political parties

[fidel59]

Should we lefties join political parties, and work through them to bring revolution are we better off working underground so to speak, and do we have anything to fear by putting our names on a party list.

[More Fire for the People]

No. Political ‘parties’ are the political organizations of the capitalists — they are bourgeoisie through and through. So-called proletarian political parties have served to only curb the extent of revolutionary action. Everywhere and anywhere parties have served to secure the political rule of the bourgeoisie. To serve a party is to capitulate to the side of the bourgeoisie.

There are limited circumstances in which it would be more ‘pragmatic’, for lack of a better word, to vote for one of these organizations. For instance, in areas where the working class has become used to articulating class antagonism through elections it would be of more use to simply vote for the more ‘worker-oriented’ parties while simultaneously exposing the reality of their ‘worker-oriented’ policies as mere concessions designed to preserve bourgeois hegemony. However, it would be a waste of resources and time to actually aid these parties.

[Janus]

Should we lefties join political parties
Some leftists believe in using the official system in order to gain greater legitimacy and win concessions.

However, I think that radical leftists should avoid this reformist road whenever possible because as revolutionaries we should not seek the use the system but rather overthrow it.

[OneBrickOneVoice]

We should. Many here are against worker organization. Revolutionary Parties are exactly that.



No. Political ‘parties’ are the political organizations of the capitalists — they are bourgeoisie through and through. So-called proletarian political parties have served to only curb the extent of revolutionary action. Everywhere and anywhere parties have served to secure the political rule of the bourgeoisie. To serve a party is to capitulate to the side of the bourgeoisie.

No one "serves" the party. In case you didn't notice, every successful revolution has been led by a Revolutionary vanguard party. The do not secure the rule of the bourgieous but rather, bring about a organized and stable worker's state.



vote for the more ‘worker-oriented’ parties

You shouldn't vote. Most of the worker parties that run in elections are democratic socialist or social democratic and thus don't even understand class antagonism and the fact that our goals cannot be achieved through the ballot box.

However in cases like the one hopscotch explained, then voting is not a bad idea.

[Ander]

Originally posted by [email protected] 29, 2006 11:50 pm
In case you didn't notice, every successful revolution has been led by a Revolutionary vanguard party.
Wrong; Cuba.

And I'm not completely sure because I'm not very familiar with the Asian communists in general, but wasn't Mao and his guerillas the driving force behind the Chinese revolution, not a vanguard? If I'm right, then shame on you, Maoist! :P If not, I apologise for my ignorance.

[More Fire for the People]

No one "serves" the party. In case you didn't notice, every successful revolution has been led by a Revolutionary vanguard party. The do not secure the rule of the bourgieous but rather, bring about a organized and stable worker's state.

Every 'succesful' revolution? What bullshit. How exactly was the Bolshevik Revolution succesful? It went downhill from revolutionary society to bureaucratic militarism to Stalinism. However, every working class revolution has spawned workers’ councils.

[Floyce White]

Communists must join into every area of political, social, and economic struggle. Wherever working-class people express their political activity, we must be there.

A party is a form of organization of political groups under capitalism. Lower-class activists must organize their own party that excludes all capitalists without exception. This is the main message we must spread to workers whose rebellion has been captured and caged by the bourgeois parties.

[LSD]

Should we lefties join political parties

No.

Parties, by their nature, centralize authority into the hands of the most "theoretically advanced". This is beneficial when the objective is to promote some ideological line. But working class revolution is not about ideology, it's about liberation.

The revolutionary process needs to be an emancipatory one. Workers need to learn to manage themselves and their work without "supervision" from anyone. Party-based action does not promote this.

On the contrary, while any worker can join a "revolutionary" party, very few will ever be anything more than rank-and-file card carriers. The leadership will be composed of those who have the time and energy to play the bullshit bureaucratic game nescessary to rise through the ranks.

Someone working an 8 hour shift in a automotive factory does not have the time to sit on a "central committee" or "politburo". For most of us, party politics is a decidedly spectator sport.

Now, for bourgeois parties this isn't a problem. Their fundamental purpose is to promote some political line. An inactive membership is irrelevent so long as the party stays ideologically on message.

When a bourgeois party takes power it aims to make changes, surely, but those changes are top-down in nature. Training average workers to be self-empowered is the last thing the bourgeoisie wants.

Political parties work for bourgeois changes to the bourgeois system. They do not work as an insurrectionary tool against the system itself. The proletariat []cannot[/b] look to the "capitalist example" when attacking the foundations of capitalism itself.

A proletarian revolution is the only kind of revolution in history that seeks to enfranchise the masses. Accordingly, no historical revolutionary "models" can possibly apply.


We should. Many here are against worker organization. Revolutionary Parties are exactly that.

Workers need to organize, but they cannot use oppressive bourgeois structures to do it.

Again, a political party is built to take political power and execute its ideology. That's the whole reason for its existance.

