the sclerosis of organized pro-revolutionaries and what is to be done

[PhoenixAsh]

Was not the actual intention to form a kind of loose rally around the paper 'De Waarheid'?

No the intentions were to organise a pan leftist movement so to speak. Resistance leaders from several cities, The Hague, Groningen and Amsterdam ao. , were active amongts others.

It was in the first few days/weeks after the war and the intiative was nipped in the bud pretty quickly.

The Comintern didn't exist at that time any more, but didn't some prominent party leaders support that idea first, but they ended up deciding to restore the party instead, at the behest of Moscow?

Quite right about the comintern. Confused a few terms there. Paul de Groot didn't like the idea and neither did Moscow.

But no...they went behind Sauls back. They didn't like him much.

The thing is that the party at that time actually did have quite a lot to gain from refounding itself, and plenty to lose by dissolving itself. I still think that a flawed party is better than no party at all, and that a coalition of loose sand will remain just that. But it's hard to find a good practical example of this.

We will never know. What happened was that the party gained votes but lost them eventually. The left was still horribly fractionalised and the CPN wasn't one to work together well with others....and not very well internally either. Which came to a head in the 56's when they basically felt the need to dream up some horrible lies to blacken resistance fighters and try to brand them as traitors in "De CPN in the oolog". That was not a good time. A lot of very good communists became desillusioned with the CPN at that point. A lot of resistance fighters knew they were lies, spoke out against them and were side tracked or pressured or basically kicked out. By that time the CPN was horribly lost between infighting and BVD instigations.

Perhaps one of them is that the CP of Venezuela decided not to liquidate itself to fully merge into Chavez's movement, for which they got a lot of flak from Chavez himself. Now I don't think I'm in a room full of Chavez supporters here, so maybe it's not that relevant, but a complete lack of people calling themselves communists and openly and consciously organising themselves for communism does not seem like a good idea to me in any circumstance.

Well sometimes that may be the right decision. I think in this case at least the decission to not create a broad movement worked out badly.
We will never know for sure.

I do think there is too much preoccupation with small "democratic centralist communist organisations" on this forum and on the western left in general, but I don't think that the concept itself is wrong and shouldn't be attempted. Same with the anti-unionism that's popular on this forum. I also don't agree with trying to shepherd everyone into the framework of the reformist and compromised trade unions, "and then someday we'll pull it to the left - maybe", but staying away from them also seems like a massive mistake. I wonder what kind of alternatives people here have.

I am not against democratic centralisms position of freedom of discussion and unity of action....in fact we mix parts of this with our consensus model. When we reach a decision everybody toes that line. If you don't want to you stand aside. If you break the line then you are most likely out. Then again the group is a mix of Anarchists and Marxist Leninists and that gives some tensions since organisational debates tend to gravitate towards the classic contradictions between the two. So its a pain in the ass and requires a lot of energy and creativity to find solutions to bridge these.

Mostly this works when you operate in a hostile environment....such as capitalist society. It won't work in post revolutionary society IMO.

[RedTrackWorker]

Historically, the working class has created its own organs in struggle, without the guidance of any “saviors” from other classes.
[snip]
Similarly, neither the Bolsheviks or any other permanent organization created the Soviets. It was the working class itself.
[snip]
And they can point to examples of “spontaneous” uprisings falling apart. But that proves nothing other than that they were not ready.

I think that Trotsky's unfinished essay on why the Spanish revolution was defeated is most apt to quote:

The historical falsification consists in this, that the responsibility for the defeat of the Spanish masses is unloaded on the working masses and not those parties which paralyzed or simply crushed the revolutionary movement of the masses. The attorneys of the POUM simply deny the responsibility of the leaders, in order thus to escape shouldering their own responsibility.

and:

By reducing to zero the significance of the party and of the leadership these sages deny in general the possibility of revolutionary victory. Because there are not the least grounds for expecting conditions more favorable.

I could've well quoted almost the whole essay. The point is that if your idea is that the workers just weren't ready every time they've failed, when the fuck do you think they'll ever be ready--and how? Why would today's working class be better able to take power than the Spanish working class in 1936?