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The Fate of the Russian Revolution Vol 1

£8.00
Combination/copies

Lost Texts of Critical Marxism

Book Cover "The Fate of the Russian Revolution: The Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Vol 1" overlaid on a black and white photo of Russian workers, holding banners, in winter.
by
Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, C L R James, Leon Trotsky and others, with an introduction by Sean Matgamna
1998
-
Second Edition
Long book
-
608 pages
ISBN
978-0-9531864-0-2

What was the USSR? Was it socialism? A powerful body of critical Marxist analysis of the USSR from the ‘40s and ‘50s remains largely unknown. This work of critical rediscovery vindicates those who made the Revolution, who fought Stalinism until it killed them. It traces efforts to remake a democratic, revolutionary socialist movement during the mid-century events that shaped the world since.

Promotions & Offers

Get it discounted with Vol 2, or with The Russian Revolution:

The Russian Revolution, and its Fate (Vols 1 and 2)
£35.00
A three book bundle
Variations 

The Russian Revolution was a great emancipatory event for the working-class until the Stalinist counter-revolution crushed it. But the real histories of (1) the revolution; (2) those who made it and then fought Stalinism until it killed them; and (3) attempts to understand an evolving Stalinism and USSR, and to build a non-Stalinised labour movement — are all hidden. They are buried beneath both Stalinist and anti-socialist lies. These three books uncover these histories, respectively.

The history described is vital for understanding how the left got to where it is, how we can purge Stalinism from our movement and rebuild an authentic socialism, and how we should think about socialist revolution.

This discounted bundle comes with a paper study guide for each of the three books. Two book combinations are also available for the first or last pairs in this set of three.

See also In Defence of Bolshevism, plus more content on the Russian Revolution and its fate.

Included publications 
The Fate of the Russian Revolution (Vols 1 and 2)
£25.00
A two book combo
Variations 

These books uncover the real histories — buried beneath both Stalinist and anti-socialist lies — of those of those who made the Russian Revolution and then fought Stalinism until it killed them; of attempts to understand an evolving Stalinism and USSR; and to build a non-Stalinised labour movement .

This history is vital for understanding how the left got to where it is, and how we can purge Stalinism from our movement and rebuild an authentic socialism.

This discounted combination comes with a paper study guide for both of the books. You can also get these books in combination with The Russian Revolution, which covers the history of the revolution itself.

See also In Defence of Bolshevism, and more content on the Russian Revolution and its fate.

Included publications 
The Russian Revolution, and its Fate (Vol 1)
£17.00
A two book bundle
Variations 

The Russian Revolution was a great emancipatory event for the working-class until the Stalinist counter-revolution crushed it. But the real histories of (1) the revolution; (2) those who made it and then fought Stalinism until it killed them; and (3) attempts to understand an evolving Stalinism and USSR, and to build a non-Stalinised labour movement — are all hidden. They are buried beneath both Stalinist and anti-socialist lies. These two books uncover the first two of these histories respectively.

These histories are vital for understanding how the left got to where it is, how we can purge Stalinism from our movement and rebuild an authentic socialism, and how we should think about socialist revolution.

This discounted combination comes with a paper study guide for each of the books. You can also get them in combination with Vol 2, which covers the third of the hidden histories listed above.

See also In Defence of Bolshevism, plus more content on the Russian Revolution and its fate.

Included publications 
Files 
Links 
Blurb 

Exactly what was the USSR? Was it socialism? A powerful body of critical Marxist analysis of the USSR was produced in the 1940s and '50s by Max Shachtman, Hal Draper and others, including C L R James. Today, their work is virtually unknown. It does not deserve to be.

The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism is a work of rediscovery. Here the reader will find the key texts of these long-eclipsed, but very important, political thinkers.

The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism vindicates those who made the October Revolution. It restates the real ideas of those Bolsheviks who fought Stalinism until it killed them.

It provides an account of efforts to remake a democratic, revolutionary socialist movement in the maelstrom of the mid-century events that gave to the world the shape it would retain until the 1990s.

A long introductory essay traces Leon Trotsky's attempts to understand Stalinism and submits Trotsky's ideas to a systematic criticism.

