Revolutionary perspectives

"Revolutionary Perspectives" is or was a magazine published by a small British leftist group, the CWO. The group is affiliated with the IBRP or ICT, a Left Communist tendency dominated by the Italian Partito Comunista Internazionalista, also known as Battaglia Comunista. CWO's political positions, while ultraleftist, are less apocalyptic than those of the International Communist Current (ICC), their closest competitor and ideological cousin.

In this issue of their magazine, published in 1997, the CWO rejects both the idea that the economy is in a real upturn, and the opposite notion that terminal crisis and world revolution are on the immediate agenda. The economic crisis works iself out slowly but steadfastly due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The capitalists turn to speculation rather than productive investment, while the state attempts to manipulate the economy in a desperate attempt to make the rate of profit go up. Even privatizations are an attack by the state, since the state has usually artificially beefed up the companies they are selling cheaply. Nor does the state ever relinquish its basic prerogative to interfere in the economy through currecy manipulations, subsidies, etc. The end result is an unprofitable, unmanageable system that can only be "saved" by a new world war, in which the decks are cleared for a new cycle of accumulation to begin. In our present epoch such a world war will probably destroy civilization itself. However, the exact course of history is impossible to predict, and the CWO actually mentions the centuries-long death throes of the Roman Empire as an example of a doomed system which didn't disappear overnight. Interestingly, the CWO doesn't believe that socialism is inevitable, or that world history has a teleological goal, making the choice "socialism or barbarism" even starker. (On this point, they are arguably at variance with Marx and Lenin.) Completely absent from the equation is the ecological crisis and peak oil, a blind spot CWO shares with the ICC.

Apart from the general perspectives article, the magazine contains pieces on the World Trade Organization, British welfare cuts, and several polemics with the increasingly erratic ICC.