From owner-marxism-international  Fri Apr 18 13:25:58 1997
Subject: Re: M-I: PANIC LEFTIST:  FRAME TEN
Message-ID: <19970418.132341.12518.0.JSchulman@juno.com>
References: <3.0.32.19970418060043.006889b4@mail.algonet.se>
From: jschulman@juno.com (Jason A Schulman)
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 13:24:05 EDT


On Fri, 18 Apr 1997 14:51:50 +0200 Robert Malecki writes:

>I will leave the remark about the "Spartacists" unmentioned. But 
>Please tell us about your understanding of the "Vanguard" who everybody
else
>misunderstands.

Not "everybody else."  But certainly the RMC people.

Ernest Mandel, one more time:

"I do not believe in 50 or 100 people standing in Market Square beating
their breasts and saying, 'We are the vanguard party.'  Perhaps they are,
in their own consciousness, but if the rest of society does not give a
damn about them, they will be shouting in that marketplace for a very
long time  without this having any result in real life, or worse, they
will try to impose their convictions on an unreceptive mass through
violence.  A vanguard organization is something which is permanent.  A
vanguard party has to be constructed, has to be built through a long
process.  One of the characteristics of its existence is that it becomes
recognized by a substantial minority of the class itself.  You cannot
have a vanguard party which has no following in the class...Marx says:
'Do not forget that the educators need to be educated.'  You do not have
people who are in posession of the full truth and who go to the masses in
order to preach this full truth."  "Vanguard Parties" (1983).

There is no "ideological vanguard."  One's organization only becomes a
"vanguard" through actual struggle, through its activity in mass
movements, through its leadership.  

I could accept the Trotskyists in the UAW in the 30s as a vanguard; ditto
for the International Socialists who helped build Teamsters for A
Democratic Union..  The plethora of sects who shove newspapers in one's
face are not vanguards, nor is the RMC.

-- Jason
______
"Radicalism in the United States has no great triumphs to record; but the
sooner we begin to understand why this is, the sooner we will be able to
change it."  Christopher Lasch (1932-95), *The Agony of the American
Left* (1969).




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