En Passant

Today the capitalist system is in crisis internationally. It is inflicting experiences on people that undermine neoliberal ideas in the eyes of millions. The struggle against this austerity and the system is also, with various ups and downs, developing internationally. If we want ideas to change, and we do, our job as socialists is to raise the level of that struggle. We also need to make sure that at the heart of the struggle is a political movement systematically arguing for a real change in the system.

Of course, whether we leave behind a world to our descendants as beautiful as the one we were born into, will depend on our own independent, organized self-activity to wrench control away from a ruling elite that is quite happy to continue making money from a system that must be overturned.

In the reality of community that the bushfires have bought out in us lies our hope for the future; in the working class and its power to turn society on its head lies the reality of the realisation of a future with hope.

Contrary to the popular stereotype, revolution is a result, not of the mass of the population spontaneously becoming Marxist revolutionaries, but of the failure of the allegedly “more realistic” project of reforming the system write Tom Bramble and Ben Hillier in Socialist Alternative.

May 1968 in France shows the revolutionary left can’t just build and lead once the upsurge happens. We need to have done the steady work beforehand of building a mass working class party of revolution with real roots in the working class.

We revolutionaries need to build for the future now. A good starting point is building a revolutionary socialist party and all that that entails. Not tomorrow; not when the class moves; now. Such an organisation does not exist in Australia today.

As the revolutionary unity project Socialist Alternative initiated continues, isn’t it time we had a look at what is on offer? We might just owe it to history and to the future.

Lenin concluded that you have to begin by grouping together militants and activists -because we’re not talking here about commentators and writers, but people who are involved in the actual struggle against capitalism – into a party that can lead politically other sections of the working-class movement through the ebbs and flow of the working-class struggle.

He used the term vanguard for this, to mean people who are in advance in consciousness – that is, who are enemies of capitalism, rather than half opposed and half accepting. This isn’t an insult – it’s the reality for most people, that they hate the system, but don’t know what else you can put in its place.

The point was how to put together a political organization that in reality represented the best fighters of the working-class movement.

The urgency is great. Capitalism cannot cure itself. It is driven by its internal logic to destroy the planet in the search for profit and the reinvestment of any surplus value we create. The choice is becoming starker and starker. It is either socialism with democracy, planning and satisfying human need leading to a secure and safe environment or the continuation of capitalism and the descent into global warming barbarism.

It is widely claimed that the 1918 November Revolution in Germany failed. But it succeeded in ending the First World War – the biggest and bloodiest war in human history up to that time. Internationalism and class struggle are vital weapons for fighting imperialism. The lessons of the uprising in 1918 against the bloody war machinery remain valid for today.

Those in the Western left who allow a reflexive and unthinking “anti-imperialism” to set them against the Syrian revolution are simply confessing their own bankruptcy.

Tiananmen Square was a dress rehearsal for the future. The Chinese working class has a material interest in democracy. It has the strength to overthrow the corrupt and bankrupt butchers in Beijing.

Having done that the Chinese working class will be forced to take the revolution beyond bourgeois political demands and threaten capitalism in China itself. Then and only then can we talk about genuine socialism, the self-emancipation of the working class through its own democratic organs of societal control.