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Parties are one way, a very important and particular one, by which the masses of people exercise their own agency, their consciousness and their ability to rule.

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In fact, there is no other way.

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You say Leninism just "doesn't work." What's funny about that is the amount of time you spend arguing the history of what it has done, while leaving your council-type theories to be the one true way.

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I'm sure you recognize that what one platoon or even division does in time of war is service the strategic goals of the army. Well, politics is war. And sometimes the plain fact is that choices must be made. Hard choices that aren't often any clearer or easier even after decades of hindsight.

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...I think it should be noted in all fairness the depth of self-criticism revolutionary communists have gone through even on cardinal questions. Acting like people are power mad, or deluded because you think that political mediation and synthesis are impossible is deeply unfair and philosophical bunk.

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The masses are inchoate as such, organized to produce and reproduce the conditions of their own oppression. The power of science, class consciousness and a revolutionary vanguard is the only way, (how's this for categorical?), that people can cease being objects and become subjects.

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Parties aren't just how the workers and other oppressed people will come to rule. They are how any social class becomes conscious of itself, its direction and means.

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But the Shanghai Commune, despite my sympathies with the highest aspirations, is similar to Kronstadt. Form doesn't always define content. The defense of the socialist state, the ability to wage protracted political war -- even within the communist party at the highest levels -- isn't just a matter of opening the gates. It's just not that simple.

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You also downplay the real ultra-leftism that was going on, particularly among some sections of the student movement.

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Your answer to hard questions is to say the questions themselves are what produce the answers you don't like. And you have the same answer for everything...Leaders are the problem, politics is suspect, and mediation is itself the enemy.

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Why we're not debating the track record of "the masses" ruling in some unmediated way is self-evident. Revolt ain't revolution.

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Redstar argues that people who say there must be leadership (or "mediation to representation") just are power mad (i.e., just want to be the mediators).

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Still confusing ethics with politics?

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After over a decade of organizing popular movements and institutions, I can't help but observe that every single one has had a mediating function (people), including – indeed especially – those that denied it. This last point is key.

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Anti-authoritarians, in my experience, deny their leaders so that they are totally unaccountable.

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This gives rise to leadership by class (those who can afford to travel and not work full time to earn an income), age (post-college graduates dominate leadership) and race (those who uphold these ideas tend to be disproportionately white). It also means that political line is often less important (or clear) than position in the "network" and control of communications.

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I would love to hear you whip up some ideas because the movements I see fixated on "immediatism" are often the most undemocratic of all.

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Perhaps the article about SDS that influenced me the most was "Grand Coolie Damn" by Marge Piercy. She was a poet, novelist and early feminist who broke down how the structures of SDS gave rise to "machers" and honchos, reinforced (or failed to challenge) traditional patriarchal relationships and in general was the epitome of the hierarchical system they criticized elsewhere.

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I like and agree with the "participatory" part, but deeply believe that democratic formalism is often (intrinsically) a way of figuring out disputes among the like minded. It is not so good for resolving fundamental contradictions, such as befell SDS when they were moved on by PL or, for that matter, Shanghai.

I feel your affinity for this model. But I think if we approach it idealistically instead of materialistically, democratic illusions often (enough) mask the power relationships in a "circle of equals."

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But you're also confusing a tautology for an analysis. Groups do what they do, in power or out, and saying "see, they always do what the leaders want" is also just a way of observing that groups do whatever and that they have leaders. It's like blaming the sun for shining.

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No, the successful entrepreneur uses all the forms of workers' control and collective decision making. He may covertly despise these indirect, time-consuming methods. Or he may have contempt instead for those who attempt to work without them, and feel morally superior because of his attachment to the forms of participatory democracy. This distinction is equivalent to the different between the modes of the male supremacist and the male liberal: but both aim to retain control.

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Accountable leadership must be explicit.

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You act as if it is impossible and doesn't happen, but it does by 1) choice of participation, 2) the process of figuring out the line which line the leadership adopts, and 3) by having a public program.

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Without clear program, acknowledged leadership and agreed methods of work, the anarchy of "participatory democracy" is ALWAYS an informal tyranny.

