Introduction
From its start, Internationalist Perspective (IP) has believed in the importance of revolutionary theory, because, in our view, the communist revolution can only be a conscious act of social transformation, not something the working class stumbles into unconsciously, driven automatically by crisis and calamity. But we also believed that revolutionary theory is not a finished product, that it is not a pre-existing program that has to be merely assimilated and applied. Both misconceptions were and are present in the traditional Communist Left, the political current within which our group originated. We still identify with the Communist Left, with its fight against the degeneration of the Second and Third Internationals, with its unwavering defense of revolutionary positions even in the worst of times. However, some came to believe that theory is irrelevant because the working class will simply be compelled by economic conditions to overthrow capitalism, while others claimed that revolutionary theory is essentially finished and merely needs to be absorbed by the class. It was this latter view which in 1985 led to a split between those who would form IP and the organization they were then a part of, the Internationalist Communist Current (ICC). In that year, the ICC adopted the position that “class consciousness” was different from “consciousness of the class”, that Marxist theory embodied the first, and that it would require an ever larger army of militants to spread the first into the second.
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