Irish Marxist Review, a new journal of socialist ideas published in association with the Socialist Workers Party.

This article appeared in the International Discussion Bulletin of the British SWP 30 years ago. At that time some of the biggest far left organisations in Italy to emerge from the great wave of struggle from 1968 to 1975 changed their strategy to one of focussing on the formation of a ‘left’ government within the existing parliamentary set up. Such a government never materialised—instead the then-powerful Italian Communist Party accepted a subordinate role to a Christian Democrat government through the ‘historic compromise’, and the revolutionary left entered a terminal crisis.

SOME ACADEMICS and historians may be happy to foster the idea that Karl Marx confined himself to analyzing the world, but the truth is that he and Frederick Engels sought to change it--and took part in building organizations dedicated to the goal of socialism.
In 1885, looking back on their discoveries about class society and the founding of the Communist League, Engels wrote:

Throughout his life, Karl Marx argued that for socialism to be realized, the state would have to be done away with. But since his death, many so-called socialists championed building up the state.Lee Sustar shows that this is opposite to Marx's views--and to any notion of socialism. This article was first published in the February 1985 issue of Socialist Worker.

Capitalism, as we have seen, is a class divided society based on exploitation. Under capitalism a tiny highly privileged minority rules over the large majority and lives off their labour. How do they get away with it ?

The answer, as the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci pointed out, is by a combination of force and consent. In reality force and consent are very closely intertwined and mutually reinforce each other, but for the moment I shall discuss them separately.

The sixties saw the development of mass college sit-ins, strikes and demonstrations throughout the world, in Berkeley in 1964, Berlin in 1966-67 and Paris in 1968. Tokyo students were involved in large-scale militancy. British students were first involved in March 1967 when London School of Economics (LSE) students had a sit-in.

Autopsy

Nine years ago the Berlin Wall collapsed. Shortly afterwards the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and Russia followed suit.

Why do we need a revolutionary party? The basic reason is in two statements Marx made. He stated that “the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class” and at the same time he said that “the prevailing ideas of every society are the ideas of the ruling class.’

Revolutionary Marxists differ from all other people who stand for womens liberation in one important respect. We do not believe womens oppression is something that has always existed; either because of the biological differences between the sexes or because of something inherent in the male psyche.

We hold that womens oppression arose at a particular point in history; at the point at which society began to divide in classes. In all class societies women are oppressed; the evidence suggests that in at least some pre-class societies there was no such oppression.