In August 2025 we decided to re-found our organization under the name “vorwärts.” This went hand in hand with discussions about our status as part of the Project for a Revolutionary Marxist International (PRMI). These discussions culminated in the unanimous decision in September to break with the PRMI. The following document aims to set out the reasons for this decision – but our concern is not inner-left factional quarrels with their all-too-familiar and often irrational dynamics. Our concern is a greater task: to draw the right lessons from the history of the CWI, the ISA, and the PRMI; to consciously reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of our own traditions; and to make a new beginning – one that is not merely formal, but based on a solid programmatic and methodological foundation.[1]

Particular weight – both in current social movements and in the political debates of recent years – must be given to questions of socialist feminism and of national and racial oppression. What we outline in this document represents an intermediate result of our ongoing theoretical work and discussions. It does not yet amount to a fully elaborated program, but it does lay out the approach we consider necessary in order to continue the building of an international revolutionary organization on a new basis.

In this document we put forward sharp criticisms. At the same time, we are aware that we ourselves have made political mistakes in the past – and that, in the current period of deepening and overlapping capitalist multi-crises, further mistakes will inevitably occur. The decisive question, therefore, is not whether an organization can claim to have always been correct (wherever such claims are made, they should be met with particular suspicion). The decisive question is whether an organization is capable of learning while moving forward.

For this reason, we invite our current, former, and future comrades and fellow activists and socialists, as well as all interested readers, to engage with the analyses and arguments put forward here. We welcome feedback, critique, and comradely exchange – with the aim of building common revolutionary practice.

Bureaucratic Centralism in the Handling of Safeguarding

The PRMI emerged in 2024 out of the split of the International Socialist Alternative (ISA). In many respects, the ISA split of 2024 resembled the CWI split of 2019: once again there stood on one side a politically weak and unrepentant leadership that acted bureaucratically in order to secure its control – and on the other side a collection of sections, groups, and individuals united more by their opposition than by any shared positive program. Once again, the international structures that were supposed to serve debate collapsed under the slightest pressure. Once again, the much-vaunted “democratic centralism” gave way immediately to tactical bureaucratic maneuvering.

Nevertheless, we too initially associated the founding of the PRMI with the hope of a necessary new beginning. After years of crises and degeneration within the CWI and the ISA, the PRMI seemed to offer the chance to critically examine our traditions, preserve their strengths, and overcome their weaknesses. At its founding, the PRMI rightly diagnosed the deep crisis into which our political tradition had fallen, and the need for a fundamental renewal on the theoretical, programmatic, and organizational level. Yet after just one year we must state clearly: the PRMI has failed in this task. From the outset, the development of a genuine program and of democratic international structures was indefinitely postponed. The recognition that much needed to be rethought from the ground up, and that a new International could not simply be proclaimed overnight, was correct. But in place of programmatic clarification there emerged an unchecked, pseudo-democratic federalism that in practice has led to an informal bureaucratic centralism concentrated at the top.

Our critique of the PRMI is therefore not aimed merely at an organization whose analyses are politically weak or whose strategic orientation is inadequate. If that were the case, the disputes could and should be carried out within the organization – through open debate, democratic decision-making, and programmatic clarification. But this is precisely what is not possible in the PRMI. Its undemocratic character is not a secondary issue, but one of the central reasons why political differences cannot be addressed constructively. As with the late CWI and the ISA, a bureaucratic centralism dominates, in which conflicts are managed along informal lines of loyalty. At the same time, this centralism is paradoxically combined with a federalist arbitrariness: the federal fragmentation produces nationally isolated partial perspectives with no coherent international foundation. Political opposition is discouraged or marginalized, rather than treated as an opportunity for clarification and development.

Yet a revolutionary International can only exist if it provides a lasting structure of democratic debate – an organization that treats dissent not as a threat, but as a motor of its own development. The PRMI has demonstrated that it is neither able nor willing to meet this requirement. The founding of vorwärts and our departure from the PRMI are therefore not the expression of a split for its own sake, but the necessary consequence of an organization that has rendered itself incapable of acting.

The PRMI leadership inherited not only its personnel but also its approach to internal democracy from the CWI and the ISA. This became more than clear in the handling of the crisis within the Austrian organization in the spring and summer of 2025. On the background of this crisis, our own response to it, and the lessons we drew, we published three statements in March and August.[2] Here we cite the relevant passages from our statement “Learning While Moving Forward”:

“The occasion was a case of sexual violence committed in 2014 by a person who only later joined our organization and has since been expelled. The case became known to the leadership in 2019 and was mishandled in a false and negligent way. Thanks to the insistence of the survivor, these grave mistakes were brought back onto the agenda in early 2025 (see our March 2025 statement). We therefore decided to suspend our activities and to confront the mistakes of our organization in the past, in collaboration with the leadership of the Project for a Revolutionary Marxist International (PRMI). Once again we would like to apologize to the survivor – and we hope that our past and ongoing work of reflection and accountability will contribute to a process of healing. In the weeks that followed, an international commission of inquiry of the PRMI worked on clarifying these failures. Numerous members who played a very active and/or leading role at the time were interviewed, in some cases several times, in order to reconstruct events and also to understand their current attitudes toward their past mistakes. In the conversations, especially with the two still-active members who were part of the national leadership at the time, there was broad agreement on the course of events and the collective and individual failures involved."[3]