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For example, whether I agree with how it went or not, I find the RCP's public/private program process very interesting and something I've certainly never seen any "anti-authoritarian" group carry out. They use entirely informal means (personal ties, sexual relationships, casual meetings, creating pariahs, etc.) to enforce their agenda while charismatic "spokespeople" write books about participation, etc. Very clever, hard to pin down and still pretty obvious when non-participants look at it.

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On the flip side, I've also seen several bullies denounce collectives as "authoritarian" because they couldn't piss all over the people working in them. It would be funny if it wasn't so common.

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I had to deal with the ISO (and other Trot grouplets) as a student organizer and I can promise you that nobody -- and I mean nobody -- felt the tickle to "out-Trotsky" them for a second.

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In fact, socialism gets drearier and grayer the farther its lived experience gets.

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I have heard the argument put forward that all 20th century socialist revolutions were actually capitalist revolutions in countries where the bourgeoisie itself wasn't up to the "historical" task. (e.g., the "primitive accumulation" of the Stalin years, etc.) Those who have made this argument had complex ideas about what it implied. I don't agree with it, and I don't think the historical record bears it out.

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I agree with Avakian's take on Shanghai, but I think we have to wonder "what if..."

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Look: on one level it was mass democracy, and thousands of kids forming a loose and bold organization. And there was a lot of great debate, and wrangling. And that was not just cool, it was great.

But when it came to real organization, planning and decision making, the pretense of "participatory democracy" often (even usually) hid the emergence of an unofficial core of "heavies" (who often had different and opposing lines from each other). It was not even narrowly the "fault" of the heavies themselves, really, it was part of the dynamics of an organization conceived and organized this way.

Redstar may claim that he was there and it wasn't so. But in fact, anyone who was there (and awake) knows it was.

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In a very real, and profound sense, revisionism is a default mode in real life.

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So let me just say, we need a discussion that deals with the reality of how leadership and centralism and line struggle work in a genuine communist party (like Mao's or Avakian's), rather than recycle anticommunist assumptions and stereotypes as if they were facts.

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First hand knowledge is not the key to correct summation. All knowledge ultimately is rooted in direct experience (observation, action, production, experiment etc.) But most summation and learning is on the basis of INDIRECT experience -- summing up the broader experiences of many people to make a synthesis.

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... it is quite possible for the new generation to deeply understand and sum up the SDS experience, even if they were not there.

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You may be skeptical that we can learn from history, and care very much what events felt like.

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You mention Russia and the best history I'm aware of was Jack Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, and it gave an excellent invocation of how those days felt.

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I'm not dismissing real experience, but I do think the power of science, whether social or natural, is in discovering necessary relationships instead of partial observations.

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Maybe I'm reading too much into your argument, but I suspect you think any definitive statement (except semi-anarchist dismissals of definitive statements) is intrinsically oppressive.

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But perhaps more importantly, I have extensive experience in "participatory" projects and when I read the histories of SDS I had a eureka moment. I knew the truth of how "participatory" structures cloud the power dynamics not because Kirkpatrick Sale said so, but because I saw the same shit using a slightly different vocabulary in movement after movement. Maybe it's also apparent after the fact that the people most wed to the "democratic" structures were the old guard honchos, while the decidedly less elite later waves gravitated towards democratic centralism, anti-imperialism and a recognition that in order to build a working class movement it might be important to build groups around line and process.

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But the difference is that leaders in ML groups are accountable to the organization's general line and practice.

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SDS was never able to rise above being a "resistance" organization. They didn't have a vision of how society should be put together, the social base to work among, or even an across the board respect for the orthodoxies of participatory democracy.

Further, from what I remember, SDS shattered with PL taking formal leadership. Even if you think that method is so great, it's hard to not notice that a skilled faction hijacked it.

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By adopting a "left" position against hierarchy, discipline, unity of action, governance as such, etc -- this "democratic" line leads into pretty open counter-revolution. The bourgeoisie gets to rule, we get to complain and feel self-righteous and on it goes.

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In participatory politics, meetings don't generally decide anything.

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Practically, this is why ten cops can wade into a crowd of five hundred people and disperse them. Without unity of action agreed upon and led, people are a mob, smart or otherwise.

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But to bring out the issue a little more deeply, RedStar assumes that the relationship between leaders and led is inherently exploitative. This implies that leaders, whether as representatives of line, facilitators or "heavies," are somehow getting over on people.

