[OPE] Post on the German and Russian working class movements

A good review of two books on the topic:

    Party and Class in Revolutionary Crises
    Charlie Post

    "Clearly, the Bolshevik experience of building an independent
    organization of revolutionary workers and intellectuals, with almost
    two decades of common practice in the class struggle, was a key
    factor explaining the success of the Russian workers' revolution in
    1917. The attempts to forge such organizations in Germany and the
    rest of Europe 'on the fly' --- in the midst of the most sustained
    wave of revolutionary workers’ struggles in the history of the
    advanced capitalist world --- failed.

    It should be clear, however, that the construction of that party in
    Russia was not the product of the Bolsheviks’ theoretical
    superiority to other left-wing social-democrats before 1914. Lenin
    did not claim or develop an original 'theory of the party,' nor did
    the Bolsheviks achieve programmatic-theoretical clarity on
    revolutionary strategy in Russia."

    <http://www.solidarity-us.org/current/node/3119>

//Dave Z
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Received on Sun Jan 9 08:13:30 2011