The fall of European Stalinism: Workers' Liberty 3/25

What was the Bolsheviks’ conception of the 1917 revolution?

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part By Sean Matgamna [An Introduction to "Trotsky's 3 Conceptions...". Both were published in Socialist Organiser at the time of the collapse of Stalinist Russia.] The erstwhile rulers of the Stalinist system — which they said was the realisation of socialism — are now working openly for the restoration of capitalism. So are most of those they rule, and in the first place the working class. The people trapped inside the Stalinist system have been kept for decades in political, economic and intellectual slavery to...

Why the workers want to restore capitalism

Socialists like ourselves, watching the replacement of the Stalinist state economies not by socialist workers’ power and a democratic collectivist system, but by capitalism, are in a position roughly similar to the pioneering Marxists George Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky when they watched the Russian workers take power although their dogmatic expectation was that only the bourgeoisie could replace the Tsar. In fact not the Russian bourgeoisie, but the working class led by the Bolsheviks, replaced the Tsar. The parallel has lessons for us. What we are witnessing in the USSR is a bourgeois...

In the beginning was the critique of capitalism

The Russian socialist revolution is dead? It died long ago! It died not in December 1991, when the USSR formally ceased to exist, nor in August 1991, when the failure of the attempted coup finally broke the back of what power the “Communist Party” had left. It died more than six decades earlier, when Stalin led the state bureaucracy he personified to the final defeat of the working class and the destruction of the working-class communists led by Trotsky. It died in a bloody one-sided civil war in which the new bureaucratic ruling class, having defeated the workers, established itself as the...

Trotskyism after the collapse of Stalinism: an open letter to Ernest Mandel

Comrade Ernest Mandel: Certain of your critics — James P Cannon reasonably in the 1950s, the degenerate sectarians (Healy, Lambert) ridiculously in the 1960s — named the “Fourth International” current you lead “Pabloism”. The truth, however, is that you, comrade Mandel, are the representative leader of post-Trotsky “Trotskyism”. If it is to be given a special “ism”, then it must be “Mandelism”. Others played their part, of course — Deutscher, Cannon, Pablo, Hansen, Healy, etc. Some of them, at certain points along the road, played a more important role than you. Deutscher played the role of...

Rula Lenska and Saddam Hussein's Pet Cat

“I soon had occasion to become convinced, by experience, that the old bourgeois functionaries sometimes have a broader viewpoint and a more profound sense of dignity than Messrs. ‘Socialist’ Ministers.” Leon Trotsky, after his expulsion from Norway by the country’s Labour government in 1937. Maybe we should call it the “swallowing camels and choking on gnats” syndrome. Max Hastings summed it up nicely in the Guardian: Tony Blair has survived as prime minister despite lying his head off about the war in Iraq; if he had been “caught” with a prostitute, of either sex, he’d have had to resign. We...

And where were Jacob Sverdlov's sons?

AND WHERE WERE JACOB SVERDLOV'S SONS? Sverdlov killed the bloody Tsar, He signed the warrant for it; So when they struck his statue down The Tsarists cheered who saw it: They hauled the hollow statue down, And the Tsarists sang when they saw it. And where were Jacob Sverdlov's sons? And Lenin's proud granddaughters? And where were Trotsky's Bolsheviks? All of them lost, slaughtered; All of the leaders, fighters, Reds, All of them, all, slaughtered! They made no statues out of bronze, The heroes Stalin killed; In Lubianka and Vorkuta They died, their voices stilled: The Tsar's song fills the...

Sources

The program we advocated: WSL fusion platform, 26 July 1981 The system they overthrew: Workers’ Fight (first series), no.8, August 1968 1. The risen people: Eastern Europe after the revolutions. Socialist Organiser 429, 4 January 1990 2. What’s in the coffin at the funeral of socialism? Originally published in Socialist Organiser, March 1990. This version from Workers’ Liberty 28, February 1996 3. The lies against socialism answered: Eastern Europe: Towards capitalism or workers’ liberty?, Socialist Organiser special pamphlet issue, 427-8, 7 December 1989 4. Stalin’s system collapses...

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