Class War and the Mass Party

[p058] class and its party It is clear that there can be no understanding of the contradictions of imperialism, let alone of projecting a means of fighting against it, on the part of people who, for all their ‘anti-imperialism’, cannot recognize the role of the working class and therefore do not see any need to build a revolutionary party to lead this class to power. Thus ‘left’ writings about imperialism have reached an impasse. Formally they recognize the Leninist theory, but they emasculate it by separat- ing it off from its revolutionary practice and therefore render it sterile. They tag along behind whatever movement looks revolutionary at the moment—Castroism, Maoism, the student radicals, black nationalism—but get no higher than radical protest because they do not believe that imperialism is really in a crisis. Events during and since 1968—‘life itself’— have struck heavy blows against these revisionist tendencies and have made necessary some adjust- ments, at least in words, to take account of the working-class struggles in the European capitalist countries and the USA. Even Marcuse who, by an ironic twist, was present at the UNESCO farce in Paris to ikonize Marx at the very time when the May events were beginning, had to revise his paper when published to bring in the working class, when it is no longer ‘the prisoner of its own integration and of bureaucratic trade union and party apparatus supporting this integration’— not, be it said as a class for itself but as a supporter of the ghetto population, the students and the intellectuals whom he still sees as the main instru- ment of social change. The fact is that the working class has been challenging the right of the bour- geoisie to rule all over Europe in a series of revolutionary confrontations of which the events in France were the beginning. Behind these events lies the deepening and insoluble crisis of im- perialism which the bourgeoisie desperately tries to solve on the backs of the working class. The vindication of Lenin’s work goes much further than verifying certain theses put forward in Imperialism, but it is clearly fundamental that it has stood the test of experience and remains the starting point for a Marxist understanding of the dominant forces in the present epoch. This can be seen if we take a number of tendencies