For that matter, 2003 ain't exactly 1917. Or 1902. The United States ain't exactly czarist Russia. Czarist Russia wasn't exactly the world's only superpower. We're different people operating in different conditions. What's your point? Your thesis was that Marxism has been 'smashed'. That is to say that it is not widely accepted, that most people don't agree with Marxists and believe other theories. But the same was true of the RSDLP in Russia at all times up until November of 1917, no? So why are we worse off?
In some ways we are better off. We have 44 years of experience of working together as a party, 44 years of party tradition, which is several times what the RSDLP had in 1917. We did not have to argue out the ABC's of Marxism because we are building on the foundations that were laid down long ago. This means that we have been able to avoid most of the "squabbles" and most of the principled divisions that characterized RSDLP politics throughout its history. We don't have to re-invent and debate concepts like self-determination and revolutionary defeatism in imperialist war and Bernsteinian revisionism.
We have seen a hell of a lot of ways that Marxists can screw up and screw each other up. If Edison was right in saying that 99% of experimental science was in learning what doesn't work, we are on a much better experimental foundation than the RSDLP could have been.
We are able to instantly communicate with each other and with the working class. More people read our paper on line than read any edition of the RSDLP papers before the February revolution.
Looking at it more globally, everyone in the world knows something of what Marxism is. They may not believe it, but they have heard of it. Every country has Marxists in it. Compare this to the period of existence of the RSDLP, when most of the colonial regions of the world had never seen a Marxist. Surely we are better off now, when Marxism has global recognition, than we were before it had gotten any.
Furthermore the 'democratic' baseline from which we are starting is considerably higher worldwide than it was in 1902. Racism is discredited. Sexism is discredited. Imperialist war is discredited. We still have them, of course, but they aren't normative. People believe that everyone has the right to healthcare, that wars should not be made to no purpose, that the poor should not starve, that businesses should be at least limited.
So if you actually add up our assets, we are in many ways much better off than the RSDLP was, whether 'we' means the WWP or Marxists internationally. The whole trick to your presentation is that you are trying to impose a narrative structure on Marxism: first there was no Marxism, then there was a little Marxism, then there was a lot of Marxism, and now there is a little Marxism and 'therefore' soon there won't be any. How is this better than Anne Elk's theory of the brontosaurus?
Clearly you don't believe that Marxism's existence is grounded in the real world. But if all the astronomers were killed off, you would not be surprised to see astronomy regenerate because its existence is a reflection of the fact that there are real stars and planets, and there is a predictable drive to understand unknown things. Even more aptly: if all the doctors were killed off, and the medical schools razed, and the medical texts all burned, the practice of medicine would regenerate because disease and trauma would continue to exist, and the needs of people to combat disease and trauma would continue to exist. Well, I see Marxism as being a practice very much analogous to medicine. It is the science and practice of fighting capitalism and its attendant outrages.
But even though you do not believe that, and consider Marxism as being essentially an idiosyncratic belief system unconnected with the real world, like Marcionism or Christian Science, I would suggest that you read Stephen Jay Gould and learn something about the perils of reasoning from a superimposed narrative structure. Evolution doesn't work as predictably as you believe, even for random variations.
LP