New website: Atlanta RCYB

[redstar2000]

Originally posted by celticfire+--> (celticfire)Sometimes I wonder why redstar2000 doesn't just join the PLP?[/b]

Here is a post I wrote on the Progressive Labor Party back on April 12, 2005...

Originally posted by PLP+--> (PLP)We communists are bitterly opposed to the democracy practiced in capitalist countries, that is, to "bourgeois democracy" based on periodic elections with secret ballots for presidents and parliaments or congresses.[/b]

Yes, we are indeed bitterly opposed to fake "democracy" that simply conceals the actual rule of the capitalist class. Few would argue with the criticisms of capitalist "democracy" sprinkled throughout this document.

Does that mean that there can be "no such thing" as proletarian democracy? That workers could not "elect/recall their own", by secret ballot, "freely and fairly", without participation by the old capitalists and their lackeys?

Originally posted by PLP
We want a system where every worker is actively pushed to become involved in running society, where everyone is trained to act for the common good, where putting individual self-interest above the social good is punished. We want a system that helps each worker grow, that corrects mistakes, that encourages honest evaluation and self-evaluation of each person. We want a system that stamps out rotten ideas and punishes anti-social behavior.

It reads to me like a nightmare of nagging. And moreover, one of such vagueness that no matter what you did, it would "never be sufficient".

Would you want to be "actively pushed" all the time...even in a "good direction"?

Who would define "the common good"? Or "individual self-interest"? And what would the punishments be?

Guess!

Originally posted by PLP
The Party is divided into cells, or clubs, which meet regularly to evaluate members' work and to make suggestions about how to improve it, and to evaluate the Party's positions and make suggestions for change. These suggestions are taken by the club leader to section meetings (made up of the club leaders and other leading comrades in an area, and by section leaders to the Central Committee. Based on the collective experience of the Party, the leadership decides on new positions (a new line) which all Party members are then bound to put into practice.

The members suggest -- the leaders decide!

Originally posted by PLP
Democratic centralism is communist democracy. After the revolution we will run all of society along democratic centralist lines.

Not for very long you won't...as you will have created a set-up that will make capitalism look like paradise. There will be no need for the capitalists to await the rot of revisionism -- the disgust of the masses will overturn your regime within a year.

Originally posted by PLP
Democratic centralism forces everyone to speak up. At club meetings, each person must express their opinions, including openly voicing their disagreements.

And risk being "punished" for "putting self-interest" above the "common good"? Hah! Everyone will "enthusiastically endorse" the leadership's current line...no matter what their real opinions are.

Originally posted by PLP
Some people think that having one party stifles discussion and disagreement. Quite the contrary: Having many parties often leads to sham competition based on personalities, as in the U.S., with the Democrats and Republicans. A democratic-centralist party organizes full discussion: each party member is required to express his frank opinion on all party policies, and all workers outside the party are urged to do the same.

But if his/her opinion is a critical one, guess what happens? S/he will be accused of putting "self-interest" above the "common good"...and will land in the shit.

PLP

@
The Bolsheviks also gave some support to workers' councils (soviets) in 1917-18. These soviets were usually organized on bourgeois democratic lines, and they had the usual faults of bourgeois democratic institutions. The superstar speakers and the best educated and richest (meaning the skilled workers) dominated. Individualism was the order of the day: many factory soviets refused to cooperate for the common good in the spring of 1918, hoarding goods that were vital for the defense of the revolution and for provisioning workers elsewhere. In practice, the soviets were pretty much under the influence of syndicalism, which calls for the workers in each factory to run their plant without any overall organization of society as a whole. Syndicalism is basically capitalism based on workers' cooperatives. We communists want to see a collective solution, with workers as a class running society as a whole, not competing with each other.

They're a little bit confused here. Individual factories were run by factory committees. The soviets were organized along geographical lines and had delegates from many factories.

But PLP's purpose is clear: the workers are not to have any decision-making powers even over their own workplace -- the party leadership decides everything.

PLP

The Party's goal must be to recruit every worker into the Party, to involve every worker in the democratic centralist process. The correct way to resolve the problem of the Party's relation to non-Party workers is to recruit all workers to the Party.

This is the "joker" in PLP's "straight to communism" deck. When they abolish the capitalist state, they intend to replace it with the party. The party will be the new state.

And since there are no elections, fake or real, within the party (the PLP leadership is entirely self-appointed and self-replicating), their version of "communism" would be as despotic as the Roman Empire.

I would give credit to the PLP, however, for being refreshingly honest about the real content of "democratic" centralism. They "tell it like it is".

In my view, those who choose "democratic" centralism as a means of organization all end up with the PLP's practice...whether they admit it or not.

