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Great Essay on organizing a new revolutionary socialist movement.
http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/DiMaggio.pdf
Much of what Di Maggio is saying has been touched upon by Lih and others like Louis Proyect, Solidarity and a number of regroup the left types. Nevertheless, it's worth a read from someone who has learned a lot from being in the existing radical left, but also has new ideas on how to move forward.
Same mentality, just bottled in a different can.
Summary: Re-create the second international! ...because that worked so well the first time.
I posted a thread similar to this yesterday, but nobody replied: http://www.revleft.com/vb/ponderings....html?t=166528
Not a bad essay [Di Maggio's], something to think about.
Those who, in the name of the quest for the "new," reject the use of the tested insights, understandings, and accomplishments of the last century or more, will merely repeat "old" mistakes.
The original Socialist International was about way more than just principled "left unity." Institutional organization was and is something needed by the working class.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
It's not 1889 though, it's 2012. We have the benefit of a century of practice and theory to draw on, and the world is reorganized on different lines than at that time.
Of course not. Such necessary, institution-based reorganization of the worker-class movement should take modern conditions into account. Those modern conditions are heavily weighted against "ad hoc"-isms, apolitical and anti-political nihilism, etc.
Critically speaking, I think that Di Maggio really needs to re-read Chapter 1 of Lars Lih's book on Lenin's WITBD. He doesn't seem to appreciate the fact that the pre-war SPD was beyond what he himself perceives to be a "mass party."
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
Ha Ha Ha, and the 4th is working so well too!
The Fourth, which basically died as early as the early 1950s, never had the chance to show its stuff, never got real mass support. Between Nazism, Stalinism and world dominion by American imperialism after WWII, it never really got off the ground. So its best organizer, Michel Pablo, essentially gave up on the Trotskyist project and decided the thing to do was tail and join other non-Trotskyist movements and put the Trotskyist program in the closet, and everything has gone downhill from there ever since. The Spartacists are really the only group with any real continuity with the heritage of Trotsky and Lenin and Marx.Ha Ha Ha, and the 4th is working so well too!
The Second most certainly did have the chance to show what it was. We really, really don't want to go back to that, any more than we want to go back to Stalin and his Third. Training the next generation of murderers for the next generation of Rosa Luxemburg's...
The ideas of the Fourth International, and its quite heroic history in the 1940s, are a precious revolutionary heritage, and a perfectly good basis to recreate a workers revolutionary movement. After all, you have to start with something, it's too late in history to try to reinvent the wheel.
-M.H.-
isn't there an essay about how to 'organize a new revolutionary movement' published once a week that just regurgitates a bunch of the same old snooze button shit?
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
Let's be honest here, it never really got off the ground in 1938. It organised, at best, about 10 000 Trotskyists around the globe and the "biggest section" - the USSR - was just a bunch of NKVD agents.
As for the piece mentioned in the OP, I saved it and intend to read it while going to work or somesuch.
I think, thus I disagree. | Chairperson of a Socialist Party branchMarxist Internet Archive | Communistisch Platform
Working class independence - Internationalism - Democracy
Educate - Agitate - Organise
Which would seem to indicate the present movement isn't exactly growing by leaps and bounds.
Didn't you just post an article by a member of Socialist Action?Ha Ha Ha, and the 4th is working so well too!
there is much growth in the last year, it just isn't among leftist troglodyte sects who only measure 'progress' by the growth of said troglodyte sects
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
I was sad to hear that Dan had left us, that is the CWI and must say I, unsuprisingly, profundly disagree with his new perspectives.
"I want to say sweet, silly things." - V.I Lenin
Well, it was true, wasn't it?Originally Posted by Majakovskij's negrep comment
Also, please learn me your speedreading skills. I too want to read 50 A4 pages in half a day.
I think, thus I disagree. | Chairperson of a Socialist Party branchMarxist Internet Archive | Communistisch Platform
Working class independence - Internationalism - Democracy
Educate - Agitate - Organise
The primary tactical approaches of the left being so focused on the short term (getting the next paper published, showing up at the next protest) seem to militate for the sectist approach. Long term projects of building real working class institutions would require more cooperation. The period of union strength probably has a lot to do with why mass parties were so much more successful than they are now. Now that unions are marginalised and weak there is less in terms of resources and institutional power and fewer obviously useful long term projects in which to be involved.
