What can revolutionaries do now?
Be in the struggle and build the party
From a talk given by Richard Becker at the Dec. 6-7 New
York conference on reviving the struggle for socialism.
Karl Marx once wrote that people "make their
own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do
not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the
past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp
[mountain] on the brains of the living. ..."
How do these well-known words, written 150 years ago, relate
to the theme of our conference this weekend?
How can the struggle for socialism be revived? That is the
question on the minds of revolutionaries all over the
world.
How has the worldwide struggle for soc ialism been revived
in the past? We know that it was, as Sam Marcy often pointed
out, Lenin who rescued and revived Marxism, and updated it for
our era, the era of imperialism. But what made Lenin's
invaluable contributions known and popularized around the world
was the Russian Revolution of 1917 and after, which in itself
was in large part due to the world crisis created by the first
imperialist world war.
The Bolsheviks made their own history, but under
circumstances transmitted from the past. The upheaval in Russia
was largely a spontaneous rebellion against the war and the
misery it created. Even as perceptive and insightful a thinker
as Lenin was taken by surprise. He had just given a speech to
some Swiss youth a month before saying, in effect, "I might not
live to see the revolution, but you certainly will."
It took the existence of a highly trained and experienced
revolutionary party to transform the revolutionary crisis in
Russia into the first successful socialist revolution. The
victory of the revolution and the creation of the Communist
International caused the ideas of revolutionary Marxism and
Leninism to spread all over the world.
Communist parties were soon formed. In the advanced
industrialized and imperialist countries, the old Socialist
parties split into revolutionary communist and reformist
socialist wings. In the decade of the 1920s, communist parties
arose in the colonized and oppressed countries of Asia, the
Middle East, Latin America and Africa.
A great expansion of socialism and the development of the
socialist camp came about as a result of the revolutions that
grew out of World War II in China, Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia
and elsewhere in eastern Europe. A new socialist upsurge came
about in the 1960s when the Chinese leadership opened up a
revolutionary po lemic against the reformist Soviet line--the
parliamentary road to socialism, etc.--and in response to the
Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.
In the last century, war and revolution have gone
hand-in-hand. War is where imperialism is at one and the same
time at its most dangerous and most vulnerable. That fact is
one reason that the struggle against imperialist war is such a
critical question. Looking back, we can see that the great
advances of the socialist perspective have flowed from great
revolutions. And it is--unfortunately--true that the
revolutionaries do not control the pace of development or the
unfolding of revolutionary crises in society. Neither does the
ruling class.
What revolutionaries do have some control over is not when a
new great revolution will come, but what type of organization
will be available when a revolutionary crisis does arise, as it
inevitably will. How strong, experienced, widespread, numerous
and united will the revolutionary party be? How steeled will it
be in many and widely varying struggles? How well does its
class composition correspond to its ideology? Is it able to
renew itself and build for the future by attracting young
people--workers and students? How has it measured up to
challenges, especially in times of crisis?
To the question, what do revolutionaries do in
non-revolutionary times, Lenin's answer was to build the party,
build the organization without which the revolution cannot
succeed. Build now, because if you wait, it will be too late.
"You can't build your ship once you're in the storm," as the
saying goes. From Lenin's point of view, the entire reason for
the party from the very beginning was preparation for the
revolutionary opportunity.
And preparation doesn't mean just reading books and
studying, as indispensable as those factors are--and we need
more reading and more studying.
It means being involved in the most critical struggles of
the day, at the points of greatest conflict between the
classes. It means fighting to win the movements that
spontaneously respond to crises in capitalist society to a
truly progressive and revolutionary outlook.
A little over a year ago, starting in Sep tember 2002, was
such a development with the seemingly sudden upsurge of mass
anti-war activism. On Oct. 26, 2003, some 200,000 people
marched in D.C., 100,000 more in San Francisco; on Jan. 18,
500,000 and 200,000, respectively, and similarly on Feb.
15-16.
Much as we might want to, we can't attribute the vast
increase in the size of the protests to our exemplary
visibility work. No, something else was going on. It was a
spontaneous response to the Bush administration's war
program.
What the ANSWER Coalition, in which WWP works along with
many other organizations, did was to fight to win the movement
to an anti-imperialist perspective, to a perspective of
unconditional support for the right of self-determination for
the Iraqi, Palestinian, Iranian and other oppressed peoples of
the Middle East, and irreconcilable opposition to the
imperialist ruling class of the U.S. ANSWER did this while at
the same time pursuing a United Front tactic for the mass
protests with the more moderate and conciliationist forces in
the anti-war movement, something which the base of the anti-war
movement very much desired.
The ANSWER Coalition was firm in its principles and at the
same time flexible in tactics. Everyone involved in this
process has learned a great deal, and the anti-imperialist core
of the anti-war movement has been very significantly expanded,
and ANSWERstanding in the world movement is very strong.
Reprinted from the Jan. 15, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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