Anatomy of the Micro-Sect

by Hal Draper

online

Published October 1, 1973

About the author

Hal Draper (born Harold Dubinsky) was an American socialist activist and author who played a significant role in the Berkeley, California Free Speech Movement. He is known for his extensive scholarship on the history and meaning of the thought of Karl Marx.

Draper was a lifelong advocate of what he called "socialism from below", self-emancipation by the working class, in opposition to capitalism and Stalinist bureaucracy, both of which, he held, practiced domination from above. He was one of the creators of the Third Camp tradition, a form ("the form", according to its adherents) of Marxist socialism.

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved everything about this except for the small section dealing with Lenin. As for what I loved, Draper's analysis of modern socialism (I'd argue everywhere, not just in America) is spot on. The movement is fractured and we no longer pay heed to actual social needs and material conditions, but hard lines as set forth by administrative folk or misguided parties. Draper's solution at first appears to be a product of it's time, but in reality it's more easily accomplished today than in the past. We need community and we need to work together and to form a mass, not an autonomous mass, but a mass who believe in worker management and the power of the prolerariat.

As for Lenin, I feel Draper completely misses the mark with his analysis. Lenin didn't just take a sect approach he eventually codified it into law. Once he had the power to make his sect be the only voice heard he did so. That this was his intention is clear far before the revolution so it is either naive or disingenuous of Draper to argue that Lenin believed in a politically centered mass movement when history clearly shows he believed in a movement led and controlled by his sect and that part of that process was unity by force and the crushing of all other sects.