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Full-Text Articles in Politics and Social Change
Strategy, Meta-Strategy, And Anti-Capitalist Activism, Stephen J. D'Arcy
Strategy, Meta-Strategy, And Anti-Capitalist Activism, Stephen J. D'Arcy
Stephen D'Arcy
Whereas Marxism is a theory, or rather a cluster of theories, Leninism is something else: a political strategy. And as Lenin himself pointed out, strategies are neither true nor false, but only effective nor ineffective, depending largely on the context within which they are carried out. In the context of contemporary North America, however, the adoption by radical activists of the standard Leninist norms for anti-capitalist organizing would be counter-productive. What is needed now is a very different approach: a strategy of attrition, as Lenin would have said, rather than a strategy of overthrow. This article concludes by sketching an …
Participatory Democracy And The Renewal Of Radical Politics, Stephen D'Arcy
Participatory Democracy And The Renewal Of Radical Politics, Stephen D'Arcy
Stephen D'Arcy
In recent decades, the project of radically transforming societies to create communities that are in some sense 'socialist' has undergone a profound crisis. This crisis has sometimes looked like a complete collapse of the radical Left. In this paper, I make the case for a cautiously optimistic assessment of the prospects for a self-reinvention by the North American radical Left, on the basis of grassroots organizing for a non-statist, egalitarian and participatory-democratic alternative to capitalism.