Workers' Liberty

The Chinese road?

Samuel Farber, Cuban “Third Camp” Marxist and author of The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered, was interviewed about the book in US socialist journal Against the Current (November 2006). Here we reprint an extract with his predictions for Cuba without Castro.

By Leon Trotsky (August 1937)

Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class and isolate its vanguard but also lower the general ideological level of the movement and throw political thinking back to stages long since passed through.

By Sean Matgamna

In the 1940s, so recently-released government papers show, the BBC discriminated against “Communists”, among them Ewan MacColl, the Stalinist folk-singer, and his wife, who would later become well known as the theatrical director Joan Littlewood.

In this study in depth, Sean Matgamna examines the political and social history of Afghanistan, especially in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, and what the experience of Stalinism there, the 1978 Stalinist-Armed Forces Revolution and then the Russian invasion, tells us about Stalinism in history. Click here to read the article.

The story of the Chinese revolution of 1927, is a story of how a working class developed in China, how its struggles interlaced with those of the nationalist bourgeoisie, how the young Chinese Communist Party misled those struggles and why, ultimately, they were defeated.

By Max Shachtman
The organisation of the party will take the place of the party; the Central Committee will take the place of the organisation; and finally the dictator will take the place of the Central Committee.
Leon Trotsky, 1904

Predictions like this, Trotsky's, in a polemic written in 1904, have often been used to “explain” Stalinism as a logical continuation of Bolshevism.

By Sean Matgamna

"The attempt of the bourgeoisie during its internecine conflict to oblige humanity to divide up into only two camps is motivated by a desire to prohibit the proletariat from having its own independent ideas.

Paul Hampton Reviews "Cuba: Socialism and Democracy" by Peter Taaffe
This book is a pseudo-debate between Peter Taaffe of the Socialist Party and CWI (formerly-Militant) in Britain and Doug Lorimer of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party (DSP)

by Sean Matgamna

By David Broder

At a recent conference in France I spoke to a young man who was a member of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF, French Communist Party). When I asked him why any young activist would join an ossified party now in terminal decline, he replied that “I intervene in the PCF because I am a Luxemburgist. I can see the difference between the leadership of an organisation and its membership.”

Discussion points on Revolution Betrayed

1. Section 1 of chapter 1 gives a much rosier picture of progress in the USSR than the rest of the book. How do the remaining sections of chapter 1 qualify that? How does it all hold up with hindsight?

By John O’Mahony
Click here for the debate around this contribution.

19th and 20th century socialism is a house of many rooms, cellars, attics, alcoves, and hidden chambers (not to speak of private chapels and “priest-holes”.)

By Paul Hampton
Click here for the debate around this contribution
Chris Ford’s plea for more attention to Raya Dunayevskaya (Transcending our fragmented tradition Solidarity 3/111, 3 May 2007) rests heavily on her “extensively researched original analysis of the USSR as a state-capitalist society which she first outlined in 1941.”

A collection of articles

A collection of articles on solidarity with workers in Eastern Europe before the revolutions of 1989, and on those revolutions and the prospects they opened up

By Hal Draper

THERE is a paradox - only an apparent one - in the development of Stalinist imperialism. Stalinism arose out of the counter-revolution in Russia under the slogan of building “socialism in one country” as against the perspective of “world revolution” represented by the Bolshevik left wing under Trotsky. An historic internal struggle took place within the party under these different banners, in which, as everybody knows, the Stalinist wing won out.

By Max Shachtman
(From Labor Action
6 November 1950)

• What is Trotskyism? - Our fragmented tradition, by Sean Matgamna
  Fragmented Trotskyist tradition? Remember C L R James and Raya Dunayevskaya too, by Chris Ford

• James-Dunayevskaya? Like the Koran and the Bible!, by Barry Finger
• The Shachtman-Johnson donnybrook, by Ernest Haberkern
• The fantasy of state capitalism in the USSR, by Paul Hampton
• C L R James, by Sean Matgamna
• Don't be starry-eyed about James, by Jane Ryan
• The Johnson-Forest tendency, by Sean Matgamna
• James-Dunayevskaya: the End of an Experience, by Max Shachtman
• James-Dunayevskaya split from SWP(USA) - at 8.30 sharp, by Max Shachtman
• Types of revolutionary leadership: the James-Dunayevskaya tendency, by James P Cannon
• What is Trotskyism, by Max Shachtman (1943)

British workers and the Stalinist state 'unions'

By John O'Mahony

What's in the coffin at the funeral of socialism?

By John O'Mahony

BOURGEOIS propagandists and ex-Stalinists alike tell us that we are witnessing the end of socialism.

Socialism is dying of shame, failure and self disgust before our eyes in Eastern Europe. Socialism has been tried and is now deservedly rejected as an all-round social and historical failure.

It is rejected most explicitly by the working class who, for example, gave the right the bulk of its vote in last month's East German election.

The workers want capitalism, and socialism, "history's great dream" - so bourgeois and ex-socialist propagandists alike say - goes the way of other ignorant yearnings and strivings, taking its place in the museum of quackery alongside such relics of barbarism as alchemy.