Yet already during this process the bureaucratic-centralist approach of the PRMI leadership became apparent. Three months after the crisis broke, when no report from the commission had yet been presented, several members proposed in a letter that the organization should cautiously resume its activities to the extent that the investigation and reflection process allowed – because complete paralysis threatened the very existence of the organization. As we wrote in our statement, “the increasing isolation without any organizational or political perspective only led members and supporters to withdraw further – a situation that did not support the reflection process we were striving for.”[4]

This proposal was interpreted by the PRMI leadership as sabotage of the safeguarding process. Needless to say, the letter was in no way an attempt to sabotage – on the contrary, it was an attempt to secure the continuation of the organization, and thereby also of the reflection process, through a minimum level of activity. Instead of discussing the proposal democratically, the PRMI leadership threatened the signatories with suspension if they did not distance themselves from it. In one case, such a suspension was actually carried out (even though none of the signatories had distanced themselves from the content of the letter). Criticism of this bureaucratic approach was then portrayed as if it were opposition to safeguarding itself – a complete distortion of reality.

When the final report of the commission was eventually released, there was broad agreement on its substantive findings. Yet the PRMI leadership drew almost exclusively bureaucratic conclusions: the expulsion (or indirect expulsion) of the remaining former leadership members, and the dissolution of the organization – the latter “proposal” presented to the Austrian members only a few hours before the membership assembly. Anyone who argued that suspensions, expulsions, or ad-hoc dissolutions and refoundings were not adequate measures in this situation was again accused of not taking safeguarding seriously. A majority of the Austrian membership opposed this ultimately superficial approach, and emphasized the necessary connection between organizational activity and both collective and individual reflection.

It is a bitter irony, though by no means accidental, that the PRMI leadership has sought to present itself as the bureaucratic guardian of socialist feminism, even though many of its leading members had themselves spent decades within the leadership structures of the CWI, where they actively fostered its toxic internal culture – without ever being held accountable. The methods have remained the same, only the vocabulary has changed: in the past, political criticism was dismissed wholesale as “petty-bourgeois feminism” or “academic”; now it is silenced under the banner of “safeguarding.” Precisely because of our own past mistakes on this indispensable principle for building a revolutionary organization, we have been outspoken in criticizing the way the PRMI leadership has placed any political criticism of its political trajectory or practical conduct in the same category as abusive behavior – and sanctioned it accordingly. To play safeguarding off against democratic debate is to sabotage both.

Within the PRMI, there is no possibility of correcting this practice. There are no functioning democratic structures, no fora for serious political exchange. It is no surprise, then, that the PRMI has already begun to disintegrate wherever the direct influence of the bureaucratic leadership clique has receded. The atomization of the LSP/PSL in Belgium – which has fragmented into a host of small groups – is one such example. At the same time, the example of Austria shows how the PRMI leadership has sought to counteract such disintegration: not through political clarification and democratic debate, but through purely formal-bureaucratic measures – expulsions, suspensions, and the top-down imposition of new organizations. This condition of the PRMI is both the expression of its lack of political basis and perspective, and the reason why such a basis can never be developed under its current framework.

No Perspectives in Sight

What the PRMI presents as “analyses” and perspectives consists almost entirely of isolated contributions from the leadership’s inner circle, whose quality varies widely. A coherent programmatic orientation, or even the beginnings of one, for the building of a revolutionary international organization are completely absent. If there is any consistency at all in the PRMI’s publications, it is that the question of the necessity of a revolutionary organization is systematically downplayed or ignored altogether.

Even the texts on Asia – which count among the better publications of the PRMI – reveal this weakness clearly. The article on the youth revolt in Nepal and the one on the mass protests in Indonesia provide useful information, but when it comes to the question of a “way forward,” the analyses suddenly leap to ready-made slogans. Either the necessity of a “revolutionary government” is proclaimed without answering how such a government is to arise, which parties would constitute it, and on which structures it would rest – beyond vague references to the potential power of a united working class.[5] Or – as in the case of Indonesia – the formation of councils and committees is proclaimed as a sufficient basis for “a new kind of people’s power,” without explaining how such spontaneous structures could facilitate revolutionary processes.[6]

What is missing from all these texts is the central lesson of the successful Russian Revolution, as well as of the many failed revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries: the indispensable necessity of an internationally organized revolutionary party. Councils, committees, or revolutionary transitional governments arise in most mass movements. Whether they can endure and be victorious, however, depends decisively on whether there exists a sufficiently rooted, democratically centralist, internationally organized party capable of playing a revolutionary role within these bodies. Trotsky and Lenin made it clear time and again: the revolutionary party is only one factor among many that determine the success or failure of a revolution – but it is precisely the factor that falls within the responsibility of those who call themselves Trotskyists and Leninists.

Needless to say, this difficulty is not resolved by simply appending the “necessity of the revolutionary party” like a catechism at the end of an article, as the late CWI often did. The task is to show concretely how such a party can be built out of the current situation and the struggles unfolding today. What organizational options exist in a given situation for workers, youth, and the oppressed? What are the specific strengths and weaknesses of these organizations? In which areas and questions is there an organizational and programmatic vacuum? Where do we see dynamics and potential to fill that vacuum? What concrete organizational proposals can we advance? It is no accident that the PRMI consistently omits these key questions in its analyses and perspectives: its inability to build a revolutionary and democratic organization of its own goes hand in hand with its inability to embed that necessity programmatically and strategically within today’s movements and struggles.

