Who should be a Party member?

[Die Neue Zeit]

For some reason, the MIA rendition of Lenin's One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/g.htm) is incomplete. Section G doesn't have the two drafts of membership outlined, as compared to M2M:

http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/OSF04.html


Paragraph 1 in Martov's draft: "A member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party is one who, accepting its programme, works actively to accomplish its aims under the control and direction of the organs [sic!] of the Party."

Paragraph 1 in my draft: "A member of the Party is one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organisations."

Paragraph 1 as formulated by Martov at the Congress and adopted by the Congress: "A member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party is one who accepts its programme, supports the Party financially, and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organisations."



Should the definition of "membership" be revisited?

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1179737&postcount=14


The SPGB's (and WSM's) approach seems to be a very low-yield/low-stress type of affair, meaning they don't expect to have a huge impact on daily events in a short time span (instead counting on the slow accumulation of their educational and persuasive efforts over time), but this also means that being a part of the organization is very low-impact. One is not apparently ordered around to devote a lot of time and energy (and money) to various reformist campaigns (and nor does the SPGB try to intrude a whole lot into personal lives, it seems). Instead, one quietly makes one's case to people, and otherwise the group's activities consist of refining their internal socialist vision through imaginative discussions. I expect that, for this reason, they have a very low "burnout" of activists who join. So even though they probably aren't constantly getting new recruits (and pushing their existing members to do constant recruiting drives), they keep the members that they do have for a whole, and those members become more knowledgeable and higher-quality members over time. This has probably contributed to the organization's longevity. I think this is a worthwhile model that bears some consideration for prospective leftist groups.

One could perhaps draw a contrast with an organization like the RCP, which I might tentatively classify (given I don't know a whole lot about what the internal dynamics of the organization feel like) as a high-yield, high-stress type of organization. It's involved in multiple reformist campaigns, and its members are expected to be very active with these campaigns, with getting new recruits, with selling the newspaper, and with tailoring their personal lives to be in harmony with the Party. This produces bursts of impressive activity (such as the start of the WCW campaign), followed by an aftermath of dwindling presence and, I assume, increasing burnout and "turnover." This seems to be the model that most leftist organizations follow (CPUSA in the '30s, for instance, which apparently had a pretty much perpetually revolving door of new recruits and burnt-out members leaving), so maybe it's time that some organizations give the other model a chance....

Edit: I'd also like to add that it seems like a lot of reformist mass parties use this low yield-low stress approach already as well (and maybe that's one small reason why they have better luck attracting and keeping average working people involved, people who have busy daily lives to worry about as well). That said, these reformist mass parties are, 1, reformist, and 2, not so keen on member education as much as ordering members around in reformist campaigns. WSM at least seems to be trying to avoid those problems while still maintaining the low yield-low stress model of membership involvement.



The remarks above are in my head as I read this book:

Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism (http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~pnorris/books/Democratic%20Phoenix.htm)

[Particularly Chapters 6 and 7]

[Rawthentic]

I think Party members should be recruited based on their commitment to the revolution, class, and the Party.

Also based on their grasp of communist theory and ability to carry it out amongst the masses.

[Yehuda Stern]

I think Lenin's definition applies - a party member is one who supports its line and pays membership dues. He doesn't have to read everything every Marxist has ever written (though it wouldn't hurt), but he does have to prove himself in the service of the party - that's why I think a few months' candidacy period is necessary.

[apathy maybe]

The only people who should be party members should be lawyers, bureaucrats, and mangers. Then, when the inevitable take over of the state occurs, the party will have sufficient talent to run the infrastructure.

[534634634265]

The only people who should be party members should be lawyers, bureaucrats, and mangers. Then, when the inevitable take over of the state occurs, the party will have sufficient talent to run the infrastructure.
if this wasnt a joke i still laughed when i read it.:D

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

It depends on what kind of organization you are building and what your goals are.

[trivas7]

The only people who should be party members should be lawyers, bureaucrats, and mangers. Then, when the inevitable take over of the state occurs, the party will have sufficient talent to run the infrastructure.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" -- W. Shakespeare, Henry VI

[534634634265]

when i saw this thread i immediately thought
"anyone that wants to be?"
i still haven't come up with a better answer.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Notwithstanding anarkiddie hijack attempts, perhaps I was overreacting (especially given that Lenin cited the mass SPD's membership requirements as his model). :(

I guess a better question is, considering my quote of Comrade-Z: how should "personal participation" be defined?

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/641/macnair.htm


Collective consciousness therefore involves institutional memory: state, parties, educational institutions and so on; for the workers’ movement, parties, unions and so on. But these institutions are necessarily composed of individuals actively involved in them; and the institutional memory takes the form partly of written party programmes and rules, partly of the memories of these individuals.

Under feudalism and in the early stages of capitalist development all of the propertied classes, down to peasants (including villeins) and master-craftsmen, were involved to some extent in active political life, if only in the form of attending manorial and borough courts. The wholly unpropertied - mainly women and youth - were (largely) excluded.

In capitalism, economic development tends to cause growth of the unpropertied in the form of the proletariat and to break down the basis of the formal legal boundary between master-craftsmen and farmers on the one hand and women and ‘servants’ on the other. To create and reproduce its political monopoly, capital has to have non-legal mechanisms of political exclusion.

