A relevant paragraph from an article by the ICC  in 1979. Written by C.D.Ward. 

Quote:

There are many people who want to be ‘leaders’ of the working class. But most of them confuse the bourgeois concept of leadership with the way that the proletariat generates its own leadership. Those who, in the name of leadership, call on the class to abandon its most crucial task to a minor­ity are not leading the class towards communism, but strengthening the hold of bourgeois ideology in the class, the ideology which from cradle to grave tries to convince workers that they are incapable of organizing themselves, that they must entrust others with the task of organizing them. The revolutionary party will only contribute to the progress towards communism by stimulating and generalizing a consciousness which runs entirely counter to the ideology of the bourgeoisie: a consciousness of the inexhaustible capacity of the class to organize itself and become conscious of itself as the subject of history. Communists, secreted by a class which contains no new relations of exploitation within itself, are unique in the history of revolutionary parties in that they do everything they can to make their own function unnecessary as class consciousness and activity becomes a homogeneous reality throughout all of the class. The more the proletariat advances on the road to communism, the more the whole class will become the living expression of “man’s pos­itive self-awareness”, of a liberated and consci­ous human community.

Wrong thread

If radicalchains means that he doesn't see the relevance of the passage I quoted above about the party, I posted it because the CLT are concerned about the nature of the Party and whether it should be a mass party, as in the 2nd.International or a small vanguard party organised at world level. The ICC think the latter and go to some trouble to explain why in their reply. 

The ICC reply also clears up for me a certain point made by Marx about the working class as part of civil society. 

ICC wrote:

...just as the working class is a “class of civil society which is not a class of civil society”, so the revolutionary organisation which is a product of this class is essentially an alien body in capitalist society, and its militants cannot be deterred by the inevitable hostility they encounter from the representatives of the ruling ideology in all its forms.

I have often wondered about how workers can and cannot be a class of civil society simultaneously. But now the penny has dropped. We workers are aliens inside capitalism. We don't belong.  We're just there to be screwed. To acknowledge this and to say it out loud is loathsome to the ruling class for it exposes their dirty secret. Hence their hostility

And just finally to end with some gossip! A new thread on libcom hosted by Jamal about the CLT and the ICC manages to pour scorn on both organisations while hedging its  bets about the honesty of the CLT at the same time. In Jamal's view now, however, the ICC appears to have lost all credibility.  

Ah well! You win some, you lose some. All's  fair in love and war etc. And there's  always an inevitable hostility flowing from the ruling ideology, in its various disguises, as the quote above points out. 

I don't think RC was talking to Pierre lem, because Pierre cancelled his post. I also don't think I'm "jostling" as you put it but discussing seriously about workers seen as "a class of civil society, which it isn't!" And of course some gossip thrown in! 

But what about the Greek soldiers? A class of soldiers who are challenging the concept "soldier" by not doing what they're told. They've been pushed into criticism. Wow! Don't you like that?