Introducing the International Socialism Project

We live in a time of peril and promise.

The crises that face our world can seem overwhelming. An impending climate catastrophe. A global emergency of refugee displacement and migration. Wars rendering whole countries unlivable. The imposition of vicious austerity measures that have robbed working people of their rights and security. And meanwhile, far right political forces continue their ascent across the world. Since the global capitalist crisis that emerged more than a decade ago, resistance to these catastrophes has taken shape. From the Arab Spring to Occupy to Black Lives Matter and the Yellow Vest uprising in France. In the emerging climate justice movement. In new working-class women’s movements. In the beginnings of a revived class struggle and the new interest in “socialism” in the U.S. While all of these are positive signs, socialists who look reality in the face must conclude that this resistance is not where it needs to be.

The resistance has also suffered setbacks that the global left must evaluate. In Greece, a decade of mass struggle produced a political vehicle, Syriza, that appeared to offer hope against a future of austerity and oppression. Instead, Syriza itself became the administrator of austerity and oppression that shattered popular resistance and opened the door to a restoration of the revanchist Right. From the experience of Rifondiazone Comunista in Italy through the degradation of the Workers Party in Brazil, the balance sheet of the “broad party” experience for revolutionary socialists has tallied many more failures than successes.

Recent developments, however, do not erase the revolutionary potential of the working class—which is why history matters. In the midst of the wave of mass working class struggle from May 1968 in France, to the 1974-75 Portuguese Revolution that overthrew fascism, and the triumph of the Vietnamese people against the US war machine, the influence of revolutionary Marxism grew on the left. Millions across the globe dedicated themselves to building revolutionary organizations. It was a period when what George Lukacs called the “actuality of revolution” resonated with millions.

Today, however—despite positive signs of struggle and shifts in political consciousness, the working-class movement is emerging from decades of working-class defeat and the marginalization of revolutionary ideas and organizations. For small groups of revolutionaries, the gap between the crying need for social change and the existing social forces to bring it about can lead even very dedicated socialists to make political accommodations that lead away from the self-emancipation of the working class.

One of these accommodations is “campism.” In a world in which genuine anti-imperialist movements have waned while militarism and neoliberalism roll forward, some segments of the left have adopted the motto of the “enemy of my enemy is my friend.” As in the 1930s, when rebels against capitalism in the West accepted Stalin’s Russia as the main bulwark against the rise of fascism, some on the left today have lost sight of the fact that only working class revolution can cleanse the world of the evils of imperialism and capitalism.

The most egregious of these are those who accuse the Syrian Revolution against the Assad regime of being nothing more than a cat’s-paw of Western imperialism and its NGOs. Longtime clients of imperialism like the Assad regime in Syria, who have now found themselves temporarily in opposition to Western intervention, have now suddenly become anti-imperialist fighters in the eyes of some leftists. But they remain the butchers they always were, and revolutionaries must continue to support mass popular resistance against them.

Another accommodation is adaptation to a different version of “socialism from above,” that is, a new reformism in the guise of a refurbished Eurocommunism or social democracy in the US and Britain. The experiences of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in the Spanish state show the limitations of this project even if it is embodied in new, initially radical parties. The transformation of parties ostensibly committed to “rupture” with the existing system into enforcers of that system (Syriza) or into largely electoral machines (Podemos) shows that a commitment to “a long march through the institutions” can lead to absorption into the capitalist state.

In the U.S., the popularity of figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and the related growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, has resuscitated the ideology of the “parliamentary road to socialism” that a century of social democratic failures and betrayals had discredited. The U.S. situation is even more problematic in that its largest socialist organization, the Demcratic Socialists of America (DSA), remains committed to supporting candidates and campaigns inside the Democratic Party, one of the world’s oldest capitalist parties. As a result, the task of socialists from the time of Karl Marx—that of building an independent working-class socialist party—is put off to some unknown future.

Endorsers of this statement are long-time socialists who were members of organizations (Socialist Action and the International Socialist Organization) largely destroyed by the two types of accommodation to “socialism from above.” We come from different traditions. We have different positions on critical issues. But we share the goal of keeping revolutionary Marxism alive.

We also recognize that resistance to capitalism and imperialism continues to unfold in Haiti, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Iraq and Chile, just to name a few. Inside the U.S. at the time of this writing, Chicago teachers and staff are on strike not only for better wages but also for increasing the number of nurses, social workers and other staff in a school district where students face the consequences of racism and poverty—pointing the way forward for the kind of social justice unionism that can transform the class struggle in the future.

We are launching this Website for the future. We hope it will serve as a forum for debate and discussion. We would like this to be a place where those committed to—or just newly interested in—revolutionary Marxism, can find analyses of contemporary politics, discussions of Marxist theory, and education in the collective history of the socialist and working-class movements.

We stand for a few simple points: revolutionary Marxism; independence from the Democratic Party; a revolutionary socialist approach to fighting oppression; and the struggle against imperialism. We look forward to engagement with all those who share those political goals, and we ask you to support our efforts.