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 • Revolutionary Democracy

Posted by arthur at 2005-11-26 11:51 AM
I'd like to see more discussion on the issue of how communists and other revolutionary democrats cope with the paradoxes involved in a radical minority organizing to win over a majority in broad mass movements. This is a much broader global question which has come up in the more parochially Australian topic: "The Kerr coup":http://www.lastsuperpower.net/disc/members/116080529061


It is also separate from the question of what governmental and electoral systems we should advocate for western bourgeois democracies which has also come up there but is likewise of general rather than narrowly Australian importance.


Keza referred to the experience of how open public meetings deciding the policies of the protest movement against the Vietnam war in one city was directly related to both a more "left" line prevailing of solidarity with the Vietnamese against imperialist aggression and a much wider mass mobilization against the war in that city than elsewhere.


Similar experiences in the student movement of the late sixties. I think that's dead right. But Bill's also dead right about fighting fascism being more important than democratic procedures.


In fact we were denounced as an undemocratic minority imposing the views of the few hundred people who attended the open public meetings and insisted on fighting for victory against imperialist aggression, upon the more moderate "anti-war" views of the hundreds of thousands of people who participated in the actual protests -  and of course these people were  in turn denounced as an undemocratic minority, obstructing a government, supported by a large majority of the people, in waging a war in defence of democracy against "totalitarian" enemies of democracy.


Revolutionary democrats have done our share of dispersing constituent assemblies and dragging whole nations into modernity, kicking and screaming. Not just communists - the tradition goes back to Oliver Cromwell and the rule of the Major-Generals.

Right now we are a (pitifully) small minority of a (pitifully) small pro-war left.


As revolutionary democrats and communists our task is to win over the middle forces, isolate our enemies and impose our conquering spirit to change the world.


 We obviously cannot do it by bleating that our views are more popular than our opponents views since we are in fact, as always by definition of being a radical, let alone revolutionary, a minority.


We have to do it by taking on and challenging our opponents with a conquering spirit - ie we are debating them for the purpose of defeating them and imposing our own views in order to change reality. Some of us have experience of having done it before. All should have confidence that it will be done again since history hasn't stood still for long ever since a minority proposed coming down from the trees.
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 • Re: Revolutionary Democracy

Posted by keza at 2005-11-30 12:43 AM

Arthur wrote:

I'd like to see more discussion on the issue of how communists and other revolutionary democrats cope with the paradoxes involved in a radical minority organizing to win over a majority in broad mass movements.


Yes, I  think we do need to talk more about this paradox .


By definition revolutionaries must always (or almost always?) be a minority and as far as I can see  there will never be a society in which  there aren't some people out in front pushing for something that to the majority seems dangerously radical. However I don't know whether it's so much a matter of "imposing our views"  as of forcing the debate. 

When Fukuyama proposed that the end of the cold war and the triumph of bourgois democracy marked "the end of history",  some "marxists "  opposed him on the grounds that he had got it wrong.  The "end of history" would not be reached they argued,  until we had achieved a classless society.  But this is a crude misunderstanding of Marxism because on a fundamental level Marxism  is  about   the constancy of change - the way in which things must keep on changing.  (see the dialectics thread).  That's why Marx referred to communism as the end of pre-history.

Anyway..... if there's no end of history then there's always going to be a tension between the majority and the dangerous radicals who are trying to push things forward.

So how can a minority oppose the majority without being seen as "undemocratic" or perhaps "anti-democratic?  I think its a matter of being prepared to confront the majority by creating situations in which they can't so easily continue to be passive. 

Those in authority always like to talk about "the silent majority" while labelling the radicals as "noisy", "domineering", "undemocratic" etc.    When I was a Monsah student,  the Student Representative Council" (SRC) was dissolved and replaced by a form of student government based on mass meetings.  Although these meetings were often very large, they were almost never attended by a majority of students.  The debates at these meetings were very intense and although the most radical motions were often defeated, the whole  process  of public debate  had the  effect of  pushing things to the left at a very rapid pace.

The authorities jumped up and down saying that the process was undemocratic because a minority was taking decisions "on behalf of the whole student body" - that most "ordinary, decent  students"  did not want to spend their lunch times participating in these meetings - that it would be more democratic for them to elect represantatives to an SRC who could then take decisions on their behalf - and so on.

I tend to think that the "paradox" of being a part of a tiny minority while at the same time being a revolutionary democrat  is at least partially resolved by taking a position which is in principle opposed to the idea that "the silent majority" should be able to get away with being passive and not wanting to get involved. 
 
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 • Re: Revolutionary Democracy

Posted by arthur at 2005-11-30 04:59 AM
Using the process of public debate to push things to the left at a rapid pace was a conscious policy which positively welcomed radical proposals being defeated at mass meetings provided that that the enemy had to mobilize still larger numbers of (initially conservative) students to participate and outvote the radicals (upon which they started becoming radicalized themselves).

This general orientation was developed into tightly disciplined tactics for particular campaigns and individual activities by a highly organized tiny minority which had a leading core that was literally a "handful", a cadre force of a couple of dozen, a few hundred activists and was able to influence thousands.


This involved continuous study of concepts such as "the mass line", "protracted war", "united front" etc as the enemy tried to isolate the radicals from the masses while the radicals tried to mobilize the masses to overthrow them.

A "conquering spirit" was central. This approach has much in common with the "creative destruction" of Sombart/Schumpeter and the neocons, or Erisian "creative disorder" or Nietzschean "will to power".

Communists and revolutionary democrats are not liberals. We're troublemakers. We don't echo liberal platitudes about the virtues of an open mind. We pry minds open by actively challenging our opponents.
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