"The Relevance of socialism" discussion

**Hot off the press**

My 5-10 minute long speech i will be giving 2morrow

gimme any corrections i can stick in i will check thisplace at 7am b4 my train for adjustments

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The need for organization

The Bourgeois often used to joke, 'if the revolution is inevitable, why form a party for it, why not form a party for the solar eclipse?'

•   I’m going to talk about the need for local organization and the need to use organization for the success of the movement

What’s the need?
•   What are we against? We are against a colossal organised state, which while well maintained, can seem to many invincible and unbreakable. This state is organised, through legislation, judiciary, schooling institutions etc
•   The only way to effectively fight against this organised state is to unite and fight within a strong powerful organisation
•   Using Trotsky’s analogy of steam, The steam being the workers will to change society and the box piston being the party if steam is released it quickly disperses around the surrounding areas, however, if this steam is in a box piston, it can drive this piston at a great force
•   Only through an organised press can we fight against the lies of the capitalist press such as the BBC, daily mail, the times etc who spread lies recently about fire-fighters, the situation in Iraq etc
•   Only through organised workers mobilisation can we fight against police and state brutality
•   Only through organised pressure from below can we force the trade unions to do what we say, and through organisation can we put pressure on parliament to put in place progressive legislation

Five main points

•   A revolutionary organization puts together the efforts of many different revolutionaries towards a common goal
o   This means that through a structure of an organization, people are able to push in numbers against their objectives, in one whole force, being able to apply most pressure. This would ensure that the actions of the organization are achieved most successively rather than in small individual groups or persons.
   An important example would the RSDLP combined the many revolutionaries of Russia at the time and pushed forward with such force

•   a revolutionary organisation is the historical memory of past defeats and struggles of the class so the movement does not need to repeat them at every step
o   This enables an organisational structure to facilitate discussion and debate over past events and how today’s organisation can learn from the mistakes of the past and learn from the past
   Such an example would be post war France where today we can learn that only during a slump can people attentively listen to the Marxist argument and that unlike in France the organisation should push for power for itself rather than collude with its foe, i.e. the capitalists

•   a revolutionary organisation concentrates the efforts of the movement of the class and makes it a powerful force able to change the world
o   Proletariat, atomized, individualized, can’t fight against class oppression.
   For example you can say that fascism which appears mainly to maintain capitalism destroys workers organizations, because that is the most efficient way of destroying the workers ability to rise against the oppression.

•   Being part of a revolutionary organisation allows you to intervene in an organised way in a movement, to discuss the ideas in common with other comrades from all over the world and intervene on the same lines, something which is surely more effective than isolated action
o   This was clearly shown at the Stop the War Coalition, where 2 million people protested against the unjust imperialist actions against Iraq. Such an organisation was able to bring together a great variety of people along the same lines, and across the world exceeding 10 million people. Despite the capitalist out looking leadership, the protests nearly overthrew Blair from his seat as Prime ministers

•   a revolutionary organisation is first and foremost ideas and theory, only these are the basis for action, and you can only get them if you are part of such an organization
o   Individual learning will go to a certain extent, however will not be able to fully stimulate or challenge ideas. This can mean that the theory becomes a chore and decreases the motivation to learn more theory
o   Firstly ideas and theory, and only in second place an organization, something what Stalinists fail to see. You can point out that in Stalinism organization is without any ideas, only an organization without any real theory, so practice without theory is equally bad, because it leaves out historical experiences
   This use of organisation was used during the years previous to the Russian revolution, where papers were sent to factories, and discussion circles appeared, increasing the education of the workers and providing shells for the growth of a potentially revolutionary organisation growing.
   The Communist Party should have conducted agitation among the dockers to refuse to load arms and supplies to Algeria, and appealed to the conscripts boarding the ships to form committees of action in conjunction with the workers in the ports, and to refuse to go to Algeria. It would be unbelievable if one did not know the class position of the SP leadership and the bureaucratic degeneracy of the CP leadership, that they should have learned nothing from the tragic pages of the past.

Critique of Anarchist “organizations”
•   Anarchist organisations have always hidden behind a facade of 'self-organisation'. They claim to have no leaders, no policy etc. Yet who decides? If there was no leadership and no policy then there could be no action of any kind. The recent demonstrations have been highly organised and coordinated on an international scale. Good, so it should be. However, without organisation and democracy no-one, except a clique at the top, has any say in why, where and when. Such a movement will never bring international capital trembling to its knees.

Conclusion

•   The task of our time is to combine the strength and experience of the working class and its mighty organisations with the power and energy of the youth internationally, on the basis of a clear understanding of what capitalism is, what the state is, and a programme for changing society. That requires a combination of theory and action. In that combination lies the strength of Marxism.

in reply to the original introduction of 'if the revolution is inevitable, why form a party for it, why not form a party for the solar eclipse?", the answer wud be that:
humans play no part in solar eclipse, but humans play the crucial role in society and the transformation of society into a just one