomination (and not parrot the early 20th-century liberal critique of Marxism as "secular religion"), I don't think Catholicism is the right one at all.

If anything else, I'm leaning more towards a handful of Protestant denominations at most. Regular communal lunch, for example, is something found in Protestant gatherings and not Catholic ones. One Protestant denomination that I think should be in the social outreach and organization-building mix is Evangelism (at least before the "televangelist" craze), not least because the pre-war SPD had more support among Protestant workers than Catholic ones.

I should know about the Evangelism part, given a Catholic childhood and Protestant adolescence, both long ago.

Also:


It is counter-productive, for example, to have groups inside it whose primary loyalty is not to the organisation itself, but to their own faction or to a level of political purity that entails only their own strategy being able to exist within the party. The incorporation of different strategic approaches, therefore, does not entail disarming oneself before strategies which are fundamentally hostile to the Centrism.

What are your thoughts on Tjis's remarks below, in my signature? Would you consider reform coalitionism as hostile as the Trotskyist strawman?

[La Guaneña]

I'd just like to point out that this is one of the discussions I enjoyed reading the most lately on RevLeft.

[La Guaneña]

So, reviving this: what do these modern styled mass parties mean for us communists? (Podemos, Syriza, PSUV)