Party and Organizations

Why would i join a communist party? Give me one good reason to join a stagnant political entity that, at best, will fight for social democratic reforms within the capitalist system while spouting social democratic bullshit and occasionally say something actually leftists but never act on it.

Why would i choose that when i could (an am) and active participant in the labor moment of my country that actually accomplishes things through collective struggle that is very and truly active in trying to further the goals of the working class and providing a viable alternative to the capitalist structure?

...

i misread that, my mistake.

what is it that your labor movement accomplishes? And how is it different from a party?
What are your economic and ideological policies?

We kept our colleges from being privatized for 3 years now, and we kept many state owned companies from being sold to local and foreign capitalists, thus preventing these factories/etc from falling into foreign hands and ultimately losing any right of property for them.

I am a baker.

But Zizek is only pretends to be an Stalinist ironically to piss off liberals and is very much anti-stalinist.

lacan.com/zizek-suicide.htm

Is that you in the picture?

I'd join a party if they weren't ineffectual. I live in the the UK, and the communist/socialist party makes zero effort to get themselves known.

Why not join the labor party to help comrade corbyn and practice slick entryism , the UK is a bastion of Trotskyism isn't it? Are all the trot parties too sectarian?

we are well aware of this. He is still an interesting philosopher, he has good criticism of post-modernity. The party has no 'official' stance on him, I am telling you off-hand when we analyzed him a few times.

No it's some Bosnian worker, but my workplace looks pretty much the same, uniform and everything.

That sucks. There are cases of no good party, and from what I've seen the 'progressive' parties have some hang ups like supporting China, which has reverted to capitalism even back during Deng. Are they inactive, or are they simply too small in a place as large as the UK to make themselves known?
Also, link to their site?

M8 this place couldn't be further from that.

www.cbgb.org.uk
Membership of less than 1000
Makes no effort to advertise
Basically vestigial.

They're not the only ones.

mentioned SRP.

But SRP's website seems to be inactive since 2014 or so.

I think the problem in Croatia is that everyone wants to be the middle class. Being a worker, laborer is shameful and a job for those who couldn't finish university. That's why you have hundreds of university students serving coffee and beer to tourists. They think it's temporary until they can leave and go to Austria or Germany, and be construction workers there.

HDZ is in power and the right-wing is getting stronger. Fascists are literally beating people up who express leftist views. It's a grim situation.

MASA is trying to reorganize itself as a workers syndicate. I'm gonna try and go to a few meetings. If they're going to be a syndicate then it's better to start a branch of the IWW I think. They aren't political, but are trying to improve working conditions within the existing capitalist system.

Another problem is that people are right-wing, especially since the war in 91-95. My family has been partisans in WWII and I've always been proud of that. Other people my age are proud if their ancestors were Ustashe. Disgusting.

Pretty sure Lenin never planned on killing most of the old guard, establishing a monstrous bureaucracy or support autocrats like Chiang Kai-shek or Hitler.

yeah, that looks bad.
christ, we have 400 members, most of them war pensioners, and about 30 active members, and we still accomplish a lot of shit. Not as individuals, but we organize people outside of our party.
Che only needed 25 people to take Cuba.

I just called up some friends of mine from the party, we actually have semi-regular contact with SRP. They are not marxist-leninists, but that is irrelevant since they are still progressive. I have heard positive things about them, I'd recommend you at least to pay a visit to their party, ask about their plans for the future, their actions, their ideology, etc.
The left is very weak in croatia, just like in Serbia.

It is the same here, to the letter. It is a very sad state of affairs.

Same happens here, they prowl on old men returning from protests. Here they are trying to rehabilitate fascist war Collaborators, Nedic, and I am sure you already heard they rehabilitated Drazha. Where ever we find fascists we beat them and hit them, because they do the same.

this is good, just make sure that they are not government owned. 90% of the syndicates here are still government owned after the fall of socialism, it means nothing to be in one. It is a club. The Syndies do nothing the government doesn't tell them to do

It is same here with Chetniks.

marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/sep/20.htm
read this, Lenin wrote it. Purging the party regularly is a necessity.
Stalin fought the bureaucracy, but keep believing Trotsky. The only reason he cried about the bureaucracy was because he and his sect within the party got outvoted on every party congress. That's democratic, no mater how asshurt Trotsky gets.

top kek

Well, think you might have answered why people won't associate with you guys.

