[Edited Message Follows] [Reason: Amended second sentance for greater clarity.]
On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 11:03 AM, Mark Baugher wrote: > > Or is there only one, true party organization for working people under > capitalism? > I wouldn't be surprised or disappointed if there were many differences. > Marx and Engels lived in a time when "the mass proletarian movement awoke > to its own powers..." > On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 02:05 PM, gojko rakic wrote: > > Lenin’s theory of a party of professional revolutionaries, especially in > What Is to Be Done?, represents a qualitative shift: socialist > consciousness is introduced from outside the spontaneous movement, and a > tightly organised, centralised vanguard is required to lead the class. So are these two forms of party organization in conflict with each other? I would suggest not. While workers’ parties can and have gained a mass following in multiparty representative democracies with electoral systems and other institutions which give capitalism popular legitimacy, history has shown that the ruling class will never permit the expropriation of the private means of production, distribution and exchange. Whenever it has felt the system threatened, it has responded with brute force - fascism being the most extreme example. To answer the question posed above, I would say there is not one but two "true party organizations for working people under capitalism" - one form appropriate to peaceful organization of the masses where democratic rights offer that opportunity, the other appropriate to conditions in which such rights do not exist or are quashed by the bourgeoisie. They are not in contradiction but represent continuity, each a response to different stages of class struggle in capitalist society. Marx and Engels acknowledged the potential for a peaceful transition to socialism in the UK, Germany, and other advanced industrial societies where voting rights had been won. But they were indisputably far more skeptical about this possibility than were the Labour and German social democratic parties, the largest in the Second International, whose programs anticipated the gradual and peaceful parliamentary replacement of the system. Marx and Engels were deeply influenced by the reaction of the bourgeoisie to the 1848 uprisings and the Paris Commune. Both died before Lenin wrote WITBD and the debate between revolutionaries and reformists reached a fever pitch culminating in WWI, the Bolshevik revolution, and a formal split resulting in the formation of the Third International. It's inconceivable that they would have sided with the parliamentary social democrats who went over to the bourgeoisie rather than with Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, herself an early critic of the vanguard party concept, and others from the Zimmerwald left and revolutionary socialist wing of the International on the decisive questions of war and revolution. > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40277): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40277 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117257520/21656 -=-=- 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. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
