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Welcome! If you're signed up you want to discuss about revolutionary strategy, an inspiring topic!

Now, this group is specifically about discussing the book "Revolutionary Strategy" by mike Macnair. Chapters and sources will be discussed in seperate topics to establish the most thorough form of discussion.

If you have any questions, ask them here. Offtopic threads will be deleted

Which are the rules regarding length of each debate and deadlines?

Well, I was thinking of doing a chapter every week and work our way up from there. After that we could let topic stay open for new members to enjoy from it and participate at a later point.

About length, I don't really care.

But that's me, what do you think?

Okidoki, wont do much between 8/17 and 9/1.

The obligatory spoiler post, as usual (the links ARE working):



http://www.cpgb.org.uk/books/order.htm

The free-market triumphalism of the 1990s is over. Early 21st century capitalism looks like Karl Marx’s description: growing extremes of wealth and poverty, and irrepressible boom-bust cycles. But for the moment, the beneficiary of growing anti-capitalism is forms of right wing religious and nationalist nostalgia politics. The political left remains in the shadow of its disastrous failures in the 20th century.

The centre-left, insofar as it has not joined forces with the neoliberal right, clings to nationalist and bureaucratic-statist nostalgia for the social-democratic Cold War era. The far left clings to the coat-tails of the centre-left. It is barred from uniting itself - let alone anyone else - by its unwillingness to think critically about the ideas of the early Communist International, especially on the ‘revolutionary party’.

To get beyond these traps we need to re-examine critically the strategic ideas of socialists since Marx and Engels’ time and their development. In this book, Mike Macnair begins this task.

The "profoundly true and important" contents of this book are, in fact, edited renditions of past editions of various 2006 articles found in the Weekly Worker:

Floundering towards Eurocommunism
While Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire theorists flounder towards Eurocommunism, the SWP’s Alex Callinicos can only answer them with evasion. In the first of a number articles, Mike Macnair discusses revolutionary strategy

Revolutionary strategy and Marxist conclusions
In the second in a series of articles, Mike Macnair continues his examination of right-moving Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire theorists and the response of the SWP’s Alex Callinicos

Reform coalition, or mass strike?
In the third article in this series, Mike Macnair examines the basis of two contending strategies for working class advance

The revolutionary strategy of centrists
In the fourth article in this series, Mike Macnair turns his attention to Kautsky’s perspective of patient organisation and party building in the years before World War I. There were undoubted strengths in this strategy. But fatal flaws too

"The difference between the conceptions 'Marxist centre' (= independent policy, independent ideas, independent theory) and 'Marsh' (= wavering, lack of principle, 'turn table' ('Drehscheibe'), weathercock)." (Vladimir Lenin)

Down to 1914, Russian Bolshevism was a tendency within the centre, not a tendency opposed to it [...] Without the centre tendency’s international unity policy there would have been no RSDLP; without the lessons the Bolsheviks learned from the international centre tendency, there could have been no mass opening of the Bolshevik membership in 1905, no recovery of the party’s strength through trade union, electoral and other forms of low-level mass work in 1911-14, and no Bolshevik political struggle to win a majority between April and October 1917.

[...]

It is important to be clear that the movement that the centre tendency sought to build was not the gutted form of the modern social-democracy/Labourism, which is dependent on the support of the state and the capitalist media for its mass character. The idea was of a party which stood explicitly for the power of the working class and socialism. It was one which was built up on the basis of its own resources, its own organisation with local and national press, as well as its own welfare and educational institutions, etc.

[...]

The centre’s strategy of patience was more successful than the other strategies in actually building a mass party. Its insistence on the revolution as the act of the majority, and refusal of coalitionism, was equally relevant to conditions of revolutionary crisis: the Bolsheviks proved this positively in April-October 1917, and it has been proved negatively over and over again between the 1890s and the 2000s. However, because it addressed neither the state form, nor the international character of the capitalist state system and the tasks of the workers’ movement, the centre’s strategy proved to collapse into the policy of the right when matters came to the crunch.

