Which Party Which Country?

Yeah Ultra-lefts and reformers and anarchists oh my. As much respect I have for some MLers they are all over the place politically. Doesn't help that their party was founded by a Multimillionaire.

Do you view it as bad to avoid ultra-leftists, reformers and anarchists?

To be fair, Lenin was a fairly wealthy petty-bourgeois lawyer, Marx was an educated writer, so was Engels, Mao was the son of a rich peasant family that used sharecropping labor and Stalin was the son of a cobbler who owned his own shop. Hoxha too, owned his own tobacco shop during the founding of the Communist Party of Albania, which would become the PPSH.


And I haven't seen any political vacillation in the CPC-ML any more than I have the rest of the global parties. They were heavily Maoist back in the 70s, but then made the switch to being pro-Albania.

>>Do you view it as bad to avoid ultra-leftists, reformers and anarchists?<<

I'm not referring to the CPC (M-L), because I don't know very much about it.

But I genuinely believe that a basic requirement for a Marxist-Leninist organization is to not have potential counterrevolutionaries in their ranks. The vanguard party won't be formulated with Left communists, reformers and anarchists among them.

Germany, Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD), member

Website: http://www.mlpd.de

in english: http://www.mlpd.de/en/view?set_language=en

I live in Australia and I am supportive of the Communist Party of Australia. I might try and join when I am older.

http://www.cpa.org.au/

I live in Australia and I am supportive of the Communist Party of Australia. I might try and join when I am older.

http://www.cpa.org.au/

They don't have a youth branch? Most Communist parties do. Strange...

Ireland: I support the IRSM but am not a member

Serbia:Partija Rada(Party of labour)

Irish Republican Socialist Party.

Netherlands, supporter of the NCPN and I will probably apply for membership somewhere in the future.

Portugal, Portuguese Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)

United States- used to be a member of Young socialists (yes attached to the Socialist Workers Party) but grew tired of it and left.

I understood the Green party but why would the WWP endorse her? I remember when I was 14 most everyone here in Atlanta hated McKinney.

Workers World Party ran candidates for decades and then suddenly stopped. 2012 will likely show if they will pick back up on electoral action or not, and if they forsake that field, I feel they may become irrelevant. Only time will tell, but they're still one of the best parties out there.

>>why would the WWP endorse her? I remember when I was 14 most everyone here in Atlanta hated McKinney<<

It had to do with ballot access, funds and an interpretation of the National Question. Also look at the Wallace campaign of 1948...
However, I wasn't a member in 2008 and so had no involvement in that decision.

>>Workers World Party ran candidates for decades and then suddenly stopped. 2012 will likely show if they will pick back up on electoral action or not, and if they forsake that field, I feel they may become irrelevant<<

Electoral involvement is good and certainly has benefits but doesn't make or break a vanguard party at this point in time.
It's a question of resources, among other things; how best to allocate.

>>Only time will tell, but they're still one of the best parties out there<<

THE best. Get that right comrade

>>why would the WWP endorse her? I remember when I was 14 most everyone here in Atlanta hated McKinney<<

It had to do with ballot access, funds and an interpretation of the National Question. Also look at the Wallace campaign of 1948...
However, I wasn't a member in 2008 and so had no involvement in that decision.

>>Workers World Party ran candidates for decades and then suddenly stopped. 2012 will likely show if they will pick back up on electoral action or not, and if they forsake that field, I feel they may become irrelevant<<

Electoral involvement is good and certainly has benefits but doesn't make or break a vanguard party at this point in time.
It's a question of resources, among other things; how best to allocate.

>>Only time will tell, but they're still one of the best parties out there<<

THE best. Get that right comrade

What exactly is this interpretation of the national question that supports endorsing bourgeois candidates?

What exactly is this interpretation of the national question that supports endorsing bourgeois candidates?

McKinney is one of the main forces behind a program that supports black self-determination, an excerpt below and the full statement can be found here.

McKinney’s “Power to the People Campaign” gets most of its program from the draft program of the still-in-formation Reconstruction Party. Activists in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, together with supporters nationwide, have been developing a Reconstruction Party as a mass political vehicle to fight for the reconstruction of the Gulf and justice for Katrina survivors.
The draft program of the Reconstruction Party is inspired by the program of the original Black Panther Party. The Reconstruction Party draft program calls for, among other things: self-determination for Black people, the relocation of displaced survivors of Katrina back to the Gulf, jobs, healthcare and housing, reparations for Black people, an end to racist terror and political repression, an end to the prison-industrial complex and an end to the war.
McKinney’s campaign is laying the foundation for a radical coalition of Black, Latin@, Asian and Indigenous activists, trade unionists, progressives and revolutionaries. This is important and timely.

I'm from the USA and a PSL sympathizer. I'm not sure I'll ever join because although I think Marcy was a tremendous theorist, I find myself more supportive of Stalin's legacy than either he or most of the members I know.

I'm from the USA and a PSL sympathizer. I'm not sure I'll ever join because although I think Marcy was a tremendous theorist, I find myself more supportive of Stalin's legacy than either he or most of the members I know.

Then you will fit in American Party of Labor. http://americanpartyoflabor.org/

I joined the IRSM a few months back.

Then you will fit in American Party of Labor. http://americanpartyoflabor.org/

Except if he supports the Party for Socialism and Liberation's line regarding everything but Stalin, I sincerely doubt he'd be that fond of the American Party of Labor's insanely anti-revisionist line. Don't you uphold Cuba, China and Russia after Stalin as state capitalist or something? I guess anti-revisionists and Trotskyists can get along!

