We have just had a torrent of lies about the Russian Revolution which tried to prove that workers cannot make a real revolution of their own 3 . But Marxism is the science of the proletariat. And that is precisely the aim of the modern democrats. Today our starting point is not just what the working class is at present but what it has to become. The working class is international and is the only international force capable of resisting capitalist monopoly in its global phase.
Humanity has no better or indeed other hope.
Hobsbawm, partially still recognises this but as an 81 year old repentant Stalinist, can only put it in an entirely negative way. He then goes on to focus on the phrase that Marx uses to describe what the historical outcome of the class struggle could be either the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or the common ruin of the contending classes. However this should be turned upside down and posed in a revolutionary way. If the working class does not end the exploitation, famine and wars of imperialist capitalism then humanity has no future. Marx looked at all of human history and could see what humanity had already achieved in the ten millennia since the last Ice Age.