Marxism and Stalinism

We have seen a tremendous series of revolutions in Eastern Europe, the latest in Romania during Christmas week [1989]. At the beginning of the week the Ceaucescus were in full control. By its end they lay crumpled like rag dolls, dead beside a bullet-marked wall. People after people has risen in revolt against the dictatorship of Stalinist bureaucrats — Poles, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians — and sloughed off the dictators like so much dead and putrid skin. Millions of people rallied in streets and squares all across Eastern Europe, in the countries that have been held in...

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...

Immediately after the August coup in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin and his friends turned the Russian parliament into a veritable revolutionary committee which, backed by the people, took measures it had no legal power to take, to break up the old order. They struck heavy blows at the so-called “Communist Party”, which had backed the coup. This 17 million-strong cartel of the old bureaucratic ruling class was banned It was forbidden to organise in the factories and in the army, and all its property was confiscated. In short, the Yeltsinites used the coup to make a political revolution which has...

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...

“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...