HOW TO FINANCE REVOLUTION? HOW TO FINANCE AN ORDINARY MEETING? (Editorial No.8)

HOW TO FINANCE A REVOLUTION?
HOW TO FINANCE AN ORDINARY MEETING?
(Editorial No. 8)

        The destruction of the material base of a worker's life, of workers' movement, means its very independence is undermined. The question of how and in what way to restore material base, to provide for finances, is of crucial importance for the workers' movement. Do we have an answer to this question? What way are we to take in the process of restoring its material and political independence? The working class cannot be doomed to being financed by its class enemy since in this way it goes for class cooperation. Especially in the Balkans where riches are not in the hands of bourgeoisie but mafia, this issue is burning and much more dramatic than in the West. If the workers of the Balkans cannot reestablish their material base, does that mean they are doomed to charity of its class enemies, class friends and maybe even mafia? This and such bitter questions are posed in the days when we celebrate the jubilee of the Great October Revolution. Very few are relevant records of how Lenin, Trotsky and comrades used to finance their undertakings while today's Marxists seem unwilling to talk about it, regardless of how crucial it is. How, then, are we to finance a revolution? It seems that by opening up such an issue, the revolutionary theory steps on an irrational terrain since revolution cannot be financed from union or party membership fee. Not only because parties of independent workers today lack such mass membership as the Bolsheviks had in early 20th century (at the July Congress in 1917 registered were 240.000 members while in April there were only 80.000) but because union and party membership fees lack ideological and material capacity for financing any real struggle whatsoever.
      At the Balkans the state is such that not even activists' meetings can be financed. Those held today, in the largest part of the „Left“, are financed by Die Linke and its foundations such as Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung; consequently, they are meetings and actions and ideological copies of Philistine fake-left that likes to act and present itself as proletarian activity while in fact it is only raising fog to cover the capitalist caravan thus enabling it to go its own way.
      Again: to accept help from class friends and comrades, it is necessary to sign the deals providing for transparency without affecting independence of the party receiving the given help. This would mean that a given working group at the Balkans can accept someone else’s material help only under the condition that it has got free hand and freedom of decision-making. And this is very hard to agree upon.
       To accept help with only one objective, namely, to become a branch of a much richer class friend means democratic capitulation, that is, loss of one's own subjectivity. These days, as it happens, we are witnessing divergence of national, class and ideologically congenial groups of wealthy nations for the sake of preserving democratic rights. Then, how can we, sans-culottes and barefoot Balkan peoples, preserve our democratic rights that everyone wants to trample on? This is not so easy to find out. For this reason, what rules on the Balkans – otherwise lacking predisposition for a spineless lackey - is brigandage and it is hard to deny its full meaning for our territory. And brigandage is, as is well known, an anarchist phenomenon.

        That is why the task of Marxism and Marxists is to argumentatively discuss this problem and try to order, conceptualize and place it within some agreed framework of strategy and tactics. We are of the opinion that each true revolutionary and revolutionary organization will have to act in this way. If we fail to settle it today, the future of an independent workers' movement in the Balkans is not promising. It will either lose independence or will turn to brigandage and each one of us will settle for what suits him best: either among brigands or among lackeys. Yet, we hope that organized independent labor that has just begun to get organized in the Balkans, can find, in this region, a place and perspectives for itself.

Editorial Board