The task of a “Project for a Revolutionary Marxist International” should be to help movements and struggles both analytically and organizationally – by sharpening the still underdeveloped consciousness of the necessity of revolutionary political organization. Such organization must unify the struggles against exploitation and oppression and orient them toward a generalization in the fight against capitalism. Instead, the PRMI increasingly retreats into reproducing the existing consciousness within these movements. Rather than offering the movements a clear strategic perspective, it eclecticly imports slogans, catchphrases, and fragments of theories circulating within the movements into its own work – without critically examining them. This supposed “abandonment of sectarianism” is in truth nothing more than the reverse side of the very political isolation that sectarianism itself expresses.

As Frantz Fanon showed in his analysis of the role of intellectuals in colonial liberation movements, the distance of “revolutionary” intellectuals from actual struggles often reveals itself precisely in the desperate attempt to overcome that distance by simply repeating the language of the movement. Yet, as Fanon wrote, „by seeking to follow them too closely, the intellectual turns out to be nothing better than a vulgar opportunist, even behind the times.“[7]

Because the PRMI has nothing substantive to offer that could advance struggles strategically, it is left only with the escape forward into an ever-escalating rhetoric. One example is its systematic description of the genocide in Gaza as a “Holocaust” or “new Holocaust” – and correspondingly, its labeling of German police as “Gestapo-like” when they repress Gaza protesters.[8] Even if we assume that this is not merely an attempt to cover up political disorientation through sensationalist hyperbole, the question remains: What analytical value do these comparisons add to the movement against the genocide in Gaza? This question has nothing to do with the bourgeois myth of the “unique singularity” of the Holocaust. What is at stake is the necessary Marxist analysis of the social, political, and economic foundations of different genocides – as the precondition for deriving a revolutionary strategy to fight them.

Do we really need to explain that the Holocaust was an entirely different kind of genocide, and that the character of the Nazi regime was fundamentally different from that of today’s Israeli state? The Holocaust arose from a petty-bourgeois fascist mass movement that was instrumentalized by German imperialism in the global competition for power – not only to eliminate rival imperialisms but also to smash the Soviet Union and the revolutionary workers’ movement within Germany. The extermination of European Jews was decisive in this context, but the Holocaust encompassed much more: the annihilation of all “life unworthy of life” as well as the complete destruction of political opposition, especially the socialist and communist currents – all within the framework of the war of extermination against the Soviet Union as a (however Stalinistically degenerated) systemic alternative. In what sense does this historical constellation resemble the situation in Israel and Palestine? The same applies to the equation of German police with the Gestapo. If one takes this comparison analytically seriously, it necessarily follows that Germany today is a fascist state. From this one would have to derive the need to build underground networks, organize escape routes, and propagate armed struggle. Since the PRMI draws none of these conclusions, such comparisons do not demonstrate analytical clarity but rather strategic confusion.

In fact, these formulations have a double effect. First, they contribute to the confusion of the movement by making historical and political constellations indistinguishable. Second, they trivialize the functioning of the bourgeois-democratic state in passing. For the truly scandalous truth is this: capitalism does not need fascism in order to carry out genocide or to unleash massive repression against resistance. All of this is perfectly possible within bourgeois “democracy” itself – and anyone who ignores this only fosters illusions in its democratic structures and in the bourgeois state as such.

Because the PRMI has developed neither its own programmatic basis nor a strategic perspective, it increasingly substitutes rhetorical effects for genuine analysis. Instead of advancing movements in their consciousness by demonstrating the connection between exploitation and oppression, and translating that into a perspective of revolutionary organization, the PRMI makes itself dependent on the moods within the movements. It adopts their slogans and concepts uncritically, rather than mediating them critically and expanding them strategically. In doing so, the PRMI ultimately weakens precisely those struggles whose tail it chases.

Opportunism and Eclecticism

The problem becomes even more severe when the opportunism and eclecticism of the PRMI shape not only its propaganda but also its fundamental analyses. A particularly striking example is the lengthy article that promises “a Marxist approach to the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”[9] The entire document is built on a concept popular in parts of the Gaza solidarity movement: the notion of settler colonialism. Israel is described as a “peculiar form of settler colonialism” – a formulation that bears a striking resemblance to the old CWI’s theoretical helplessness in characterizing China, which it simply labeled “a peculiar form of state capitalism.” But what exactly “settler colonialism” is supposed to mean within the framework of a Marxist theory of state and economy remains completely unexplained.

The most influential and widely known use of the term comes from J. Sakai’s book Settlers. There it is argued that the “Euro-Amerikan proletariat” – i.e. the working classes of the imperialist centers – are inherently counterrevolutionary by virtue of their “settler nature” and form a strategic unity with imperialism. Sakai writes explicitly:

“[It] disproves the thesis that in settler Amerika ‘common working class interests’ override the imperialist contradictions of oppressor and oppressed nations when it comes to tactical unity around economic issues. The same applies to the thesis that supposed ideological unity with the Euro-Amerikan ‘Left’ also overrides imperialist contradictions, and hence, even with their admitted shortcomings, they are supposed allies of the oppressed against U.S. Imperialism. Could it be the other way around? That despite their tactical contradictions with the bourgeoisie, that Euro-Amerikan workers and revisionistic radicals have strategic unity with U.S. Imperialism?” [10]

Sakai’s rhetorical question leaves no doubt as to his answer. If this is the basis for the PRMI’s use of the concept of “settler colonialism,” then this framework – despite its Marxist phraseology – has nothing in common with genuine, internationalist Marxism. If, however, the PRMI means something different by it, it has entirely failed to provide any definition.

