This is the fourth and concluding part of a series reflecting on Douglas Greene’s, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024). The review-essay examines the New Kautskyists, Trotskyism, Stalinism, and the challenges facing socialists in the 21^st Century. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Red Spark.

This is the third part of what is now a four-part series reflecting on Douglas Greene’s, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024). The review-essay examines the New Kautskyists, Trotskyism, Stalinism, and the challenges facing socialists in the 21^st Century. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Red Spark.

This is the second of a four-part series reflecting on Douglas Greene’s, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024). The review-essay examines the New Kautskyists, Trotskyism, and the challenges facing socialists in the 21st Century. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Red Spark.

This is the first of a four-part series reflecting on Douglas Greene’s, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024). The review-essay examines the New Kautskyists, Trotskyism, and the challenges facing socialists in the 21^st Century. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Red Spark.

In today's imperialist world, which is starkly polarised between rich and poor societies, revolutionary Internationalism is the most basic principle of Marxist politics.

It is not enough simply to support the struggle of workers in our own country for better lives. Redistribution of wealth within a rich, imperialist country like Australia – if the workers movement is limited to that – is historically a social democratic project.

In his otherwise well-argued article “The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat Peasantry: Permanent Revolution Vietnam” in Activist Vol. 14, No. 4, Comrade Mike Karadjis wrote: According to Siegelbaum (Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, Cambridge Uni Press, 1992, pp. 43-44), the ‘poor peasant committees’ had been a failure; there had been no second stage of the revolution in the countryside. I think this is probably correct, judging both by what happened next and what has happened elsewhere in the world...

There were a considerable number of misrepresentations of our party’s positions in David Glanz’s article in the IST discussion bulletin. In this response we will take up only the most politically important of these.

The Communist Party of Australia has recently published a pamphlet by David Matters entitled Putting Lenin’s Clothes on Trotskyism which claims that the DSP’s rejection of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is really a cover for its support for Trotskyism. However, the real purpose of the pamphlet is to criticise the DSP’s position on the 1998 waterfront dispute.

During the first imperialist world war, a trend began to emerge among the Russian revolutionary Marxists that argued that since national oppression could not be abolished without an economic revolution against imperialism and capitalism, Marxists did not need to concern themselves with the problems of a political revolution to achieve democracy. Instead, the “nascent trend of imperialist Economism” (as Lenin characterised it) argued that all that was needed to abolish national oppression was the anti-capitalist economic revolution, i.e., the socialist revolution.

“From the democratic revolution we shall at once, and precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the class conscious and organised proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half way… we shall bend every effort to help the entire peasantry achieve the democratic revolution, in order thereby to make it easier for us, the party of the proletariat, to pass on as quickly as possible to the new and higher task – the socialist revolution.” (V.I. Lenin, Social-Democracy’s Attitude to the Peasant Movement, September 1905)