Revolutionary Studies S.
2 total works
As a new generation discovers socialism, this important text by American Marxist Hal Draper makes the case that genuine liberation can only come from the self-activity of workers.
Draper outlines the important distinction in the socialist movement between those who looked for freedom to be handed down from above and those who saw the revolutionary struggle as being led by ordinary people from below for their own liberation.
The late Hal Draper was the author of the five-volume study of Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (Monthly Review Press).
Draper outlines the important distinction in the socialist movement between those who looked for freedom to be handed down from above and those who saw the revolutionary struggle as being led by ordinary people from below for their own liberation.
The late Hal Draper was the author of the five-volume study of Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (Monthly Review Press).
A great debate took place following the collapse of the socialist movement in the crisis of 1914. "Revolutionary defeatism" was the phrase used to define Lenin's antiwar position and to distinguish it, so it is claimed, from that of the other antiwar socialists including Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. But what did "revolutionary defeatism" mean? It is generally with this question that discussion dissolves into vague generalities.Hal Draper demonstrates that the slogan coined by Lenin in 1914 was based on a myth that Marx and Engels would have supported a war against tsarist Russia, even one waged by a bourgeois government. Draper contrasts revolutionary defeatism with the "Third Camp" views of Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, which, he suggests, offered a more defensible, lucid, and no less militant argument for the antiwar position.