Marxist.net – Marxist resource from the Committee for a Workers' International

2018-19

The great scientific socialists, beginning with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, defended the role of the working class as the main agency for fighting capitalism and establishing a new socialist society. This was a thread running throughout their works. The working class, organised and disciplined by mass production, is the only class capable of developing the necessary collective consciousness through their organisations to achieve this task.

In 2018-19, a dispute broke out within the Committee for a Workers’ International (the CWI) over this question. This section of our website brings together key documents produced to defend a working-class, Trotskyist CWI, a process which culminated in the CWI’s re-foundation, and those of the opposition.

1991

Marxism and the British Labour Party – the ‘Open Turn’ debate

The ‘Open Turn’ debate, the documents of which we present here, took place in 1991 at first within what was then widely known as the Militant Tendency, the British section of the Committee for a Workers’ International, that published the ‘Militant’ newspaper, today called ‘The Socialist’.

1989

Party, Programme, Reformism and the International – the ‘Scottish debate’

The Scottish debate covered the questions of the revolutionary party and its programme; reformism; and the role of a workers’ revolutionary international.

1991

The Collapse of Stalinism

“1991 marked a turning point…We have entered a more disturbed period in world history, marked by sharper inter-imperialist rivalries and a deepening capitalist crisis.”

The world watched as the former Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union crumbled. And the destabilising effects of this and the capitalist restoration in these countries can still be felt today.