I've also already explained t you how that paper by Lenin in no way or form is relevant to Stalin's show trial and purges. Your counter-argument was a heap of official Stalinist documents and baseless accusations of plots like the good little cultist you are.

Its extremely different in terms of organization and tactics even if the goals are the same. For one, a party has the capacity to dictate its direction regardless or not if many of it's member choose to do such, the lay out policy rather than direct control of a movement by those who participate in it. In terms of tactics, party's are doomed to act within the framework of capitalist political discourse, unless of course they are formed in and for the purpose of revolution. The labor movement does not have this problem, it may act outside and against the mainstream political powers in an attempt to actually accomplish revolutionary goals.

So instead of being in the hands of foreign capitalists, you keep them nationalized by the local capitalist government in the hands of local capitalists? Forgive me, but i dont see how this is particularly effective in the long run in terms of revolutionary action. And you say this as if it was your party and the party alone that was responsible for these things, which i severely doubt in and respect.

What of places where no party exists? There is a labor movement in every country on the planet, but not a party, yet battles are still fought and won in the name of the workers themselves. I have never, in my life, seen a party action that was anything other than reformist at the very best, but i have seen and participated in labor struggles that have actually won things for workers even if it was in the framework of the capitalist system and i would much rather support and fight with them than a stagnant party who only goals are political and nothing for the people.

Gee what was Stalin's line with forcing the Chinese communist party to ally itself to the KMT which led to the 1927 shanghai massacare again?

So most are old unrepentant dinosaurs, they should of gave up back in the 1990's

literally all of the purges were justified. Bukharin had his right fraction in the USSR, and Trotsky had his sect as well. And all of this was fine, until they started sabotaging the government. The Bukharinites committed murder and conspired against members of the CC, while Trotsky was writing anti-party propaganda, all because he was outvoted at congress as he always was. Read the history of the SKP(b), this was common during lenin too
And later those who still supported Trotsky collaborated with the fascists to launch a coup d'etat when the soviet union was occupied, because they thought the soviet union would lose the war.
Also, unlike the trots, marxist-leninist parties support all progressive governments, even a Trotskyite government would be supported If it could ever be conceived out of theory And even in the time of Stalin governments that were very different ideologically were supported because their progressive role was recognized.
only anarchists were never supported.

wew, sounds like a bunch of speculations. Have you ever been a member of the party? We hold 2-3 congresses a year, where a plan of action is voted on by the members of the party, all the members.
The last congress of every year is to decide what is going to be done next year.
define this, because our party does a lot of ad-hoc work. Again sounds just like speculation.
I have a feeling you are assuming I am a social democrat.

So instead of being in the hands of foreign capitalists, you keep them nationalized by the local capitalist government in the hands of local capitalists? Forgive me, but i dont see how this is particularly effective in the long run in terms of revolutionary action. And you say this as if it was your party and the party alone that was responsible for these things, which i severely doubt in and respect.

the state cannot arbitrarily choose the price of it's products, so the prices of produced goods stay the same instead of rising up like that of other goods. The price of bread has stayed the same for years now, because if any company would raise it's bread prices it'd go bankrupt, since all the people would default to buying the government bread for a cheaper price. This way 'some' control is kept on the price of goods, and trough forced nationalization of the MoP no workers at those factories lose their job, as they would during privatization.
The means of production are owned by the state, not the party in power. Even if this nationalized factory participates in a market economy, it is still not owned by capitalists.

I never said this. I said we organized the protests against this. And I never said *all* of the protests were organized by us, but many were, and our organization was responsible for keeping privatization of colleges at bay.

You still have not defined your 'workers movement', nor your economic and ideological policies. Nor have you said what exactly you have achieved. If you are talking about movements like occupy wallstreet, that can be co-opted very easily.

The party is the people. It is formed by workers and students, most of us have party work in between jobs, do you imagine us as cackling bureaucrats?

At the time the USSR didn't have the economic basis to fund the Chinese revolution and this was made as a move to protect china as a political entity from outside imperialism
there is a hell of a difference when the external imperialists have ten times more advanced military technology.

