REVIEW BY MARGARET ALLUM
Links issue 19: "The Future of Revolution"
128 pages, $8
New Course Publications 2001
In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States, President George Bush's edict that "if you are not with us, then you are with the terrorists" is designed not just to counter terrorist activities, but also to deter all activists from fighting the imperialist might of the "home of the brave and the land of the free".
Any criticism of US foreign policy is branded "anti-American" and those who object to domestic neo-liberal policy are going against the perceived need to stand united in the face of terror.
Almost universally condemned by the left the world over, the murder of those in the World Trade Center and in Washington is now being used by the governments of the US, Britain, Australia and many other countries as a pretext to quell civil unrest of any kind, as authoritarian measures are introduced into parliaments across the world.
But many are repulsed and are speaking out in growing numbers against the retaliatory exhibition of military strength against one of the poorest nations on earth, supposedly harbouring the latest incarnation of evil, Osama bin Laden.
Many too are questioning the past and present world order which gives rise to such desperate, yet ultimately fruitless acts of terror.
Revolutionaries have come to realise that now, more than ever, the power structure that dictates such global misery must be overcome and replaced with one based on solidarity and humanity. However, it is also clearer that such change will not come as a result of a series of desperate acts by individuals, but by the collective effort of all those who stand to gain from the creation of a new, socially just, world order.
The latest issue of Links, the "international journal of socialist renewal", examines precisely how this will be possible. The theme is "The Future of Revolution", and this issue provides the latest instalment in a vital discussion about the way forward for leftist revolutionaries around the world.
Five articles explore the topic.
James Petras, a renowned scholar and thinker whose writing on peoples' movements in Latin America has helped generalise these experiences to the world left, undertakes a "historical survey of the left" over the previous half century.
In "Notes toward an understanding of revolutionary politics today", he recognises that it is "a complex project, recognising the uneven development of struggles in different continents, the contradictory tendencies, the achievements and limitations, the short- and long-term legacies, the relationship between economics and politics".
Petras' framework is a Marxist refutation of "Renewals", the defeatist proclamation by newly appointed New Left Review editor Perry Anderson of the triumph of US imperialism, (printed in New Left Review, Jan-Feb 2000).
Petras argues against Anderson's declaration of defeat by exploring the left's current state and recent history, and admits that while "there are enormous challenges in creating a new revolutionary socialist consciousness, generalising it to reach the millions in motion, organising and providing a new inclusive theory to provide diagnosis and strategic direction", the new inclusive theory is not a rejection of the work of the past.
Rather, he affirms that the emerging left "continues and deepens the intellectual work and practice of the last half century".
Dipankar Bhattacharya also writes of the relevance of classical theory in today's post-Soviet world, in "Back to good old Marx in the brave world of globalisation". As George Bush carries out his war on the poor, the timeliness of a re-examination of Marx's analysis of capitalism and the creation of the poor and the First and Third Worlds is stark.
Bhattacharya, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) notes the ruling elites' use of the "discourse of globalisation ... to camouflage capitalism and to nurture illusions about a democratic capitalism, equating globalisation with democratisation".
He writes that as the corporate world's globalisation "accentuates inequalities and aggravates the crisis of survival for most of us at the receiving end of the Third World, it undoubtedly has to be resisted and our current moorings have to be defended", and that a return to the Marxist classics is an essential part of both that defence and future advance.
"'Globalisation' has become not just the slogan of the day", declares Russia's Boris Kagarlitsky, "but also the justification for all sorts of outrages, occurring before the gaze of all and sundry."
In his article, "Facing the Crisis", he argues that the liberalisation of capital markets began in earnest from the 1970s with Nixon, later Reagan and with Thatcher in the early 1980s, and explores the "triumph of finance capital in the late twentieth century".
He considers the new movement against corporate globalisation and writes that: "The movement that began in Seattle in 1999 showed that anti-capitalist protest is becoming a vital necessity for millions of people not only in poor, but also in so-called rich, countries. As a result, what needs to be placed in the forefront is not the moderate redistributive ideology of social democracy, but the idea of public property."
A nation whose success in reclaiming property for public use and collective control is surely Cuba, whose revolution still inspires many all over the world, and where social indicators place its people's welfare as comparable to the First World. Yet this tiny nation has been under siege politically and economically for more than four decades by the United States.
"The Cuban Revolution in the epoch of neo-liberalisation" is a resolution adopted by the 19th Congress of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party in Sydney in January.
The resolution details the massive achievements of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and in the decades since. The revolution's "continuing survival after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist bloc is witness to its vitality and profound legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the Cuban people — it is their revolution."
The resolution also provides a sober assessment of the tasks of the Cuban people in defending their gains in the face of US aggression and the vital solidarity required from supporters, of which there are many, around the world.
The DSP's Pat Brewer answers the theory that the inequality that still exists between men and women is structurally that of women as a colony, the "Fourth World" as it was described by some in the women's liberation movement, and discusses the role of eco-feminism and cultural feminism.
She argues in "Nature, development and inequality: are women the last colony?" that to apply the analogy of colony to women is to distort and divert the reality of women's oppression, and that "exhortations to intrinsic feminine morality or sensibility based on reproductive experience are more likely to bolster the strategies of the traditionalist and religious right".
Finally in the discussion about the way forward for the left, Murray Smith, a Marxist in the Scottish Socialist Party, explores the role of international links and internationalism within the left.
A reprint from the Communist Party of India's (Marxist-Leninist) magazine Liberation describes the police raid on the June 2001 Asia Pacific Solidarity Conference in Jakarta, when around 40 representatives of left groups from around the world were detained along with the Indonesian organisers. The last few pages of Links contain a summary of international workers' movement news and a list of left movement events happening around the world over the next six months.
Links is published by the Democratic Socialist Party, in Australia. Many of the contributors (or representatives of their parties) will be attending the Asia Pacific International Solidarity Conference in Sydney March 29-April 1, 2002. Further information on Links is available at <http://www.dsp.org.au/links>.