Workers' Liberty

• Introduction: Revolution and Betrayal in Spain
  • Alone With Our Day (From WH Auden's poem "Spain"

  • The Spanish Revolution and Those Who Killed It: a Chronology
  • Trotsky: A "Diary" of The Spanish Revolution and the Civil War 19936-39
  • Workers' Control in the Spanish Revolution 1936-7
  • How the Stalinists Killed Workers' Control in the Spanish Revolution
  • Issues in the 1936-7 Spanish Revolution
  • Spain 1936-7: A Study in Workers Power
  • Marxism and Anarchism
  • Hobsbawm's Miserable Apology for Stalinism
  • The Spanish Revolution
  • George Orwell: Eyewithness in Barcelona: 1936-37: With the International Brigade
  • The Scottish Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War
  • Anarchists Massacred in Barcelona
  • The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning - Leon Trotsky (1937)
  • The Tragedy of Spain - Leon Trotsky (19399)
  • Once gain on the Causes of the Defeat in Spain - Leon Trotsky (1939)
  • The Class, the Party and the Leadership": Why Was the Spanish Proletariat Defeated? - Leon Trotsky
  • Trotsky: Stalinism and Bolshevism
  • George Orwell the man Who Told the Left Unpalatable Truths
  • George Orwell, 1903-2003: part 1
  • George Orwell, 1903-2003: part 2
    
    

Introduction (2010)

Stalinism dominated and shaped the would-be left for two thirds of the 20th century.

The idea of Gordon Brown writing on the future of socialism will come as a surprise to many, but that is precisely what he invites us to discuss in his foreword to a new edition of Anthony Crosland’s The Future of British Socialism.

The British line was consistently directed toward fomenting the Pan-Arab reaction against the partition.

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.

The Russian revolution was the most important event of the 20th century.

Dear Comrade Silone

We were glad to publish your political statement in Labor Action (see left), for we know that what you have to say will be of justifiably great interest to all who admire your novels as well as all who respect your past contributions to the struggle for socialism and human rights.

Hal Draper (1914-1990) was another American Marxist who upheld Third Camp politics. Draper joined the socialist movement in 1932, becoming a national organiser of the Young People's Socialist League, the youth group associated with the Socialist Party. He became a Trotskyist and was a founder member of the SWP-USA in 1938.

A lot of political tendencies and ways of thinking come under fire in the editorial “what is left anti-Semitism?” in Solidarity 3/82.

Interesting Ideas
Submitted by Arthur Bough on 13 October, 2005 - 12:24.

In the pamphlet Two Souls of Socialism, first published in 1960, Hal Draper coined the phrase "socialism from below" to describe Marxian socialism as against the "socialism from above" of Stalinism, Fabianism, and many pre-Marxian socialists who saw the future in terms of a benevolent authority reshaping society according to a rational blueprint of collective organisation.

After Lenin: the revival and reinterpretation

The revival of defeatism did not take place while Lenin was alive, that is, during the first five years of the Comintern... A check of the resolutions and theses, major documents, and publications of the Comintern permits the confident statement: if anyone referred to defeatism at all, it certainly played no role in the programme, policy and principles of the Communist International under Lenin.

“When Vladimir Ilyitch once observed me glancing through a collection of his articles written in the year 1903, which had just been published, a sly smile crossed his face, and he remarked with a laugh: ‘It is very interesting to read what stupid fellows we were!”’