[Marxism] An analysis of the DP convention that works better

[John]

On Tue, 2008-09-02 at 13:35 -0400, Marvin Gandall wrote:

> As for Lenin, none of us can say what Lenin would do today.

That's true but we can be sur thst what he would do now would be
different to what he did then because the situation is different. Here
in New Zealand (and I know it's the same throughout the Western
imperialist countries) I find it bizarre that left groups who pride
themselves in critical method blindly apply Lenin as doctrine for the
approach to parties like the Democrats, or in the NZ case, Labour. There
was, as I see it, one reason for his "advice" of the time. The party had
never been elected to government so people had illusions that these
parties would bring about socialism. There were many socialists in the
party and supporting it that believed this.

Neither of these things apply today. People don't vote Democrat/Labour
because they think it's a different path to the revolution. I doubt
you'd find anyone who believes that. Sure, there are some people who
call themselves socialists, generally with a very small s. But these
people aren't socialists at all. They think socialism is a vote for
higher taxes and more state regulation of 'naughty' capitalists. They
think socialism is getting rid of 'exploitation' (paying below the
minimum wage, running sweatshops) by bad capitalists so the good
capitalists can get on with the job of paying a "fair day's pay for a
fair day's work". The prospect of actual socialism would have these
people running a mile. This is not what Lenin was talking about.

> He wrote LWC:AID
> as a polemic against Sylvia Pankhurst and other British Marxists who raised
> the same qualms, moral and otherwise, about entering the Labour Party - what
> all agreed was a bourgeois workers party. Louis is right that the Bolsheviks
> thought such entry would be a short term thing because of the revolutionary
> nature of the period. The Boshevik program as a whole rested on that
> premise. But more than 80 years later, in a much less favourable period,
> when the USSR and international socialist movement have both disappeared,
> when workers are much less inclined to leave their existing bourgeois
> parties and leaders then they were then, when there are no longer mass
> Communist parties with parliamentary representation which they can look to
> as an alternative, how can we be so certain Lenin, in these circumstances,
> would move further to the left to embrace Pankhurst's uncompromising stance
> against any participation in these reformist parties?

Because Lenin didn't ever advocate support for openly free market
capitalist parties. The nature of those parties has changed.

> I think it was Lenin who said "the only principle is that which moves the
> struggle forward; all else is tactics", or something along those lines. If
> he didn't say it, I can imagine him doing so. There is every possibility,
> then, that he would concur today with Fred's statement that the Democratic
> party is "ALL THERE IS" and with Joaquin's that individual leftists have
> been thrown back to a period when socialists lacked a political home of
> their own - and draw his political conclusions from that. The choice
> socialists also faced in that earlier era was political abstention or
> supporting bourgeois liberal parties against reactionary ones.

But the Democratic Party IS a reactionary party. Christ! It's the party
that sent the US to war in Vietnam. It's the party that dismembered
Yugoslavia. It's the party of Southern segregation. Right now, it's the
party that's saying let's get out of the mess in Iraq so we can do a
better job of fucking over Afghanistan. And Why? Because they dislike
Afghans more than Iraqis? No. Because they think it will be better for
US imperialism.

>  The fact that
> the liberal bourgeoisie no longer plays a progressive role in the broad
> historical sense seems to me to be beside the point, which is that, in terms
> of contemporary politics, the liberal DP and SD parties and the forces they
> represent are "all there is" to block the conservative and reactionary
> parties to their right who want to rollback the historical gains of the
> masses and weaken their organizations.

Remind us again please what rolling back Clinton saved anyone from. OK,
he certainly saved a bunch of Sudanese kids from suffering a milk
allergy ... when he bombed their milk factory.
Cheers,
John