Life on the Fringe: An Inauguration Day Story
BHASKAR SUNKARA
OR: Foofooraw: The Dialectic of Impotence
2:45 pm: the day before Obama’s inauguration. The temperature is well below zero. I’m more than slightly intoxicated, ruing the poor blood circulation in my hands and wondering if Shyne is still in prison, all the while navigating through checkpoints around the White House on the way back to my dorm. I strike up a conversation with, then give two exchange students from Germany some absolutely awful directions. Unable to convince a national guardsman that I’m not an immediate threat to F and 18th, I’m forced to take a three block detour through a crowd of people. I’m no misanthrope, but I was fairly certainly that most of these people were trying to sell me crap I didn’t want. I politely refuse Obama flair of every size and shape and put my headphones in to listen to some ‘80’s pop music. I figure that no one in their right mind would bother someone looking at the ground, speed walking and blasting Prince. I was right. First, I was accosted by some religious types. Christian Zionists, to be specific. “One Jerusalem,” “Obama’s a Muslim,” some ranting about the Second Coming. I wondered what Berl Katznelson would say. I wondered what could have possibly went wrong in a 19-year old’s life that he would know who Berl Katznelson was? I thought about the pretty, now probably hopelessly lost, Germans. Poor girls. I gave my directions with such confidence. I snap back to consciousness and the teenage comrade of Israel is still raving. But having just read Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great, which caused me to reconsider my lifelong atheism, I’m especially polite to my pasty friend and I grab some of his publications. I know that their literature is “ironical” enough for one of my friends to want to put in a scrapbook or something. I take a few more copies. More for me, less for them to confuse people prone to confusion with.
Ten steps later, still looking down at the ground, thinking about how great the word “foofooraw” is, I hear two more magic words that send a warm tingle down my spine, “Bob Avakian.” I’d seen copies of the Revolutionary Communist Party’s (unimaginatively named) Revolution newspaper strewn about the street during the past few days and I had heard strange stories of encounters with Übermensch. Those whom braved the bitter cold to speak of their dear leader’s plan to “serve masses and make glorious proletarian revolution.” I quickly discard my Starbucks cup and shove my Iphone into my back pocket. Yes, an Iphone that cost, a perpetually broke student, 40 some odd labor hours. It may seem like a decadent extravagance, but if you’re among the few that are suddenly compelled to find out the legal status of Shyne’s case or the definition of “foofooraw,” it’s an absolute necessity. Now fully de-bourgeoisified, I venture forth to introduce myself to my comrades. After a few years on the radical left, I finally found the elusive vanguard.
If I pretended like the ensuing conversation was especially enlightening, instead of bitterly frustrating and depressing, anyone who has journeyed on the left would call me out. To preface, deep down inside I wasn’t seeking any sort of critical, pedagogical dialogue. I really engaged with “comrades” from the RCP for the same reason that I tell small children that the Easter Bunny is a revengeful and jealous god — I find these kind of exchanges hilarious. As a matter of fact, they are the only things that keep me going.
The conversation should have been significantly better than the ones I normally have. After all, while talking with the two redshirted cadre, I took special care to avoid thinking about Thai transsexual scat porn, time travel paradoxes or Michael Moore’s sex life — things that normally consume me. They hit me with their usual scripted routine, but I interrupt them and announce that I was already a Marxist. Why, they ask, am I not a member of the RCP? I mention that the RCP doesn’t have a presence around Washington D.C., plus I was a “post-Trotskyist” of sorts. They had traveled to DC from the Bay Area and New York respectively, but didn’t seem to have any idea what a “post-Trotskyist” could be. I asked them why they put so much emphasis around this elusive Bob Avakian character.
The response came quickly and almost robotically, “Bob Avakian’s renowned thinking is a bomb that needs to placed in the hands of workers and progressive-minded peoples.” I think the words “people’s struggle,” “imperialism” and “socio-capitalist” were also thrown about rather incoherently.
The younger RCPer added that, “The RCP is the only group committed to actually going out and doing ‘stuff’, not just sitting around and talking about doing ‘the stuff’.”
I asked what kind of “stuff” the rest of the left should be doing and I was met by a rant about the Black Panther Party, which Bob Avakian helped start (don’t tell Huey) and how it did real “stuff.” I suddenly understood why Michael Harrington sometimes liked to present himself as a social democrat.
