~ 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.

-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!

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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”.

and whoever wants to punch you in the face has to get through me.