[Marxism] The Struggle for a Petty-Bourgeois Orientation [was:RE: The Le...

[Paddy Apling]

This contribution of Waistline is one I greatly welcome and I would 
recommend that it should be well read and digested by all on this list - and 
others in the communist and socialist movement.in both USA and Britain - and 
probably France and Germany as well.

It is worth saying in this connection that the very best publication of 
Lenin relevant to comrades in the imperialist countries is his  "Left-Wing 
Communism: An Infantile Disorder" - and even this needs to be read with the 
realisation that when it was written the situation in Britain seemed to be 
vergeing on a revolutionary situation, something which lasted for only a 
very few years after Lenin wrote his recommendations.

Lenin realised all too well that all the talk of revolution in a 
non-revolutionary situation amounted to little more than petty-bourgeois 
romanticism ,and that in our countries comrades faced a long hard struggle 
to develop general political understanding among the mass of the working 
class (whether blue- or white-collar).

At present it is a great fillip to our optimism for the future that the 
situation is causing previously non-politcal people to think - and that bank 
employees, teachers and researchers - who previously were so proud of their 
"superiority" to factory workers are so often more critical of our present 
ruling class and polticians than members and leadership of the 
long-established "working-class" trade unions.

Paddy
http://apling.freeservers.com

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Waistline2 at aol.com>
To: <e.c.apling at btinternet.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 5:31 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] The Struggle for a Petty-Bourgeois Orientation 
[was:RE: The Le...


> On and off for at least 10 years the issue of the state of the social
> movement and the organization of A Leninists type Party has been raised on 
> this
> list. Often we use the same terms but proceed from different concepts of 
> the
> meaning of a Leninist "party of a new type." A party in the image of Lenin 
> has
> been impossible to build in America for specific concrete reasons. It is 
> one
> thing to call oneself a Leninists party and adopt democratic centralism as 
> a
> form of organizational cohesion. It is an entirely different matter to 
> become
> an  insurrectionary force, when a revolutionary crisis does not exist or 
> is on
> the  immediate horizon.
>
> The party Lenin built was constructed to accomplish one goal and one goal
> only: to seize political power or act as insurrectionary forces. That is 
> to say,
> a gigantic revolution was unfolding in Russia, >
> My point is that we have to figure out the strategy for the revolution
> itself.

<snip>

> Elections and our national presidential election is a gage for the working
> class consciousness as measured through the voting section of the workers. 
> It
> seems we are on the threshold of an enormous mass movement, whose 
> opposition,
> at  this time was expressed as 58 million people voting for Senator John
> McCain.  On the other hand hundreds of thousands of folks attending open 
> air
> rallies for Obama, which is without precedence in our history. 
> Considerably  less
> masses attended Senator John McCain rallies compared with the Obama 
> campaign
> rallies. These open air rallies set a new bench mark, and contain a
> configuration of the meaning of "the mass uprising." The importance of 
> these  open air
> rallies are that as a form of struggle, the OAR (open air rallies) 
> supersedes
> the rebellions of the 1970's and 1980’s and the "Million Man March
> "forum/form of the 1990's.
>