I should have probably given a Chris Cutrone-esque prognosis about the unforeseeablity of relevant, emancipatory politics with the coherent composition of the left. I could have recommended some more sane socialist thinkers, like Irving Howe or Joseph M. Schwartz, to these comrades. But it was cold and I didn’t really give a care. Plus, my Christian Zionist friend a half-block away was giving me a dirty look.
I mention that I had to go and the older Avakianista kindly offers his contact information. I’m sure, dear reader, that you’ve been offered contact information that you never planned to use before. And I’m sure you waited patiently, while your new “friend” fumbled for a pen and a scrap of paper. I’m sure you smiled and took the number and promised to call if you were ever around. But there are always alternate choices in life, if only you’re enough of a jerk to go and find them — so I just walk away, like a tall girl impervious to my 5’7” charm.
***
Jonathan Swift compared satire to a mirror in which people could see every face besides for that of their own. I ran into the RCP, one of the left’s most absurd and pathetic little cults, but the brief encounter was a microcosm for what’s wrong with the entire radical left. The RCP is languishing on the fringe of American society, spouting arcane rhetoric and claiming to speak for a class that is largely not even conscious of its own existence. What were those RCP cadre hoping to accomplish by hawking their crappy r-r-r-revolutionary wares? Did they want to gain a couple more members to cover for those constantly leaving (all small sects suffer from a high turnover and attrition)? The same can be said for the more sane (it’s all relative) and respectable members of the socialist left like the International Socialist Organization. It begs the question, is this how students of the Russian Revolution really think mass movements are born? By building a small sect with the right line member-by-member, brick-by-brick until it can pose the question of power? By tailing movements, exaggerating the level of struggle and deemphasizing their own impotence?
Deep down inside all the groups on the radical left, from the ISO to the CCDS, recognize the marginalization they face and the need to actually engage with the polity. Unfortunately, the bulk of these groups work under the illusion that their “front groups” serve this purpose. The quasi-Stalinist Party for Socialism and Liberation has the ANSWER Coalition, the ISO has the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, etc. etc. What we have in these groups are a mix of crude, autocratic centralism, a secretive, conspiratorial emphasis on “respectable” front groups and an absurd overemphasis on hawking their party publications. Ostensibly, this magic recipe amounts to “independent class action”, but what it really does is create self-sustaining, marginal, groups. On the flipside of the coin, groups like the Communist Party USA have shown astounding naivety about the character of the Obama administration and try to maintain a tenuous connection with the mainstream by giving left cover to the Democratic Party.
If you put a gun to my head and asked me if the left could be a powerful enough force in the 21st century to pose the question of power, I’d take the safe bet and say absolutely not. But, there can probably be a more effective politics. A good start would be working towards a regroupment of a democratic, internationalist, socialist left in an open, democratic, multi-tendency organization that respects freedom of intra-organizational debate (there is a simpler term for this, but apparently it’s taboo). The tasks for this generation’s left is creating this kind of coherent, pole of opposition that would multiple by many times the effectiveness of our current ventures. The truth is there are many talented figures on the left, people with real skill and experience organizing and relating to working people. The status quo is not doing this latent talent justice.
As I looked back at the Christian Zionists and the confused RCPers, I felt like that big, dumb horse at the end of Animal Farm. My eyes flickered from face to face, from Maoist to Christian fundamentalist, from stogie of Avakian to weed-carrier of Hagee, and it was impossible to tell, which one was which.
This isn’t a call for “bourgeois respectability” or for acceding to the ground rules of mainstream politics, but it is somewhat of a reality check. Comrades, like Ice Cube said to NWA, “Here’s what they think about you”:
Attending the [National Equality March] was a “waste of time at best,” Barney Frank told a reporter a few days before. “The only thing they’re going to be putting pressure on is the grass.”
According to NBC News’ John Harwood, administration officials viewed demonstrators–and, in fact, anyone who criticizes Obama from the left–as an “Internet left fringe” that “needs to take off their pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.”
