Ask Lemmygrad

Cosmonaut is mostly just the newsletter for the Marxist Unity Group in the DSA. MUG, in my experience, is full of unread chauvinists. Their main thing is to say we need to amend the US Constitution, lmao. "Revolutionary socialists".

I think it is a shame that ML groups don't merge, as it does mean that there is some level of dysfunction, but that is not a good reason to not create or join ML orgs.

Similarly, I don't think the author appreciates the true value of front orgs, which is the protection of the cadre org from both external attack and as a way to pipeline liberals without needing to let them into your organization and fuck it up with their terrible opinions. DSA does the latter and that is why it is garbage despite having so many members (on paper). You literally don't have to read or do anything to join and MUG has similarly low standards.

I do think that there is an overprescription of an aesthetic of democratic centralism, which I view as more of a situational tool than something essential for all communist organizations. The hard work of making it truly function is more about personal relationships and building the organization's capacity through education in theory and practicr and modeling productive behaviors while discouraging toxic ones. How to treat each other well and constructively, to protect each other and through this the organization and not the other way around. Only then can you have productive struggle rather than endless splits and "why I am leaving" essays.

The organizations themselves proclaim democratic centralism, but in reality, there is no public debate about party positions allowed between congresses. At the congresses debate, takes place as little as possible and is usually led by an unelected central committee that composed of full-time staffer careerists

idk, you aren't supposed to publicly debate the parties position between congresses... that is the entire premise of democratic centralism. This person clearly doesn't know what democratic centralism is... also, idk about other orgs, but in PSL an "unelected central committee of full-time staffers" is just straight up not true in my experience. The CC is most definitely elected and idk if there are really many "staffers" to speak of. this person is speaking out of their ass

While the Second International primarily made rightist political errors, the Third International primarily made ‘ultra-left’ political errors. From this observation, we can come to a sort of center, where the positives and negatives of both Internationals can be learned from. This overall position, of building a mass party around a program for revolution through patiently consolidating the organized forces of the proletariat, could be described as “Centrist Marxism” or “the Marxist Center”. While the term ‘centrism’ is often used by Trotskyists as a term of derision, we use it here in this sense of a strategy that would mean patiently building up the forces of the revolutionary proletariat into democratically organized institutions, rather than trying to build a small “vanguard” or “militant minority” that will either intervene in a spontaneous movement or spark a revolution through armed struggle.

I don't know, the article seems to be making some pretty big leaps in reasoning based on limited data. I might be being unfair, I'll be honest, I'm struggling to get through it. Trying to universalize based on a couple of examples of going too far in one direction or another to find a goldilocks zone seems a bit absurd for the scale and particularity of communism on a world and local level.

What we need is to move beyond an attempted systemization of the Comintern and Lenin in particular, but rather continue the systemization of Marxism as a whole based on the entire history of class struggle. This is what Lenin did. Lenin didn’t see himself as a “Leninist”, creating a new stage of Marxism, but as an orthodox Marxist applying a system of thought to his own conditions. This doesn’t mean we should reject the most vital contributions of Lenin, for example, his views on revolutionary defeatism and imperialism. What it does mean is that much of what made Lenin great was already in Marx, Engels and even Kautsky. It means, much in the same way that Marx critically learned from the failures of the Communist League in developing his theory of the party, that we must critically learn from the failures of all past Internationals, especially the Second and Third (which historically had the most impact on mass politics).

I don't get this. An "orthodox Marxist"? This is from a publication that says it wants to do scientific socialism, so I'm assuming they mean for things to develop and they imply such with "applying a system of thought to his own conditions", but that's not orthodoxy.

The forces of the proletariat are weak and divided, it will take a long-haul approach to develop a party that can be a vehicle of independent political action. This doesn’t rely on any kind of ‘get rich quick’ scheme, where the party uses a mass line or transitional demands to attract the working class without actually convincing and winning them over to revolutionary politics. It means actually having to develop the actual organizational strength to put the working class into command of society. One has to essentially build a ‘state within a state’ which stands in opposition to the bourgeois order and command the loyalty of proletarians in their majority against the capitalist state. We cannot hope that crisis simply accelerates the working class into such misery that it has no choice but to go on mass strikes to form workers councils and then try to insert our militant minority into the movement to guide it on its proper track. Building a real alternative to capitalist rule requires, as Lenin pointed out, a principled core that is able to stay politically consistent while utilizing every tactic possible. No space left open in civil society, where we can agitate and educate, should be left unutilized. A class-independent workers party which does not neglect this fight is a necessity.

The workers’ party itself should be a prefiguration of the workers’ republic, in the sense of its internal governance. This means it should practice a form of democracy distinct from and beyond the democracy of liberalism. This means experimentation, investigating new forms of collective decision making and seeing what works. The party should be economically organized (as all parties are firms) on a cooperative basis with no salaries that allow for careerism. The Central Committee should be directly elected by the membership and recallable. Open debate and tolerance of factions, rather than the imposition of an ideological monolithism are key if the party wishes to demonstrate to the class that communism, not capitalism, is the truly free society.

Those who hope for a “democratic road to socialism” don’t desire a new revolutionary state that is backed by the masses. They treat the liberal state as a neutral site of class conflict that the proletariat can transform to its own ends over time, slowly enough to avoid a period of social conflict where a rupture in the class nature of the state will occur. This idea assumes we can sneak a revolution pass the bourgeoisie and ignores problems like capital flight that crash attempts at social-democratic reforms. This can’t simply be combated by a hope in pressure from “mass action in the streets”. And it ignores that the capitalist class will happily resort to breaking with democratic norms in face of a government that seriously threatens the rule of property if need be, even if socialists have a democratic mandate.

I'm not seeing where they address the issue of the state doing everything in its power to destroy what you do before it can even get started, beyond the article paying the point lip service that you can't do it all peacefully.

They seem to focus on the US, but I can't find a single mention of the Black Panther Party, which seems like a pretty important piece of data to leave out in past attempts at building political power and trying similar things to what they are talking about.

It's a good article, my experience with US communist parties/orgs has been largely about too much centralism and not enough democracy. Tailist lines but more importantly tactics, a never ending building of "revolutionary consciousness" that entails bashing anyone that doesn't want to play controlled opposition for the democrats an adventurist. I have to clarify -- building revolutionary consciousness is the goal, but it's done through building dual power, not before. By limiting their organizing tactics to police sanctioned parades and attempting to build revolutionary consciousness among systemically reactionary groups, they're continually doomed to fail and thus function to forever condemn anyone looking to build a functional movement or even do a functional action.

Another aspect in the USA is the labor aristocracy. These orgs fail to see this as an integral part of organizing in the USA due to the fact that many of them are labor aristocracy, forever prioritizing the "white working class" and not building a base among the non-settler classes and then reaching out for settlers to work under non-settler leadership. As it is we have continual issues of organizations headed by white people saying they represent the liberation of black and indigenous people, having those same people abused or even sexually assaulted in the organizations on a systemic basis, and when they call the organizations out they get fed-jacketed. I legitimately think these orgs would have a better shot doing revolutionary work if they admitted their labor aristocracy base, put forth theories of transcending whiteness and committing class suicide, and put themselves at service to the revolutionaries around the world and at home instead of considering themselves vanguards to a cause that isn't in their class interest. No more shit like PSL creating theories of indigenous liberation that just recreate the colonial relationship that exists today, because as long as that kind of thing keeps happening the actual revolutionary classes of america will never have anything to gain from them.