This strategy has led the global left to adapt their activity to the political and diplomatic needs of states that purport to defend socialism, but actually undermine it at every step. This necessarily involves the development of new forms of organisation independent of the capitalist state. Lenin's famous call to arms makes the case for a disciplined revolutionary party, organised around an “All-Russian” political newspaper. OCTOBER 16, 2015 1) Healthcare — Control healthcare and you control the people The working class and oppressed majority can defeat this repression only with the most thoroughgoing self-organisation. It was felt that for a radical change of society (radical change means a thorough change in political and economic fields) reforms were insufficient. We are open to uniting with all those prepared to join us in this aim, and to be part of any political formation than can advance towards this aim. Is this the Leninist method of presenting the question? See Santiago Carillo, “Eurocommunism” and the State (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977) and G. Nepolitano, The Italian Road to Socialism: An Interview with Eric Hobsbawm (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1977). How did Messrs. the Social-Democrats try to scare the workers away from us? Poulantzas’s work, which focuses on the relationship of social classes and their struggles to the capitalist state apparatus, is more problematic. (5) Democratic feeling and consciousness began to spread rapidly among all sections and on the face of it the capitalists hesitated to continue the earlier methods of exploitation. The string of defeats that began in the 1970s and 1980s, the direct result of labor’s reliance on participation in capitalist state institutions across the world, has deepened working-class passivity and cynicism (the enduring basis of capitalist legitimacy) and opened the road to the populist far right. Direct experience of success in mass struggles is essential. [9] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871), www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm; V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution: Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (1917), www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm; E. Mandel, “Socialist Strategy in the West,” in Revolutionary Marxism Today (London: New Left Books, 1979). Consequently, the only guarantee of the final victory of Socialism, i.e., the guarantee against restoration, is a victorious Socialist revolution in a number of countries … Leninism teaches that the final victory of Socialism, in the sense of full guarantee against the restoration of bourgeois relationships, is possible only on an international scale … But it does not follow from this that it is impossible to build a complete Socialist society in a backward country like Russia, without the “state aid” (Trotsky) of countries more developed technically and economically. Trade-union democracy involves the right of the union ranks to freely determine the union’s goals and policy, and to elect and recall the union’s leaders. The Socialist Alliance seeks to increase its weight and influence in the working class as socialism remains simply a dream unless it can become a movement of the working class. . Reforms, parliamentary methods, democratic tactics could not help the common people. On the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of the Militant (October 1964), Ted Grant comments on the perspectives the comrades had at that time. The following section discusses our general approach in terms of analysis, slogans and demands around immediate aspects of capitalist exploitation and oppression. This strategy failed, not primarily because of the lack of commitment on the part of social-democratic politicians, but because it is based on a utopian understanding of the relationship of the capitalist state to both capitalist accumulation and the class struggle.[5]. Interview With Ted Grant on Militant—Fred Weston. (Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. One or the other must triumph in the end. This belief spread its roots in the minds of many in the early years of nineteenth century. © 2017 PoliticalScienceNotes - All rights reserved Terms of Service Privacy Policy Contact Us, © 2017 PoliticalScienceNotes - All rights reserved, Conditions for Transition from Socialism to Communism, Conditions and Requisites for Using Gandhian Political Technologies, Notes on Fabian Socialism and Evolutionary Socialism, Essay on Village Panchayats | India | Political Science, Essay on Communalism | India | Political Science, Directive Principles of State Policy | Essay | India | Political Science, Essay on Justice | India | Political Science. That is why the Fourteenth Party Congress rightly defined the views of the New Opposition as “lack of faith in the cause of Socialist construction,” as “a distortion of Leninism.”. But they received a rebuff and were compelled to retreat, and formally they submitted to the opposite point of view, the point of view of the majority of the Central Committee. Our aim is to spread the ideas of Marxism, in an organised fashion, in the labour and youth movement. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organized its own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world, attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, raising revolts in those countries against the capitalists, and in the event of necessity coming out even with armed force against the exploiting classes and their states.”. Available from Wellred in paper copy and as an ebook. The statement quoted above was made by Lenin in 1915, before the proletariat had taken power. All written history, Marx stated, is the history of class struggle. It briefly discusses the function of a party newspaper, in addition to basic tactics that a revolutionary Marxist organization will need to be successful. The ticket to this dance was renouncing the workers’ most powerful weapon—the right to strike. Studying the events of 1917, and understanding why the Revolution degenerated into Stalinism, provides vital lessons for revolutionaries today. In particular, we will need to decide whether or not to seek long-term alliances with the forces of official reformism (the labor and NGO bureaucracy, so-called progressive Democrats), who rely on the existing state, in the day to day struggles. For some reformists, especially those in the Communist parties, these political and economic reforms will initiate a piecemeal transition to socialism. [15] See Nicos Poultantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism (London: New Left Books, 1974).