It's just a rotten idea...period.

http://awip.proboards23.com/index.cgi?boar...read=1113277271

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Does that answer your question?

[Red Powers]

Atlanta don't blame me for your confusion. I'm beginning to think you are very easily confused. Here's the link http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php...=38364&st=20#ed. The post is about two or three up from yours.

So let's talk about methodology. Your method is to not look for the post I'm referring to and instead to assume that I'm lying. My method is to quote accurately and raise critical questions based on my understanding of Marxism. Methodology indeed.

[Severian]

Originally posted by Red Powers@Aug 16 2005, 09:56 PM
Here is the paragraph (pg 9) that pushed me to write this post:

"Another section of the proletariat consists of relatively priviliged 'bourgeoisified' workers. These workers are concentrated in large-scale industries -- like auto and steel, heavy machinery, utilities, the postal service -- and particularly where there have been strong unions " [emphasis added]

The Programme goes on to give a short history of this section of the proletariat that manages to leave out the mass upheaval of the 30s that built those strong unions and in which Communists were very active. This also gives "the dominant position of the U.S. in the world" as the main cause of the better conditions for these workers. To tell you the truth I have no idea what is meant by bourgeoisification. I think I'll ask my Letter Carrier tomorrow when it's about 96 degrees out. Or I could ask a utility guy when he's way up that pole praying he doesn't drop his tool. Oh I know I'll ask an auto worker at the end of a compulsory 58-hr. week of 52 or 60 or 80 cars/hr. "Ms. can you explain bourgeoisification to me?" Does it mean that these workers own some part of the means of production? I'll grant you that they are in possession of them most days but "ownership"? No, they dress, work talk and live like workers. the RCP seems to think that better than average pay and benefits somehow turns one bourgeois.



Finally, after almost writing off a significant section of the proletariat for being conservative, corrupted by imperialist booty and bourgeoisified there is this about the group that one has to see as the RCP's main base:


" At the same time, there is the large number of 'enlightened petty(sic) bourgeoisie' who historically have played important roles in radical and revolutionary upsurges, speaking out or acting against the savage injustices and inequalities and crimes of U. S. Imperialism."


So I see, the working class is just a bunch of parasites living off of imperialism but the enlightened petite bourgeois are the real radicals and revolutionaries. Well they may be radical and they may be revolutionary but it has nothing to do with communism. Enlightenment itself comes from the struggle of the Capitalists to establish their rule. We are way past that now are we not? If you say your aim is communism then you have to base yourself in the proletariat and you have to practice some kind of mass line. It seems to me judging from the way they talk about different classes and sections of classes that the RCP might very well be a revolutionary party but that they really should remove the communist from their name. Communists are proletarian revolutionaries.

Yeah, exactly.

The RCP doesn't even have an origin in the working-class movement; it comes out of the profoundly middle-class student group SDS.

For a brief time in the late 70s it attempted a brief turn towards the industrial working class. After certain initial successes, it alienated more and more people with huge errors like an alliance with remnants of the Boyle machine in the UMWA at one point.

Perhaps this was the "economist" or "workerist" period of RCP history which 1949 refers to: the brief time, now rejected, when the RCP actually attempted to relate to industrial workers and the organized working class. I

So the RCP chose to write off the organized working class, and blame it for the consequences of the RCP's own errors. Since then, it's become more and more hardened as a purely petty-bourgeois sect. The sections of the programme you quote are clearly a rationalization for this longstanding RCP practice.

The renaming of the newspaper is a step forward, really, towards truth in advertising. "Radical" would be even better.

The RCP doesn't have some orientation towards other sections of the working class, either. It can't maintain a proletarian political strategy, while ignoring and rejecting the most strategically important sections of the class. Industrial workers create most surplus-value, and potentially have great social and economic power. Unions are the basic defense organizations, and only mass organizations presently, of the working class.

The RCP's fundamental orientation in practice is to students and radicalised middle-class people. These layers are more mobile, politically, have more free time, are easier to recruit.

***
On the gay rights question, in response to 1949:

The RCP does have to accomodate to its social base, and potential recruits, if it's going to survive and outcompete other far-left tendencies in the almost Darwinian competition between left groups. That's really the best explanation for why it changed its line on this question while keeping similarly outmoded positions on others. Its reactionary stance on gay rights - far more reactionary than the social layers its trying to influence and recruit - was an obstacle.

Which the personality cult isn't, necessarily: youth from middle-class backgrounds give all their worldly goods to religious groups based around a single charismatic figure all the time. The personality cult may even be an attractant for some.

