In a message dated 3/16/2004 10:15:20 AM Central Standard Time, lnp3 @PANIX.COM writes: Jurriaan wrote:
>The very term ""recruiting" is problematic, because this suggests >that people are being conscripted into a military service under a Marx >commander, a Marxist boss. And this is one of the factors which gave rise to >autonomism in the first place. This is a very good point. The appeal of autonomism is that you can call yourself a revolutionary without actually forming organizations and taking responsibility for anything. This was also the appeal of the New Left in the 1960s. Louis Proyect Comment Nothing in my opinion could be more absurd. I have perhaps recruited between 150-200 individuals directly to a cause and perhaps 100 to an organization. As a union leader my job was to consistently recruit the members to various causes or to volunteer to give their time and energy to specific issues. The act of winning over people to engage an issue is called recruitment. I have recurited people to the communist organization I once belonged to on the basis of pushing forward the activity we were already involved in. Only intellectuals detached from the living fabric of the life of our diverse peoples and class can be recruited to an organization that is founded on the basis of an abstraction. This is not a bad thing but the arena of educational institutions. Communists or Marxists insurgent organizations are instruments of action, not debating societies. The program of communism founded by Karl Marx has not been understood. Victory to the workers in their current struggle has always been the program of communists. Why on earth or in Gods name would a rationale person try and recruit the working masses to a theory? American history is instructive and the abolitionists movement needs to be studied and understood by the radical intelligencia. The abolitionists published a broad array of literature that had as its focal point the ending of slavery. There were communists involved in the anti-slavery struggle and they recruited people to the cause of overthrowing slavery not a theory or method of abstraction deployed by Marx. Karl Marx himself was an abolitionists and wrote significant literature on slavery and the Civil War. People are recruited to causes and rallied on the basis of issues. The proposition presented above is absurd and cannot be verified as having a reality outside of sectarian groups. For instance the Mormons are a sectarian group. They attempt to win over people to their sectarian view of genesis and the destiny of man. Nevertheless in their activity they attempt to win people on the basis of engaging their issues. Winning people over to a vision is of course radically different from trying to win people over to a theory. It is an old axiom of communism and Marxism as insurgency, that the workers are educated on the basis of their own experience and the communists emerge as leaders on the basis of leading people where they are all ready in motion to go. It is also a fact of life and reality that everyone has a boss or rather a division of labor must exist in any organization or there is no basis to verify administrative decisions that express what every the organization is organized to do. There are going to be "bosses" or people that volunteer or are elected to manifest the responsibility to carry out the administration of things in any organization including a bingo club. Anyone that has worked in a factory or any place else in society during the past 100 years understands that collective discussion and individual responsibility is important to carry out the will of any organization. There are going to be "bosses." Leadership or being boss means you have accepted - one way or another, responsibility to do something. In the real world . . . but then again we are not talking about the real world or real people or real acitivity. Melvin P.
