Leninists
The ongoing acrimonious political factionalism taking place at WBAI, involving the "Justice and Unity" slate and an "Independents" slate ...and just about everyone else- continues as a fresh election to Local Station advisory Board approaches. The LSB is a sort of advisory council in addition to approving the budget for the station, as well as determining a pool of candidates for the General Manager position at the station, among other responsibilities. The JUS currently holds a majority on the board.
The Justice and Unity slate is heavily populated by Marxist-Leninists and Nationalists of various backgrounds (a very racially diverse group), belonging to a slew of organization, several of which are affiliated or tied closely with the International Action Center (Sara Flounders, a JUS candidate, is the co-director of the IAC) and well experienced in the political intrigues on the left in the city, all brought together in political coalition against a slate of "Independents" of various hard to discern political tendencies (including a few out Liberals) and primarily a white group (and heavily populated by wing-nuts, with some serious issues with meeting decorum).
This review was originally posted to the Marxism Mailing List by the moderator of that list, Louis Proyect. It is also available at http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/elbaum.htm
Revolution in the Air
By Louis Proyect
Despite some serious differences with the analysis found in Max Elbaum's "Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che", I strongly recommend this recently published Verso book to anybody trying to make sense of the state of the left today. While focused on the "New Communist Movement" of the 70s and 80s (that I prefer to call Maoist), the lessons Elbaum draws are applicable to all vanguard party-building projects including those of the Trotskyist movement that I participated in.
For obvious reasons, Elbaum tends to exaggerate the importance of the Maoist formations and deprecate Trotskyism, its chief rival. As a veteran of this milieu, he would naturally be place a higher importance on it than either the CPUSA or the Trotskyist SWP. However, in his haste to put Maoism at center stage of American leftwing politics in this period, he gives short shrift to its rivals.
What comes to mind is a conversation I once had with a old school Marxist about Capital, and its "applicability", or its accessibility, to the average jane and joe. She claimed that Capital is readily assessable, I claimed it was a text hardly approaching contemporary understanding without a bit of background, definitions, and maybe several years of study.
Of course that's nothing compared to what flies for "theoretical discourse" these days, from various Marxist circles, primarily. Note this passage:
One should bear in mind here the fundamental lesson of the Hegelian "concrete universality": the universal necessity is not a teleological force which, operative from the outset, pulls the strings and runs the process, guaranteeing its happy outcome; on the contrary, this universal necessity is always retroactive, it emerges out of the radical contingency of the process and signal the moment of the contingency's self-Aufhebung.
International Socialist Review Issue 01, Summer 1997
China: From Mao to Deng
Ahmed Shawki looks at the rise of Mao and the development of China up to the death of Deng Ziaoping. He shows that "socialism with Chinese characteristics" had–and has–very little to do with the socialism of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky.
The Honorary Chairman of the Chinese Bridge Association died February 19 of "complications of lung infections" associated with Parkinson’s disease. At 92 years of age, this was the only formal post Deng Xiaoping held at the time of his death. But before taking up bridge, he was chairman of the Central Military Commission until he resigned in 1989, the year of the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests. Despite his official departure from politics, Deng continued to be China’s "Paramount Leader," wielding enormous influence and power.
A series of pages writen back in 1996 and archived on the wayback machine (http://web.archive.org) by Lenny Flank, Jr.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010609224049/www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1587/index.htm
Welcome to the "Non-Leninist Marxism" Page. It contains a number of book-length works I have produced over the years exploring the possibilities of democratic communism and direct industrial democracy. It is my conclusion that the Leninists, in all of their various forms, cannot serve as a model for a successful anti-capitalist revolution, and that they need to be opposed by working class militants to the same extent as the capitalists. My motto is: "Never talk to a Trot without an ice pick in your pocket".
by Wayne Price
An anarchist leaflet
On October 28, 2006, we attended the first day of a two-day Northeast Socialist Conference: Build the Left/ Fight the Right! in New York City. Despite its ecumenical title, the conference was organized by the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and limited to its point of view. We handed out the following leaflet. The ISO has the same politics as the British Socialist Workers Party and other members of its International Socialist Tendency, although it is organizationally distinct (due to some quarrel). Some of the leaflet is applicable to other variants of Trotskyism. (Full disclosure: I was a founding member of the ISO’s predecessor, the International Socialists--having previously been an anarchist-pacifist. )
Jan 9th, 2007
Last night a group of NYMAA members went out for drinks after the Open City / NEFAC panel on Anarchist - Communism, an event rather well attended and overall informative and lively.
So we manage to find ourselves boozing into the wee hours with a member- actually one of only TWO members, of the NYC branch of the International Bolshevik Tendency , who had stood up at the panel to give the usual wingnut diatribe about Lenin and the efficacy of the Bolshevik party organization, blah blah blah.
Nice guy. Seriously, though, we tend to write off these small political sect members as if they're all just mindless dredgers of doctrine (which of course they usually appear to be) formulated some 80 years ago by some "ye ole koot" who no one cares to remember anyhow (and not to downplay the danger of suffering from such nonsence ourselves).
By Loren Goldner
[Goldner is one of the most prescient commentators on the left, and a brilliant Marxist of the "autonomous" vein - TFGC]
“We were living in times innocent of world war, of fascism, of nazism, sovietism, the Fuehrerprinzip, the totalitarian state. Nothing we were talking about had ever been tried. We thought of political democracy with its basic rights and freedoms as good things permanently secured. Planting ourselves on that firm basis, we proposed to climb higher to industrial or “real” democracy.”
Max Eastman
Love And Revolution (1964)
Thus did Max Eastman describe the climate of the pre-World War I era of The Masses magazine, which he edited in its heyday.
In these bleak times, it is still remarkable how the international revolutionary surge of 1917-1921, right after World War I, can still resonate as a moment of almost apocalyptic hope. 90 years on, this moment—in retrospect the high-water mark to date of the international working-class movement, with revolutions and insurrections and general strikes in 20 countries—retains an ability to inspire like no other. All across the left spectrum, whether Social Democratic, Stalinist, Trotskyist, left communist, anarchist or Third Worldist, militants (whether they know it or not) are still shaped by questions set down in that period and its immediate aftermath. The Russian revolutionaries (more revealingly than they knew) constantly checked course by consulting the history of the (bourgeois) French Revolution, and however much contemporary “new social movement” activists and post-modernists wish to treat the working-class radicalism of the 1910’s and 1920’s as ancient history, we have not yet fully exited, for better or for worse, the magnetic field of those years.
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