******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
On 7/2/18 7:33 PM, Jason via Marxism wrote:
It wasn't just the Dutch and the main condition was universal suffrage in this case but there were a range of conditions and considerations involved in other cases throughout the Second International. Also, while you're glib about the suffrage question, I think there is a power small-d democratic argument to made for socialists voting for the Democratic Party simply on democratic grounds given that various kinds of voter suppression affect the Democratic Party vote more so and purposively so.
You keep coming up with these obscure references to Second International parties voting for liberals, with Lenin supposedly agreeing with you, Carl Davidson et al based on a single article from 1912 that is the calling card of Maoists like Mike Ely and people moving headlong into the Democratic Party like Pham Binh. Lenin wrote 100,000 words at least attacking the idea of voting for the Cadets and you come up with the same single article I've seen referenced by everybody calling themselves a Marxist or a socialist that favors an "inside-outside" strategy. On top of that you come up with an even more obscure reference to the Dutch social democracy in 1905. It's like this. If you want to ring doorbells for the Democratic Party, there's no need to be like an attorney digging through law books to dig up a precedent. Do you honestly think that anybody reading your emails will become converted to the Democratic Party because of a single article by Lenin that supposedly makes him identical to Martov?
With 1500 subscribers to Marxmail, I doubt that there are 20 that would want to waste their time under any circumstances to volunteer for a DSA-backed candidate. Coming up with these Talmudic references would be the last thing in the world to convince someone to become the 2018 equivalent of Eugene McCarthy volunteers from 50 years ago. The people who ring doorbells and think of themselves as "Democratic Socialists" have likely never read Lenin, Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg.
For the rest of your email, you read a lot into the phrase "liberal workers’ government" as a reason to dismiss Lenin's arguments on the British Labor Party (which you have still not addressed directly in any substantive way). Further, this reference is misleading since your reference is incomplete. As John Riddell https://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/a-workers-government-as-a-step-toward-socialism/ documents, that version did not include the amendment that the first two types listed were "illusory" and were "in reality hidden coalition governments between the bourgeoisie and antirevolutionary workers’ leaders".
I think what I wrote is crystal clear. When the Comintern referred to "bourgeois" parties in the 1922 article I cited, it was talking about the Democratic Party in the USA, the Liberal Party in England, not the Labour Party. It advocated the election or revolutionary seizure of power by an alliance of Communists and Social Democrats. You could understand why it was moving in this direction since a year later this was what nearly happened in Germany, if it wasn't for the stupidity of the German CP. A Social Democrat named Erich Zeigner, who was the governor of the state of Saxony, became convinced of the need to organize an uprising co-led by the CP and the SP. As Werner Angress points out in his great history of the German CP between 1919 and 1925, Zeigner called for expropriation of the capitalist class, arming of the workers and a proletarian dictatorship. In other words, there was zero differences between him and the CP on the goal but the uprising was stillborn because the CP had its head up its ass. So if things had not gotten so bollixed up, this would have led to a workers government. This is exactly what was needed. How anybody could twist the words of the 1922 Comintern article favoring such a strategy into ringing doorbells for the Democratic Party is beyond belief.
Also, you still have not demonstrated that this is a "Menshevik electoral strategy" I'm talking about since it also reflects Bolshevik strategy and that of Luxemburg and others.
How do you expect me or anybody else to convince you of anything? You are a case-hardened reformist.
_________________________________________________________ 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