But that is the opposite of how things work. Leaders enable activity, and without them, there often is little more than sentiment. So movements that reject dynamic leadership tend to be subcultural and scene-y. Custom substitutes for direction.

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My view on participatory democracy when I was in SDS was that the theory was a joke.

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The huge mass meetings were important and exciting. Many people learned politics, and had to fight through what they thought about the different lines that fought.

These chapter meetings, and larger regional meetings, and the national conferences, the big rallies that decided take-overs or whatever -- all of this was important political life. And an important part of the times and scene.

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It was not a scam. It was what it was: i.e. a mass democratic organization (i.e. not a cadre organization with democratic centralism). It operated (somewhat primitively) as just that, a mass democratic organization. And since it didn't have a consolidated, trusted leading core, it kept trying accrete one.

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The point is that (as Bob Avakian has told in humorous ways, in his recollections) someone came to those meetings with agendas. Meetings were held before hand to decide what would be discussed (and often what would not be discussed). There were networks of people (formal and informal) within the larger chapters that congealed and fought for their lines. Very often, the meetings would lean one way, and in practice the decisions would be wrenched another way.

Objectively, inevitably, leadership structures emerged (and competing leadership structures emerged). And because they were not formalized they operated informally (sometimes they were denied, sometimes they were acknowledged, sometimes they worked by credibility of local leaders).

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The point is that mass democracy without a stable leading core ends up producing (objectively, of necessity, from the needs of the moment and the limitations of such forms) networks of half-hidden, unaccountable, often unofficial leaders and cliques. And it produces an organization that is unable to make a decision (and didn't succeed in any unified national actions, ever -- at least after Kissinger organized the 1967 march on Washington).

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When it tore itself apart, we were furious. It was unnecessary.

And yet the ground had not been laid for it to hold together on a principled basis (again because of the primitiveness of the times.)

The SDS had to die so that organized communist trends could emerge.

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So, what do you make of all those folks who make a distinction between leaders based on where they lead? And who find great liberation in collective, directed work? Are we all sheep?

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What's startling is how similar the "movement" phenomenon is. Attempting to make the movement everything, whether by "participatory democracy" or "consensus" and "direct action" seems to play out in roughly similar ways.

Do you have any thoughts on how it's gone?

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The chapters I saw close up had (by the time I saw them) almost no one who mouthed the words "participatory democracy" -- it was all about anti-imperialism, revolution and increasingly whether to form a van[guard] or not. There was struggle between currents that were "community organizer anti-imperialists" (who over time evolved into more openly social democratic forces) and forces who were more focused on how to build a mass revolutionary movement with deep roots in the Black community and multinational working class.

Even before I joined SDS, I was focused on becoming a communist, and was seriously trying to understand what this "Marxism-Leninism Mao Tsetung Thought" was all about.

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Often people do things despite their conception.

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In particular: For example, if you build a movement that does encourage debate, critical thinking, independent analysis and initiative....[but] If you do not have a style of work and an outlook that "embraces but does not replace" the profound contributions and insights of people in many spheres.... then EVEN IF YOU SEIZE POWER, you can't do anything good with it.

Your intention of having a "dictatorship of the proletariat" will (sooner or later, in one way or another, despite intentions going into it) put you in a position of acting like a dogmatic tyrant -- and (even in the service of "good policies" and revolutionary changes) deepen the divide between the new state and the masses, and drive the masses (including intellectuals and non-proletarian masses) OUT of political life.

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The folks in SDS started out wanting to have "participatory democracy" -- which basically what a form of "bottom up rule" in a rigid sense, and spokespeople but not real leaders, and a sense of local autonomy etc., rather than concerted and unified organizational efforts.

In fact, that conception does not work. You can't build the movement we increasingly wanted, you can't have the results most of us wanted, you can't have the impact we needed to have, on that basis. Because you don't have unity of will, because you don't have a real vetting of ideas, because you often have the most advanced and correct ideas extinguished by the relativism of democratic illusions.

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One of the problems of all such "mass democracy only" visions is that what people want is often not what they objectively need. What people can vote on as a plan, is often not the road and path that reaches their objectives. Which is a reason why one needs to train, identify, and develop a leadership core...

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