LALIT Concludes Wonderful 6-Day Congress
05.09.2022
After the first two days on 14 and 15 August, already reported on earlier, of LALIT’s 6-Day Congress, the next four days have just concluded from 1st to 4th September. For the second part of the Congress, members had arranged for months beforehand to take a “bridge holiday” on the Friday to link the Thursday’s religious public holiday with the week-end. During the evaluation session, many members said that even the six whole days was not enough! (It is worth mentioning, in passing, that between the first part of the 6-Day Congress and the second part, two of our leading members, Ram Seegobin and Lindsey Collen were down with Covid. However, they participated throughout the Congress, with Ram missing just the first day of the second part of the Congress, due to a residual cough. Their swift recovery is, due in part, of course, to their being fully vaccinated.)
The Congress on the theme “Class Struggle Towards Socialist Revolution: Let’s put our Minds to Work!” was at the Mother Earth Hall at Grand River North West. From 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day over the six days, members from branches all over the country contributed ideas, creating a deeper common understanding of the difference between LALIT and other political parties.
Our LALIT Congress contrasted wildly with the “congresses” recently held by the MSM and the Reform Party, where respective leaders spouted vitriol against their political adversaries of the moment, either “maharaja” or some poor barrister they link to their Labour enemies and hound out on drugs charges, or refining the stupid “BLD” (1) refrain into “Ni Navin ni Pravind”. Not much program in there!
Our own LALIT Congress also contrasted with our own annual Residential Seminars, which see one member preparing a talk, and then others asking questions and making comments, or breaking into small groups for discussion. This Congress, by contrast, was plenary sessions where people only spoke for the purposes of making a contribution to the thinking on the political issue under discussion. It was not our aim, either, to come out with an Action Plan. Our aim was to deepen our shared understanding of exactly what difference there is between LALIT and other parties – from the traditional Parliamentary ones, to others outside Parliament like Rezistans and the so-called emerging ones that are around “citizens” and civil society. And the success of the Congress is that we do indeed after the six days have a much, much deeper common understanding of what we are, what we aim for, and how we intend to get there.
What characterized the LALIT Congress was thus the depth of thinking during each session. This was, in turn, due in large part to the prior preparation for weeks, if not months, earlier. There was individual home-work. Everyone was required to read or re-read, and did, a list of LALIT past documents as well as from a list of work by the finest political thinkers in the revolutionary socialist tradition from all over the world – from Marx and Engels to CLR James and Ernest Mandel, from Lenin and Victor Serge to Frantz Fanon and Noam Chomsky. (Any of our site readers can contact us to request a copy of the shared reading list – some texts are even available as WhatsApp documents, and other soft-copy formats, and even audio formats for some, like the Communist Manifesto.) Each session, in addition, was prepared by a small group – from two to six members in it – which met from 3 to 5 times, preparing the session. So, much of the success of the Congress was due to the process of members preparing for it.
A resolution was taken at the end of the Congress that we will continue the Congress, as it were, during our fortnightly “program meetings” on those political concepts, which we still had difficulty coming to grips with. For example, the concept of a “transitional program” clearly needs more thinking about. The first few sessions post-Congress will thus perhaps help: we will discuss the short-comings of “minimalist” programs that used to be called “reformist” (2), where lists of minor reforms within the capitalist system are believed to somehow accumulate, one after another, until one day they become a major challenge to the inequalities, injustices and repression under capitalism, and the short-comings of “maximalist” programs that dream up some future society where everyone will be equal and free from class oppression, but which are “impossible” to arrive at since “maximalist” programs propose no pathway towards such a society. A genuine revolutionary change is thus neither minimalist nor maximalist, but involves a program that articulates analyses of the present reality we are living in here and now with the “demands” that, taken together, propose a bridge towards a revolutionary change, where “revolution” means something precise: the change of the class in power. Today, this means the replacement of the bourgeoisie’s dictatorship, its State (today in power) with a proletarian State, the proletariat being the vastly majority class. The program that offers this bridge is a transitional program. But exactly what makes it transitional is not easy to develop a clear understanding of.
Themes covered
After the first two days of detailed discussion on the concept of a “class struggle party” that LALIT is, as well as on “internationalism” that is built-in to the concept of revolutionary change, we also discussed the dangers of militarism for humanity today. There was a whole session on what exactly “the state” is. We then held a half-day session on the uselessness of the parties built on the unity of “citizens” – bosses and workers – and the dangers of “national chauvinism” and xenophobia that this kind of patriotism engenders. (See earlier news item, 16 August for detailed report on first two days.)
Then, an entire session linked the struggle against patriarchy with the struggle against capitalism, although patriarchy has reigned for millennia, while only in conjunction with the modern capitalist system for some 200-300 years. This session was presented with precision and imagination by Rajni Lallah, after weeks of preparation with another woman member. They described clearly what patriarchy is not (individual men dominating women, or men not doing enough housework), but instead presented it as a form of hierarchy, in which a few powerful mainly men oppress all women and children and most men, i.e. a left-over from feudal times.
The next session presented by Alain Ah Vee with a group of three other members was on the existential danger that capitalism is provoking with its ransacking and pillage of nature and our natural environment, provoking man-made pollution so extreme as to have caused climate change as well as the invasion of wild lands to an extent that now threatens mass species collapse. The important question of linking the struggle to save the planet with the struggle to overthrow the capitalist system was central to their presentations.
