Illuminatus Primus wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:SpaceMarine93 wrote:I agree with that sentiment. But it is still possible. So long as the hope that it is still possible, regardless of difficulty, we might have a chance in succeeding.We have to try. America, even the world's, future depends on the right people succeeding.
And I did suggest that we could use any mean necessary. ANY MEANS
We could, I don't know, establish a vanguard party like Lenin did, made up of ideologically similar people, intellectuals and organizers with merit, to unite all the divided factions into a strong coherent force that may effectively oppose those motivated by ignorance or greed in power.
Step back. Consider the problems.
1) A vanguard party works when you've got large numbers of people who are suffering enough to
trust the vanguard as a way of solving their problems. Here, precisely the difficulty is that most of the society's problems are abstract; the people affected are those who will be alive twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now. You can't motivate a mass popular movement led by a cabal of technocrats that way, because you haven't given people anything to fight for. It's a lot harder to do it that way than to mobilize a revolution among a peasant class whose grandparents remember being actual serfs owned by the nobility and whose rulers regularly machine-gun demonstrators.
2) Setting up a network of propaganda and indoctrination like you describe takes decades- it would not have been possible to form the Tea Party twenty years ago, even if a somewhat larger percentage of the electorate believed the same things, because they weren't as ready to bash someone's head in BY ANY MEANS (echo there is deliberate) to get it.
3) One of the eternal problems with vanguard parties and "we don't have to tell people the truth to get them to follow us!" is... well. The best explanation I've seen Yudkowsky's site
Less Wrong, which is very much NOT the be-all and end-all of anything, but is at least fairly well spoken on certain points of philosophy. He calls it
dark side epistemology: the tendency to, as a way of protecting one's lies, to encourage people to
stop thinking. To take an easy example, it's easier to get a creationist to stay a creationist after you've convinced them the scientific method is heresy and never to be allowed inside their brain where it might do damage. In general, any argument that revolves around "let's lie to people in the name of truth!" winds up with an entangling net of lies that force the liar to suppress the truth entirely; take that as a cautionary tale.
4) Bear in mind that the rich, the powerful, the movers and shakers, are selected by an asymmetric process. They are probably better at social manipulation and the problems of management than you, because
that is how they got rich, and stayed rich. Trying to beat wealthy interests at their own game is not necessarily a good strategy, and must be considered closely.
This is an absurd and empty caricature of Lenin's politics and what a "vanguard party" signified up to and past 1917 in Russia, and has no basis in historical fact. What happened didn't have anything to do with "dark side epistemology" or some such conceptual failings. And I say that as someone who does not consider himself a Leninist.
IP, I'm trying to educate a silly child in basic moral philosophy as applied to politics. I am
not trying to provide a detailed analysis of communism in Russia, except perhaps as a useful illustration of what some of the child's ideas might look like if put into practice by adults.
Now, the child started this with: "We could, I don't know, establish a vanguard party like Lenin did, made up of ideologically similar people, intellectuals and organizers with merit, to unite all the divided factions into a strong coherent force that may effectively oppose those motivated by ignorance or greed in power."
There's that phrase: "vanguard party." Now, to me, a good working definition of a "vanguard party" would read something like this:
'A group of people (who consider themselves to be) more enlightened than the average member of their culture, and who therefore take it upon themselves to lead revolutionary changes in that culture, while keeping control over the party's "platform" of objectives and tactics within the party. The party may recruit from outside, and must in order to survive, but it keeps its own council on matters of doctrine. It does not
ask the masses what kind of government they'd like; it decides for itself based on ideology what the government should look like, then sets out to create such a government by whatever means are available and necessary. It does this
on behalf of the people, but the people are not consulted in the matter, because they lack the revolutionary consciousness (or equivalent in non-Marxist terminology) to know what's good for them.'
That strikes me as a reasonably faithful representation of what I know of Lenin's original thoughts on the definition of 'vanguard party.' Any problems with this definition so far?
But (and this is important) such a definition of "vanguard party" can be generalized. Because "vanguard party" in a
generalized political sense does not necessarily mean the vanguard party of Lenin's Bolsheviks. You can have, for instance, a radical Islamic "vanguard party" which adopts some of the same attitudes about revolutions as Lenin's Bolsheviks. Substitute the tenets of Wahhabism for Marxism, and "piety" for "revolutionary consciousness," and while the substance of the ideology is changed
the organization stays much the same.
This despite the fact that any decent Bolshevik (hell, any decent socialist in general) would be utterly hostile to Islamic fundamentalism and vice versa. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, over and over, we've seen that the tactics of radical revolutionaries can closely resemble other even when the revolutionary ideologies are as different as night and day. Tactics are not the same thing as policy.
So let us ask, in the general case, what issues come to mind as potential problems with the scheme "let's make a vanguard party to promote our ideology!"
As I mentioned in (1), one thing you need is for the masses to be desperate and unhappy enough to follow a revolutionary party's lead. In times of relative peace and prosperity
for themselves, people will not be much interested in revolution. For Russian workers and peasants, this condition was met- was met
very well by the time World War One had dragged on a few years. The people were desperate, and the times were ripe for revolutionary change.
In the developed world, particularly the US, the time is not ripe for revolution. Too many people are too content to risk dying in a revolution. People still have a lot to lose, and would like to think they will soon have
more to lose. The fact that there are long-term structural problems with the society, and that these problems may be impossible to resolve without revolution, is not enough to make revolution possible.