But communism and workers' liberation isn't just a matter of "seizing" power. The revolutionary process cannot be treated as just another political process, because when it is, the results bear nothing in common with communism.

"Vanguard parties" promise liberation once they've been placed in power; we are expected to "trust" that when they become the bosses, things will "get better".

The problem with this equation, however, is that it ignores the material basis of class relations. Once the "leadership" of a party is firmly in control, that leadership becomes the new ruling class.

Not the class that it supposedly "represents", but the party elite itself.

That's why every Leninist revolution has failed so spectacularly, that's why despite the dedication and best wishes of Communist leaders throughout history, the workers have yet to actually gain power anywhere.

For a proletarian revolution to actually succeed, it must be a liberating process in itself. It must begin and end with the workers on the ground and it must be predicated on worker self-managment and motility.

"Iron discipline" or "centralization" is fundamentally antithetical to this aim and so any revolution predicated on those principles cannot help but fail. "Military-like" party organization may prove useful at overthrowing weak governments, but if coup d'états were our aim, we'd all be social-democrats.

Communism is about more than a change in government, it's about a change in governance; it's about replacing top-down coercion with participatory democracy.

Syndicalism is therefore the only means pursuing a revolutionary proletarian agenda while remaining true to the actual proletariat. Political parties, no matter how they are organized, exist to service an ideology. Workers' syndicates, however, exist to service workers. In my judgment, revolution must come from the latter direction rather than the former.

We cannot succede the bourgeois by doing exactly what they do "with a red flag". Exploitation is at the heart of what the bourgeoisie is and so it is at the heart of their political model as well.


In case you didn't notice, every successful revolution has been led by a Revolutionary vanguard party.

In case you didn't notice, every "succesful revolution" has also failed to achieve worker liberation.

Maybe that's because we've been going at this from the wrong direction, trying to apply bourgeois models to the proletarian struggle. I think at this point it's become eminently clear that while capitalist organizing principles work for capitalists, they don't work for us.

People cannot be "forced to be free" and oppressive institutions cannot bring emancipation.

Worker liberation must be part and parcel of the revolution, not some fucking political promise.


No one "serves" the party.

No? Then how come it's nearly always petty-bourgeois academic types who end up "speaking for" the proletariat?

I know that recently some Marxist groups have begun establishing "worker only" membership rules and that's certainly a step in the right direction. But I don't think that it goes far enough in eliminating the fundmental inequality that is at the heart of the bourgeois "party".

Victorious revolutionary organizations will inevitably shape the structure of post-revolutionary society. You can try and seperate "pre" and "post" revolution as if they're divorced from eac other, but the reality is that once the old order falls, something needs to take its place.

In those situations, the leading proletarian organization is usually the only thing with enough support to fill the vacuum.

Accordingly, if that organization is structured along hiearchical anti-democratic lines, so will the emergent post-revolutionary society. That's what happened in Russia, that's what happened in China, that's what happened in Cuba.

Besides, there's something very odd about self-described "Leninists" establishing party rules that would have excluded Lenin. If petty-bourgeois theoreticians should not lead "vanguard parties" then wasn't Lenin's most fundamental belief, namely his own fitness to rule, completely in error?

How then can we take anything that he "theorized" without a great deal of skepticism?

It seems to me that its time for the proletariat to approach the question of its liberatoin from a proletarian perspective. We're not bourgeois politicians trying to push a "policy", we're the exploited masses of the world trying to gain our freedom.

It's time we started acting like it!

[Whitten]

No? Then how come it's nearly always petty-bourgeois academic types who end up "speaking for" the proletariat?

Most of those "petty-bourgeois academic types" come from proletarian backgrounds, often born to manual labourers. Why would the people elect non-intelegent representitives?

[LSD]

Most of those "petty-bourgeois academic types" come from proletarian backgrounds

Sorry, but like it or not, Trotsky and Lenin and all the rest do not meet any Marxist definition of worker. They may have been excellent theoreticians and truly dedicated communists, but they had no place "leading" a proletarian organization.

Besides, once a person holds a position of leadership in a hierarchical state structure, they cease to be workers. Class is not some immutable characteristic like race or religion, it is defined entirely by one's existant relationship to the means of production.

Even if someone used to be a worker, once they enter "leadership" and gain power over economic production, their class position nescessarily adjusts.

The political party and the "representative" state are bourgeois institutions used to perpetuate bourgeois dominance. By accepting a position of authority in either, one becomes a tool of the capitalists and/or a de facto capitalist oneself.

You can't "seperate" yourself from your class just by "wishing" it to be so. "Political workers", "declassed intellectuals", these are nonsense terms invented to cover up the fundamentally petty-bourgeois nature of Vanguardist party politics.

Unfortuantely, the class nature of Leninist revolutionaries has had a profound effect on twentieth century "socialism".

Lenin was petty-bourgeois and so he was thoroughly laced with petty-bourgeois stereotypes. And so, for him, the workers were too "stupid" and too "backwards" to rule themselves. That's why he Had to rule them "for their own good".

