Socialist Review (August 1937)
Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class and isolate its vanguard but also lower the general ideological level of the movement and throw political thinking back to stages long since passed through. In these conditions the task of the vanguard is, above all, not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow: it must swim against the current. If an unfavorable relation of forces prevents it from holding political positions it has won, it must at least retain its ideological positions, because in them is expressed the dearly paid experience of the past. Fools will consider this policy “sectarian.” Actually it is the only means of preparing for a new tremendous surge forward with the coming historical tide.
The reaction against Marxism and Bolshevism
Great political defeats provoke a reconsideration of values, generally
occurring in two directions. On the one hand the true vanguard, enriched
by the experience of defeat, defends with tooth and nail the heritage
of revolutionary thought and on this basis strives to educate new cadres
for the mass struggle to come. On the other hand the routinists,
centrists and dilettantes, frightened by defeat, do their best to
destroy the authority of the revolutionary tradition and go backwards in
their search for a “New World.”
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