Will do.
That is a shame. I'm often in the South Bay, as I have family there. So if there is ever something of interest politically speaking which you are attending do tell me and we could remind each other that communists actually exist in real life as well
Meant to get back to you sooner...unfortunately, I won't be in the area during that time. It's a shame, really. I somehow manage to miss every opportunity to see revlefters in person (I've been involved in actions with other people from here without realizing they were there, too).
So Comrade, Sentinel from the CWI is coming to the Bay area August 11 to the 16th and a couple of Revlefters have agreed to meet. Most likely place will be San Jose. Seeing as I remember you posting slightly favorable towards Partyism ("Leninism In the Wake of Occupy"), I thought I'd let you in on the meet
I write "vehicle" because a political Party is so much more than votes and discussions. That is the difference we (the radical left) are lacking, actual exiting social institutions of our own, independent social (sports, recreation, libraries, trucks, shooting ranges) organization of the working class. Without creating an actual Party we will continue being those guys in the 57 different "Parties" that sit in their living rooms discussing how we might have turned a colleague into a sympathizer the other day, instead of organizing fairs for the public, sport events, building a social movement and culture around communism.
Yes, good point there at the end. You obviously have given this field a lot of thought. I work at a liberal progressive, environmentalist organization ("save the fish!"..) which campaigns for the Democratic Party. Socialist and Communist Workers naturally already hold positions in the ranks of the modern Mass Unions and Progressive Bourgeois organizations, the fight to turn Unions into schools of Communism is our bread and butter. But what is ultimately needed to "form the Proletariat into a class" (Communist Manifesto) is political organization, an actual Party. Political organization always means the fight of the most advanced elements of a class to unite their class into one Party. As a side note, the service economy is diminishing labor needs of industry. Service workers do not unionize. The form of organization they need is a political Party. It is up to us, the Marxist Left, to provide this vehicle of working class.
This all said, I think you've assumed a much too absolutist position here. The revolutionary left is such a minuscule percentage of the wider population that it cannot afford to work solely within other radical circles - the point is to agitate, educate, and organize the working-class after all. This entails winning people over to our perspectives, linking their problems and struggles up with the overarching fight against exploitation and oppression. It means we must operate openly within unions, community organizations, and popular vehicles of peoples' power in order to better organize our side. Now, this doesn't extend to entryism, or attempts to 'infiltrate' the Democratic Party in the hopes of altering its present (indeed, historical) orientation; it does, however, include efforts to drive a wedge between the Democratic Party and its constituencies.
That might make sense (though to be fair, I think you're reaching in your explanation), were I making the case for collaboration with union management. Of course, I was referring largely to rank-and-file membership; that is, where the true power of the union resides. Union memberships operate within a particular capacity that enables them, if properly organized, to pressure their leaderships into taking a particular action or position. Sometimes they oust said leaders via reform caucuses, such as in the CTU (as well as other 'social unionist' groups that agitate within their larger labor orgs).
Well, it's interesting to me from numerous angles really. You used to be an Anarchist, eh? Well, I guess it's good you are out of that "dead end"-so-to-speak. But, working with the modern mass unions, or rather, supporting the campaigns of the very same people who sold out the American working class more than 4 decades ago, is as well a dead-end. A lot of self-proclaimed "Trotskyist" comrades seem to believe that it doesn't matter whether the union bureaucratic leadership is socialist or not. By that logic Communists should work alongside the "progressive" Democratic Party campaigns as there are a majority of wage dependent members in it. We should look to Greece as an example, where unions like PAME are 'Class-Strugglist', openly Socialist.
Care to elaborate on that?
