[Rally in Panama in 1959 supporting Cuban revolution…]

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Rally in Panama in 1959 supporting Cuban revolution and demanding U.S. out In this issue of Socialist Action we inaugurate a theoretical supplement.

Lenin taught the organic connection between theory and action. "Without a revolutionary theory," he explained over and over again, "there can be no revolutionary movement. "

Unfortunately, this respect for theory has never been more scorned by movements in the world that call themselves revolutionary-and Leninist, to the bargain-than in recent years.

Barren pragmatism

It's no mystery why nearly the entire socialist movement has succumbed so definitively to an anti-Marxist, anti-scientific, barren pragmatism.

Since World War II, the world has witnessed 12 countries-including China with its 1 billion people-taking the road to socialist revolution. But in every case, the leading political forces involved set out to fight for sharing governmental power with a section of the bourgeoisie-not for its overthrow.

The Stalinists, the most cynical and demagogic advocates of class collaboration, argued that the revolution they sought had to take place in two separate stages. They relegated the second stage of the revolution-the socialist stage-to the distant future owing to conditions of political and economic backwardness in the neocolonial world.

They faithfully attempted to carry out such a policy, which they repeatedly explained was limited to achieving democratic reforms within the ABADO 155 COM YANKEE EASES CUB/ NO QUIREMOS of the Canal Zone BEJÉRCITOS FYTI CU RAR AL LIBE YANKY world's capitalists.

Again, at the end of World War II, the Stalinist parties of France, Greece, and Italy refused to take power. But power lay in the streets after the military defeat of the fascist regimes.

The capitalists of these countries, discredited because of their collaboration with German and Italian fascism, were incapable of ruling in their own name. They had lost virtually all authority and influence in any section of the population.

The Communist parties, along with their social-democratic class-collaborationist counterparts, rescued capitalism by joining coalition capitalist governments in these three countries and throughout Europe.

The pattern is always the same. The capitalists, threatened by upsurging workers and peasants, and badly discredited, welcome the help of workers' parties in stemming revolutionary mass mobilizations.

The popular front is then discarded by the capitalists-and the workers often crushed-as soon as their revolutionary momentum has been dissipated and the workers demoralized.

Postwar boom and decay This sequence of defeats led to an unprecedentedly long period of stability for capitalism in the imperialist centers-only now coming to an end.

But in the countries occupied by the Red Army-and in Asia-a different dynamic was set into motion. Germany

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A Marxist Theoretical Revieu