Neither is it clarified what “settler colonialism” is supposed to mean within the framework of a Marxist economic and social analysis, nor what strategic consequences are meant to follow from it. The theoretical and practical implications are left unexamined: Who exactly are the “settlers”? Only those in the settlements in the occupied West Bank? The entire Israeli proletariat? Or a supposed “settler class,” as has sometimes been argued with reference to apartheid-era South Africa? And how is such a “settler class” analytically distinguished from the classic Marxist categories of proletariat and bourgeoisie, and their respective internal differentiations?

Instead of addressing these questions, the article merely points in a footnote to “different kinds of settler colonialism,” which the Israeli-British Marxist Moshe Machover supposedly describes. Machover was a co-founder of the Trotskyist organization Matzpen in Israel. Even though we certainly do not agree with him on everything, his analysis in the cited text is far more differentiated and instructive than anything the PRMI offers. Machover shows with great precision how the adoption of the settler-colonialism schema led the Palestinian liberation movement itself into an analytical and political dead end:

„Until 1969, the Palestinian nationalist movement regarded Palestine as forever the homeland of one national group: the Palestinian Arabs - it was an Arab country. However, they came to the conclusion, in view of the actual reality, that the Zionist settlers could not be dislodged. They are there to stay. So they reasonably thought that they should propose a solution that would incorporate them. But, being stuck in a nationalist mindset, they could not accept the idea that what had crystallised in the occupied part of Palestine, in Israel, was a national formation, a settler nation. This is not unique - there are other settler nations in the world - but this was a settler nation still in the process of colonisation, which made it even harder to accept.

So the PLO related to this particular settler nation as a religious entity - hence the word, “secular”. The future Palestine is going to be Arab in national character, but it is going to be secular: it is going to allow equal religious rights and freedom of religious worship to all concerned - Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Paradoxically, in relating to the settlers not as a new nation, but just as part of Jewry, they accepted implicitly the diametrically opposed stance of Zionism, which also regards the Israelis just as part of Jewry, not a new nation. Except that, according to Zionist ideology, all Jews around the world constitute a nation. However, this was 1969, remember - it was at the height of the Vietnam war and the PLO was no doubt inspired by the Vietnamese struggle against colonialism, although in very different circumstances. The inspiration and ideas they got from Vietnam were very unhelpful and in fact soon led to disaster.“[11]

The contrast with Moshe Machover’s analysis could hardly be greater. While Machover shows, in a materialist way, how the uncritical use of the “settler colonialism” schema led the Palestinian liberation movement itself into a strategic dead end with catastrophic consequences (Black September 1970), the PRMI repeats the very same mistake – but on an even weaker theoretical foundation. Instead of presenting a materialist class analysis of the Israeli state and its social formations, the PRMI uncritically adopts concepts and narratives that it has not itself theoretically grounded. The impression left is that the PRMI is not proceeding from its own analysis at all, but rather borrowing a concept on the cue of certain activist layers, without having worked through its political and theoretical implications. The result is a double weakening: 1. The movement against the genocide in Gaza is deprived of a clear analysis of how imperialism, national oppression, and class struggle are interconnected. 2. At the same time, uncritical importation of concepts injects additional confusion into the movement itself.

(National) Oppression and Class Perspective

It is obvious that the PRMI’s mistakes on questions of national oppression and class analysis are, in many respects, a reaction to the opposite mistakes made by the late CWI. Without doubt, this is a central complex of problems for Marxists in the current period of intensified imperialist rivalry and neocolonial exploitation: How can struggles against national, neocolonial, and imperialist oppression be successful? Which social forces can lead these struggles on the side of the oppressed nations? And what role do the working classes of the oppressor nations and imperialist centers play?

In its early phase, the CWI made decisive contributions to these questions. In Ireland, for example, while most left currents in the struggle against British imperialism placed their hopes in petty-bourgeois nationalist and sectarian forces such as the IRA, the CWI centered its approach on the unity of Catholic and Protestant workers. But this unity was never simply assumed: it was clear that it had to be fought for. This meant waging a consistent political struggle against British imperialism and its Unionist proxies in Northern Ireland, but also making a concrete appeal to Northern Irish Protestant workers to break with “their” British ruling class. At the same time, it required a sharp critique of the petty-bourgeois and equally pro-capitalist Irish nationalism of the IRA, Sinn Féin, & Co. as well as of their terrorist methods. Only on this basis, the CWI argued, was a united struggle of the entire working class for its common interests possible: a life in peace and prosperity, free from national oppression and capitalist exploitation, with guaranteed national and religious self-determination for all.[12]

Yet, as we have shown elsewhere in the example of socialist feminism, the CWI also exhibited the tendency to sideline questions of specific oppression in the name of preserving “unity” of the working class. As we wrote in the statement in question:

“The approach to struggles against specific forms of oppression was shaped by the idea of translating them into ‘social’ demands that could then be subsumed under the ‘real’ class struggle – understood primarily as economic struggles for higher wages, better working conditions, etc. In one sense, this was not entirely wrong: the fight for better living conditions for the entire working class can indeed undermine the ground on which racist propaganda grows. Yet, on the other hand, this conception of ‘class unity,’ by focusing only on what ‘all workers’ have in common, led to ignoring everything they do not share – for example, the lived experiences of specific oppression on the basis of origin, gender, sexual orientation, and so on.

