In the Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels say that all those bourgeois revolutions — as the dominant class were the feudal lords and aristocrats — e.g. Bonapartist revolution, the one in Germany, the anti-colonial ones, etc., do not change the system; i.e. the system of class division and subjugation of one to the other persists. The ones that ended monarchies and feudalism, starting republics, allowed for the political development of capitalism.

What about the revolutions from the bottom (which in this current society and moment of History, can only be a proletarian revolution)?

The dominant ideology is the ideology of the dominant class.

It also states in some way in the Manifesto that the communist consciousness comes from without, later strategized by Lenin in “What is to be Done?” the way to bring it. Without it, the dominated class during the revolution will end up only changing the superstructure of the society again to an “anti-communist” one, like the radical democracy of France at that time, or trade-unionism.

The problem that we have is that most people have no direct contact with the same German ideology, utopian socialists, anarchism, and other philosophical, historical, and economic tendencies that Marx and Engels as intellectuals had access to at their time and place (also because of their social status), not allowing the average person to arrive to the same conclusions as Marxism, ending up following dominant class tendencies like the ones from the Chartists in England’s 1830s–40s or following Lassalle’s ideology in Germany a bit later in that century. Tendencies like these or others of the worker’s movement throughout History serve to learn from the previous errors.

One’s or his factory/school’s economic struggle isn’t enough. One of the vanguard’s goals — besides preparing for the agitation of the masses and directing them during a revolutionary moment, analyzing the current dominant class ideologies, etc. — is to introduce the Marxist materialist philosophy and teach scientific socialism and History (permitting further self-historical materialism analysis) and to give political denunciations from all classes and their political struggles and relations, creating new internationalist revolutionary socialists; new communists. Elevating their political consciousness to that of a communist with our hard newspaper. Creating the conditions so that they can be “more Marx and Engels” (they can’t exist anymore), and forging new professional revolutionaries.

This way we prevent revisionism based on dominant ideologies like the Marxist–Leninist/Stalinist “socialism in one country” creating this reactionary patriotism/nationalism against internationalism, that then Trotskyism followed — all called “the correct follow-up of Leninism” by their defenders — using Lenin to advocate for united fronts, allowing class collaboration, and ending up with this “anti-imperialist” campiest tendency that defends a bourgeois of an “oppressed state”, like “defending Cuba/Palestine against American imperialism”.

The revolutionaries mentioned were deceived by their own bourgeois corrupted theory, thinking they were right at the time. From outside, we see they weren’t, and we should learn from it.

#class-struggle #internationalism #leninism #marxism #revisionism