I'm from the USA and a PSL sympathizer. I'm not sure I'll ever join because although I think Marcy was a tremendous theorist, I find myself more supportive of Stalin's legacy than either he or most of the members I know.

I'd really encourage you to keep reading into Marcy's work and our party. Marcy's Trotskyist-influenced writings took a very distinct turn after his founding of the Workers World Party. In the PSL, we acknowledge Stalin's resolute defense of socialism in defeating fascism and his gains in modernizing the Soviet economy. We realize that Trotsky's call for "political revolution" was ridiculous, as we opposed counterrevolutionary measures in the Soviet Union. However, we note that Stalin basically purged the entire Bolshevik party, which consisted of revolutionary cadres that had steered the Bolsheviks during the initial stages of revolution and provided revolutionary leadership. These cadres were elected by other revolutionaries. Though there were "right" and "left" tendencies in the communist party, as there have been in other communist parties, I don't see how anyone finds that as justification for wild accusations of fascist tendencies.

That's where we differ with other pro-Stalin parties, but you can obviously tell that there's a sincere difference between Trotskyist opportunism and critical analysis of socialist development.

Except if he supports the Party for Socialism and Liberation's line regarding everything but Stalin, I sincerely doubt he'd be that fond of the American Party of Labor's insanely anti-revisionist line. Don't you uphold Cuba, China and Russia after Stalin as state capitalist or something? I guess anti-revisionists and Trotskyists can get along!

Trots generally view such states as "degenerated," e.g. still socialist, just "degenerated."

Of course such a view is lame so we PUSH IT TO THE LIMITTTTTTTT.

Except if he supports the Party for Socialism and Liberation's line regarding everything but Stalin, I sincerely doubt he'd be that fond of the American Party of Labor's insanely anti-revisionist line. Don't you uphold Cuba, China and Russia after Stalin as state capitalist or something? I guess anti-revisionists and Trotskyists can get along!

It's true, while I disagree with some of the PSL line on Stalin, I agree with most of their line. Certainly, I think the state capitalist analysis is not only sectarian and ultra-leftist, but also fundamentally at variance with the facts. This is probably not the right thread on which to develop the full critique of the theory (although I'm open to having the argument).

Suffice it to say, I've never been very interested in the American Party of Labor, besides which they're not active in my area so far as I can tell. Indeed, in 8 years of being a leftist activist (in Philadelphia, Boston, and Upstate New York), I've never met a single one of their members in real life. In contradistinction, the PSL has been extremely active not just in polemicizing and propagandizing, but also organizing mass struggle through ANSWER.

I'd really encourage you to keep reading into Marcy's work and our party.

I certainly will. At the moment I definately consider myself a supporter of the party. I volunteered for, voted for, and donated to La Riva and other PSL campaigns, I go to all the ANSWER demos in Washington and New York, etc. My question is whether I should try to join, or whether my current ideas about Stalin are anathema to the party.

In the PSL, we acknowledge Stalin's resolute defense of socialism in defeating fascism and his gains in modernizing the Soviet economy. We realize that Trotsky's call for "political revolution" was ridiculous, as we opposed counterrevolutionary measures in the Soviet Union. However, we note that Stalin basically purged the entire Bolshevik party, which consisted of revolutionary cadres that had steered the Bolsheviks during the initial stages of revolution and provided revolutionary leadership.

This is the heart of my question, and perhaps the only major disagreement I have with the PSL line as far as I know (I have some other minor ones, and I would not say I'm fully conversant in the line at the moment). First, the PSL correctly acknowledges Stalin's role in defending the USSR, then they criticize the very means by which he defended the USSR.

Certainly, no Marxist-Leninist denies the need for periodic re-registrations of party memebers (i.e. purges). Lenin put this policy in place in 1921 in order to ensure that old Tsarists, SRs, and Mensheviks who had come over to the Bolsheviks for opportunistic reasons were excluded from the party.

This purge was sucessful in ensuring that the party could sucessfully undertake collectivization, the first five years plan, etc. In 1937, after two five year plans and the effective smashing of kulak power, the party needed to be purged once more, this time of opportunistic kulaks and their supporters who came over to the Bolsheviks, like so many entryists before them, when they realized who was winning.

It's not a suprise that these Kulak elements would link up with party rightists who had opposed the five year plans. Therefore, this element needed to be eliminated from the party membership.

With hindsight we might say that expulsion would have been enough, that these people did not have to be killed. However, put yourself in the Bolshevik's shoes. You have a rightist, pro-Kulak tendency in the party. You have reason to believe that this clique is linking up with Trotsky internationally who, as you acknowlege, was calling for open counter-revolution in the USSR. Add to that the growing wave of European fascism preparing to unleash the blackest terror that working people had ever seen. We should not forget that Mussolini was a self-described "apostate to socialism" who was once a member of a rightist faction of Italianan Socialist Party.

Whether they were incipient fascists or not, the Rightists in the Bolshevik CP were a threat of some sort. That Stalin and the majority acted with caution, ended these people, and saved Soviet socialism is proof enough that their actions were both understandable and justifyable.

Apologies for the longish rant, this is probably not the appropriate place. Nevertheless, it is meant in the spirit of comradely criticism. I still think the PSL is the most exciting thing on the US left in my lifetime.

Canada, Communist Party of Canada, Though I'm not yet a member, just a supporter.

United States, more specifically Oregon.

I joined the IRSM a few months back.

Ditto.