Politics without Marxism-Leninism is like a journey with no map. Throughout the last century and a half, the thinking of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin and many of their followers has propelled the working classes and the oppressed the vast majority of the world’s population to fight for a just and equitable world. Inspired by the idea of a community of ownership, shared possession of the wealth of society what we have come to call “socialism”, the poor, the neglected, the powerless, and exploited have found comfort and inspiration in the path to liberation developed and elaborated by these revolutionaries.
“As long as there are two classes
Proletarians must agree
It’s the task of none but the working class
To set the worker free…”
Bertolt Brecht, United Front Song
Before the theories of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the great mass of humanity was relegated to the political sidelines. They lacked a vision, a plan, and an organization. With the brutal, traitorous suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune as a lesson, Lenin brilliantly developed the idea of a vanguard, working class party with the organizational principles necessary to carry out a socialist revolution. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution in the cauldron of war, class conflict, confusion, betrayal and intervention proved the correctness of his views. Thus began the era of the working classes contesting for power throughout the world. Despite brutal reaction and unspeakable imperialist war and aggression, the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution brought the liberation of the entire colonial world and a vast expansion of the socialist community.
“Slave, who is it who shall free you?
Those in deepest darkness lying,
Comrade, these alone can see you,
They alone can hear you crying.
Comrade, only slaves can free you.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can’t better.
Either gun or fetter.”
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
Bertolt Brecht, All of Us or None
Sadly, forty-five years of a so-called “Cold War” a life or death ideological, social, and military struggle closed with the scribes of the Capitalist World claiming victory. An ideologically disarmed Soviet Communist Party surrendered to the enemy with barely a fight. A chapter closed, but the book of working class struggle remains open.
It has become commonplace to search the wreckage of Soviet Communism for the mistakes, missteps, and moral failings. Certainly they are there to be found, but we insist that there is also a noble, brave, and selfless struggle unparalleled in human history. While we are not afraid of the negative, we see this era of capitalist triumphalism as a crusade to distort and erase these great achievements.
We exist to fight for that history. We exist to defend and elaborate that map first sketched some hundred and fifty years ago. We exist to help bring life back to the working class movement.
