quetzalcoatl wrote:I have no problem with centralized power, as such - or even a vanguard to administer it. But we ought to acknowledge that a vanguard that becomes formalized within a Party structure effectively deprecates the role of the working class. The ideal of workers owning and administering their workplaces is (permanently?) delayed. In its stead is created an in loco parentis trust that administers a nominal workers' state on their behalf.
It becomes a labor of Hercules to change this arrangement to facilitate workers assuming command. Perhaps the idea of the state withering away is not achievable?
I think this is agreeable and this is where Draper seems to emphasize that the supposed elitism of Lenin was but a practical point until a significant change in which masses of workers could be more directly adopted within the party.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1990/myth/myth.htm#section5All comrades, he enjoined, must “devise new forms of organization” to take in an influx of workers, new forms that were “definitely much broader” than the old, “less rigid. more ‘free,’ more ‘loose.’” “With complete freedom of association and civil liberties for the people, we should, of course, have to found Social-Democratic unions ...” [21] “Each union, organization or group will immediately elect its bureau, or board, or directing committee ...” [22] Furthermore, he recommended, it was now possible to bring about party unity, Bolsheviks with Mensheviks, on the basis of a broad democratic vote of the rank and file, since this could not be organized under the new conditions. [23]
All of this sea-change had to be explained to Russian workers who had never faced such conditions before. We must not be afraid, Lenin argued, of “a sudden influx of large numbers of non-Social-Democrats into the Party.” [24]
Note this remark made almost in passing: “The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social-Democratic, and more than ten years of work put in by Social-Democracy has done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into consciousness.” [25] It looks as if Lenin had forgotten even the existence of the Kautsky theory he had copied out and quoted in 1902!
The initiative of the workers themselves will now display itself on a scale that we, the underground and circle workers of yesterday, did not even dare dream of. [26]
He seized on the new conditions especially to advocate that mass recruitment of workers (possible for the first time) should swamp over the influence of intellectuals in the party work:
At the Third Congress of the Party I suggested that there be about eight workers to every two intellectuals in the Party committees. How obsolete that suggestion seems now! Now we must wish for the new Party organizations to have one Social-Democratic intellectual to several hundred Social-Democratic workers. [27]
The article concluded this way, with a typical Lenin reaction:
“We have ‘theorized’ for so long (sometimes – why not admit it? – to no use) in the unhealthy atmosphere of political exile, that it will really not be amiss if we now ‘bend the bow’ slightly, a little, just a little, ‘the other way’ and put practice a little more in the forefront.” [28]
So now the bow bent the other way – “slightly.”
The situation would now be quite clear even if Lenin never mentioned WITBD again. But in fact we can now turn to remarks by Lenin in which he reconsidered WITBD specifically, in the light of the new conditions and of these new concepts of party organization (new for Russia).
In November 1907 Lenin published a collection of old articles, called Twelve Years. Its aim was to review the thought and action of the movement over that period of time, a historical purpose. His preface to this collection was plainly addressed to the new audience generated by the revolutionary upheaval going on since 1905, an audience to whom the old disputes were now past history. Here he explained why WITBD had been included in the collection. Note in the first place that it required an explanation.
WITBD had been included (explains Lenin) because it “is frequently mentioned by the Mensheviks” and bourgeois-liberal writers; therefore he wanted to “draw the attention of the modern reader” to what was its “essential content.” His explanation began with a statement that might just as well be addressed to contemporary Leninologists:
The basic mistake made by those who now criticize WITBD is to treat the pamphlet apart from its connection with the concrete historical situation of a definite, and now long past, period in the development of our Party.
This applied, he said, to those “who, many years after the pamphlet appeared, wrote about its incorrect or exaggerated ideas on the subject of an organization of professional revolution-aries.” Such criticisms were wrong “to dismiss gains which, in their time, had to be fought for, but which have long ago been consolidated and have served their purpose.” [29]
It is obvious that the reference to “exaggerated ideas” is an admission of a degree of incorrectness, even if the confession simultaneously maintains that the incorrectness was pardonable. But that had already been the sense of the “bending the bow” remarks; it was not really even new.
WITBD had done its 1902 job, and should not be treated any more as if it were a current proposal; it had been by-passed. Lenin did not apologize for it or repudiate it; this was something different. He was pigeonholing it as of historical interest only. Socialists would not repudiate the First International either, but no one would dream of bringing it back to life.
It was a far cry from a permanent “concept of the party.”
The characterization of Lenin as a kind of elitist reminds me of how some smear the original class position of Karl Marx even though he was reluctant in ways of taking over and wanted to give great reign to workers.
https://www.marxists.org/subject/marxmyths/francis-wheen/article.htmA few years later, when a doctor called Sexton was proposed for membership, there were the usual mutterings about ‘whether it was desirable to add professional men to the Council’; according to the minutes, however, ‘Citizen Marx did not think there was anything to fear from the admission of professional men while the great majority of the Council was composed of workers.’ In 1872, when there were problems with various crackpot American sects infiltrating the International, it was Marx himself who proposed – successfully – that no new section should be allowed to affiliate unless at least two-thirds of its members were wage labourers.
