NEWS & OPINION

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Revolutionary Collective: Comrades, Critics, and Dynamics in the Struggle for Socialism / by Paul Le Blanc

In Revolutionary Collective, Paul Le Blanc explores debates about worker activism, class consciousness, party-building and socialist strategy. Through an engagement with writers such as Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, and Lukács, Le Blanc examines their contributions to the theory of revolutionary organization.

Revolutionary Collective combines the insights of Marxist theorists with Le Blanc’s own socialist political experience as a member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which went through a major political crisis until it liquidated itself in 2019. Besides allegations of sexual abuse that were poorly handled by its leadership, one of the recurring issues in the ISO was a doctrinaire attitude to Marxist theory and a lack of party democracy. In Revolutionary Collective, Le Blanc returns to the primary theorists of Leninist organizing in order to help socialist activists build organisations that avoid these errors. One weakness of the book is that it does not envision non-Leninist approaches to revolutionary politics through an engagement with writers like Paul Mattick or Anton Pannenkoek. Also, despite its title, the book does not offer significant analysis of what constitutes the nature of a collective and what it means to act collectively. Read more…