I think I left the school with more hope than I had going in. I must admit that I sometimes feel a sense of despair thinking about how many communist movements ended in defeat, repression, or a slide back toward capitalism. But the session on permanent revolution gave me a way to actually analyze those defeats rather than just mourn them. They weren’t inevitable failures, but the concrete result of concrete mistakes: here the revolutionary forces allied with the bourgeoisie who then turned on them, here they tried to contain the revolution within democratic capitalism rather than pushing through expropriation.
The session on Chavez and Venezuela really brought this home. Here was a leader elected legally, with massive popular support, and the analysis showed that a genuine socialist transformation was within reach without armed struggle. But the revolution tried to work within and appease the capitalist class rather than committing fully to expropriation. Knowing these were concrete, identifiable mistakes is relieving in itself, because it means imperialist sabotage wasn’t the only factor in these failures, and that takes away that sense of an unresistable, crushing power.
– Anonymous