As a result, little progress was made in anchoring the organization within migrant layers or in formulating politics from their perspective. The addressees of the anti-racist program were less the oppressed themselves, and more the ‘native’ workers, who were told that racism was merely a distraction from their ‘real’ social problems. But for migrants, racism is not a distraction tactic from their actual problems – they are the direct target of that tactic. Racism is their immediate problem.

What is needed is a Marxist program from the perspective of those layers of the class who are subjected to racial oppression, one that addresses the oppression they face on a daily basis. From the history of the revolutionary Jewish workers’ movement, to anti-colonial struggles, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the strikes of migrant workers in Germany, and the sans-papiers movement in France, there is no shortage of historical lessons. They also show that precisely such struggles can generate solidarity within the ‘majority’ of the working class, and win it away from racist propaganda.

Class unity is therefore not the ‘lowest common denominator’ that remains once everything else in life outside the paycheck has been stripped away. On the contrary: real class consciousness and actual unity of the working class can only consist in politically fighting all forms of oppression, and orienting that struggle toward the overthrow of capitalism and its state.”[13]

This is the central lesson from Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, which in many ways marks the birth of Bolshevism. This lesson must be relearned today, and the one-sidedness of earlier understandings overcome. For Lenin, “genuine class consciousness” does not mean only that the working class understands itself as a “class for itself” and fights against the bourgeoisie for concrete improvements for its own conditions – important as this undoubtedly is. Above all, it is a “truly political” consciousness: one that does not merely reflect its own immediate oppression, but develops an all-encompassing awareness of the injustices that capitalism produces at every level. Lenin writes:

“The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population. Those who concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon itself alone are not Social-Democrats; for the self-knowledge of the working classis indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding – or rather, not so much with thetheoretical, as with the practical, understanding – of the relationships between all the various classesof modern society, acquired through the experience of political life.”[14]

This of course does not mean that Lenin demanded abandoning the class perspective – on the contrary. For Lenin, the class perspective is not a matter of staring at one’s own feet, but rather the vantage point from which all processes in society are to be observed, studied, and analyzed. The idea that one could “develop the class political consciousness of the workers from within, so to speak, from their economic struggle, i.e., by making this struggle the exclusive (or, at least, the main) starting-point, by making it the exclusive (or, at least, the main) basis,” Lenin considered “the basic error that all the Economists commit”.[15] Such consciousness, as he wrote in his often misunderstood formulation, “can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes.”[16] In other words, “from without” does not mean that bourgeois intellectuals should explain the world to the workers. Rather, Lenin meant that the working class, beyond the realm of economic struggle, must create for itself a political organization that enables it not only to fight the trench warfare of wages against bosses and police, but to analyze the entire social situation and target the system as a whole. This is why Lenin also called the “the conception of the economic struggle as the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into the political movement,” as preached by the Economists, “extremely harmful and reactionary in its practical significance.”[17]

Many of today’s self-proclaimed “Marxists” find Lenin’s arguments deeply unsettling. They sidestep them awkwardly by claiming that in What Is To Be Done? Lenin merely “bended the stick” in one direction in order to balance a weakness in the other (this was the interpretation common in the CWI). Others remain entirely silent on the matter—always out of fear of being accused of “contaminating” class consciousness with “petty-bourgeois” issues, or of capitulating to “liberalism” or even “postmodernism.” To such “Marxists,” Lenin’s reply is unambiguous:

“He who sees in these tactics an obscuring of the class-consciousness of the proletariat and a compromise with liberalism […] drags Social-Democracy towards the “economic struggle against the employers and the government” and yields to liberalism, abandons the task of actively intervening in every “liberal” issue and of determining his own, Social-Democratic, attitude towards this question.”[18]

The significance of these arguments for today’s struggles against specific forms of oppression (racism, sexism, queerphobia, etc.) in connection with the general class struggle – which, for Lenin, must always be a struggle against the system as a whole – can hardly be overstated. Lenin makes this point explicitly. Equipped with real, political class consciousness, Lenin argues,

“the most backward worker will understand, or will feel, that the students and religious sects, the peasants and the authors are being abused and outraged by those same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him at everystep of his life. Feeling that, he himself will be filled with an irresistible desire to react, and he will know how to hoot the censors one day, on another day to demonstrate outside the house of a governor who has brutally suppressed a peasant uprising, on still another day to teach a lesson to the gendarmes in surplices who are doing the work of the Holy Inquisition, etc.”[19]

Only when all these struggles are taken together do they constitute the political class struggle through which the working class can overthrow the ruling class and its system. One can, if desired, add contemporary struggles here – such as those against the climate crisis.

These considerations are particularly connected to the complex of imperialism and anti-imperialism. For the more mechanical the late CWI’s approach to the question of “class unity” became, the more abstract it grew in this context as well. To be sure, it correctly rejected approaches such as Sakai’s theory of “settler colonialism,” which explicitly wrote off the working classes of the imperialist centers. But in response it offered only the notion of the “common class interests” of workers in both the oppressor nations and the oppressed nations. This inevitably remained entirely abstract, especially for those layers who experience their oppression as tolerated – or even actively supported – by those relatively more privileged sections of the class. The result was an understanding of “class unity” based solely on the most general economic categories – particularly inadequate in the epoch of imperialist domination and wars.

Trotsky had already analyzed this problem in much more depth in 1914, in The War and the International. Faced with the mass support of the working classes in the imperialist countries for the First World War, he described “The dependence of the proletarian class movement, particularly in its economic conflicts, upon the scope and the successes of the imperialistic policy of the state”. Trotsky wrote:

„As capitalism passed from a national to an international-imperialistic ground, national production, and with it the economic struggle of the proletariat, came into direct dependence on those conditions of the world market which are secured by dreadnaughts and cannon. In other words, in contradiction of the fundarrental interests of the proletariat taken in their wide historic extent, the immediate trade interests of various strata of the proletariat proved to have a direct dependence upon the successes or the failures of the foreign policies of the governments.“[20]

Trotsky thus recognized that in the imperialist epoch the fundamental common interests of the world proletariat are by no means identical with the immediate interests of certain layers or national working classes. This does not mean that the working classes in the imperialist centers have a “strategic unity with imperialism,” as in Sakai’s theory of “settler colonialism.” But it does mean that a class perspective in anti-imperialist or anti-colonial struggles is not simply a matter of appealing to the “fundamental common interests” of the working classes in the imperialist centers and those in the oppressed countries or territories. Such appeals ignore the fact that the immediate interests of different layers or national working classes in these conflicts can indeed contradict one another – and thus appeals to “common interests” necessarily appear hollow and abstract. Only reformists and Economists can feign outrage when, like Trotsky, one points out that the working classes of the imperialist centers tie certain immediate interests to the success of “their” imperialism. The root error here again lies in the superficial conception of class as a purely economic category, and of class struggle as merely a struggle over surplus value in capitalist production. In this way, the struggle of the class becomes bound to the development of the “national” productive forces. Trotsky traced the emergence of this misunderstanding, and its fate in the imperialist epoch, as follows:

"As long as capitalism remained on a national basis, the proletanat could not refrain from cooperation in democratizing the political relations and in developing the forces of production through its parliamentary, communal and other activities. […] But when the capitalist states overstep their national form to become imperialistic world powers, the proletariat cannot oppose this new imperialism. And the reason is the so-called minimal program which fashioned its policy upon the framework of the national state. When its main concern is for tariff treaties and social legislation, the proletariat is incapable of expending the same energy in fighting imperialism that it did in fighting feudalism. By applying its old methods of the class struggle – the constant adaptation to the movements of the markets – to the changed conditions produced by imperialism, it itself falls into material and ideological dependence on imperialism."[21]

Here Trotsky formulates a central lesson for the question of class struggle in the imperialist centers: as long as it is waged on the basis of immediate economic demands, the dependence on one’s own imperialism cannot be broken. In the worst case, it is even reinforced, as Trotsky showed in relation to the German Social Democracy and the trade unions in 1914. For in their economistic and reformist logic – not  incorrectly – they tied immediate improvements for German workers to the military success of German imperialism in the war.

It is true that in the First World War – and in different forms also in later imperialist wars – the support of the proletariat for “its own” imperialism diminished the more obvious it became that the plunder of “their” rulers was failing, from which workers had hoped to gain a few crumbs. This was the basis for the Bolsheviks’ tactics during the war years.[22] But this by no means meant an automatic solidarity with those oppressed by their own imperialism. Even in the Russian February Revolution there was still a widespread hope among workers and peasants that by overthrowing the Tsar they could prosecute the war more effectively. Russian imperialism was only overthrown through the October Revolution and the decisive role of the Bolsheviks. This was only possible because the Bolsheviks (under Trotsky’s influence) understood the “immediate demands” of land, bread, and peace as the direct tasks of the social revolution, which by definition breaks with every imperialism. In the 1914 text cited, Trotsky already emphasized:

„The only way the proletariat can pit its revolutionary force against imperialism is under the banner of Socialism. The working class is powerless against imperialism as long as its great organizations stand by their old opportunist tactics. The working class will be all-powerful against imperialism when it takes to the battlefield of Social Revolution.“[23]

The working classes in the imperialist countries – whether in Austria, the United States, or Israel – are neither the strategic allies of their own imperialism, nor the saviors of the oppressed in the neocolonial countries who must rely on their goodwill. Yes, the workers in the imperialist centers have the fundamental interest and the historical responsibility to confront their own imperialism with their revolutionary power. But the history of anti-colonial struggles from Angola to Vietnam also shows that they have usually only done so to the extent that their imperialism had already been weakened by these struggles. The French May 1968 would be unthinkable without the simultaneous struggle of the Algerian people against French colonial rule, as well as France’s defeat in Vietnam only a few years earlier. The Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 1974 would have been impossible without the anti-colonial struggle in Angola. Yes, struggles against imperialist and neocolonial oppression need the support of workers in the imperialist centers. But for that support to realize its full strength, it requires even more the example and living experience of the uncompromising struggle of the nationally and colonially oppressed themselves. The program and tactics against national and neocolonial oppression therefore cannot be based on the present consciousness of the working classes in the oppressor countries or nations. Both must be formulated from the standpoint of the interests of the oppressed.

For Marxists, taking a genuine class standpoint in movements against imperialist or neocolonial oppression must therefore mean two things. First, within the struggles of the oppressed themselves, defending the independence of the working class from all petty-bourgeois nationalist or even feudal-reactionary forces, and asserting its claim to leadership as the only truly revolutionary force according to the Theory of Permanent Revolution – above all through the building of its own revolutionary organizations. Second, within the imperialist centers, carrying into the struggles of the working class the program for the defeat of “its own” imperialism and for the liberation of those it oppresses, on all levels. This will necessarily remain a minority program until the balance of forces is tipped by the strength of the struggles of the oppressed. But once such a point is reached, it can become a central lever of proletarian revolution in the imperialist centers – and thereby concretely link the fundamental common interests of the global working class with its immediate, everyday interests.

At this point, we have only sketched and briefly discussed some aspects of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s approach to the questions of class unity and national oppression. In our view, the depth and implications of this approach have yet to be fully grasped and updated. On the contrary, what we see, especially on the revolutionary left today, is a theoretical flattening that expresses itself both in opportunistic arbitrariness and in sectarian dogmatism.[24]

Outlook: Four Lessons and the Task of vorwärts

The preceding discussion has attempted to formulate some more fundamental analyses out of concrete points of contention and experiences of recent years. Without any claim to completeness, we want to highlight four concrete lessons that we take with us for our future political practice:

• The first lesson concerns the relationship between exploitation and oppression. Capitalism does not create a homogeneous working class, but rather a plural and stratified class, incorporated into – or excluded from – the capitalist mode of production in diverse ways. If we take the working class seriously as the revolutionary subject, we cannot treat relations of oppression as “secondary contradictions,” but must instead place them at the center of a Marxist strategy. The struggles against racism, sexism, queerphobia, and colonial domination are not “additional fields,” but are decisive for the contemporary conditions of class struggle.
  The structural transformation of capitalism compels us to deepen this analysis. In the advanced capitalist centers, the reproductive systems – healthcare, education, care work, social systems – have gained enormous significance. These are areas in which a growing share of socially necessary labor is concentrated, and they are precisely the sectors marked by layers of the class that, due to traditional gender roles, global divisions of labor, and migration processes, are disproportionately female and migrantized. At the same time, industrial production has in large part shifted to the global South, where the proletariat lives under a double oppression: exploited by local capitalists while simultaneously subjugated by imperialist and neocolonial structures.
  A Marxist strategy that fails to account for these realities can grasp neither the struggles of the present nor the tasks of a revolutionary organization. Exploitation and oppression can only be fought together – or not at all.
• From this follows directly a second lesson: socialist feminism and safeguarding must be central principles of organizational building. If we take seriously that the future of class struggle lies to a decisive extent in the hands of those layers who fight in the reproductive sectors of capitalism, in precarious forms of labor, and in movements against various forms of specific oppression, then these layers must today be able to feel as free, safe, and empowered as possible within our organization. Safeguarding is not a “secondary task” or a matter of individual sensitivity, but a political necessity: only if we create structures that prevent sexual assault, discriminatory behavior, and abuses of power as much as possible – and that ensure a consistent, survivor-centered response when such incidents occur – can we organize and retain those people who are indispensable to our perspective of building a revolutionary International. Socialist feminism therefore cannot be reduced to abstract proclamations, nor abused as a pretext for bureaucratic maneuvers, but must be expressed in a living organizational culture. The mistakes that the CWI, the ISA, and we ourselves made in the past in dealing with such cases must not be repeated.
• The third lesson concerns the continuing relevance of the “dual task” – a concept developed by the CWI in the 1990s. It is not enough to build small revolutionary organizations or “pure propaganda groups” which, at best, provide political commentary, but at worst remain trapped in isolation. The decisive question is how we can contribute to the reorganization of the workers’ movement as a whole – and above all, its political expressions, which on a global scale will necessarily be far more diverse, fluid, and situationally adapted than the simple model of a “new workers’ party.” Revolutionary organizations must prove their usefulness: they must demonstrate that they can advance concrete struggles, that they can build structures which empower those directly involved. Projects like Sozial, aber nicht blöd![25] illustrate on a small scale how a revolutionary organization can root itself if it creates practice-oriented structures that both organize struggles and develop consciousness. Without such roots, even numerically large organizations remain little more than propaganda groups – incapable of truly shaping the dynamics of struggle.
• The fourth lesson concerns the relationship between democracy, centralism, and party-building. A Marxist organization cannot pride itself on principles such as “complete freedom of debate” and the “right to recall leaders at any time” – only to abandon these principles the moment they are put to even the mildest test. Genuine political unity cannot be imposed through personal loyalties or administrative measures, but only through living, open debates in which minority rights are guaranteed and strategic conflicts are truly fought out. Only such inner democracy allows real political unity to emerge – and only on this basis can effective international centralism be built. Conversely, only a centralism rooted in such democracy can guarantee the international debate and collective capacity for action that are indispensable in a globalized capitalist world. The history of the CWI, ISA, and PRMI demonstrates that organizations which fail to establish this connection inevitably produce two false tendencies: bureaucratic-centralist ossification on the one hand, and federalist fragmentation on the other.
  These dangers are directly tied to the question of party culture and party-building. It is true, as Trotsky emphasized, that there can be no revolutionaries without a spirit of sacrifice – but such sacrifice can only arise from personal conviction and trust in the organization and its politics. It cannot be commanded or demanded. “Activist burnout” is a real problem, especially for revolutionary organizations operating under non-revolutionary conditions. It is the product of an ultimately unpolitical approach to practice and perspectives: in the absence of convincing political perspectives and of resource allocation and planning structured around them, a hyperactivism emerges which imagines it must be present everywhere at once – because “something could happen” anywhere.
  The result is an endless cycle of reacting rather than setting one’s own political-practical priorities. Far from being political flexibility, such hyperactivism stems from an inability to adjust perspectives. It is only logical that entire generations of activists have burned out in this mode of work: people participate as long as they can, “intervening” here and there, without feeling that their efforts, time, and sacrifices serve a clearly defined political (sub-)goal within a coherent perspective. In activities such as selling newspapers, personal conviction is replaced by a sense of duty to the organization, while on the organizational level the means (the sale of material) becomes the end and the measure of success. On this basis, the building of a healthy revolutionary organization is impossible.
  Commitment must not mean self-sacrifice. Bolshevism, as we understand it, is Bolshevism without burnout. Not because we want to demand “less” from our members in general, but because we know how fruitless it is to pressure people into activities they are not convinced of. Not because we deny the necessity of professional revolutionaries, but because we know that a student without children has different time resources than a working single mother – and that both must be able to participate in party work in their own way and according to their possibilities.