You're right that the RCP does show a great inertia in changing positions. Those positions are not derived from the "international communist movement", however, but from Kremlin apparatchiks, and later their Chinese pupils. This is one of many questions where Stalinism and Leninism have opposite positions.

The persecution of homosexuality, far from deriving to oppostion to male chauvinism, was part of the bureaucracy's efforts to shore up the patriarchal family. It went along with banning abortion, giving medals for having a dozen babies, etc etc.

A whole number of RCP positions derive from permanent or transitory interests of the bureaucratic caste. It's still clinging to a line on Cuba as capitalist which derives from a onetime Chinese diplomatic interest, for example.

If the RCP was still linked to some apparatchik regime in power, these positions would change with the changing interests of the bureaucracy. Since it isn't, they persist out of inertia, even though they no longer serve any class interest.

Over time, we can expect to see the RCP accomodate more and more to the interests and moods of its radical middle-class milieu. One example of that is the RCP's veiled support to the Democratic Party through various "Dump Bush" efforts popular among radical-liberals.

The RCP's traditional (inertia again) refusal to participate in elections has been no obstacle to moving into the orbit of the Democratic Party....

Only a proletarian basis for a party, in composition as well as program, can guard against reformist degeneration.

[Severian]

Originally posted by redstar2000@Aug 20 2005, 09:31 AM

That is "proof-texting" by definition.

It's not clear to me why the RCP objects to this practice so strenuously. When we "dig in" to a position, why shouldn't we look for "the revealing detail" in the mass of verbiage?

It wouldn't be there if someone hadn't put it in there, right? And they wouldn't have put it in there if they didn't mean it, right?

Of course, care must always be exercised; it would be dishonest to rip a phrase or two out of context and bash a group for what was clearly not their position.

But when you enter the arena of public discourse, you do have to be careful of what you say...ambiguity is rarely welcome and some folks will always "think the worst".

Right. Or to quote Darwin, "How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!"

Of course all participants in debate will look for those facts or points which reinforce their view. Then we can see who can come up with the most and best support for their view.

The RCP doesn't practice what they preach on this either; they invent or deny facts at will to reach the desired conclusion. The real giveaway is that Avakian has to give a long explanation of why telling the truth is good; in what kind of political tradition is that necessary? Only in one so steeped in lies that such an explanation is totally insufficient.

Perhaps I should have made my speculations clearer...I get the distinct impression that Avakian himself is drifting away from a proletarian orientation -- but it's always possible that significant portions of the RCP will not follow his leadership.

That seems improbable. Especially since the RCP's not so much moving away from a proletarian orientation, as from empty lip service to a proletarian orientation. There's no social basis for a revolt against this drift, which would have to be pretty strong to overcome the personality cult.

When Marx and Engels began their pathbreaking work they did not have a significant number of followers...

Quite true. But their work really was pathbreaking...you surely cannot compare anything written by Avakian to the work of Marx and Engels, can you?

Right. What's good in Avakian is not new (though sometimes disguised as new), and what's new is not good.

But a consequence of the personality cult is that every Maoist guru must pretend to have made great new theoretical contributions, to place himself in the pantheon of gods next to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin,and Mao....so we have "Prachandra Path", "Chairman Gonzalo Thought", and Avakian's supposedly pathbreaking ideas.

[redstar2000]

Originally posted by atlanta rcyber
I don't have the time or energy to debate in circles around the same issues in the same thread. Nor to debate endlessly with people from trends that think this is all about some sort of macho-intellectual competition.

I look forward to engaging more arguments against the meat of the positions I am putting forward, arguments that are backed up, not just thrown out there. And I look forward to debating methodology on a high plain. Anything less, and my time will go to other political work.

Up to you, of course.

But there's not many places you can go, on or off the internet, where you will find an acquiescent audience these days. Only people who are completely unfamiliar with the "left" might possibly take in your views without critical inspection...and what happens when they run into the same reception that you've received here?

If you're looking for disciples, then I agree, this is not the right board for you.

And probably not the right country, either. We are not peasants.

[Severian]

Originally posted by atlanta rcyber@Aug 22 2005, 09:31 PM
I think what this comrade was struggling to communicate is the real tendency among sections of the left and among revisionists, to only recognize a section of the working class as a part of the proletariat. The point is not to say that these sections are not an important part of the proletariat, but more that other extremely important sections of the proletariat, generally the "on the bottom" sections, are often overlook or purposely ignored. Many times with a real condescension to the most down and out sections. This is a form of 'workerism' and it is a revisionist outlook.

Yeah, here you're really just arguing with the RCP's own past.

