Editorial Introduction to Issue 3

Editorial Introduction to Issue 3, by Aneurin Delmas

It has unfortunately taken a lot longer to put this issue together than we would have liked. A combination of circumstances, mainly involving the setting up of practical activity and interventions within the movement, has led to us publishing this as the Spring 2017 journal rather than the Autumn/Winter 2016 edition we had originally planned.

That said, needs must and it is my honour to write the editorial to this on the eve of the anniversary of the Great February Revolution! 100 years ago workers and peasants unable to bear the horrors of the Great War rose up and overthrew the Tsarist Autocracy ending 300 years of Romanov rule, setting into motion a struggle which would end the first world war and lead to the construction of the first workers’ state.

This issue of the journal covers a variety of topics that have been under consideration by contributors since the publication of the previous issue. However, a common thread running through the articles is the concept of imperialism. This is particularly relevant given the debates currently taking place in the workers’ movement.

The main feature article is a reply by Steve Dobbs to Peter Glover dealing with conceptions of imperialism and what it means for revolutionaries today. We are also proud to announce three extremely timely and interesting international contributions from comrades in India and Germany. ‘Refugee Crisis One Year On: The End of the German Illusion‘ by Sebastian Vargas promises to shed light on the realities of the German state’s policy towards refugees and provides some much needed analysis of the situation there. We also include an article by Ajachi Chakrabarti discussing workers’ struggles during the Honda strike last year in India, which we hope will bring a new subject to the attention of our readers and provide a fresh perspective from a country whose class struggles are often overlooked in mainstream media. On top of this, Barnamala Roy and Soumabrata Chatterjee provide a valuable analysis of the recent history of Indian student movements by interviewing key leaders. Revolutionary Marxism has always been an internationalist movement - it is with great pleasure we welcome these contributions to our pages and hope we can continue to see more.

We started this journal almost a year ago and since then have been able to maintain a respectable level of debate within its pages and the accompanying website, particularly around the EU referendum. We hope that, in some small way, the arena for serious debate we have tried to provide has helped workers and radicals arm themselves with ideas that will aid the struggle to cleanse the world of oppression.

We are excited to announce that, as ever, we are selling our modest print run of 200 at a good level, with most copies of the journal now having been sold. We feel validated in our original assumption that a layer of workers were looking towards Marxist ideas and debates in a serious way during this period.

Additionally, various readers of Marxist World have begun setting up Capital reading groups around the country and we have had to print a second run of our abridged copies of Capital due to demand. You can order Capital and find out about reading groups on our website.

Supporters and contributors to Marxist World have also been engaged in all manner of work, from Kurdish Solidarity to work within the Labour Party to supporting women’s rights in Latin America. We’re proud of the contacts worldwide we’ve been making.

Revolutionary strategy
The great financial crisis of 2008, the EU referendum and the recent Trump victory in the United States proves now more than ever the need of revolutionaries to think seriously about strategy. We encourage all revolutionaries to seriously and critically study theories of revolutionary strategy and practice. As we stated in the previous issue of the journal, there is no contradiction between serious study and practical activity, and supporters of this journal have been engaged in both over this period.

Whilst it is important to stress again the heterogeneous nature of opinions on the Editorial Board, we have had ongoing discussions which have led to some broad consensus. Much of the old Left has shown itself largely incapable of adapting to these new situations, and our study and discussions both via meetings, the journal and online have brought us to some shared conclusions:

1. We reaffirm the need for a revolutionary vanguard party of the working class to be constructed and the centrality of Lenin’s ideas in this direction. However, we do not believe that many so-called Leninists’ idea of a monolithic, single tendency party is a correct understanding of how the Bolsheviks actually operated. We accept elements of Lars T. Lih’s research in understanding how the Bolshevik Party really worked and believe a greater degree of emphasis needs to be placed on the democratic element in democratic centralism than is currently by many of the groups who claim to operate on this model.
2. Linked to this we reaffirm the right to free, open and public debate of disagreements in front of the class (provided it does not undermine unity of an action, e.g. in exposing comrades involved in anti fascist actions to police attention by publishing names etc). Without these free and open debates in front of workers, the best ideas for taking the struggle forward will be unable to emerge. We also reaffirm our belief that the advanced sections of the workers should not be patronised by notions of not being interested in theoretical discussions.
3. We affirm the centrality of keeping the workers’ movement independent from other class forces leadership, such as so-called ‘progressive’ alliances with liberals.
4. We recognise and reaffirm that the proletariat is the only independent revolutionary class under capitalism and therefore our goal must be to create a workers’ movement which leads all movements of the oppressed to the overthrow of capitalism by tying them to the banner of socialist revolution.
5. Therefore, we believe that we must again be honest and forthright on the Left in our assertion that to represent the interests of workers, we need a party of the working class that is explicitly for socialist revolution. This is not to say, however, that any particular tendency inside that bracket can be described as holding a monopoly of truth.
6. As such, we affirm that one of the most important strategic goals of the Left currently is to construct a multi-tendency revolutionary socialist party. We do not believe this process will come about by the transformation of any one of the existing sects, nor will it be a case of a small group such as ourselves creating our own party and declaring it as the Party. Instead, we conceive of a process where new elements of advanced workers entering the struggle act as the catalyst for a new revolutionary organisation. Such a process would, in turn, pull in those elements of the old Left who are able to break from their ossified practices. In this scenario, we would conceive of Marxist World as operating as a tendency within such a formation.

Where forward from here for Marxist World?
In the medium term, our current goal is to add some democratic legitimacy to the Editorial Board (which has hitherto been done on a voluntary basis) by developing a document which allows our supporters to vote upon the Editorial Board’s membership. We hope that this will further facilitate the journal becoming the organ for debate we envisioned it as.

We would also like as ever to expand the list of regular contributors to our pages, and as ever urge people to contact us with ideas for submission and submissions! On top of this, we are now accepting submissions of shorter articles to go straight to our webpage and we encourage all our readers to submit short pieces regularly on subjects they are interested in (and longer ones should they wish of course). We can be contacted via our email address and the website.

In the meanwhile, we wish good luck to all comrades in struggle. We hope as ever that the ideas and debates contained here prove useful. As we are reminded this year more than any other, our movement stands upon the shoulders of giants. Onwards, comrades, to the Socialist Commonwealth of Humanity!

Issue 3 of the journal is available to order from the shop.