Ouch! They certainly aren’t using any Vaseline, but they might be right. Maybe getting ignored at the G20 was precisely what the left deserved. The left can’t just pop out of nowhere a few weekends of a year and expect to me treated as a real political force instead of an absurd aberration. In all likelihood things will never change. The psuedo-left loves the word “resistance”, because it likes the almost biblical struggle it represents. We, the weak, the holy, against them, the Goliaths, the malevolent. We’ll lose, but at least we’ll have a history of bitter defeats to reminiscence about. This fatalism is deeply engrained on the left. Che Guevara’s martyrdom won’t be forgotten by the psuedo-left, but what of the real, living, contradictions in Cuban society today? How many young Black Panthers died in Oakland, while students cheered on from Berkeley? Has this adolescent thirst for violence really changed in a left willing to cheerlead anyone, no matter how reactionary, in their resistance against “the Empire”? The fetish of “resistance” implies that there will always be the enemy taking the initiative to resist. The left, whether conscious of it or not, will probably be unable to break its addiction to this paradigm and engage in more productive politics that might actually one day yield victory. Victory will beget a counterrevolutionary resistance — the reactionaries resisting the agents of History. Isn’t that a novel idea?
There has been some inspiring recent attempts at unity and organization across the broader Western left. Specifically, SYRIZA in Greece, the Left Bloc in Portugal and the New Anticapitalist Party in France. These nations have a far more vibrant left and more residual class consciousness, but there are certainly some lessons to be learned.
Maybe I’m a jaded young man, but I feel like these banner drops, the reactionary yearnings for pre-capitalist society, the black blocs, the “revolutionary” newspapers, the self-appointed vanguard sects, are at worst a waste of time and resources and, at best, some entertaining foofooraw.
There’s so much wrong with this article, it’s hard to know where to begin.
First of all, if anyone has read Revolution Newspaper, it would be clear these quotes supposedly from someone with the RCP are utterly false and distorted.
To continue, the author says upfront “the question of power” is off the table and the most we can hope to do is create a “pole of opposition.” This is an argument to settle into the world as it is, and in the US it reflects a serious amount of American chauvinism (just please tell me what good your “pole of opposition” is going to mean to the people around the world who made your iphone?).
His disdain (and yes, jaded attitude) for confronting the reality of the world, and looking seriously at what it will take to change it is connected to his disdain for Avakian and the RCP.
Look at our planet with clear eyes: potential ecocide, over one billion people go hungry every day, thousands of farmers committing suicide because of debt, millions of women sold into sex slavery, 2.3 million people imprisoned in the US, police in this country shoot one person at least every day and it is continuing illegal and unjust war and torture… I could unfortunately go on and still not fully describe or capture the outrages most people are forced to suffer through…
This is reality, and it’s a reality that should drive people to examine radical, and yes, revolutionary solutions.
It is clear the author of this article has not read what Avakian has written on the theory and strategy for how a revolution could be made in a country like this. This is not an easy question, but there’s no one who has done more work on this than him. He’s also spent the last 30 years studying deeply the experience of socialist revolutions – their profound accomplishments, as well as very real and serious shortcomings – but he has not rested with facile verdicts, he’s looked at what they were up against and where they went wrong in conception. On this basis, Avakian has developed a radically re-envisioned revolution and communism. This is more than I’m going to attempt to delineate here but for anyone who is serious about changing the world, get into this new Manifesto from the RCP, Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage.
(This Manifesto also gets into in brief his work on communist method and approach, including the difference between religion and science which the author has entirely chosen to ignore.)
This kind of snide approach, this “dismissal without engagement” should be unacceptable to anyone serious about fighting for a better world.
re: dependency theory- informed, microsect- defending, bob avakian- praising rant:
>> the Easter Bunny is a revengeful and jealous god
===
PS: that little manifesto of yours has zero mention of Kautsky or Luxemburg —- some serious study of socialist strategy
. also, though you probably won’t consider my question, where does the justification for a minority to make social change come from? is it inherent, because you fancy yourself an agent of history, or does it have to be grounded in majoritarian support? you’d be surprised to hear that your impetus towards immediate radical putschism has more of the drippings of Sorel/Mussolini than Marx/Lenin.
that’s about all I have to say about the piece. i’m guessing that debates with first world Maoists can’t possibly go anywhere.
Bhaskar:
Joni Mitchell once sang that to get by in America you need a perfect mix of ignorance and arrogance.
IN your reply to the RCP-supporter you write “you probably won’t even think of this question, where does the justification for a minority to make social change come from?”
But in fact you reveal that you are denouncing theories you have not read — since in fact, Avakian has written essays and analyses of precisely that question (how to deal with the dilemmas of forcing social change without numerical majorities.)