And as I mentioned in (2), creating vanguard parties and propaganda machines
takes a long time. It took fifteen years from the writing of
What Is To Be Done to the Bolshevik Revolution, and that was under very favorable conditions. Czarist Russia was arguably a place where
only vanguard political parties which organized in relative secrecy and kept their own council could thrive, because overt mass-action parties devoted to peaceful, non-revolutionary change were banned or neutralized by the monarchy. Much as mushrooms will grow in darkness, where grass will not, revolutionary vanguard parties can grow where the typical political parties of a democracy cannot.
And while we're on the subject of favorable conditions, World War One probably accelerated the revolution by years, by bringing the Czarist system to a state of utter collapse that made a mockery of attempts to fix it by peaceful political processes during the tenure of the provisional government. Even so, we have that period of fifteen years or more between the formation of a vanguard party and the circumstances that permitted it to succeed. Similar lengths of time apply in most other states that experienced a communist revolution, or other ideological revolutions.
Now, I doubt the silly child who started this discussion has the attention span to participate in such a process. He strikes me as the sort of person who will get impatient when the world isn't fixed in a span of two months and rage-quit. There are people on this thread who I do respect enough to think they could participate in such a project- but the person I was writing to isn't one of them, which colored my original response. I wouldn't have made such a point of (2) if I were talking to, say, Stas Bush, because he's got a damn brain.
And then there's what I mentioned in (3), which you dismiss as inapplicable to what happened to the USSR. And I must apologize for that, because I should have done a better job explaining what I was talking about in the first place. I allowed myself too much indiscipline on account of the low intellectual and political caliber of my audience.
To make my point more clear: there is a fundamental problem with the concept of a vanguard party. It may not be unresolvable, but it's still a problem, and it plagued communism throughout the 20th century in all its forms that I am familiar with.
Vanguard parties are great for leading a radicalized populace against an authoritarian government that oppresses their ideas, and staging a revolution which throws out the remnants of the
ancien régime. That's what Lenin designed his vanguard party to do- to cultivate revolutionary attitudes, to imbue a cadre of leaders with the idea that revolution was
necessary and that mere trade-unionism and a fondness for regular elections wasn't enough to fix what was wrong with the country. Which worked: they got their revolution. The Party has triumphed.
[The Party may be communist, or may be something else entirely, as long as it is revolutionary, remember that]
At which point, Lenin's original question, "what is to be done?" is answered- you've taken "what is to be done" and
done it. The next question, phrased much the same, is "what do we do now?" Now that the revolution has driven out competing social control mechanisms, and the vanguard party is firmly in power, what does it do?
Which is where the problem sets in. A vanguard party, by nature, will come to regard itself as the guardian of correct political thought, because that's the entire point of its existence in the first place.
So what happens when the guardians of correct political thought run into five million peasants who are all complaining that they don't like some of the Party's new laws? Are they going to stop and listen to these people, these unenlightened masses who have not been awakened by the flame of revolution, who do not and cannot understand the profound necessities which any Party man worth his membership card would perceive?
Remember that these are the very same peasants in whose name the Party fought and won the revolution. And that the Party was founded and organized as a vanguard
specifically because the peasants lacked awareness of the need for revolution. The Party's job was to educate those peasants and form them into a revolutionary army, not to stop and listen to them. Naturally, of course, the Party recruits promising members from the peasants, they aren't a hereditary aristocracy or anything, but non-Party members who basically just sat on their asses while the Party did the hard work? Why care what they think about such matters? Push them aside, and on to business!
This kind of thinking is very common- as I said, it has been a terrible plague on 20th century communism. It also afflicts other revolutionary movements, like Islamic fundamentalism- the Iranian fundamentalist government has done many things that made a lot of Iranian citizens unhappy, because it (being run by theocrats) perceives necessity where ordinary people perceive a senseless waste of time. In a somewhat different form, it even afflicted the earlier French Revolution- which was not led by a vanguard party but managed to fall prey to some of the same problems, as the champions of revolutionary virtue who saw the necessity of mass guillotinings and the massacre of resistance in the Vendée. Letting them secede from the revolution was not an option, for instance- one cannot allow the forces of reaction a foothold!
And who knows? Maybe this is really necessary, maybe you
do have to break a million screaming eggs to make that omelette. But what I know is that among revolutionaries, the perception of necessity often outruns the reality. The psychological pressures within a revolutionary vanguard are strongly in favor of going too far, and rarely in favor of going not far enough.
So talking about the way that revolutionary vanguards, once in power, tend to assume absolute power and become corrupted accordingly, is vital. It should not be overlooked by anyone talking about revolution and vanguard parties, especially someone whose political thought process is as simplistic as "this is bad, we must stop it by ANY MEANS," with capitalization included. Someone who has no clear visualization of what "ANY MEANS" looks like, or of the ways it can backfire.
Maybe you do not need this bit of education. I think the child I was talking to did.
And then there was my final point, (4), again aimed at SM93. That point raises a problem for anyone who thinks that you can copy the means of bad men to defeat them- all to often, they got where they are by being better at their methods than you are. If you're so good at manipulating public opinion, good enough to overpower them by using the same basic methods,
why haven't you already done it?
Getting into a head-on confrontation with a ruling class in the areas the ruling class has to be good at in order to rule at all is a losing game. Any wise reformer will be looking to create asymmetry in their favor, not symmetry.
Which is not to say that someone with real political sophistication wouldn't already know this- I only brought it up because such sophistican was lacking in the original poster's arguments.
