What makes a party revolutionary?

BY: Scott Hiley| January 30, 2019
What makes a party revolutionary?
QOK...tell me why we have this awful "migration" issue - people forced to get the hell out of their home countries because of what and who US corporations are supporting ….shouldn't Communists world wide be advocating they revolt...revolution?..."Workers of the World you have nothing to lose but your chains!" Don't get it...a "revolutionary party?" apparently not anymore....
AHi, and thanks for writing to us.  So, why aren't we telling refugees to arm themselves and rise up against the forces responsible for their oppression?

First of all, it isn't on migrants and refugees to rise up in revolt against U.S. imperialism.  It is a fight for the whole working class. From our perspective, U.S. workers have a special role in that fight, just as white workers have a special role in fighting racism, and just as working-class men have a special duty to struggle against misogyny and male supremacy.

On the bigger question of what qualifies us as a revolutionary party, the short answer is that there's a difference between calling for a revolution and making a revolution.

There's a saying among teachers (or at least among the people who train teachers) that we don't teach subjects, we teach students.  A little hokey, but it's true: what makes us teachers isn't how well we know constitutional law or French literature, but how effectively we pass that knowledge on to others and enable them to do something with it.

Same goes for communists, who are supposed to teach other workers how to fight and win. "The fate of a class," wrote György Lukács, "depends upon its ability to elucidate and solve the problems with which history confronts it."  Right now, those problems are momentous: the interlocking political, economic, and environmental crises of capitalism, the entry of the fascist right into the political mainstream, the danger of imperialist war...

Think of the upcoming period as a test--not a multiple choice quiz on the Manifesto, or even a take-home essay on why we need a revolution, but a practical test of the working class's ability to impose a democratic solution to the current crisis.  Our task, as communists, is to help our class and our people pass that test.  That means meeting people where they are and working to build unity and political experience in the other struggles along the path to socialism: labor struggles, mass democratic movements, elections, and anywhere collective power is built and exercised.

Hope this helps.



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