From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-Socialist Revolution Is the Only Way Out

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.

Markin comment:

I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
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Workers Vanguard No. 1005
6 July 2012

Socialist Revolution Is the Only Way Out

(Quote of the Week)

Writing during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Leon Trotsky underlined that only workers revolution can put an end to the privation and social regression endemic to the decaying capitalist profit system. The need to build revolutionary workers parties based on this understanding is graphically underscored by the current economic crisis, as the capitalists and their governments attempt to force greater austerity down the throats of working people.

The first and most important premise of a revolutionary situation is the most intense sharpening of the contradictions between the productive forces and the property relations. The nation stops going forward. The arrest in the economic development and, even more, its regression signify that the capitalist system of production is definitely worn out and must give way to the socialist system.

The present crisis, which encompasses all countries and thrusts the economy back decades, has definitely pushed the bourgeois system to absurdity. If, at the dawn of capitalism, ignorant and starving workers broke machines, today it is the capitalists themselves who destroy machines and factories. The further maintenance of the private ownership of the means of production threatens humanity with degeneration and barbarism.

The basis of society is economic. That basis is ripe for socialism in a double sense: modern technology has advanced to a point where it can assure a high standard of living to the nation and to all humanity; but the capitalist property system, which has outlived itself, dooms the masses to ever-increasing poverty and suffering.

The fundamental premise of socialism—that is, the economic premise—has already been present for some time. But capitalism will not disappear from the scene automatically. Only the working class can seize the forces of production from the stranglehold of the exploiters. History places this task squarely before us. If the proletariat is, for one reason or another, incapable of routing the bourgeoisie and of seizing power—if it is, for example, paralyzed by its own parties and trade unions—the continued decay of economy and civilization will follow, calamities will pile up, despair and prostration will engulf the masses, and capitalism—decrepit, decayed, rotting—will strangle the people with increasing strength, and will thrust them into the abyss of a new war. Other than the socialist revolution, there is no way out.

—Leon Trotsky, “Once Again, Whither France?” (March 1935)