Marxism and Stalinism

Introduction Reading the press of the "orthodox" Trotskyist movement from the 1940s inescapably suggests a question: didn't they have access to the serious bourgeois press? They did, of course. Yet their picture of the world and what was happening in it was gappy, patchy, selective, and vastly distorted by the narrow-focus ideological spectacles they had strapped on themselves. Where others - including socialists like the Workers' Party of the USA - saw the enormous expansion of a Russian empire in eastern and central Europe, the "orthodox" Trotskyists saw the spreading of a distorted working...

See also: Like it or not, Stalinism is still a live force Introduction (2010) Stalinism dominated and shaped the would-be left for two thirds of the 20th century. Its consequences still warp and shape much of the would-be left, including organisations that are ostensibly anti-Stalinist. To a surprising extent, the left has still not properly come to terms with the lessons of Stalinism. This 1953 article by Hal Draper was an attempt to summarise concisely the conclusions which the Independent Socialist League (formerly the Workers' Party: the "Shachtmanites", the heterodox Trotskyists) was...

It was very hard to distinguish between criticism of Stalinism - which is what the Communist Party's "communism" was, of course - and basic hostility to the ideas of communism. All I had, I suppose, was a general notion of a world which would be organised like a good family, a caring family. It was very primitive, but also very heart-felt. I was torn for a long time - for two years, in fact - by inner conflict about such things as the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956. I finally decided my indecision was self-indulgence, and I joined the YCL. As I've said, a strange thing was that what I'd...

At 15 I fell in love with the idea of communism — the image, the goal, the seduction, the hypnosis, of it. I fell in love with the idea of humankind as a great caring family, a world governed by class and then human solidarity. I’ve never fallen out with it. Everything I see in the capitalist reality around me has reinforced and strengthened it — renewed and yet again renewed my conviction about it. I have shifted in the sense that I tend to take — and believe I should take — a longer view of things, beyond the instant agitationalism of the would-be left which is opportunistic in the sense...

Workers’ Fight — the initial group of what is now the AWL tendency — inherited the “orthodox Trotskyist” view that the USSR and the other Stalinist states were “deformed and degenerated workers’ states”. Why did we take so long to move away from that view towards the conclusion that the Stalinist states were in fact a new sort of exploitative class system? My presentation in a debate we held in 1976 may help explain. We had recently merged with the Left Faction of IS (SWP). They held that the USSR was “state capitalist”, though they rejected Cliff’s specific theory. (In fact, they were unsure...

The origins of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty: the thirteen questions (This is an expanded version of the text in Workers Liberty 3/26) The political tendency now organised as AWL originates from Workers’ Fight, a small Trotskyist group formed in 1966. Why, and how? Workers’ Fight came into existence as a distinct tendency in response to two linked “crises”. There was a prolonged crisis of British capitalist society, and of the labour movement which had grown so very powerful within it and yet was unable — despite a mass socialist sentiment in the trade unions — to overthrow capitalism and...

[This is part of a polemic about the Stalinist PDP led army coup in Afghanistan, in April 1978, with "J-J" (Jack Conrad/John Bridge/John Chamberlain) of the Weekly Worker Group "CPGB"). J-J was for many years a fervent supporter of the Russian invaders and their Afghan Stalinist tools in Afghanistan. "Engin" is a Turkish Stalinist whose views on the Afghan coup J-J followed.] Like Engin, J-J "proves" that the Saur [April] coup was not a coup but a revolution by obliterating the distinction between a revolution and a coup. Being a karaoke Leninist and not a Marxist, he rests on quotations and...

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed. Joseph Stalin In Britain genealogists can be found in your local library. In Russia they can end up behind bars. This was one of the many illuminating and worrying facts in John Sweeney’s brave but flawed documentary ( Stalin’s back? BBC2, 2 December) about the way Stalin’s reputation is being rehabilitated by the current Russian regime. Sweeney traveled to the Stalinist theme park of Gori in Georgia, met veterans in Volgograd (better known as Stalingrad), met survivors of famines in the...

It is 20 years since the destruction of the Berlin Wall by the people of then divided Germany signalled that Russia’s control over Eastern Europe was collapsing. Russia had held Eastern Europe in a brutal grip for four and a half decades, since the end of the Second World War. It had used the most brutal and bloody methods of imperialist control to maintain that grip. In East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 it used as much military force as was required to beat down revolt against old-style Stalinist, and Russian, rule. The threat of Russian invasion and re...