From: 	 Ben Seattle [icd@communism.org]
To: 	 marxism@lists.panix.com
Subject: The core of the working class program
Date: 	 Tue, 2 Jun 1998 09:45:18 -0700

Louis Proyect:
>We had big differences on the party-building question. He thought
>that James P. Cannon's concepts were still valid, but that the
>current SWP leadership had abandoned them.  These concepts
>revolve around the need to define a correct, revolutionary
>program and then recruit people to the organization that defends it.
>My disagreement, which I'm sure comrades are ready to scream
>at since they've heard it so many times in the past, is based on
>what a program should consist of. I don't think it should include a
>wide range of historical and international questions that Marxists
>are almost inevitably going to disagree strongly on. The program
>should focus on issues of the current class struggle.

Ben Seattle:
I think the most important part of the program, the core of the program,
must be the overthrow of bourgeois rule and its replacement with a
system of workers' rule.

Such a system must be capable of mobilizing the vast energies of the
masses and preventing a bourgeois restoration during the lengthy period
of transition to a classless society.  The final goal is a communist
economy capable of creating wealth and abundance for all without the
need for either money nor all-powerful central planners.

I think there are many misconceptions about what such a system of
workers rule would be like. These misconceptions arise, in my opinion,
from the view that the measures of repression and one-party rule (which
were an unfortunate necessity in Russian conditions while Lenin was
alive) would be appropriate in a modern stable society.  Such
misconceptions serve to obstruct intelligent discussion about what
workers' rule would be like in the modern world.  I would like to see
such discussion develop.  Until such discussion does develop, there can
never be any significant consensus on the nature of the fundamental
tasks of the working class.

Ben Seattle ----//-//
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