[Marxism] Answering 6 questions on the economic collapse

[Aaron Aarons]

At 17:05 -0400 2008/10/19, Joaquin Bustelo wrote:
-------------------- Begin quote: -------------------
When Lenin was alive, at least the position of some Marxists, like Lenin, was different, as embodied in the Comintern's second congress supplementary theses on the national and colonial question that explained revolution in the major powers of Europe was impossible UNTIL the flow of super-profits from the colonies was stopped. 

I think experience showed the theses were right, and a REALISTIC assessment of prospects today should start by looking to understand the failure of the great depression to lead to any successful socialist revolutions as a function if what the second congress's theses posited, rather than simply as the autonomous negative consequence of the hegemony of Stalinism and social democracy, which is where analysis normally stops. The second congress theses would suggest there is a material grounding to the prevalence of those currents, just as Lenin, during WWI, sought to explain the collapse of the second international as a revolutionary force in a similar materialist way in his 1916 article on "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism." 
-------------------- End of quote -------------------