Letter in Reply to a Friend about Political Choices in a time of Crisis

By: Andrew W. Taylor

I am not sure which Marxist-Leninist, Sandinista or Bolivarian political programme you were engaging in your good letter, so excuse me if I do not succeed in hitting the nail on the head! (You've always forgiven me in the past so I feel some liberty). One view you were broaching was the whole question of Reformism? I realise many say things can change gradually through greater and greater reforms --so revolutionary struggles are unnecessary, and if a working-class party is needed at all -- it should not be a revolutionary one.

I think this view fails to see how the state serves ruling-class interests. I believe that Administrations as they are constituted under Capitalism can not be trusted to carry out reforms. The governments give drops to the workers through an eye-dropper because their class-interest is with Big Capital.

Another view - social democracy - assumes collective aspirations to 'the Good State' can be realized in the present System and lead in time to a people-controlled Government. The experiences of my life - and my present view of the increasing size of the army of the unemployed, tell me the social-democratic UK, Sweden, France, Germany, Canada, etc., have not been able to build a people-friendly state. As capitalism convulses, destroying lives and producing a broken generation, they wonder like awed children. They know not what is to befall their privileged world or their power. The crisis-cycle of boom and bust is inherent in capitalism. So the social democratic prescription turns out to be a naive failure. Reforms like Unemplyment Ins. or Single Payer Health Care are reforms radicals should struggle to achieve - but these reforms do not alter the main anti-working class orientation of the present system.

The State, Big Business, and the Media compose a single Entity: there are certain conflicts -- but they are axes of one Corporate entity. The State is not neutral -- we see this all around us today.

I think it is my duty to become an adherent of an organisation of the working class composed of workers and their allies from academia and small business, etc. This party has in its programme the taking of state power from the capitalist class and the creation of a socialist state.

There are a number of revolutionary socialist paths: Cuba is the last quasi-Leninist one in our part of the world; Venezuela-Bolivia-Ecuador may be going down an incrementalist transfer from private-property dominance to socialized-property dominance... I can't judge which way things will turn out in the end. I do know the US government has attempted scores of coup d'etat against Cuba and to a lesser degree, Venezuela. Imperialism does not suffer such states to flourish or even exist! It is too distracting for the masses.

I can't choose between paths to socialism - the path is conditioned by the political culture. I think we may have major differences regarding pacifism. I am not a pacifist and instead follow the main Catholic and Humanist positions on just war.

“Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.” Bertholt Brecht