During his lifetime, Karl Kautsky was such an influential theorist he was called the “Pope of Marxism” — but he was also famously branded “the renegade Kautsky” by Lenin for his betrayals of revolutionary socialism. In recent years there have been efforts to revive Kautskyism in order to justify reformism and electoralism. This approach is as wrong as it always was: Kautskyism remains a renegade socialism that is fundamentally opposed to revolution.
Most on the broad left view electoral activity as all-important to progressive reform and even the advance of socialism. They focus almost exclusively on elections, inevitably to the benefit of parties of the liberal bourgeoisie, like the Democrats. By contrast, revolutionary socialists recognize the electoral system as a weapon in the hands of the ruling class that can never be used to transform the system in any lasting way.
There are two ideological traps that prove a problem for many Marxists: eclecticism, the habit of grabbing ideas from all over the place, which either dilutes Marxism or renders it meaningless; and dogmatism, the stubborn rejection of any new ideas at all. Understanding how society and history work dialectically is crucial to navigating through these twin pitfalls and developing a sound approach to Marxism.
Last Sunday, February 25, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty airman in the United States Air Force, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, in what he called “an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian...
A free Palestine from the river to the sea is the demand that has been taken up by the unprecedented global protest movement in the wake of Israel’s brutal war and genocide in Gaza. Most sincere supporters of the Palestinian cause can understand why the dismantling of...
The current debate in Tempest between Dan La Botz and Stephen R. Shalom on one side, and Jonah ben Avraham and Sean Larson on the other, is an important one for the left. La Botz and Shalom have claimed ben Avraham and Larson are too soft on October 7. The latter have...
Earlier this month, I attended Socialist Alternative’s Socialism conference in Sydney. For readers outside Australia, I’m referring to the Australian Trotskyist organization (which was a cousin of sorts to the ISO in the US before the latter disbanded), and not the...
Continued from Part One After my first experiences with the International Socialist Organization (ISO), what convinced me to join was the sincere belief that my views and actions mattered. After meeting up with some comrades from the organization in early 2011, we...
Introduction “Trotsky considers the opportunist current and its leaders somewhat as victims of circumstances… There is no doubt that opportunism, like all else in the world has its objective causes in external conditions. But in politics more than anywhere else, to...
What kind of party do we need? Or what kind of party should revolutionary socialists be focused on building? I want to propose some answers to the organizational questions we’re facing. But more than that, I want to invite those who are asking the same questions to...