For sixty and more years, "socialism", in common discourse, has been what existed in the USSR. The ideas conveyed by the words socialism and communism before Stalin established his system sixty years ago faded into the mists of pre-history, and "socialism" came to be the theory and practice of Stalinism - what became known in the '70s as "actually existing socialism".

That was "socialism". There has been no other socialism (unless some fool wants to cite Western "democratic socialism", Sweden for example).

And yes, it is this "actually existing socialism" that is ceasing to exist, melting like islands of ice in the warm seas of international capitalism. And yes, its enemies are the very working class in whose name the "socialist" states claimed their historic legitimacy

So much for "socialism", "actually existing socialism' . But for the socialism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci, it is a good thing that millions of people in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union have risen in revolt against 'socialism" and "communism". In fact it is the best thing that has happened for socialists in fully half a century.

The fact that those millions hate and despise "socialism" is the best pledge we could have that socialism has a future, that socialism is indeed the "wave of the future."

This becomes clear when you ask yourself the question: what have the workers revolted against when they revolted against "socialism"? What has been proved or disproved by the indisputable failure of the Stalinist system?

The workers and others have revolted against:

* National oppression by the USSR and within the IJSSR.

* Subordination of individuals, social groups, and nations to an all-powerful regulating state through which a bureaucratic ruling class exercised its dictatorship

* The denial of free speech, free press' free assembly, free organisations.

* Exploitation and poverty, combined with outrageous privilege.

They want instead:

* National and individual freedom.

* Democracy.

* Prosperity and equality - an end, at least, to the peculiarly glaring sort of inequality imposed on the Eastern Bloc by bureaucratic privilege.

That the workers think they can get these things, or get more of them, under a market system, is very important, and determines what happens now, but it is not the whole story. It is not even the gist of the story. And it is not the end but the beginning of the chapter that opened in the East last autumn.

And what has the failure of Stalinist "socialism" proved? That rigidly bureaucratic systems, where all power, decision, initiative and resources are concentrated in the hands of the state, cannot plan their economies effectively. No Marxist ever believed they could.

That the workers become alienated when a supposed "workers' state" actually means rule over them by privileged bureaucrats.

That socialism is impossible without freedom and democracy, without free initiative and comprehensive self-rule.

That socialism is impossible when the socialists set out to develop backward national economies, rather than the working class seizing power on the basis of the technology created by advanced capitalism and beginning with equality and freedom.

Eastern Europe proves all these things. But then its evidence vindicates, rather than disproves, the ideas of Karl Marx.

Marx argued that socialism would grow out of advanced capitalism, which had developed the means of production far enough that want could be abolished almost immediately; that socialism would be the creation of the mass of the people, led by the working class, and, by definition, therefore, democratic; and that socialism would immediately destroy the bureaucratic state machine, substituting an accountable system of working-class administration.

What came to be known as "socialism", and in fact was "actually existing socialism", was never socialism. Lenin and Trotsky did not believe that socialism was possible in the backward Tsarist empire. What they believed was that the workers could take power there, and make the first in a chain of revolutions that would reach the advanced countries where socialism was possible.

The revolutions in Western Europe were betrayed and defeated. In isolation, the Stalinist mutation, a new form of class society with collective property, emerged by way of a bloody one-sided civil war against the workers of the USSR, led by the genuine Marxists, Trotsky and his comrades. After World War 2 it spread.

Stalinism was never socialism. But the revolt against it is socialism in embryo - the mass self-assertion and revolt of millions of people is the raw material of socialism.

It would be a true miracle if the workers in the Stalinist countries had political clarity after years in darkness. It would be remarkable if they were not confused by the official "socialism" which meant tyranny and poverty, and by the capitalism of Western Europe which means comparative prosperity and liberty.

What they are gaining now is the freedom to think, to organise, the freedom to struggle and to learn from their struggle. Out of this, the first steps towards socialism - independent workers' organisations, parties and trade unions - w ill emerge again in countries in which History did indeed seem to have ended in hell forty or more years ago. In the East, working-class history- has begun again.

Working classes which fail to shape their own history sometimes get a second chance - in the first place the chance to learn from and not repeat that history.

"Socialism" is dead. Long live socialism!

(Originally published in Socialist Organiser, March 1990. This version from Workers' Liberty 28, February 1996)

Their nightmare, our hope

By John O'Mahony

The risen people: Eastern Europe after the revolutions

John O'Mahony

A socialist manifesto from the editorial board of Socialist Organiser

Socialist Organiser 434, 15 February 1990

By Sean Matgamna.

Socialism, yes! Stalinism, no!

Sectarian lessons from afar

By Martin Thomas

By Chris Ford
Click here for the debate around this contribution

The latest Workers Liberty reproduces a number of articles by the American Marxists Max Shachtman and Hal Draper as evidence of the continued value of this material from this pivotal conjuncture in world history and international socialism, and poses some interesting questions.