It's true that during the RCP's brief turn to industry it often took a workerist (here's what it means) and economist approach. It was roughly during this late 70s period that the RCP came out against the Boston busing struggle for example, ostensibly for not being sufficiently class-based, really based on an accomodation to white racism.

(At one point the Boston RCP even came out with a anti-busing leaflet using the stop-sign symbol of the ROAR racists who were stoning school buses full of Black children...in fairness, this was followed by a half-assed 'self-criticism' in which the RCP pulled back from the full implications of its anti-busing line but not the line itself.)

But just because the RCP made these errors, it hardly proves that these errors are an inevitable consequence of doing proletarian politics. The RCP simply gave up on the working class, rather than correcting its errors and continue attempting to become a workers party.

You haven't shown that your opponents in this debate make this type of error, so are you arguing with flesh-and-blood people or with a construct of your own imagination?

Nor have you given any examples of RCP political work orienting to any section of the working class. Much less that its a party of the working class...

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Not to be trivial but a friend of mine in New York who is very active politically and has alot of experience on the left "scene" always calls RCP-USA "the only lumpen party in existance."

[redstar2000]

Atlanta rcyber has illustrated some things that I've noticed about Maoists in general. One of them is a special fascination with the peasantry...perhaps not surprising in light of the fact that their "patron saint" was a middle peasant.

Another is their habit of switching to a personal attack whenever they run short of coherent arguments.

And I also want to point out the outright DOWN ON THE PEOPLE viewpoint of RedStar2000 who would never condescend himself to be a "peasant."

An attitude that I share with Marx, of course. He didn't use the phrase "the muck of rural idiocy" just because he thought the words sounded "really cool".

But why have you personalized my rather commonplace observation -- people in the "west" are not peasants, are they?

What that means (among other things) is that you cannot do with Bob Avakian what the Chinese party did with Mao. Peasants may accept and even welcome the idea of a "good emperor"...the idea falls flat in the "west".

As you have seen in discussions on this board.

I am sure there is a name for this, ahhh, it's ethnocentrism. Cultural elitism would be apt as well.

All depends on what you really mean by those fashionable phrases. Do I think that peasants are intellectually inferior to city dwellers? No...I have no reason to believe that "intelligence" (whatever is meant by that) is not equitably distributed among all modern humans.

Do I think that peasants are ignorant shitkickers? Um...yes, I do.

Do I think it's "their fault"? No, their condition is a product of objective conditions...both the means and the relations of production have created their class and kept it in a state of ignorance.

Will they "always be like that"? No, they won't...they will move to the cities and their children and grandchildren will be "just like me" -- since, after all, my great grandparents were also ignorant shitkickers.

Am I "guilty" of the "sins" of ethnocentrism and cultural elitism?

Let the jury retire and consider a verdict.

What also runs through RedStar's comments is another DOWN ON THE PEOPLE attitude. This one is a bit more subtle. What he basically is putting forward is that "Only people who are completely unfamiliar with the 'left'," which is huge sections of the basic masses, would be easy for people like me to bring to the revolutionary communist stand. That they do not have intelligence and opinions of their own, and that if "they" came online and received the "same reception" that I did, then they would be torn to pieces by the intellectual superior that is RedStar, et al.

Well, you have been sort of "torn to pieces" here...perhaps we were too harsh on you.

I didn't say, by the way, that it would be "easy" for you to recruit disciples for Avakian even among people unfamiliar with the left -- I said that "only people who are completely unfamiliar with the 'left' might possibly take in your views without critical inspection...".

I don't see anything in that statement that is "down on the people" -- many people are ignorant and naive...and they can be fooled.

The problem for you and others with similar agendas is that people don't stay fooled...especially in the modern era.

In the "internet age", would-be "great leaders" have no place to hide. No matter how obscure their origins, somewhere there are sites that expose them and their ideas to ruthless critical examination...and the more famous they become, the more such sites proliferate.

"Great leaders" are really a product of mass ignorance...but that ignorance is under constant attack.

One of the worst things that's happen over the last five decades or so -- from the Leninist standpoint -- is that being a "dummy" is no longer considered "virtuous" by the "basic masses". The Christian fascists are trying their best to halt and reverse this...to no avail.

The masses in the "west" are slowly but surely entering the "realm of critical discourse"...a catastrophe for all those who wish to claim "special expertise" and the "right to decide for others".

Deference to superiors is on the way out -- you are going to find more and more people like the ones you ran into on this board...who will subject your ideas to harsh and critical examination.

The "age of faith" really is waning...though with painful slowness. You'd better recruit whomever you can now from those still willing to believe.

And keep them off of the internet for as long as you can.

[Red Flag]

Don't worry, the net will be regulated, CPC style after Chairman Bobby takes office.