Continuing on WL - HOWLER #2 The quote we started with from WL concludes:
"...Lenin's outlook became the political foundation of the Third International. "The essence of 2011- its distinguishing economic feature, is an epoch of social revolution, based on 'post industrial' means of production." The key here is the revisionist method of WL's exposition. Lenin declares that, with the coming to power of the Bolsheviks, the world has moved into the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution. Before that point, there is the emergence of modern imperialism alongside great confusion in the organization of workers' struggles. This was seen most grossly in 1914, when the politically most-organized detachment of the working class, in Germany, voted the Kaiser war credits. What is impermissible here is precisely to gloss over the successful overthrow of Tsarism. That overthrow was and remains the key condition for Lenin's description of our era -- "the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution" -- to hold any water. That overthrow includes mass uprisings in a variety of forms. The Bolshevik victory demonstrated in practice that the one final push so beloved of the IWW and other anarcho-syndicalists --- their idea of the general strike --- wasn't gonna fly any further. This was critical for winning the most active revolutionary fighters from the class at that time not only to the Bolsheviks' cause but to the Bolsheviks' approach to revolutionary tactics. Another key matter is the lengthy ideological and political preparation of the working class as the leading force for achieving revolutionary victory. This preparation included partially-failed previous power-seizing attempts such as in 1905. It included learning the lesson of the need to maintain maximum vigilance against counter-revolutionary plots such as Kornilov's near-coup in August 1917; that was a coup attempt set in motion by a nominally revolutionary democratic government supported by the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets! The Bolsheviks' experience taught the necessity to be ready to seize the initiative in the precise moment of maximum crisis -- in the 3rd week of October 1917 [old-style calendar] as it turned out -- but not prematurely and not "too late." Despite being but a tiny minority in the general population, the Russian working class could aim for, and accomplish, the overthrow of a centuries-long social, political, economic and military order and its entire arrangement of social structures. This was because its political consciousness expressed through revolutionary deeds won to its side all the other social forces that could no longer tolerate the Tsarist order. Without the party of the new type developed under Lenin, the class could not and would not have acquired the discipline and broad-mindedness necessary for accomplishing such a sweeping revolutionary aim. With the revolutionary victory and the massing of strength to beat off the reactionary comeback attempts of the Civil War, Russia under the Bolsheviks won the authority and respect of the workers of the world as the reliable rear area of the world revolutionary struggle. THIS was why the Third International took off. That is why Lenin's political and ideological authority stood so high there. WL reduces all this to remarking that "Lenin's outlook became the political foundation of the Third International." He leaves out precisely how such a thing could happen. His description creates instead an impression of someone cooking up a nice formulation about the nature of our era and getting to propagate it within an international organisation! The source of Lenin's authority was this reality that had been accomplished by a revolutionary section of the working class steeling itself ideologically, politically and even militarily. It was not about the prestige of some intellectual individual. Perhaps WL can explain how it is that no one has ever suggested that the nature of our era changed when Chairman Mao Zedong declared that "China has stood up" and the Communists took power at the head of the people in October 1949. Or perhaps he could illuminate on the basis of his "theory" why no one suggested that the era had changed when the July 26th Movement led by Fidel Castro, placing itself at the head of the revolutionary independence struggle of the Cuban people against U.S. neocolonial enslavement, took power declaring "¡Patria o Muerte!" [Homeland or Death] 52 years ago yesterday. What WL's line of argument implicitly suggests is that some economic changes in the organisation of production can be put forward as something that could redefine the nature of an era. Such a thing is not even the case for insurgent mass movements, such as in China and Cuba, effecting profound advances of people's rights-to-be through the seizure of power from the clutches of the most dangerous exploiters on the face of the earth. So how can some so-called "post-industrial" economic transformation(s) be placed in such a category?!? Like the Devil avoiding holy water, WL is silent about the quote from Lenin's 1908 pamphlet on Marxism and Revisionism. So it is reiterated here, in the context of WL's evident fascination with the allegedly socially transformative powers of Monopoly Capital's latest scams and schemes for further bleeding the workers white: Every more or less "new" question, every more or less unexpected and unforeseen turn of events, even though it change the basic line of development only to an insignificant degree and only for the briefest period, will always inevitably give rise to one variety of revisionism or another. _______________________________________________ Marxist-Leninist-List mailing list Marxist-Leninist-List@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxist-leninist-list