War and revolutionary strategy
Mike Macnair puts the record straight on Lenin’s call for defeatism and insists on the necessity of the left taking the democratic question of arms seriously

Communist strategy and the party form
Mike Macnair examines the Leninist ‘party of a new type’ and disentangles its advantages and shortcomings from the necessity of splitting from the Second International

Unity in diversity
How does the concept of the united front fit into the struggle for a Communist Party? Mike Macnair continues his examination of strategy

The split between communists, loyal to the working class as an international class, and coalitionist socialists, loyal to the nation-state, will never be ‘healed’ as long as communists insist on organising to fight for their ideas. The policy of the united workers’ front is therefore an essential element of strategy in the fight for workers’ power.

But this policy can only make sense as part of a larger struggle for unity in diversity. And this struggle is a struggle against - among other things - the Trotskyists’ concept of the united front.

The minimum platform and extreme democracy
Under what conditions should communists participate in government? Mike Macnair revisits the strategic problem of authority

We saw in the fourth article in this series that the Kautskyan centre, which deliberately refused coalitions and government participation, was able to build up powerful independent workers’ parties (Weekly Worker April 13). In the sixth article we saw that the post-war communist parties could turn into Kautskyan parties, and as such could - even if they were small - play an important role in developing class consciousness and the mass workers’ movement (Weekly Worker April 27). This possibility was available to them precisely because, though they sought to participate in government coalitions, the bourgeoisie and the socialists did not trust their loyalty to the state and used every means possible to exclude them from national government.

The Kautskyans were right on a fundamental point. Communists can only take power when we have won majority support for working class rule through extreme democracy. ‘Revolutionary crisis’ may accelerate processes of changing political allegiance, but it does not alter this fundamental point or offer a way around it. There are no short cuts, whether by coalitionism or by the mass strike.

The present task of communists/socialists is therefore not to fight for an alternative government. It is to fight to build an alternative opposition: one which commits itself unambiguously to self-emancipation of the working class through extreme democracy, as opposed to all the loyalist parties.

Political consciousness and international unity
What is the link between national and international revolution? What is the role of the workers’ international? Mike Macnair continues his series on communist strategy

Comintern and the Trotskyists
What sort of international does the workers’ movement need? Mike Macnair looks at the negative lessons of previous attempts

Imitating the Russians was not utterly disastrous, as attempts to imitate the Maoists in more developed countries were in the 1960s and 1970s. This is attributable to the fact that most of what the Russians endeavoured to teach the Comintern in 1920-23 was in fact orthodox Kautskyism, which the Russians had learned from the German SPD. But there were exceptions. The worker-peasant alliance was utterly meaningless in the politics of the western communist parties before 1940, and after 1945 was a force for conservatism, as the European bourgeoisies turned to subsidising agriculture.

The ‘Bolshevisation’ of the communist parties, and the savage polemics against Kautsky and others over “classless democracy”, which became part of the common inheritance of ‘official communism’, Maoism and Trotskyism, deeply deformed these movements. In the end, the Bonapartist-centralised dictatorship of the party bureaucracy produced kleptocrats in the USSR and the countries that copied it. In the western communist parties and the trade unions associated with them, it produced ordinary labour bureaucrats with more power to quash dissent than the old socialist bureaucracy had had (a feature gratefully copied by the social democratic right). In the Trotskyist and Maoist groups, it produced petty patriarchs and tinpot dictators whose interests in holding onto their jobs and petty power were an effective obstacle to unity. It thus turned out to be in the interests of … the capitalist class.

Moreover, casting out “the renegade Kautsky” cut off the communists from the western European roots of their politics. Lenin and his co-thinkers’ transmission of the inheritance of the Second International into Russian politics became Lenin’s unique genius on the party question, feeding into the cult of the personality of Lenin (and its successors …). Perfectly ordinary western socialist political divisions, pre-existing the split in the Second International, had to be cast in Russian terms. Communists began to speak a language alien to their broader audiences, the language that has descended into today’s Trot-speak.

Republican democracy and revolutionary patience
Mike Macnair concludes his series on communist strategy by throwing down the challenge to the existing left

In this sense ‘Kautskyism’ means the struggle for an independent workers’ party, intimately linked to independent workers’ media, trade unions, cooperatives and so on, and for - at least symbolic - internationalism. On the other hand, it means the struggle against the ideas of short cuts to power that evade the problem of winning a majority, through coalitionism or ‘conning the working class into taking power’ via the mass strike. These are positive lessons for today’s left.

