Marx and Engels famously wrote in The Communist Manifesto that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

The idea of a world free from the domination of Wall Street bankers and the heads of huge corporations, their politicians and their lies, their armies and their wars, is an appealing one. But the idea of socialism from below - the billions of ordinary, working class people who create society's wealth actually governing the world through a system of mass democracy - can seem like an impossible dream.

Goethe, the towering German figure of the Enlightenment, welcomed the Great French Revolution in 1792: "Here and today begins a new age in the history of the world". Today in academic circles and in popular culture images of the genteel aristocracy and even some of the revolutionaries going to the guillotine are used to warn us that any attempt at revolution will end, not in liberation, but with terror. They promote the slogan: "revolutions always devour their own children".

"Class" is often used as a fairly meaningless term. Yet for Marxists, class is the key to both understanding the world and to changing it.

Regardless of what people hope Labor would be like in government, Kevin Rudd's team is no radical alternative to Howard. But if the Labor Party is fundamentally flawed, what's the alternative?

Because only a workers' movement from below can change the world, a totally different kind of party to the ALP is needed. Its job is to encourage struggles, and to try to win the arguments within them that will lead to victory.

Marxism has never lacked grave-diggers, from newspaper columnists to post-modernist professors proclaiming the death of class. The problem is, it keeps rising from the dead.

There is a deep well of revulsion at the violence which permeates our society. And the media, politicians and others in authority cynically try to manipulate it. "Violent" in political discourse is code for "unsupportable".

The theory of reformism is that repeated success in achieving reforms could, over time, completely transform society, peacefully and without the sharp break represented by revolution.