In short, while accepting that most office-holders and members must be working class, Marx was unembarrassed by his own lack of proletarian credentials: men such as himself still had much to offer the association as long as they didn’t pull rank or hog the limelight. Engels followed this example, though as an affluent capitalist he was understandably more reluctant to impose himself. After selling his stake in the family firm and moving down to London in 1870, he accepted a seat on the General Council almost at once but declined the office of treasurer. ‘Citizen Engels objected that none but working men ought to be appointed to have anything to do [with] the finances,’ the minutes record. ‘Citizen Marx did not consider the objection tenable: an ex-commercial man was the best for the office.’ Engels persisted with his refusal – and was probably right to do so. As the Marxian scholar Hal Draper has pointed out, handling money was the touchiest job in a workers’ association, for charges of financial irregularity were routine ploys whenever political conflict started; and a Johnny-come-lately businessman from Manchester would have been an obvious target for any ‘French monsieurs’ who wanted to stir up trouble.
I think what the above represents however is that while the class character of an organization must be firmly based in people being working class, many can hold ideas and enact actions which have the content of the working class' interest.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/On%20Political%20Representation.pdfI see in America black Americans have some kind of saying that not all skinfolk are kinfolk which to me clearly summarizes how one's background doesn't automatically make one a political ally, which seems implicit in some of the liberal diversity spiels.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/On%20Political%20Representation.pdfBut representation is an active process: forming and giving expression to a collective view, selecting representatives, instructing the representatives, and then acting for the group whether in deliberation or action as such, reporting back, educating the group and over again ... A focus group or a committee that simply resembles the group it represents in some way is not thereby representing them at all. This is not to deny that a deliberative body which reflects the diversity of the principal in the diversity of its participants is not a good idea. It is, but it is not the essential question.
The problem of representation does not arise from the diversity of people; it arises even when I represent myself. (See Hegel, 1821, §115) I have innumerable different needs and desires, but at every given moment I nonetheless form an intention and act according to that intention. My intention furthers a purpose which resolves the contradictions between my various desires and the constraints imposed by those of others. I cannot act at all other than through momentarily resolving the contradictions between my various desires, and formulating a purpose, even while I take myself to be an single, independent human being – I cannot do two things at once, nevertheless, I must act. So in representing myself I face the same contradiction that confronts the representative who acts on behalf of a group. In selecting a representative and instructing the representative, the group implicitly resolves these contradictions and thereby forms itself into a subject, a personality.
It is by acting in the world that an individual makes themself into a personality and in just the same way, by choosing and mandating representatives, a group transforms themself from a collection of individuals into a subject, an actor on the stage of history. There is no implication in this that internal differences are dissolved, overridden or ignored, but they are transcended.
I guess the balance comes in that professing the objective interest of the working class isn't inherently bad to the extent that it doesn't become a paternalistic kind that infantalizes the working class rather than showing solidarity.
https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/555/7/Blackledge%20on%20MacIntyre%20for%20ACPQ%20Submitted%20Version.pdfBy contrast with MacIntyre’s conception of socialist leadership, it is a great strength of Lukács’s position that he recognised that ‘the class consciousness of the proletariat does not develop uniformly throughout the whole proletariat’. Consequently, a communist party could ‘only be created through struggle’ and in particular through the ‘interaction of spontaneity and conscious control’.69 So while Lukács distanced his ideas from those sectarians who deified the party as ‘the representative of the ‘unconscious’ masses’, he did so without flipping over into the opposite error of embracing a simplistic deification of spontaneity.70 Thus his use of the most contentious term in History and Class Consciousness: ‘imputed consciousness’.71 While often presented as the means through which he did deify the party, this term is best understood as the corollary of Marx’s essentialist model of social class.72 Far from allowing Lukács to slip back towards a form of dualism, it opened a space within which he was able to conceptualise socialist political intervention within the class struggle in a non-emotivist but yet activist way by means of the generalisations about class interests that could be made on the basis of the history of workers’ struggles. For instance, to say that workers have an objective interest in challenging racism even in the absence of an anti-racist movement does not imply imposing the idea of anti-racism onto the working class. Rather, it functions as a generalisation about objective interests made on the basis of previous moments of struggle. This way of thinking about politics opens the door to an interventionist conception of political leadership that escapes the emotivist substitutionism of self-appointed vanguards without liquidating the left into a (retreating) movement.73
So maybe this is kind of a dead thread idea in that no one subscribes to an extreme notion of totally relying on an intellectual cadre nor spontaneity of the masses.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics