Internationalist Discussion Forum

We live in a class society. For so long as it exists, there will exist competition and the struggle for power, looting and terror, big and small wars. Any attempts to get rid of all these calamities while preserving the foundation of class society--relations of property and management in which those productive forces that belong to me do not belong to another and vice versa and in which society is divided into managers and managed--are utopian and unrealisable.

But let us ask ourselves a question. Is it worth trying to get rid of these calamities? After all, people have been living in class society for nine thousand years. They seem to have grown accustomed to social alienation and all its consequences. Perhaps it is not worth our while to engage in risky experiments in the quest for some new way of life? To accept and live by the rules of the game that are now in force, and if you do try to change them somehow then only in particular minor details--that, you know, is safer than destroying the whole world of violence and building a new world in its place. What kind of new world exactly? And how is it to be built--in accordance with what models, by what means? And what for? Of course, many do not survive in this world. Many find life in it unbearable. But most adapt somehow and live--some better, others (the majority) worse, but somehow people get by. And what if the notorious new world turns out much worse than the old? What if humanity comes to ruin in its quest?

Presentation of the GPRC’s text

“Why, 80 years after the October revolution, does capitalism still dominate the world”. To reply to this question, according to the GPRC, it is necessary to use the method of historical materialism and pose another question: “was the level of the development of productive forces of mankind (first of all in the most highly-developed countries) in the 19th - first half of 20th centuries sufficient to make proletarians capable to organise the ruling over production, distribution & exchange by all the society as a whole?”

When the revolution broke out in Russia, revolutionaries unanimously greeted it as the first step towards the world proletarian revolution, Already in 1914, Lenin had put forward this perspective: “In all the advanced countries, the war is putting the socialist revolution on the agenda.”

The slaughter of over 300 people, the majority of them children, at School Number One in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, cannot fail to provoke indignation and revulsion. No less than the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 in the US, this was a war crime in which, as ever, the most defenceless members of the civilian population are the first victims. In Beslan, the hostages were subjected to intimidation, hunger, thirst and summary executions, while many more who survived the initial explosion in the gym where they were being held were shot in the back by the hostage-takers when they tried to flee.

The tragedy of Beslan shocked even the population of Russia which is accustomed yet to all things, as it seems. The Russian authorities accuses of all the «international terrorism», the Chechen separatists make responsible for the death of hundreds people the Russian leadership which organized the storm of school, encroached by them.

To answer the question: "Why already now, 80 years after the October revolution, capital dominates above the world?" - a successive follower of the historical materialism will try, first of all, to clear: was the level of the development of productive forces of mankind (first of all in the most-highly-developed countries) in the 19th - first half of 20th centuries sufficient to make proletarians capable to organise the ruling over production, distribution & exchange by all the society as a whole (and so, to cease to be proletarians)?

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