And if that dosn't demonstrate manegerial thinking, nothing does.


Why would the people elect non-intelegent representitives?

It's not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of class.

Unless you're suggesting that working people are less intelligent than petty-bourgeois types... :rolleyes:

[Whitten]

How about all the other evil Leninist leaders you tend to hate so much? Stalin and Mao being perfect examples (ok Mao was a peasent but close enough).


It's not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of class.

Unless you're suggesting that working people are less intelligent than petty-bourgeois types... rolleyes.gif

What I'm suggesting is that the intelligent are far more likely to be elected to important positions than complete morons in a workers state. Most of the people elected came from proletarian backgrounds anyway. Ofcourse Lenin was born Bourgeois but that was just chance of birth, you cant hold that against him can you?

[LSD]

How about all the other evil Leninist leaders you tend to hate so much?

What about them? How many of them were actually working class? More importantly, how many of them stayed working class while they were "leading" the "vanguard"?

Again class isn't ethnicity, it's economics; and so when a Stalin or a Mao gains the kind of personal economic control that they did, they cease to be worker of peasant and become de facto bourgeoisie.

Yeah, it's a little more complex than that and state capitalist "leaders" are better described as a seperate bureaucratic class than an emergent bourgeoisie; but that they constitute a managerial clique is basically unavoidable fact.


What I'm suggesting is that the intelligent are far more likely to be elected to important positions than complete morons in a workers state.

Well, that's true in any political system; you have to be reasonably skilled to get to high office.

But the fact that Leninist party politics are so similar to bourgeois politics is hardly a vindication of the former. On the contrary, it's just another example of how fundamentally bourgeois "democratic centralist" vanguardism is.

Officials in "workers' states" may genuinely believe that they are somehow serving the population at large (although I suspect that most are smarter than that), but conviction doesn't trump material class reality.

The party structure is, again, intrinsically capitalist in function. So it doesn't matter what percentaqe of it's membership or "delegates" are technically workers, it will nonetheless always be fundamentally antithetical to proletarian organization.

Remember, fascist groups can be made up of workers too, that doesn't make them any less petty-bourgeois as organizations nor does it make them any less of a threat to the working class at large.

The American democratic party is almost entirely made of workers at its base, nonetheless because it is a bourgeois political party, its membership statistics are wholly irrelevent.

The nature of political parties is that the leadership very rarely reflects the party at large. Ideologues and bureacrats are the only ones who have the dedication and energy to rise to the top. The rest barely have time to attend meetings.

At its hight, the CPSU counted something like 10% of the Soviet population among its members, around half of those were industrial workers. Despite the official tally, however, no one but the most die hard "revisionist" would claim that those 9 odd million workers had any say whatsover over state policy.

Stalin and Khruschev and Gorbachev did not defer to the "will" of the proletariat, they "judged" what was in the "popular interest" and acted accordingly. And they did so because that's what Lenin had done before them.

Power perpetuates itself and once it's established it does not dissapate without a fight. Lenin and his successors may have meant well, but because they operated within a centralized and anti-democratic power structure, they could not help but be oppressive.

A political party is designed to promote an ideology, the most "effective" means of doing this is to centralize and restrict power to those who are most expert in and most dedicated to the said ideology.

Obviously, however, that's not conducive to democracy.


Ofcourse Lenin was born Bourgeois but that was just chance of birth, you cant hold that against him can you?

No, but it is rather indicative of the class nature of the Bolshevik party.

That a supposedly workers' organization could end up being that subject to the whims and eccentricities of a petty-bourgeois non worker rather clearly demonstrates that hierarchical "vanguardism" doesn't work.

No one can "speak for" the working class, it needs to speak for itself.

[Patchd]

Not trying to spark off a massive argument with LSD :unsure:


Sorry, but like it or not, Trotsky and Lenin and all the rest do not meet any Marxist definition of worker.

I may be mistaken, but wasn't Lenin born the son of a school teacher, although his dad may have been middle class, that is still not confined to only the petty-bourgeoisie is it, you can still have well-paid proletarians making up the middle class can't you? And wasn't Trotsky also born into a peasant Ukrainian family?

[LSD]

I may be mistaken, but wasn't Lenin born the son of a school teacher

His father started as a professor, but he quickly rose the social and economic ladders to become a state administrator and member of the lower Russian nobility.


And wasn't Trotsky also born into a peasant Ukrainian family?

Trotsky was born into a wealthy and labour-employing farming family. So, basically petty-bourgeoisie.

[Janus]

ok Mao was a peasent but close enough
Mao may have been born a peasant (son of a rich peasant and semi-landlord really) but he was no longer a member of the peasant class after he left to become a member of the intelligentsia.

[FuckWar]

don't join a party.

don't vote.

doing either validates a system that is broken by your own participation. How can one criticize or deconstruct someone's authority when they were instumental or at least complicit in their gaining such authority?