Throughout your essay above you “quote” the RCP salespeople saying things that are obviously not things they would say. And here you posit (arrogantly) that they “probably won’t even think of this question” and then mention an important issue where they (in fact) have an elaborated view.
(Since the RCP cadre are akways so scripted, we know that they didn’t use terms like “glorious proletarian revolution” and “socio-capitalist” simply because those terms and phrases are not in their paint-by-number scripts. You invented those things — because their actual jargon and ideas didn’t interest you enough to pay attention.)
Clearly you don’t treat other people and their ideas with any respect — since you are a bit more absorbed with yourself and your sarcastic musings.
On one point I agree with you: A revolutionary movement is not built by forging some small mini-party, elaborating a fairly arbitrary set of beliefs, and then recruiting stray individuals one by one. That is not how mass revolutionary movements (and their leading cores) are built. And in some ways we should give props to a generation of activists who TRIED that method (sincerely and faithfully), because their experience can help us sum up the problems with that approach. That is one of the ways new insights emerge, and we should respect those who tried false experiments and their contribution to the larger process. (That would, in fact, be to mirror a scientific approach to ideas, including wrong ideas.)
I also largely agree with you that we need a larger formation, attracting revolutionary and internationalist forces for some common practice and ongoing clarification-through-experience-and-debate.
But I have to say your snide, cynical and disrespectful approach to the stray rads you met suggests that you don’t know how to be a constructive part of such a formation (any more than some RCP cadre do.)
I said that I would abdicate from this discussion, but since nando’s comments were interesting I thought I would jump back in one more time….
My only intent was to tell a slightly exaggerated, but true story (my conversation was a bit longer and the older RCPer actually knew quite a lot about the party’s stance on the situation in Nepal) to annoy and provoke those engaging in the pointless and futile politics of the microsect.
I also wasn’t seriously saying that any RCP member ever said “make glorious proletarian revolution” it was a pun on “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”, which I’m sure our pinko, pop-culture literate audience got.
“On one point I agree with you….”
you mean my main point?
“you are a bit more absorbed with yourself and your sarcastic musings.”
true.
“you don’t know how to be a constructive part of such a formation”
double true. luckily such a formation doesn’t exist, so I’m not missing out on all the fun. i’m quite good at working with mainstream progressives though.
“(any more than some RCP cadre do.)”
would RCP cadre be a part of the regroupment of the democratic left that I pine for?
also I was saying that I didn’t think the RCP-supporter would engage in my question, without immediately dismissing me as a “right-revisionist” or whatever I am in Mao-speak…. not that they didn’t have the intellectual rigor to ask those questions.
the defensiveness from portions of the fringe left was expected. I intentionally provoked this response. the main moral of the story for someone like you is that— the Hagee people and the RCPers provoked virtually the same sort of response from me, a self-professed socialist. that’s the absolute truth, so you might want to consider what chance these sort of tactics and rhetoric have in broader society. the fact that I’m an irreverent jackass is absolutely superfluous. I could have told you as much.
/ now i re-resign from this discussion
I think you had two main point (not just one).
The point we agree on is that the strategy of mini-sects is not going to produce a revolutionary movement. Not just (or mainly) because they turn you off — but because we can see from the whole arc of their experience that they are unable to generate traction, and are unable to adapt.
But your other point is that everyone sucks. it permeates your discussion. It explains your willingness to distort what people say and believe (and claim it is justified by poetic license and humor). You posture with an unjustified superiority — make demeaning assumptions about people. And don’t (for a second) grant them the dignity of good intention, or serious efforts, or justified urgency. You don’t seem to have a clue of what Avakian has said or explored (so that you can dismiss him based on the woodenness of his followers) And so on…
And on that point we don’t agree. And it is not a small point of disagreement.
Revolutionary politics requires a generosity toward people as they attempt to change the world. Dialectics require that we can “divide things into to.”
The very core of the revolutionary project is a sense that people (ordinary people with all their prejudices, foibles, ignorances, self-deceptions, and more) can find a way toward liberation. That people can sort through various methods, ideas, and organizations — and (one way or another, over time and great effort) congeal in a common movement of liberation.
That process is invisible to people with your sensibilities and arrogances.
Cynicism may be justified most of the time — but is the moments when it is not justified that we use to build something better for humanity.
Shit on people if you must. Mock those who disagree with you. Invent ways in which you are smarter or superior.
