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Proyect wrote: You mean like the Spartacist League and the International Bolshevik Tendency that you belonged to for 30 years? Or the CPGB with its hammer-and-sickle festooned website whose newspaper you write for on occasion? We are dealing with two types of politics basically. There are those who believe in the power of deeds. That is why I spent a half-decade recruiting technical aid volunteers for Nicaragua and the ANC and the frontline states in the 1980s when you were writing articles calling for proletarian dictatorship in a newspaper that probably had a circulation of about 2 or 3 hundred. You must have believed that your words had some kind of magical power to transform reality. I think that a mojo and a monkey's paw would have had more impact. I created this mailing list as an alternative to the kind of sterile, self-regarding, vaporous formulas that come so easy to you. My advice is to get off the Internet and go work in a soup kitchen or something if you really want to make a difference. Reply Reply to all Forward Click I can think of no more apposite reply to Mr. Deeds than to resend my post from December 1: Louis can't seem to answer the arguments of anyone who disagrees with him w/o baiting them for other political positions or their political past. But apart from that, he is right that attempts to organize a revolutionary party in the US and other Western countries have failed in the post-war period, mainly because they can't recruit more than a handful of people, and the idea of revolution is very remote from any segment of the population right now. Any existing energy for change is in the reformist camp. But Louis might pause in his rush to join the left-reformists long enough to consider this fact: left-reformism, even (and especially) where it has achieved its electoral aims, hasn't "worked" either. Left-reformist governments have come under massive political and economic attacks from the ruling classes, for which they have no answer. They either retreat, or go down to defeat (usually both). This occurs because their politics are explicitly or implicitly based on faith in bourgeois democracy. They believe in the mobilization of the masses solely or chiefly for electoral purposes. Further, when the reformists are defeated, the masses who followed them don't draw the appropriate conclusions and go on to some higher level of revolutionary consciousness on their own. They are instead despairing and demoralized for years and decades after. Nothing fails like failure. True, a much larger number of people are drawn to reformist parties and causes, and this is probably why Louis finds them so much more appealing than the SWP of his younger days. But this doesn't make them any more successful in the long run than minuscule revolutionary sects. . ******************** Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why a sectarian like me has been able more or less to predict what would happen well in advance of the event, while a man of deeds such as yourself never seems to have a clue? Jim _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