Now that we have this chicken-egg scenario the question presents itself of what type of institutions would best be supported by and support a non-sectist approach to politics.
I think the idea of pooling resources for the purpose of media makes sense. It's crazy for sects to be publishing their own papers independently. There can be disagreement and debate only if there is difference of opinion. The left is rarely very clear on what their opponents say, and that tends to reinforce a lack of clarity about what they themselves think! More (comradely) engagement would be healthier for everyone.
There are probably other places in which it would be useful to cooperate. For instance, education and face-to-face debate around strategic and economic issues as well as cooperation in practical endeavours such as militant trade union circles, social centres and cooperatives.
I don't think, comrade, that there's a chicken-egg scenario. The German worker-class movement emerged on the political end long before the tred iunion movement boarded and hijacked the bandwagon.
Lassalle's ADAV spearheaded the worker-class movement on a very anti-union note; the real reason behind the "Iron Law of Wages" rhetoric was an anti-union stance coupled with political partyism (i.e., tendencies of wages to fall can't be countered by union action, but only politically).
Bebel's and Liebknecht's SAPD followed suit even though the anti-union rhetoric wasn't there. By 1875, the SAPD swallowed the ADAV, even though the Gotha Program was quite a compromise made by the Eisenachers towards the struggling Lassalleans. Again, only after more the 20 years did the tred-iunionisty hop in.
The rest of continental Europe followed the German model to some extent. Only in the UK have we seen the Labourite phenomenon you describe.
[And, of course, as Mike Macnair commented upon, the American movement itself, contrary to "exceptionalism" rhetoric, was more successful when the German model was followed.]
Contemporarily speaking, look to Occupy, and not even the most aggressive of union militancy, as being closer to where genuine class struggle will erupt.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
No.
Excuse me, comrade, but this is not the first time this article has come up. Besides I am not sure if speed-reading is a skill that can be taught.
"I want to say sweet, silly things." - V.I Lenin
You're very, very wrong about its USSR section. It got wiped out almost to the last, and no, infiltration by NKVD agents was far from the biggest of its problems. Its real problem with the NKVD was, shall we say, more direct than infiltration?
Actually, you had a fair number of Trotskyists within the NKVD, and they got shot first of course, like Blumkin. Though Beloborodov, one of the last prominent Trotskyists to capitulate, was actually the head of the Russian (as opposed to Soviet) NKVD in 1927 when he was expelled. (Actually the 1927 NKVD was in charge of prisons and local police in Russia, not Chekists who were in the GPU, a separate organization at the time).
The old Left Opposition had tens of thousands of members and lots of support in the working class, which was why it was crushed so vigorously. In the late '20s and early '30s, non-capitulatory Trotskyist groups in the underground led strikes, fought for control of various unions with the party, etc. etc. Had it not been extirpated, it would have been a serious menace to Stalinist control of the USSR. And nobody knew that better than Stalin and Yezhov, which is why they put such allout efforts into destroying it root and branch.
By the time of the founding of the FI, just about every one of them were in Soivet prison camps, and were being shot by the thousand. Had they not been exterminated to the last, they would have become a serious political factor when the Stalinist edifice started to break down when Stalin died. Instead of a Hungarian Revolution in '56, you'd have had another Russian Revolution.
That the FI was fairly small in 1938 was certainly a problem, but not decisive. The Zimmerwald Movement founded in 1916, which the Comintern came out of, was smaller. The reason that the Trotskyists couldn't take the lead in the post-WWII revolutionary outbreaks all over the world was because the Stalinists, who had gained great credibility with the world working class through the Soviet Union defeating Hitler, were in the way.
Just as it was Social Democracy, the traditional mass party of the working class, who were in the way which prevented world revolution after WWI.
Had the FI not bit the dust in the 1950s, it would have become a mass force all over the world during the '60s, possibly even leading a revolution in France in 1968. Instead, you had the rise of New Leftism, Maoism, etc. etc.
Now that's all alternative history of course, but if you are trying to evaluate whether the FI of the 1930s and '40s mattered or not, that like it or not is where you have to go.
-M.H.-
