[was: RE: [PEN-L:24984] Re: Bureaucracy (speculative rant alert)] Rob writes: >Democratic centralism leads to bureaucratic centralism and, ultimately, an apparat not unlike a ruling class, whose being (and material interests) is unlike that of its 'constituency' and whose consciousness comes to reflect this. It's a process of substitutionism. [to bring up a concept that Trotsky used to criticize Lenin in 1905 (?)] First, the party stands for the class on the grounds that those not yet in the party (the vast majority of the class) could not yet be expected to know its own interests (just what you'd expect a middle class intellectual minority to think, I suppose). Then, to disagree with the party (or, rather, what current power relations within the formal party determine) is to be a counter-revolutionary, an enemy of your class. So you're removed. Top-down nonsense like this ain't Marxian revolution at all - not in the medium term anyway. Read Marx on The Paris Commune, mate; it's all about ever revocable delegates from, for, of and by the people. Theory ain't nothin' without social practice (praxis), so the revolutionary engine is the people, not a bunch of abstractly-theorising elitists selflessly throwing pearls before swine.<
Rob is talking about what "democratic centralism" usually means _in practice_, while my emphasis is on what it originally meant in _theory_. My reading of history is that there are substitutionist forces in all or almost all organizations, including social democratic and pro-anarchy ones. For example, look how the Blairites took over the Labour party in the UK or how the FAI ran the CNT in Spain during the Civil War. On a more mundane level, it seems like every "progressive" organization in the U.S. -- including pro-environment organizations -- has been taken over by its national office staff, while its members are bombarded with fund-raising mail all the time and are expected to be passive followers. In sum, substitutionism of the sort that Rob describes is not unique to the tradition that follows Lenin. But, contrary to Trotsky's implications, there is no inevitability of substitutionism -- there is no "iron law of oligarchy." If rank and file members of the working class are well organized for their own goals and are concious of their self-organization, that limits the substitutionism by the party. If the party rank and file are well organized, that limits the substitutionism by the central committee or the national office. That is, subsitutionism is a symptom of a social movement's decline. (The rise of Stalinism in the USSR reflected the decline in working-class power after 1917.) Though it can allow that movement's tradition to persist in hard times, usually that tradition is corrupted. The elite then usually fights to prevent the revival of the movement, since that would threaten their power. Instead, the elite wants to act in the movement's name. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
