The classical social-democratic and “communist” movement is gone. The crisis of humanity is reduced to the proletarian crisis. This class is currently in its worst state yet, having been reduced to an army of totally defenceless and mercilessly exploited wage slaves. The duty of revolutionaries is therefore to understand this historical crisis and its causes instead of reciting old Trotskyite mantras.
It’s also useful to understand the extent to which the old proletariat of the social-democratic and communist parties was socialist and what Marxism meant in the context of being their ideologies.
10 theses on Marxism today (Karl Korsch, 1950):
1. It no longer makes sense to ask to what extent the teaching of Marx and Engels is, today, theoretically acceptable and practically applicable.
2. Today, all attempts to re-establish the Marxist doctrine as a whole in its original function as a theory of the working classes social revolution are reactionary utopias. Continue reading “Marxism and the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.”
