School of Communism

Communists place a great deal of importance on education and theoretical study, but that doesn’t mean we confine ourselves to small reading groups. The question of building the revolutionary party is central. Once a small revolutionary organisation has grown to the size necessary to become a factor in the class struggle, how can the revolutionary party win over the most advanced layer of the youth and the working class? Furthermore, what is a revolutionary crisis, and how can the party conquer the leadership of the working class? Above all, in order to lead the revolution to victory, how can it conquer the support of the masses? The Revolutionary Communist International aims to organise the most advanced, revolutionary-oriented youth and workers, and train them as communist cadres. While we do so we need to steel all our members with an understanding of how to approach these questions. If we succeed in this task, we will be building powerful communist parties around the world. As Francesco Merli from our international leadership explains in this talk, we must understand the method of Lenin and the Bolsheviks if we want to find a route to the working class, in order to offer direction and a programme when revolutionary struggles eventually, inevitably erupt.

We communists have set ourselves the task of changing the course of world history. For that we need a theory of history, how it develops and changes and what role we, as communists, can play in bringing about that change. The saying popularly attributed to Henry Ford, that history is “just one damn thing after another” sums up the bourgeois attitude to historical events. Rather than any process or logic, things simply ‘happen’ randomly, or at the whim of a handful of ‘Great Men’. By contrast, communists are historical materialists. We see history as driven by the struggle between classes, progressing to higher stages as production methods, culture and thought become increasingly sophisticated. When senile and stagnant societies refuse to change, revolution becomes necessary to break the impasse and move humanity to the next rung. As Marie Fredericksen, a leading Danish communist, explains in this talk, we need a scientific understanding of history to draw lessons from the past that can be applied to our struggle for a socialist future.

In the last analysis, economics - the means by which men and women produce and reproduce the means of existence - are the driving force of any society. Marx’s analysis of capitalism is one of his most important contributions. In the pages of Capital, one finds a scientific explanation of how capitalism functions, why it enriches a few and impoverishes the majority, and why it inevitably goes into crisis.Listen as Adam Booth, a leading British communist who has co-written a readers’ guide to Das Capital, offers an introduction to Marxist economic theory and its relevance to today.

War is inevitable under capitalism. In fact, it is the direct consequence of imperialism. The struggle between competing nations for markets, fields of investment, and spheres of influence always results in clashes where workers fight and die to protect the profits of their ruling classes. In Lenin’s day, the capitalist rulers of Europe sent millions to slaughter one another in the trenches of WWI, with the treacherous support of the leaders of the mass workers’ organisations. As Jorge Martin from our international leadership explains in this talk, Lenin did not bend an inch to nationalist pressures to set aside class differences and fight to ‘defend the fatherland’, nor did he preach impotent pacifism. Instead, he insisted on workers struggling independently for their interests, against the machinations of their warmongering ruling classes. Ultimately, the only way to end capitalist war is by fighting a revolutionary class war against the system responsible for armed conflict.

The October Revolution of 1917 was the first time in history that workers and peasants had taken on the bosses, landlords and capitalists and not only won, but held onto power. For this, communists today recognise the Russian Revolution as the greatest event in human history. It is for the same reason that today’s capitalists and their cronies seek to pour slander and scorn on the real history of the revolution. As Alessio Marconi, a leading comrade in Italy explains, it is our duty today to defend the legacy of the Russian Revolution, which is a beacon to all class fighters. It remains proof in practice that the ruling class can be defeated, and that a new form of society is possible.

After the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas ‘the Bloody’ Romanov in 1917, the new revolutionary regime in Russia (led by the Bolshevik Party) began the monumental task of socialist reconstruction. They were met almost immediately by the White counter-revolution, leading to a terrible Civil War in which the Bolsheviks led a life-or-death struggle to save the revolution. Despite enormous difficulties, immense strides forward were taken for the peasantry, women, and oppressed nationalities; while control of production began to be transferred to workers in the factories. Attempts were made to spread the revolution worldwide, with the founding of the Communist International.In this talk, Rob Sewell, co-author of a new biography, In Defence of Lenin, talks about the accomplishments of the Bolsheviks during the early, heroic years after the revolution. Purchase your copy from Wellred-Books.com today!

In the October Revolution of 1917, the Russian workers and peasants took power with the Bolsheviks at their head, but Lenin understood that socialism could not be built in Russia alone. That’s why he and the Bolsheviks founded the Third, Communist International - or Comintern - as a single party of world revolution, bringing together and assisting the development of communist parties in every country. In this talk, Fred Weston from the leading body of the RCI explains how the Comintern was built, what it accomplished, and the reasons for its eventual degeneration - leaving behind an absence of revolutionary leadership that we strive to fill with our new International.

The degeneration of the Soviet Union into a dictatorial parody of socialism, at the hands of Stalin’s counterrevolutionary clique of bureaucrats, is one of the great tragedies of world history. Today, our critics use this example to argue that communism always results in a small clique at the top controlling everything. But as Jerome Mellatus, leading French communist, explains: the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy was a product of the backwardness of Russia and the failure of the world revolution. Lenin spent the last years of his life fighting this degeneration in vain. To avoid repeating history, we must build communism on healthy foundations.

In order to transform the world, we must first understand it. In this speech, the RCI’s leading theoretician, Alan Woods, explains dialectics: a revolutionary school of thought, which holds that nothing is fixed or static. Taking his starting point from the great idealist German Philosopher Hegel, Karl Marx placed dialectics on a sound materialist basis. This great philosophical revolution developed into dialectical materialism – a revolutionary philosophy that explains the most general laws of motion of nature, human society and thought itself. This remains the most powerful theoretical tool communists have at their disposal for understanding the world – the prior condition for bringing about its complete transformation.

In June, hundreds of revolutionaries from all over the world gathered in Italy for the founding conference of the Revolutionary Communist International, with thousands more participating online. In addition to officially establishing our new International, the conference was a school of communism, with around 20 sessions on all aspects of our theory, history and thought. This podcast series provides recordings of all of the speeches from the founding conference of the RCI. You’ll find episodes about our philosophy, our perspective on the most pressing issues facing workers and youth today, and answers to common slanders about what communists stand for. Together, these talks represent the complete programme of our international. If you’re inspired by what you hear, and agree with our point of view: join us at marxist.com/join-us.htm Links and information about getting involved are included in all the episode descriptions, and you can learn more about the RCI on our main website: marxist.com. You can also listen to our main weekly podcast series, the Spectre of Communism.