But on that, your OTHER main point, we don’t agree.
If Bhaskar believes that EVERYONE “sucks,” why does he single out for praise “SYRIZA in Greece, the Left Bloc in Portugal and the New Anticapitalist Party in France”?
I’m talking about his obvious cynical and snide and onesided view of people — of human beings who cross his path.
It is a question of worldview and a view of an individual’s place in that human landscape.
The fact that he may or may not like this-or-that trend somewhere — I’m not aware of that, and am not referring to that.
Nah J, lessons from Maoists in Peru or the Philippines are a lot more relevant to us than how the Left Bloc were able to cobble together the Trotskyists, left greens and democratic socialists to the point where they are legitimately the most popular party among the Portuguese youth and are making inroads with unions that have traditionally affiliated with the CP or the center-left.
It’s a bit presumptuous to try to figure out someone’s worldview from a piece that took “poetic license” recanting a 19-year old’s encounters with groups of people engaging in different types of fringe politics, while intoxicated. But my final word (seriously this time) on the subject is that the piece was meant to put a mirror to the portions of the left that do have decent politics and do subscribe to democratic radicalism. I don’t care much about engagement with those willing to sweep aside the historic failures and crimes of Maoism or Stalinism. I guess I could have been sadder that those comrades were almost freezing to death for a futile pursuit, but at the time my reaction was more eccentric. But what of their own, or your worldview? Tell me that these natural impulses were more antisocial than crimes done to the persecuted, humiliated, tortured, and even murdered “rightists” during the heyday of Mao or the 32,000 deaths that were the product of the Shining Path’s “resistance” in Peru.
I can’t think of anything more cynical or callous than the dismissal of these crimes. Not mistakes, crimes. Again, I have to recall Irving Howe’s question — “Can there be a decent left?,” in addition to the question that I asked in my own way in this piece, “Can there be a relevant [democratic] left?”
The RCP is out to start a new stage of revolution and that they seek to bust open a debate – society wide – about the history and future of the communist project. They have made deepgoing criticisms of staying close to the margins and turning what is and should be a living and vibrant communist theory into another safe, religious, dried up dogma (they’ve made these critiques of the communist movement internationally and those same approaches in their own party – all of which you will again find in that Manifesto).
For those who are interested in this – forging the beginnings of a movement for revolution – be a part of seriously engaging these ideas. And I would in particular invite you to come hear Raymond Lotta at NYU tomorrow (and in LA and Chicago in November).
“EVERYTHING YOU’VE BEEN TOLD ABOUT COMMUNISM IS WRONG, CAPITALISM IS A FAILURE, REVOLUTION IS THE SOLUTION”
NYU, New York City, Monday, October 26, 7pm
Cantor Film Center, 36 E. 8th Street
http://www.revcom.us/lottatour
One thing that stands out is that the RCP claims they “seek to bust open a debate – society wide” — but are literally incapable of dealing with the arguments people raise except through pre-existing scripted remarks. Every comment is canned. (And each is distilled from Avakian quotes, or the latest campaign of the party’s paper.)
On a basic level it is obvious that such methods can’t “bust open a debate” — nor can they actually engage (or answer) the real questions (and insights!) that other people have.
It is a pretense of engagement, and a reality of disassociated preaching by the deeply isolated.
See what you’ve started, Bhaskar?
Bit of trivia — NYC DSA member and important labor journalist Robert Fitch (if you haven’t read Solidarity for Sale, you gotta) used to know Bob Avakian back in Berkeley in the early 1970s, back when the RCP was the Revolutionary Union.
Other commentaries on the silliness of Chairman Bob and his crew:
http://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/07/where-have-you-gone-bob-avakian-the-nation-turns-its-lonely-eyes-to-you/
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee100
i just want to say that i was with you on inauguration day, and you actually had hypothermia, so idk if i can take this seriously.
and whoever wants to punch you in the face has to get through me.
Threats of violence are not allowed on this blog and will be deleted.
2:45 pm: the day before Obama’s inauguration. This occurred when you were flirting with Rachel Maddow. And yes, I’m pretty sure I almost died on inauguration day. Like I said— poor circulation.
I think a good fistfight once a year is good for the spirit and I must say that I’m awfully touched by the reaction my piece as generated. Disgust and impotent anger beats apathy in my book any day and the attention is really tickling. But in all seriousness I’d take a punch if that’s what it took to challenge people who have openly claimed that Stalin didn’t commit any “crimes”, he only made “mistakes”.