All these lessons together form the starting point of our own work. We want to build an organization that reconnects theory, strategy, and practice: one that understands the struggles against exploitation and oppression as a unity, proves its usefulness in real confrontations, and develops an international structure that combines democratic debate with coordinated action. This also means giving ourselves the time and space for serious perspectives work – not in the form of a collection of day-to-day political commentaries or vague predictions disguised as a “perspectives document”, but as a fundamental clarification of the conditions, possibilities, and strategies for revolutionary transformation in the 21st century.

We are thus faced with a task that recalls historical moments such as the emergence of the CWI in the 1970s, when there was likewise no current that could credibly claim to represent revolutionary Marxism internationally. Texts such as Trotsky’s Transitional Program of 1938 or Ted Grant’s Programme of the International of 1970 demonstrate how orientation can be created in such situations: through patient analysis, drawing lessons from history, and formulating perspectives that reach beyond the immediate moment.

This is the standard we take up – not to copy the past, but to build from it and go beyond it. vorwärts does not aim to be just another group among many, but a project dedicated to reworking the political and organizational foundations for a new revolutionary International. This means acknowledging mistakes, building structures that enable discussion, and working together with other currents and activists to fill the fatal programmatic and organizational void that currently exists on the revolutionary left.

 

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[1] See our statement: https://www.slp.at/artikel/aus-isaslp-wird-vorw%C3%A4rts-11393

[2] See: https://www.slp.at/artikel/schwere-fehler-unserer-organisation-im-bereich-des-safeguardings-bez%C3%BCglich; https://www.slp.at/artikel/lernen-im-vorw%C3%A4rtsgehen-11392; https://www.slp.at/artikel/aus-isaslp-wird-vorw%C3%A4rts-11393   

[3] https://www.slp.at/artikel/lernen-im-vorw%C3%A4rtsgehen-11392

[4]  https://www.slp.at/artikel/lernen-im-vorw%C3%A4rtsgehen-11392

[5] https://revolutionarymarxism.com/nepals-gen-z-rise-up/

[6] https://revolutionarymarxism.com/indonesia-explodes-in-revolt/

[7] Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004, p. 161.

[8] https://revolutionarymarxism.com/strike-against-gaza-holocaust-shut-down-the-system-of-genocide/; https://revolutionarymarxism.com/its-a-new-holocaust-stop-the-genocide-in-gaza/; https://revolutionarymarxism.com/sumud-flotilla-sets-out-as-arab-rulers-bury-heads-in-the-sand/

[9] https://revolutionarymarxism.com/marxist-approach-to-the-struggle-for-palestinian-liberation

[10] J. Sakai: Settlers. The Mythology of the White Proletariat. Chicago: Morning Star Press 1989, p.164.

[11] Moshe Machover: Two Impossibilities, https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1395/two-impossibilities/

[12] See Peter Hadden: Troubled Times, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/hadden/1995/natq/index.html

[13] https://www.slp.at/artikel/aus-isaslp-wird-vorw%C3%A4rts-11393

[14] V.I. Lenin: What is to be done? In: Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 347-530, p. 412-3., available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iv.htm

[15] Ibid., p. 421-2.

[16] Ibid., p. 422.

[17] Ibid., p. 413.

[18] Ibid., p. 436.

[19] Ibid., p. 414.

[20] Leon Trotsky: The War and the International. Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1914/war/part3.htm#ch10

[21] Ibid.

[22] See our Publication: Roman Rosdolsky: Imperialist war and the question of peace. The Bolshevik Peace Politics of the Bolsheviks before the November 1917 Revolution (2024)

[23] Leon Trotsky: The War and the International. Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1914/war/part3.htm#ch10

[24] On the dialectics of opportunism and sectarianism see our statement: https://www.slp.at/artikel/aus-isaslp-wird-vorw%C3%A4rts-11393

[25] A rank’n’file initiative in the austrian social sector, initiated by us over ten years ago