Marxism Today No. 22 Out Now
A journal for militants and activists who are aware that “without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary movement.” The theory Lenin was referring to in this famous phrase was Marxism, and the meaning of that statement is that socialist consciousness—that is, ultimately, the consciousness of the need to smash the bourgeois state in order to establish, through revolutionary means, workers’ power over the whole of society (the dictatorship of the proletariat), does not spring up spontaneously among workers; it is not merely a reflection of their material condition or of the class struggle itself that they are inevitably compelled to wage in a class-divided society. That consciousness must be “brought in from outside” the daily confrontation between the classes, and this is what justifies the need to build a revolutionary vanguard party that brings together the most advanced sector of workers and youth emerging from those very struggles.