I’m pretty sure this means I kind of fail at satire by Swift’s definition, because these last few legionnaires of the Stalinist left are seeing their own reflection in the RCP. I only beg for clemency when the peasant revolution comes rolling down from Appalachia.
PS: re: “Shyne as a ‘lumpenproletarian’ shit”. Wow. Isn’t that just loaded with veiled racism. I thought the Stalinoid left—at the very least— was good at caring about wrongly imprisoned victims of the ‘justice’ system. I guess not if they are polluting good proletarian culture with their “bourgeois decadence”.
Like so many on the pseudo-left of the United States, you are:
-Still valiantly fighting the ghost of Stalin and his infinite legions of defenders. I admire your courage. There are so few people out there willing to point even a mere finger at Djugashvili.
-Romanticizing marginalized elements of capitalist society as representing foci of privileged sources of anti-capitalist consciousness–a position I think is implicit in the penchant of US leftists to admire, or at least be concerned about the fate of, individuals like Shyne.
-Proud to point out aspects of your life that relate to consumerism or day-to-day living in the US and revel in the contradictions that you see between that existence and–what you see as–your leftist political views.
-probably without any experience of working with the WWP or PSL or ISO or RCP but you are certain that their members are automatons (even if you are willing to grudgingly concede in the comments section that they may not be total drones). [I've done a decent amount with the WWP and PSL, less with the ISO and minimal with the RCP, just to note.] Callinicos’ final comments to Michael Albert, after the latter had described SWP members as robotic, in their debate on strategy are quite pertinent here.
-entangled in the political discourses of the last 30 years or so. Your views are inundated with the individualist ethos that pervades the Western left and this is embodied in your strong aversion to party politics and organization, fetishization of social democratic or anarchistic organizations (8-10 years ago you probably would have listed the Zapatistas as a model), conceptualization and understanding of cultural issues (e.g. consumerism, incarceration) in individualistic and libertarian terms, and, just to add one more thing, pleased with a vulgar and petulant sense of humor.
I won’t get belligerent again, because I don’t want my comment deleted this time and neither will I complain about first comment being scratched. Fair’s fair. Were it my page I probably would have deleted it, too.
One last thing.
Слава Сталину!
Сталин, Берия, ГУЛАГ!
“entangled in the political discourses of the last 30 years or so. Your views are inundated with the individualist ethos that pervades the Western left and this is embodied in your strong aversion to party politics and organization, fetishization of social democratic or anarchistic organizations (8-10 years ago you probably would have listed the Zapatistas as a model)”
~ Nothing could be further than the truth, but keep those lines, because they actually do apply to most of our domestic left. If you read a bit more closely I implicitly said the left needed a centralized organization that respects the freedom of intra-party debate. As a frequent derider of the EZLN and the tendency of “radical liberals” and anarchists to see a couple occupied factories in Argentina as the next Petrograd Soviet, my views organization are pretty classically Marxist…. which were actually the class organs of “social democracy”, like the SPD- pre 1914.
Personally, I think that Lenin would be appalled at the structure of the sects you mention and it’s also very funny that you claim to uphold “party politics”…. there’s virtually no internal debate and real party politics in the RCP and groups of that sort. Hell, Lenin in 1917 had a hard time getting his own controversial articles published in Iskra…. no one was expelled from the Bolshevik Party other than Tsarist agents until after the revolution… etc. Real vibrant “party politics” exists in groups like the SP-USA that do to their credit allow multiple tendencies and permanent factions.
Worth reading.. on the topic of organization and strategy: (also read Lars Lih’s writings if you haven’t yet)
http://radicalebooks.blogspot.com/2009/07/revolutionary-strategy-by-mike-mcnair.html
(I think that the ISO could be a part of a left re-foundation along these lines…. despite my (significant) disagreements with their model of politics it isn’t fair to mention them in the same breath as the RCP)
You’re equating the microsect and the frontgroup with the party. The saying “working class is nothing without a party and everything with it” is a bit arcane, but I think it still applies today. Your rant was entertaining, but I’m not sure how you missed my main point. Also, I’ll admit that my problems with a lot of these Stalinoid groups aren’t just that my tactics differ with them, but I think they have a pretty dreary “socialism from above” conception of a post capitalist society that I would actively oppose.