Table of Contents 
  • The Russian Revolution and Marxism
    • Introduction by Sean Matgamna
  • Revolution and Counter-revolution in Russia
    • For the Bolshevik Revolution!
    • The Stalinist Counter-revolution in the USSR
  • What Sort of Counter Revolution?
    • The Two Souls of Trotskyism
    • Which Class Rules in the USSR?
    • Russian Imperialist Expansion
    • What Did it Mean for Socialists to "Defend the USSR" in the Second World War?
  • The Long "Third Period": Trotskyism after Trotsky
    • The Other Trotskyists
    • From "Orthodoxy" to Millenarianism I: Who Will Make the Revolution
    • From "Orthodoxy" to Millenarianism II: The Red Army and Stalinism as Agents of Socialist Advance
    • Balance Sheets
    • Trotsky's International at the Nadir
    • The New Russian Empire
    • Trotsky or Deutscher
    • Stalinism and the Marxist Tradition
  • Appendices
  • Index
Related / Further reading 

Reviews of The Fate of the Russian Revolution

An in-depth review of Fate of the Russian Revolution Vol 1, by Alan Johnson

Penetrating but unsound, by Al Richardson

The dynamics of bureaucratism, by Ernest Haberkern

Stalinism in theory and history, a reply to Ernest Haberkern, by Pablo Velasco

Other related

Was Stalinism the new barbarism?

Paul Hampton analyses the arguments used by Tony Cliff and others to rubbish the ideas developed in the 1940s by Max Shachtman and the “unorthodox” Trotskyists in the USA about the USSR.

 

Extracts from The Fate of the Russian Revolution:

The significance of October

The Bolshevik revolution was the great dividing line between socialism in theory and socialism in practice...

They proved at long last that the proletariat does not have to have a master to exploit and oppress it, that there is no quality inherent in the proletariat that precludes its taking power for itself. They proved that in the dark mass for which all rulers and their retainers have such lordly contempt are hidden deep and powerful springs of resourcefulness, idealism, passion for liberty, capacity for brotherhood, enormous creative genius, which await only revolutionary release to inundate and fructify the social soil corrupted by the rule of man over man until it blooms for a peaceful world...
— October is ours! Max Shachtman, 1944

The workers lose power

The working class acquires economic supremacy only after it has seized political power. By its very position in the new society, the proletariat remains a propertyless class.
It seizes state power. The new state is simply the proletariat organized as the ruling class. The essence of the change lies in the fact that the working class is in command of that state-owned property because the state is the proletariat organized as the ruling class (through its Soviets, its army, its courts and institutions like the party, the unions, the factory committees, etc.) There is the nub of the question.

The Stalinist reaction meant the systematic hacking away of every finger of control the working class had over its state. And with the triumph of the bureaucratic counter-revolution came the end of rule of the working class. When the Soviet proletariat finally lost the possibility of submitting the bureaucracy to itself by means of reform, and was left with the weapon of revolution, we should have abandoned our characterization of the USSR as a workers' state. Even if belatedly, it is necessary to do that now.
— Is Russia a workers' state? Max Shachtman, 1941

Trotsky and independent working class politics

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.

This method is as old as bourgeois society, or more exactly, as class society in general. No one is obliged to become a Marxist; no one is obliged to swear by Lenin's name. But the whole of the politics of these two titans of revolutionary thought was directed towards this, that the fetishism of two camps would give way to a third, independent, sovereign camp of the proletariat, that camp upon which, in point of fact, the future of humanity depends.
— Trotsky's Writings (Supplement), 1938

Stalinist imperialism

During the period since the end of the 2nd World War, Russia has emerged not only as a major imperialist power but as one of the Big Two of the earth. Its imperialism has matured and expanded with a rapidity characteristic of change in our epoch. Beginning the war as Hitler's junior partner in the Stalin-Nazi pact, it is today capitalist America's only rival for world domination - a rivalry not only between two different imperialisms but also between two different systems of class exploitation. Russia has not merely "expanded"; it has set out to build and has already acquired in part a far-flung empire on every side of its borders, consisting of states which are not merely "satellites" but subject nations held in chains by the same totalitarian terrorthat operates within Russia itself. The euphemism of Russian "expansionism" as a substitute for "imperialism" can be used only if all reality is ignored.
— The Russian Empire, Hal Draper, 1938

Why Stalinism collapsed

Stalinist Russia is thus a reactionary state based upon a new system of economic exploitation, bureaucratic collectivism. The ruling class is the bureaucracy which, through its control of the state, collectively owns, controls and administers the means of production and exchange. The basic motive force of the economy is the extraction of more and more surplus labor from the toilers so as to increase the revenue, power and position of the bureaucracy. The economy is organized and directed through state totalitarian planning and political terrorism. The toilers are compelled by the state (as well as economic necessity) to labor in the factories and fields.

Forced labor is thus an inherent feature of present-day Russian productive relations.

The relations within the ruling class ... are determined by noneconomic, primarily political, factors...

The raising of the standard of living of the masses demands scientific planning, that is, democratic planning by and of the masses. This is the antithesis of Stalinism...

From a historical viewpoint, Russia has taken a bastard path backward from the regime established by the Bolshevik revolution.
— Bureaucratic Collectivism, Joseph Carter, 1941

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