[...]

This strategic orientation demands patience. The fundamental present problem is that after the failures of the strategies of the 20th century, in the absence of a Marxist strategic understanding, most socialists are socialists by ethical and emotional commitment only. This leads to the adoption of ‘get-rich-quick’ solutions that enter into the capitalist politicians’ government games.

This is the trouble with the idea that the Ligue should join a new gauche plurielle project rather than addressing seriously the question of unity with Lutte Ouvrière; with Rifondazione’s decision to participate in the Olive Tree government; with the PDS’s participation in a coalition with the SDP in Berlin; with the SSP’s orientation to an SNP-led coalition for independence; with Respect. The result is not to lead towards an effective workers’ party, but towards another round of brief hope and long disillusionment.

A different sort of impatience is offered by those who split prematurely and refuse partial unity in the hope of building their own ‘Leninist party’: the decision of the far-left platforms (Progetto Comunista and Proposta) to split prematurely from Rifondazione; the SAV’s split orientation in the WASG-PDS fusion process; the splits of the Socialist Party and Workers Power from the Socialist Alliance; and the refusal of much of the left of the SA to work as a minority in Respect. We find that, although these sects sell themselves as ‘revolutionary’, when they stand for election either to parliaments or in unions their policies are broadly similar to the coalitionists. They are still playing within the capitalist rules of the game.

The left, in other words, needs to break with the endless series of failed ‘quick fixes’ that has characterised the 20th century. It needs a strategy of patience, like Kautsky’s: but one that is internationalist and radical-democratic, not one that accepts the existing order of nation-states.

Two questions:

Does the introduction need discussion?

Will we be discussing the first chapter next week, or will we only be prepairing (reading) that chapter?

Two questions:

Does the introduction need discussion?

I don't believe it should as it only sums up the purpose of the book, not to bring novel elements (which happens from chapter 1 on).

Will we be discussing the first chapter next week, or will we only be prepairing (reading) that chapter?

Let us prepare chapter 1 now and start discussing it from Monday on.

Got the book, but unfortunately I've got to finish reading a few essential 'classics' first (I've got a bad habit of starting several books at the same time).

I don't think I'll be able to start debating Revolutionary Strategy from Monday, but I will certainly use this thread for future reference to broaden my undestanding of the book once I get around to read it myself.

Thanks for setting up the group.

I'm sorry for my apparent lack of activity. I'm very busy these last few weeks and don't have the time/energy to delve into this right now. I'll catch up next week though!

I suggest we start with the third chapter next week? Only then will I be able to contribute something to both the 2nd and the 3rd chapter.

I think we needs to discuss the totally of the work. And by "to discuss" I mean (1) to figure out what it means (to us), and (2) an act of more than just two people sharing thoughts. Why having a group when it could have been done by mail or chat?

I think we needs to discuss the totally of the work. And by "to discuss" I mean (1) to figure out what it means (to us), and (2) an act of more than just two people sharing thoughts. Why having a group when it could have been done by mail or chat?

I agree there is a need for that, but I was more hoping of doing it at the end, as a kind of "sum up". Also, I'm sorry for my inactivity on the matter. I'm still very interested to discuss the topic but cannot find the appropriate time I hope to gain on later on. Thirdly, this group is also for people who will drop by later on, read up and contribute their views. Emails are much more restricted in that sense.

Yeah. Also, for some reason, various comrades (even RevMarx ones) haven't yet joined the Revolutionary Strategy group even if they agree with the views presented in the book.

Yeah. Also, for some reason, various comrades (even RevMarx ones) haven't yet joined the Revolutionary Strategy group even if they agree with the views presented in the book.

Invite them

I did. Comrades like chegitz guevara didn't respond for some reason. Since you're the head honcho of this group, please send an Invite to him.

I was told about this group by Jacob who kindly sent me a file containing the text of the book. I have done a critical review of the book and placed it on the web page http://reality.gn.apc.org/polemic/
along with Jacob's own contribution.

Next chapter please. I think that Paul's contribution needs to be discussed. Argubaly the last chapter poses the ideal environment.

Should I be posting bits of my review here for discusssion?

Should I be posting bits of my review here for discusssion?

Sure