Re: "Nero fiddles while Rome burns"

Hari, Marv,

You are both asking the same question about the ULP, so let me answer it in the only honest way I can. I do not know. What is public is the founding statement, the principles and guidelines Hari quoted, and the defense campaigns. Nothing on the site tells you who decides, by what majority, or what a participating organization is bound to once a protocol is "established." I am a member of Solidarity, not a delegate to the ULP, and I am not going to invent a structure for you.

I will say that the question is the right one and that it is exactly the question I have been putting to DSA all year. If the six organizations cannot say who decides, then the ULP is a masthead with six names on it, and I will have to say so. I will ask, and I will report what I am told, including if the answer is that nobody has worked it out. Better that than defending a formation I cannot describe.

Mark, you are right that I answered a point you had not made, and the correction about the date was pedantry that did no work. Withdrawn.

On the substance we agree almost entirely, and I think your Cuba example is stronger than you are using it for. Every additional demand narrows the front; the demands that can carry the most people are the blockade, the SSOT listing, and the escalation; the maximalist meta-demand and the endorsements of the Cuban government's policies are a filter that keeps out exactly the bodies you need. Yes.

But look at what you found and what you did with it. NNOC has assembled a list of resolutions passed by city councils, labor bodies, and civic organizations opposing the embargo and the listing. That list is evidence of enormous latent opposition and evidence of something else: not one of those resolutions obligates the body that passed it to do anything. A central labor council votes that the blockade should end and then goes back to its agenda. The resolution is a statement of opinion by a body that has no mechanism for converting its opinion into an action, and no one inside it can be held to it.

So subtracting demands is necessary, and it is not sufficient. Narrowing the demand widens the potential front; it does not create the machinery through which anyone joins it. Out Now! did not work because it was one demand. It worked because NPAC and the SMC had chapters, staff, a date, and the ability to deliver bodies on that date, so that "Out Now!" named something a participating organization could be asked to do and be seen as failing to do. The demand was the agreement; the apparatus was what made the agreement mean anything. In Cuba today we have the demand and not the apparatus, which is why the resolutions sit in a list.

Marv, on the ULP: I did not say it resembles a united front on the scale you mean, and I would not. Six small organizations are six small organizations, and I am not going to do arithmetic that flatters us. What I said, and all I said, was that it is a body already constituted, already meeting, with a date on the calendar in September. That is a place where a proposal can be moved. Regroupment is a fair description, and I do not think regroupment is what saves anyone.

But take your own alternative seriously, and my point gets worse, not better. You are right that the forces with mass reach are DSA, Indivisible, 50501, and the milieu around left-reformist Democrats, and right that a party to the left of the Democrats, if it ever comes, comes from there. Now ask what any of them can be held to. Indivisible and 50501 can call a date and turn out millions on it and can commit no one to anything the day after. DSA has the membership and, as I have argued at length, cannot discipline an officeholder it elected on its own platform. The mass forces are real. The binding problem is at its most acute precisely where the numbers are. That is not an argument for the six. It is an argument that the diagnosis does not go away when you scale up.

On freedom of criticism, your objection is the serious one in this exchange, and I want to concede its weight before answering it. You are right that most blocs that tried it dissolved, and paragraph 21 of the theses says as much in advance: the danger for parties not yet consolidated is dissolution into a formless bloc. The condition is a condition, not a description of what usually happens.

But it has happened. August 1917 is the case: the Bolsheviks fought Kornilov alongside a government they were simultaneously denouncing in print, and Lenin's formulation was explicit that fighting Kornilov was not support for Kerensky. The bloc did not dissolve. Kornilov did. The KPD's open letter of January 1921 to the SPD, the USPD, and the unions is the other: concrete demands, common action proposed, and no suspension whatever of the polemic against the parties addressed.

And the control case proves the rule from the other side. The Anglo-Russian Committee survived the General Council's conduct in May 1926 and went on surviving into 1927 because criticism was withheld to keep the committee alive. What the bloc then produced was cover for the people who called off the strike. That is what a united front purchased at the price of silence buys you.

Which is why your #42924 is the strongest thing said against your own position. You write that if either partner had attacked the other over the turn to the bourgeoisie, unity would have ended. Agreed — and that is the mechanism of a popular front, not a united front. Once a section of the bourgeoisie is inside the alliance, its participation is conditioned on nothing being said about class collaboration, and the coalition's floor becomes its ceiling. Between workers' organizations, no partner holds that veto, which is why criticism there is survivable. Where naming what an ally is doing would destroy the bloc, that is information about what the bloc rests on.

On Trotsky and the period, I will be brief, because my argument does not need him. Take your causal account as given: The revolution did not spread; the relationship of forces shifted, the Comintern's turn followed from that rather than from an error in the ideological realm, and the Left Opposition's isolation was mostly due to external factors. I can grant all of it. My actual claim is that an organization unable to enforce a decision cannot be a party to an agreement; the rest is irrelevant. That is a claim about form. It applies to the six, to DSA, to the NNOC, and to whatever comes after all of them.,

--
Tony


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