From:    Louis Proyect 
To:      marxism-international
Subject: Re: M-I: Leaders and Caudillos of the Left
Date:    Sunday, April 05, 1998 3:23 PM

Jim Monaghan:
>What does everyone else think is the healthy democratic norms of a
>Revolutionary party.

The most important thing is to reject the notion that the party is
organized on the basis of some declared "correct" program which is rooted
in revolutionary continuity back to Marx. This is a guarantee that you will
become a cult. All Lenin was trying to do was build a nation-wide socialist
party in Russia where there was none. He was not trying to invent a new
type of party. This unfortunately was the legacy of Zinoviev who took the
Bolshevik model and made a fetish out of it, with rigid organizational
norms and escalation of program into some sort of ahistorical, essence. We
are in the same position Lenin was in in 1890. Nobody but ourselves can
create a socialist party. It has to be done from scratch. But it also has
to incorporate the positive examples of the past, which includes all sorts
of seemingly opposed tendencies: Mao, Trotsky, Guevara, etc. Mainly it
requires that we think for ourselves, a daunting task in the world of
cult-sects that dominate organized Marxism.

Louis Proyect



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