Communist Prometheus

Who we are and what we fight for.

Latest materials

Editorial

From the editorial board: A new stage

The publication of the first issue of “Communist Prometheus” is a natural result of nearly thirty years of work done by our group. In conditions of extreme weakness on the part of the contemporary workers’ movement and fragmentation of Marxist forces, we are not trying to start all over. On the contrary, we draw upon accumulated political and theoretical experience. Our praxis has passed through several stages, each one required a refinement of strategy and the consistent application of the Marxist method to changing historical conditions.

History

The Bolsheviks’ last battle

We turn to one of the most tragic, yet politically crucial pages in the history of the world working-class movement: the heroic and consistent struggle of the Group of Democratic Centralism (the “Decists”). While in the late 1920s most party oppositionists harbored fatal illusions regarding the nature of the Soviet state, it was the Decists (T. Sapronov, V. Smirnov, and others) who first drew a rigorous Marxist conclusion: the counter-revolution was complete; the VKP(b) and the state machine had transformed into instruments of capitalist exploitation hostile to the proletariat, which meant that what was needed was not intra-party reform, but a new revolution and the creation of a new, genuinely workers’ party. The special value of this historical material lies in its ruthless dissection of the ideology of Leon Trotsky and his supporters. Using historical documents, we demonstrate how Trotsky’s refusal to recognize the bourgeois nature of the Stalinist regime led him to a disastrous centrism – fruitless hopes for a “left course” by the bureaucracy and the substitution of real class analysis with abstract reflections on the “international situation”.

Programme

About the “Manifesto”

The work on our “Manifesto” marked an important step in the group’s political self-definition and, as we had expected, provoked a lively response among comrades. We have always been convinced that Marxism is not a rigid dogma, but a guide to action, requiring the constant verification of theory through living practice and open, uncompromising discussion among comrades. It is precisely for this reason that we are launching a new column, “Correspondence with a Comrade”, in which we will publish our replies to readers’ questions, criticisms, and comments. In the first instalment of this column, we address the most important theoretical questions raised in the responses to the “Manifesto”: the dialectic of the destruction of the bourgeois state and the withering away of the proletarian semi-state; the falsity of the metaphysical opposition between economic and political struggle; the historical assessment of Stalinism as a consummated bourgeois counter-revolution and of Trotskyism as a tendency that failed to overcome centrism; as well as the material roots of the contemporary proletariat’s passivity in the imperialist metropolises. This polemic is not an academic exercise, but our necessary contribution to the work of preparing the ideological and political foundations of the future world communist party.