The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

The fall of Stalinism in Eastern Europe — Workers' Liberty 3/25:

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WL 3/25

Download pdf (see "attachment"), or read online.

Timeline
Introduction
1. The risen people: Eastern Europe after the revolutions
2. What’s in the coffin at the funeral of socialism?
3. Lies against socialism answered
4. Stalin’s system collapses
5. Why socialists should support the banning of the CPSU
6. The triumph of unreason: market madness in the ex-USSR
7. What was the Bolsheviks’ conception of the 1917 revolution?
8. Why the workers want to restore capitalism
9. In the beginning was the critique of capitalism
10. An open letter to Ernest Mandel
11. Trotsky and the collapse of Stalinism
12. And where were Jacob Sverdlov's sons?
Sources


Socialism and Democracy: the AWL debates Michael Foot

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Was advocating extra-parliamentary direct action to bring down the elected Thatcher government anti-democratic? Are 'by democratic means' and 'by parliamentary means' identical concepts?

Former Labour leader Michael Foot, who we debated in this pamphlet in 1982, and on the same issues at a public meeting in 1993, has just died. While sending sympathy and condolences to his family, friends and comrades, we draw the attention of socialists and labour movement activists to this debate as part of the discussion on Foot's political legacy.

Socialism and Democracy: Workers' Liberty special issue (no.17), January 1994
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Download the pamphlet as a PDF:

  • Debate from 1982 between Michael Foot, then Labour Party leader, and John O'Mahony (Sean Matgamna), with a 1994 introduction
  • Appendices, including texts on socialism and democracy by James P Cannon, Max Shachtman, V I Lenin, and Hal Draper.

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Read it online:
Introduction: Democracy, direct action, and the class struggle
Michael Foot: My kind of democracy (part 1)
Michael Foot: My kind of democracy (part 2)
John O'Mahony: Introduction
Chapter 1: Is Direct Action Against Thatcher Undemocratic?
Chapter 2: The Appeal to History
Chapter 3: The Scarecrow of Stalinism
Chapter 4: Superstition or Struggle?
Appendix 1. Labour Party: the sham of "one member, one vote" - John Bloxam and John O'Mahony
Appendix 2. PR, democracy, and socialism - John O'Mahony
Appendix 3. Marxism and democracy - James P Cannon
Appendix 4. The movement of the majority - James P Cannon
Appendix 5. 1917 was a democratic revolution - Max Shachtman
Appendix 6. Lenin on Democracy and Dictatorship
Appendix 7. Democracy in the Russian Revolution - Leon Trotsky (1918)
Appendix 8. An Eyewitness Account of the Russian Revolution - Hal Draper

Appendix 7 and appendix 8, included here, were not in the printed version of January 1994.

What does Kronstadt mean?

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Author: 
Martyn Hudson

The debate in Solidarity about Kronstadt has been between those who utterly condemn the suppression and see it as the beginning of the Stalinist Thermidor and the end of workers’ self rule in Russia; those who absolutely defend the suppression and see it as guaranteeing the survival of the workers’ revolution for a little longer; and those who see it as a tragic mistake and in retrospect the first signs of an “emergent totalitarianism” whilst still defending the good intentions of the Bolsheviks and asserting their fallibility.