Much of the material in this Workers' Liberty is about Marxism itself. Even much of the coverage of the Kosova crisis is focused on the Marxist left. That is necessary. Socialism is about the class struggle, about practical action, about the inescapably violent seizure of industry and power out of the hands of the ruling class. Yet the only socialism that has ever made itself a viable force in history has been a socialism, and socialists, "of the book" - socialists concerned with theory, with science, with learning, with knowing and remembering. "Without a revolutionary theory," wrote Lenin famously, "there can be no revolutionary movement."

A hundred years ago in the Russian Empire, as far as the Tsarist authorities were concerned the most fearsome revolutionaries were the Narodnik terrorists. They killed a Tsar in 1881. Lenin's brother Alexander, who took part in a plot to kill a Tsar, was hanged in 1887. By comparison the Marxists, with their doctrinal disputes, seemed relatively harmless. Some Marxist scientific literature was legally tolerated. Yet, Trotsky would write with perfect truth after the October revolution, it was not those who set out with guns and bombs in their hands who overthrew the Tsar, but those who set out with Marx's Capital under their arms.

Of the Ulyanov brothers, it was not the heroic martyr Alexander but the book-worming Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin) who posed the fundamental threat to the system. Marxism offered an alternative world outlook to that of the bourgeoisie and the landlords and those throughout society who supported them. It provided a theory of society and a method of extending and deepening that theory; it offered the perspective of a different type of society growing up within the capitalist class society, but dependent for its realisation on the revolutionary activity of the capitalist wage-slave class, the proletariat. The Marxist socialist movement was the memory of the proletariat. The "fusion of science [Marxism] and the proletariat" created mass working class movements that did, indeed, seem capable of carving out the future they proclaimed. The battle for Marxism against bourgeois and petit-bourgeois outlooks within the labour movement was understood to be itself a front of the class struggle - the "ideological front".

This issue of Workers' Liberty contains four articles that shed light on this question. In 1914, the upper layers of the socialist parties of the Second International turned patriots and backed their own governments in the war. The bourgeoisie proclaimed the "collapse of Marxism".

Lenin and others felt obliged to dig down to the roots of the Marxism that had dominated the International, and worked to define the flaws, mistakes and corruptions of doctrine that had led to the International's collapse. Of the results of this work Lenin's State and Revolution is perhaps the best known.

The "movement of the book" had to clean, shuffle, re-read and supplement its books. In Russia "science and the proletariat" had been fused as nowhere else - a raw, militant proletariat able to innovate new weapons like the mass strike and a Marxist movement forced to keep its intellectual weapons sharp and clear: "Marxism", which saw capitalism as progressive in history, had been adapted by layers of the Russian bourgeoisie opposed to the backward Tsarist system. The proletarian Marxists had to define and redefine themselves, the nature of the Russian revolution they worked for, and their own role in that revolution - "theory" was central. Yet, though Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Plekhanov and Martov believed that there could be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory, they made no fetish of "theory".

What distinguished Lenin's group from all the others was its capacity to pierce through the limits of its own theory and learn form the living working class, adjusting theory accordingly. There was a living fructifying interaction between theory and practice.

Thus, though Lenin and his comrades, like all the Marxists before 1905, believed that Russia needed and could not have other than a bourgeois revolution, they came in practice to differ from the others. Using theory as blindfold rather than microscope, the Mensheviks were content to stay on the level of generalities and to draw conclusions not from life, but from theoretical generalisations. A bourgeois revolution? Then obviously it will be led by the bourgeoisie. A bourgeois revolution? Yes, said Lenin, in chorus with the others. But, he continued, no longer in chorus, what kind of bourgeois revolution? He insisted on examining the real Russian bourgeoisie as it was in life, irrespective of what theory said. He concluded that the Russian bourgeoisie could not lead a revolution and postulated that the workers and peasants would have to make the bourgeois revolution, against the bourgeoisie.

Focussing on the social realities he thus concretised and deepened theory and laid the grounds for a revolutionary transformation of Marxist theory in the course of the revolution of 1917. The idea of fetishising "theory" in such a way that it blinkered perception and stifled concrete analysis and thought was utterly alien to Lenin. So was the idea that one could blame "bad theory" if, out of deference to "theory" one failed to keep concrete social, political and economic reality under constant review, testing and honing, and, where necessary, supplementing the theory in the process.

Though Lenin went into the 1917 revolution with a set of mistaken theories, he was not disabled by them as were the theoretically self-blindfolded Mensheviks. The Russian revolution allowed a comprehensive renewal of Marxism.

This month's Workers' Liberty begins a series of articles about the collapse of "Marxism" in 1914, and its renewal, beginning with the first installment of an account by Boris Souvarine of the collapse of the Second International. Souvarine was a central leader of the Communist Party of France in the 1920s. When he backed the Trotskyist Opposition in the USSR he was removed by the Zinoviev-Stalinist Communist International leadership.

Clive Bradley debates Comrade Torab, whose Iranian "orthodox Trotskyist" organisation was wrecked 20 years ago in the course of the Iranian revolution. He thinks that Marxist theory is now only a thing of holes and shreds. Torab is a respectworthy victim of an understanding radically different from that of the Bolsheviks of what "Marxist theory" is, and of the consequences for his organisation of the ensuing self-blinding by the international tendency to which he then belonged [the Mandelite "Fouth International"].

Tony Brown analyses the influential obscurantist current of modern bourgeois thought known as "post-modernism".

Paul Hampton makes a sweeping survey of the theory of the SWP in a review of Tony Cliff's booklet Trotskyism after Trotsky.

The production of two books last year - How Solidarity Can Change the World and The Fate of the Russian Revolution - wreaked havoc with our publication schedules. It has to be a matter of political judgement as to whether that was a price worth paying: we think it was; the texts in The Fate of the Russian Revolution will over time help restore and regenerate the revolutionary left. Illness disrupted our plans to produce a double number on Ireland in December; illness and then the production of the special issue on unity in January derailed Part Two of the discussion piece on Hal Draper and Israel. That will appear in the May Workers' Liberty and in the following issue, Alan Johnson will reply to it. The discussion on Ireland will resume in the next Workers' Liberty with a contribution from John Bloxam. Much of the work on the projected Irish double issue is done, and we hope to publish that in August.

With this fourth consecutive monthly edition of Workers Liberty we are back on regular schedule: Workers' Liberty will appear 10 times a year, excepting August and December, with 40 pages per issue. Each August and December we will produce some sort of "special" - pamphlet issue or book.

Sales of The Fate of the Russian Revolution Volume I have been very encouraging. So far we have got back 70% of the £10,000 cost of producing and circulating it. The paucity of reviews has been disappointing so far, but a number of reviews are expected in the next few months. Three things you might do, if you haven't already, to push the circulation: order a copy of The Fate of the Russian Revolution; ask your local library to order it (do that even if you have bought it: others will benefit); order copies to sell to your friends and "contacts".