Stalin massively funded and armed the chinese communists later in the chinese civil war, this is undisputed.

yes, they have stepped off from their party positions on their own volition. It is difficult to go to portests and participate in politics when you are 88-90 years old. The members that are still frisk enough to follow modern politics are still participating members however.

Basically what this means is that they stepped off from voting in the party as well, because they couldn't follow the party events and modern events.

Man yeah you keep coming back to this bullshit.

Didn't you also claim Denmark was socialist on dubstep?

no, I said it had socialist elements. Many developed capitalist countries today have socialist elements, that does not make them socialist.

What would it take to get a socialist party noticed? Spamming fliers and leaflets? Rallies? Protests/strikes?

it needs to put it's theory to practice, first and foremost, otherwise the members it gets it will lose fast. So yes, action like protests and strikes are a must, if anything to gather members for more important rallies. Fliers and leaflets are inefficient because you'd have to sacrifice a members time to stand around and deal leaflets that most people will not want due to their spooks.

The best way to spread propaganda I have found is stickers. We have one like this, but red and the arrow points to a hammer and sickle. It says "only way out" and underneath there is our website adress, party adress and phone number.

stickers are a good way to get attention because you have many angry or downtrodden people who just don't know of a movement such as this. You stick these stickers in workplaces, in public transport, on bus and train stations, it gets attention. It is the 2# way we get members, the 1# way is trough people approaching us at protests.

I personally found out about my party this way.

Noted. I'm thinking of one day founding a pan-socialist group designed to act instead of sitting around grumbling.

okay, but I must warn you it is an expensive process. You will probably need a membership fee to accomplish anything, and you will need a 'conference', offices, to be taken seriously. If you have offices you can interact with the international socialist community.

For an example, despite being a small party we still get delegates from Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, India, Russia, Germany and so on and so forth, and we send delegates across the globe as well.

Most of your funds will go into political props, literature because you will absolutely need to have books to provide your members at any instance of time, and to rent conference rooms when you want to get attention and hold a forum.

Propaganda is also very pricey, the stickers I mentioned too. A good portion of our funds also goes to leaflets we spread after or during our protests, this is the only practical use of leaflets.

you'll be spending around 1500 euros a year.

Saving all of this in a document. Thanks for the support, comrades.

no problem. Good luck and make sure to keep your members educated. My party does this by putting members trough a 1-8 month trial (they pass the trial sooner according to how they have shown themselves in practice and in theory) and give them plenty of literature to read, specifically marx and engels for theoretical works and lenin and stalin for practical works. It is paramount that they read the manifesto, socialism from utopia to science and state and revolution. If they bugger off before the trial period (ie proved to not be able to understand theory or weren't politically active, you don't need saloon socialists) at least you got some funds for the party as they payed their monthly fee.
The monthly fee should not be something big, it should be 3-4 dollars per member, start small.
You don't need people with bad understanding of theory within the party as the party is supposed to be the vanguard of the revolution. Although keep the contacts of sympathizers and call them to protests.

This is the MASA I was talking about:

masa-hr.org/

I have had bad experience working with anarchists in occupations and on protests, I can't say I'd recommend this.

In Serbia the anarchists are not ideologically consistent, and they tend to make stupid mistakes for moral reasons.

In Serbia when there was occupation of a philosophy college, to prevent privatization, the anarchists let the fascists into the college because 'they should have a right to say something about this too, we can't discriminate.'

When the fascists entered the school they started beating people into submission and the blockade was broken apart, the fascists were dogs on the governments leash.

And when we were to protest the rehabilitation of war crimminals and the anarchists came to support us, as soon as the fascist opposition showed up the anarchists ran away…despite outnumbering them.

All I am saying is look into their organization first. And check out SRP. Don't join any political organization on a blitz, do your research.

the Party doesn't even exist yet famalama

Come on, seriously. The Party will come when we qre ready, and that situation will come when we are strong wnough, a d for that, we need people organized wherever we can.

What sort of faggot anarkids do you have there?
I mean, sure… They are ubersensitive bourgie kids everywhere… But seriously?

They make the antifa(ggots) look good!

JUST