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Showing posts from August, 2011

"The Class, the Party, and the Leadership"

The Spanish Revolution is in many ways a how-to-guide for how not to take power and implement a revolutionary workers’ democracy. Actually, it is studying the Spanish Revolution that convinced me personally that revolutionary Marxism was correct and revolutionary Anarchism, at least in practice, didn’t exist. As we know, the Spanish Revolution failed and we saw Fascist reaction not only gain control of Spain, but ultimately most of Europe. So why did the Spanish Revolution fail? Was this a failure of leadership, or were the workers simply not mature enough to carry through a revolution? In this document [ The Class, the Party, and the Leadership ] Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky answers that question by verbally body-slamming the editors of Que Faire (What To Do), which was a left-leaning bourgeois intellectual paper published in Paris. It is interesting that Trotsky made sure to write that the paper itself was of no importance, i.e, it wasn’t going to do much ot