A whole day was devoted to the process of “revolution”. An introduction by Lindsey Collen, and five other members, one of whom was absent because of a bad tooth abscess. The concept of revolution was divided, for the purposes of analysis, into parts: What are the forces, today and in general, that move towards a revolutionary change towards socialism – objective and subjective – and what are the forces against. The group then provided one example, of a revolutionary change: when the French bourgeoisie roped in the emerging working class and peasantry in order to defeat the nobles, king and clergy, destroy feudal power and set up a bourgeois state. That was a revolution. A second example of revolutionary change: when there was dual power in Russia after the defeat of the Czar and the bourgeois rule and proletarian rule that both held power between February and October, 1917 before the bourgeoisie was also overturned. Then the group examined what exactly is the role of the proletarian State, as the dictatorship of the vastly majority class, in its one central historic role: expropriating the expropriators. And finally, they introduced discussion on how a classless society will, quite possibly, not require any form of “state” in the sense of a set of institutions “outside of society”, which permit a tiny minority class of capitalists to rule over a vast majority class of working people, by imposing taxes, an ideological apparatus, and armed police and military. Once there is no longer a class society, this means it is conceivable that there is a withering away of the State. Each section saw participants, one by one, after a brief introduction by one of those who did the preparation, spoke through a cordless microphone, on each issue as they grappled with the concepts.
There was a session dedicated to “The struggle for socialism. Otherwise …. Barbary!” During the congress, the quotation attributed often to Rosa Luxembourg was somewhat refined to this version. Three members outlined the two already-existing and growing forms of Barbary – one scenario being mainly total disorder following vast mass migration, nuclear war or nuclear accident, or a collapse of social order because of serial bourgeois states’ failures, and the other scenario being one of increasing surveillance, all kinds of AI (artificial intelligence), growing regimentation and repression, all characterized by data-collection and manipulation. And when we turned to the possibility of socialism, we allowed ourselves the treat of imagining a future with plenty of spare time, when we could enjoy, for example, the process of travel on a silent wind-and-sun fueled vessel on the high seas on our way to visit people elsewhere to listen to their stories. When people would be free to enjoy what they like about life: sitting around chatting, creating art or craft, walking, singing, being lazy, larking about, and, given the new expressed desire, swimming in swimming pools. (This was a reference to demonstrating masses in countries as different as Sri Lanka and Iraq taking this kind of immersion as a signal desire once they have ousted rulers from palaces.)
The session on the importance of a transitional program was the most difficult. So, we will be continuing with it, as we mentioned earlier.
The penultimate session was on “what is a party member”? “A party cadre”? And taken collectively “the party’s cadre”? We discussed how this is the key to a party’s strength – not number of electors, nor number of members, but how many members share a common understanding of what needs to be done, politically speaking. This session was so lively that each part had more people’s hands raised than any chair could handle. It was divided into: “construction” of our party, an on-going process, i.e. party-structure building including the need to recruit to neighborhood branches on the basis of a regular party publication; how members are called on to be consistently and continually full-time party members – meaning that wherever we are, people in the general public call on us to react as party members, and indeed they are right because that is our role all the time; members’ capacity to understand and participate in individual campaigns; members roles on the shop floor or office floor – both as colleagues and at the grassroots level of trade unions, as well as in common fronts at grass-roots, like the LALIT Joint Committees, with other organizations; and the need to be able to arm oneself against the inevitable attacks of the bourgeois state in all its forms from ideology, through the family, and the religious hierarchies, and the government’s own repressive forces; then we discussed how different each member is, and contributes as they can – each one understands the program to the extent they can, and recruits on this basis.
The final session was in three parts: agreeing on post-Congress continuation of the process of developing this common understanding of what LALIT is and where it aims to go, on everyone taking a share of papers to write up, using their notes, the minutes taken manually and the party audio recording, as well as integrating progress made during debate on the issue. The last part was an evaluation by each participant. This gave an idea of just how positive, how rich in political astuteness, how dependent on our prior individual and group-work preparation, and how positively enjoyable, the Congress was for everyone.
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(1) BLD – “bur li deor” means kick the Prime Minister out, relying on a crude metaphor of rape by sodomy, a slogan much popularized in the Bruneau Laurette 29 August 2020 mass march, and this “BLD” shamefully having become the unique plank in the entire opposition forces’ platform ever since. All the opposition parties are now – as of the past one month or so, as the MSM-led government has survived this abject form of attack, and as the Opposition parties have lost all their Donald Trump-like legal actions against the last general elections – finally beginning to move away from this sterile plank (though changing to now, with no irony, being the ones to deplore the vulgarity of the MSM leader’s speeches as if they had not mobilized on “BLD” for two years) and beginning, at least in their language, to talk about their “programs”, their “vision of a future society” and even “changing the system”, although they do not yet say what they mean. The pivot towards, at the very least, mentioning the words “program” and “projet de societe” and “vision”, is salutary.
(2) From the 1990’s onwards, during the neo-liberal surge against the world’s working class, the capitalist class began to popularize the term “reform” to refer to what used to be called “reactionary measures” i.e. changes that give more power to capitalists to take any decision they wish, in particular, to move Capital to move where they wish and for the capitalist class to throw off the shackles (!) of labour law and environmental protection.
