Socialism in an Age of Waiting get right to the point today with a post which anyone who is interested in what Marxists think today should read (scroll down to Stand in the Place Where You Live):
With what ends in view? Well, obviously, in the long term, the attainment of socialism – but let us spell it out as bluntly as possible (and if we could underline it in red we probably would): the only road to socialism lies through the completion of capitalist development.
Far from living in an era that is ripe for socialist or proletarian revolution, we [*] are faced with a process of liberal or bourgeois revolution that is still not complete, even in those few economically advanced and politically powerful countries in which events labelled bourgeois revolutions have occurred. In particular, before we can talk reasonably and plausibly about even beginning to prepare for the seizure of power – by whom exactly? how exactly? – the following changes, which are already well under way, will surely have to have come much closer to completion.
(a) National liberation, which is the transition from the remaining forms of pre-capitalist domination, and from the various forms of non-democratic capitalist rule, to the universal establishment of bourgeois-democratic nation states, in which all residents enjoy the maximum of human rights and civil liberties attainable within capitalism. If Marxists do not collaborate, in whatever way they can, in at least promoting and supporting, and at most – while preserving the integrity and autonomy of their tradition – directly aiding, this transition, then there is simply no point in being a Marxist. It is the absence of bourgeois democracy from so many parts of the world, and the presence in its place of dictatorships, a few of them still claiming to be “Marxist”, that constitutes the largest single obstacle to any progress at all.
I could cut and paste the whole thing here but I urge you to go and read it for yourself. It is so refreshing to read a serious Marxist analysis which stands in stark contrast to the nihilistic guff that is spouted by the frauds of the sectarian left.
