Comments on Frank and Ben discussion of Organization
An interesting side discussion developed on Black Orchid Collective blog (above). My comments:
A couple points on the Frank and Ben discussion:
On the one hand I’m seeing that how to deal with the united front was solved 90–110 years ago. On the other hand, that the key theoretical questions for the working class are answered in the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
The problem with social democracy is an expression of the struggle between reform and revolution; in which a range of views need to be addressed. One is the view that revolution is impossible. Another is the view that revolution will be a cure worse than the disease. Another is that things just aren’t bad enough to require such a drastic solution. A revolutionary ideological struggle within a united front needs to credibly address these issues. I don’t think these issues are posed in the same way as they were 90–110 years ago.
Basically Frank correctly points out that the key to whether a revolutionary party can really act in a revolutionary way is a political question, not that leaderships just go bad for no reason. The limitation I’m seeing here is that problems will continually come up that can not be solved on the basis of a fixed body of theory. I think what has happened in the CPUSA in the 30′s, USSR in the 20′s etc. is that problems came up for which there were no good or “correct” answers. The civil war and the related collapse of the economy in the Soviet Republics in the first case. This means that theory really needs to be advanced, usually when conditions are most difficult. Significant sections of workers and their allies need to learn to do theory in the sense of generating new theory for new situations in the world. Just on the learning level this is different from lets say a class at a vocational school or something. I don’t equate theory with ideology. Good theory should translate well across a reasonable range of ideologies.
As far as organization and information technology issues: I think organizational forms flow from whats happening in society, and learning theoretically and practically what this means. I don’t think there is any fixed body of knowledge that is the solution. The IT question is not just a new opportunity for how people can organize– it’s most importantly a new rapidly evolving set of forms and configurations of capitalism globally. I would start from that and then see where that leads us in terms of organization. One problem is that the working class does not control the IT.
My initial thought is that I agree with Ben in terms of political transparency on issues of policy, direction, theory and strategic conception of revolutionary activities. In many practical areas involving more immediate strategy and tactics (like where will a revolutionary team hook up at a demo, and much broader extensions of this type of question as thing develop), a whole different security question arises. A related concern is that as events in society move towards crises with revolutionary implications, the whole parameter of state repression will likely change, and any party or network or whatever will need to quickly adapt.
If the class enemy can know what the organized revolutionaries are planning and doing on a large scale in real time in a revolutionary situation, it’s not looking good for the revolution
Another issue with IT in relation to a mass revolutionary formation is the signal to noise problem.
anton666black 
Anton,
It’s true that communists have been employing united front tactics from the time of Marx, but I don’t think it’s quite correct to say that how to deal with the united front was “solved” 90–110 years ago. As a matter of fact, that’s why (I believe) the C.I. repeatedly came back to this question throughout the 1920s, just as we have to today. And the latter is related to my agreement with your statement that theory really needs to be advanced. Indeed, we MUST advance revolutionary theory or become side-line sectarians.
Just one example of the latter is that much of the revisionist left has no theory on what to do to build the environmental movement now, while capitalism still exists. Instead, they uncritically rely on Jim Hansen and others in sounding the alarm that a global ecological catastophe is rapidly approaching, but then fall back to saying we need a revolution to reverse the course, and that’s pretty much it. Now one obviously couldn’t rely on Marx, Engels or Lenin to work out a line for what to do in this situation, but one can take their proletarian standpoint and use their method to sort out a line on what is to be done, which is what CVO has been doing especially since 2006-07, e.g., http://communistvoice.org/39cKyoto.html, and the whole series at http://communistvoice.org/00GlobalWarming.html.
I certainly think that revolutionaries should use information technology (or the internet), which many of us have long used every day (and transparently too!). But we can neither depend on it nor make it our main form of activity. Driving this home is that last year the bourgeoisie talked a lot about a Facebook/Twitter revolution in North Africa and the Middle East, but everywhere in the region the less-than-electronic-cutting-edge regimes were able to disrupt the developing mass motion simply by closing down service.* And they also used the internet to play dirty tricks on activists, track them down for jailing or murder, etc. Indeed, I think it was a weakness of the movement that it had to depend so much on the internet, i.e., the masses tended to be atomized: not part of organizations with other means of communication. Exceptions were the tens of thousands of workers at the Egyptian al-Mahalla textile factory, and other large workplaces or institutions.
*Some activists were able to figure out a way to circumvent the shut-downs fairly soon. But not everyone knew how to do this, and had this alternative lasted long I’m sure the bourgeoisie would have found a way to shut it off too.
I wasn’t clear– I was trying to raise criticisms of the idea that problems had been been solved once and for all in the past– mentioning Ben’s view that united front mehtods had been figured out 90–110 years ago, and your view which seems approximately to be that working class theory equals Marxist– Leninist classics. I haven’t spelled out specific criticisms of these two ideas yet.
I would hope that the rest of my comment clarifies that I don’t think working-class theory simply equals the Marxist-Leninist classics. Indeed, I’m amazed that you would in any way think that (start clicking and reading the articles under “Past Articles by Subject” on the CV website!). Nevertheless, having the standpoint and using the method of Marx and Lenin ARE what allow us to advance revolutionary theory today. For example, those are what’s behind all of CVO’s theoretical work on state capitalism in the USSR: a new issue in the world that Marx and Engels never foresaw, and that Lenin didn’t live long enough to confront in its full form. (Beginning in 1997, see http://communistvoice.org/00Russia.html.)
Another example is the question of imperialism, which has greatly changed since the time of Lenin, and which we’ve done a little work on, e.g., at http://communistvoice.org/38cImperialism.html. But part of the revisionist left talks about “anti-colonial” struggles when there are few colonies left, and in conditions where the imperialist powers are not aiming at establishing new colonies even in weak countries like Afghanistan. Maybe the revisionists do this because it sounds more radical to them, or maybe because they’re trying to mechanically apply the ideas of Lenin (i.e., turn them into wooden formulas) or formulas of Trotsky; but whatever their reason it corrupts consciousness because it’s not scientific. The avowed anti-Leninists (anarchists, left communists, and others) at the recent anti-capitalist smack-down used the same terminology when actually debating whether the anti-imperialist struggles should be supported!