January 12, 2006: Program does not embody experience
Trotsky's argument that program embodies experience is Idealist by definition. It's wrong, and it's been a disaster for the various currents which have described themselves over the years as "Trotskyist", engendering a legacy of incompetent sectartianism with which the Old Man himself would have been appalled.
Marx was right when he noted that every step of real progress is worth a thousand programs. That is -- well, by definition! -- the Marxist view.
It's interesting that Solidarity broke with that sectarian tradition without, to my knowledge, ever explicitly theorizing the break. I don't remember anybody ever saying "Trotsky's goofy emphasis on program as guarantor of revolutionary purity was un-Marxist and has been a disaster." Maybe Steve Z. said that, I dunno. I believe that Milt Zaslow, who had a very strong impact on many of us youth types in SoCal, held this view implicitly, but I don't remember hearing him ever explicitly formulate it.
There are implications to that lack of explicitness, I think. For instance, that regroupment was never pursued outside the Trotskyist millieux. But also that the group as a whole never thought seriously about finding new forms of collegial collaboration with other currents and with independent movement activists. To my knowledge, the youth layer in California were the only ones to experiment with "privileged united front", and other nontraditional practices which, to my excuse for a mind, seem to follow inevitably from rejection of Idealist concepts of program.
I mention this now because I wonder whether explicit rejection of programmatic sectarianism might be one helpful basis for forming collegial relationships with activists formed in different traditions than the one in which I grew up.
Comments
BTW I'm not suggesting there was anything magically insightful about the California youth types who experimented with nontraditional practices. It was our good fortune to be in contact with the Mexican PRT, who seemed to have been more open to experimentation than the U.S. tradition was.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | January 15, 2006 12:03 PM
But doesn't a good political program at least in part try to draw lessons from past organizing efforts and, at least in that sense and to that extent, seek to embody (good and bad, successful and unsuccessful) experiences? My view, then, would be that program doesn't NECESSARILY embody experience.
Posted by: Ted | January 17, 2006 11:55 AM
Maybe my political point would be more clear if the wording were that program doesn't provide a guarantee of the character of an organization, and that therefore program alone isn't adequate as a line of division between activists. Practice matters more.
But, taking that word "embodies" literally. The language suggests that ideas become materialized within and through the program. Idea becomes body: kindof a Catholic Idealism, really.
Maybe it would be better to say something like, strategy aughtta be guided by intelligent analysis of past experience, and program is presumably a shorthand for that strategy. Strictly speaking though the experience, the analysis and the strategy ain't the same things, and the program doesn't "embody" any of them.
Anyway. It's just as possible to get all moony-eyed over the word "practice", which historically has been one of the great incantations on the left. LOL!
Posted by: Mark Phillips | January 17, 2006 01:40 PM