The primary form of these mechanisms is the “dull compulsion of economic relations”. In one aspect this ensures that workers either have little free time or are excluded and pauperised by unemployment. Either makes it hard to be politically active. In another, it takes the form of ‘consumerism’. From this aspect, politics ceases to be the common mass experience it was for peasants and artisans, and becomes a consumer good, supplied by professional and semi-professional politicians who offer various competing ‘brands’.

To achieve any of its aims, the working class needs to organise. In order to organise under capitalism, it needs - outside the immediate conditions of a mass strike - its own politicians. It is this broad layer of working class professional and semi-professional politicians which I called “the activists” earlier in this article, and which can also be called ‘the vanguard’. But ‘the vanguard’ is misleading if it suggests that the working class politicians/activists are always ahead of the broad masses.

The dynamic towards bureaucracy - and towards splits - therefore grows naturally out of capitalist politics - not, as Michels argued, out of “mass society”, nor, as Kautsky argued, out of backwardness. Because capitalism politically expropriates the broad masses in favour of a professional politician caste, and because capitalist politics functions as a system of competing ‘firms’ of professional politicians which are political ‘brands’ (and also personal ‘brands’, like Blair and Cameron, Galloway and Sheridan), there is an objective dynamic towards workers’ parties copying this pattern.

Because capitalism politically expropriates the broad masses, these masses have very limited political memory: they have no continuous past political experience to draw on when confronted with new political events. Political memory is concentrated in the activists. The result is that, when the masses do enter the political stage, they are for quite a long time forced to rely on the existing activists and their institutional memory. This is why Luxemburg’s view turned out to be wrong.

But memory can also be a trap: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. If there is a genuine change in the situation we face, which does not correspond to what has gone before - or even to what has gone before within our memory - memory may radically mislead us. It is for this reason that “consciousness lags behind”, and for this reason that this “lag behind” is in a certain sense concentrated in the activists, just as political memory is.

[BobKKKindle$]

Party membership should not be made available to everyone - members should have an understanding of how exploitation takes place under capitalism and should also recognize that the transition to socialism cannot take place through existing political processes, but only through violent struggle against the bourgeois state. The inclusion of people who defend capitalism and limit political activity to fighting for reforms within the framework of capitalism will undermine the party's role as the organized vanguard of the working class.

The dangers which can arise from an excessively open membership policy were demonstrated by the Lenin levy in 1920, whereby the influx of large numbers of new members lacking in political consciousness allowed the bureaucracy to attain hegemony within the party apparatus, thereby weakening internal democracy.



Availing itself of the death of Lenin, the ruling group announced a “Leninist levy.” The gates of the party, always carefully guarded, were now thrown wide open. Workers, clerks, petty officials, flocked through in crowds. The political aim of this maneuver was to dissolve the revolutionary vanguard in raw human material, without experience, without independence, and yet with the old habit of submitting to the authorities. The scheme was successful. By freeing the bureaucracy from the control of the proletarian vanguard, the “Leninist levy” dealt a death blow to the party of Lenin.


The Degeneration of the Bolshevik Party, The Revolution Betrayed (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch05.htm#ch05-2)

[Decolonize The Left]

Why is a party necessary or desirable? I thought we were all working towards freedom and equality rather than exclusion and hierarchy...:confused:

- August

[Niccolò Rossi]

Why is a party necessary or desirable? I thought we were all working towards freedom and equality rather than exclusion and hierarchy...

We are all working toward freedom and 'equality' but a vanguard party is not mutually exclusive to this aim.

Obviously some elements/sections of the proletariat (along with members of other classes with the same interests) will attain a revolutionary class consciousness before others. The question then begs, what should these class conscious elements be doing? Should they stand around and wait for the rest of their fellow workers to become class consciousness and rebel? By no means so! Or should they actively attempt to spread their class consciousness by means of education and agitation, participate alongside the 'masses' in direct action and 'reformist' campaigns such as protests and strikes, and help organise the class into workers councils and future organs of workers rule.

The party, unlike some would foolishly suggest, should not seize power in 'the name of the proletariat'. It's task is to educate, agitate and organise, working alongside all members of the working class so as to raise the 'masses' to the level of 'socialist theoreticians'. That is to say, the vanguard must push the proletariat forward, to a point where they may emancipate themselves as the emancipation of the proletariat must be the task of the proletariat itself, ie. not the task of a 'vanguard party'.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ Zeitgeist, what if that vanguard party happens to be a mass party like the SPD? The real founder of "Marxism" said these:

"But I maintain that it is a help to political clearness to examine the problems that will grow out of the conquest of political power by us." (The Social Revolution, Volume II)

"In still another way the Socialists are revolutionary. They recognize that the power of the state is an instrument of class domination, and indeed the most powerful instrument, and that the social revolution for which the proletariat strives cannot be realized until it shall have captured political power […] the possibility of capturing and holding the state for the proletariat only exists where the working class has grown to great proportions, is in large part firmly organized, and conscious of its class interests and its relation to state and society." (The Road to Power)

This, as you know, is the basis of the first part of my Chapter 6 discussion ("the road to power"). ;)