A welcome sign indeed!
Guess who is back http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=10097
Check out the new stuff in the OM group comrade.
That replacement sucks.
Well the neon thing became unfunny because all the other assholes began copying us, so NC/Comrade Walrus made us these new avatars(and I re-sized them and turned them transparent). So here is yours: http://imgur.com/QcvybWs Save it to your desktop and upload it to revleft, that's the best way. And don't worry, I saved your current avatar on my desktop so if we get bored with these avatars you can upload your Kautsky back up.
Sometimes my head can spin on the distinctions between class independence, mere regime changes, revolutionary periods, and the revolutionary gambit. However, it can be argued that the context in which Marx declared what he said was different from the 1909 context. Marx declared that just after the dissolution of the IWMA, perhaps in partial disillusionment. Kautsky declared what he said during a revolutionary period.
Good points comrade. But that 1875 remark, it doesn't contradict our views though. Compare it to Kautsky in The Road to Power, about how the party cannot "arbitrarily" make the revolution and "The Socialist party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making party"(chapter 5). All he is saying is that the revolution cannot be accomplished against the wishes of the majority of the country. He's not entering that Rühle territory of "the revolution is not a party affair".
Think about it critically, comrade: one moment Marx pulls off an 1872, another moment he pulls off a "No revolution can be made by a party, but By a Nation" remark (1875), and yet another moment he declares "That this collective appropriation can arise only from the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat - organized in a distinct political party" (1880). It's inconsistent. Also, pay attention to a subtle difference between his 1880 remark and his 1872 remark: 1880 is about "revolutionary action," while 1872 is about becoming a class for itself. I'd take his IWMA remarks to be more authoritative on the party question than any of his remarks before (1848) or after, but by that same token that's why it's primordial and not "institutional." Your word "rudimental" is suitable, too, but the point in either event is that it took the original Socialist International to take this understanding to the optimal level, which is nothing less than "institutional."
Already in 1869, the SDAP, that is, the German Marxists under Bebel and Liebknecht, the self-proclaimed German section of the IWMA, had over 10,000 members(mostly in Saxony). Could Marx have been oblivious to this? Perhaps if he was an inactive ignorant emigre relaxing in London, but in reality he was, effectively, the leader of this same IWMA. When using this word, "party"(he said "political party" rather than just "party" actually, which is even better for our case), he could not have been oblivious to the German developments, the developments in his homeland. Maybe his conception of the party, while not exactly developed, wasn't really "primordial", but perhaps a step more advanced than that - "rudimentary"?
I was thinking about your remarks re. Marx's understanding of the party not being institutional but rather primordial("primordial" in the biological sense?). That might be true for the young Marx before his IWMA experience but probably not so much for the late Marx. This famous piece was written in 1872, for example, I know both of us are fond of quoting it. When the anti-party crowd isn't ignoring it, they usually like to claim that by "political party" Marx did not actually mean "political party" in the institutional sense. But that hardly seems true to me, if at all.
