I've just uploaded the new version of my booklet Some Forgotten Marxism. It has a new "where to from here" section and an analysis of how the economic mess in the Soviet Union and its clones was not due to communism but rather its absence.
The underlying outlook is historical materialist, and places stress on getting the most progress out of capitalism so that when the period of revolution eventually arrives it will have the best conditions to work with. A special mention here is global capitalist development and widespread bourgeois democracy.
When a left eventually emerges one of its important jobs will be to ensure there is a political movement that pesters governments in the bourgeois democracies to do far more to help rather than hinder the whole project.