So as some of you might know, I’m a member of a marxist party, maybe one of the biggest of Western Europe currently.
The party is not ML. It takes part in electoral politics, though its main focus is building class consciousness at the work places and in the local communities. Getting into parliament is beneficial because 1) money and 2) raising awareness.
The party gets criticized by groups on the margin. They sometimes specifically criticize the MLs in our party for joining, because we are not part of what Lenin described as a Vanguard Party. I guess they are not entirely wrong, I’m not going to call my party ML even though there is (increasing) room for ML sentiment.
My problem is, I don’t really know what to do with these critics. Leaving the current party, with tens of thousands of active members and actual political influence, for a ‘true ML party’ with several dozen people who struggle to organize a book club, does not sound like the way to go. Stop calling myself a ML? That would seem weird as well.
How do you guys look at this?
Currently grappling with this question myself, germany has 2-3 small ML parties, but there is one that is revisionist and doesn’t support AES, but they have a bigger reach, higher budget and more (and more diverse) members
Since apathy and alienation are at an all-time high around here, I really don’t know what to do
It depends on what your purpose is but, as a party which has not achieved a successful revolution, the party line on AES means very little.
It’s hard to imagine a successful socialist revolution being established that won’t rely upon China as a major trading partner and I suspect a lot of the pre-revolution positions will shake out in a post-revolution situation due to the material conditions.
Say your country achieves socialism tomorrow and it is faced with internal and external attempts at subversion, an effective blockade from the US and potentially other liberal economic blocs. Where do you think that your country will turn to in order for economic development and general support?
It’s going to turn to AES countries, undoubtedly. Either it will be incredibly isolationist and almost certainly doomed to fail or the pragmatic elements of the party will seek out support from AES countries and those ties will develop and sentiment towards AES countries will shift within the party as a matter of necessary.
But I’m rambling.
Maybe you can use the party as a platform to develop political connections. Maybe you can instigate a split. Maybe you can stay within the party and drive a line struggle.
There are many options but it depends on what your goal is and what the conditions are.
Thanks for the words of wisdom!
DKP is really the only communist party in Germany worth mentioning. And they are fairly based on issues relating to anti-imperialism. Their official publication UZ (Unsere Zeit) seems generally quite solid on most geopolitical topics and i haven’t seen much of an anti-AES line either there or from Junge Welt which is another somewhat sizeable publication with close ties to the DKP. Now whether they can be called reformist or not that is a matter of debate and definition, some so-called “anti-revisionists” would insist that the CPC itself is revisionist, so we need to be a little critical whenever we see that term thrown around. I find what is more important than having a 100% (by whichever standard you want to measure it) ML line, is that they take more or less the correct and principled position on the issues that really matter in practice.
And also they’re not Trotskyists, so that’s good.
Just to clear up any confusion, the revisionism part was aimed at the MLPD, not the DKP. But thanks for the solid overview!
MLPD are super sus and honestly probably some sort of op by the feds.