Marxism and Stalinism

Marxist assessments of Stalinism. What was the class nature of the Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev USSR? And of other countries modelled on it? What has been the legacy of Stalinism for the left?

The Morning Star's trouble with Gorbachev

The death of Mikhail Gorbachev has caused some difficulty at the Morning Star . That’s because any serious assessment of the man inevitably involves an assessment of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist empire across Eastern Europe whose collapse he inadvertently brought about. And the Morning Star (together with the organisation that controls it, the Communist Party of Britain) isn’t quite sure of what to say regarding the Soviet Union – at least, as it was by the time Gorbachev became leader in 1985. So best to fall back on banality, summed up by the headline of the paper’s editorial (1...

How Gorbachev's attempts to save the USSR system undid it

Gorbachev with striking Soviet miners, 1991 On 30 August 2022, former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev died. This 1988 article from Socialist Organiser discusses the USSR's Stalinist system during his rule. History has many examples of it: when the rulers of moribund repressive systems themselves decide that there must be change, and set about tinkering with their system, then it can blow up in their faces. Gorbachev's attempts at reform from above may well unleash revolution from below. The English Revolution of the 1640s broke out when the tyrant king Charles I called the first Parliament...

Haunted by Andrey Vyshinsky’s ghost

Last week I sent out a message to tens of thousands of trade unionists alerting them to two bits of news. The good news, I reported, was that some workers in Poland had won a big victory in court. The bad news was that in Ukraine, President Zelenskyy had failed to veto anti-union legislation, as we had been demanding. Most people reacted with thanks, or said nothing, but two of the emails I got within a minute of each other were, I think, interesting. The first said: “You’re talking about a fucking union at a time of war. Where’s your head at you dirty lefty”. The second said: “Of course...

BICO and Stalino-Unionism

Ideas of two Irelands have long been common. In the Provo war from 1971 to the 1990s, they were common on the nationalist side, only the Protestant Unionists were condemned by some of their characteristics as a bad Ireland, as “pro-imperialists”. They were thus condemned by the sometimes openly sectarian “left”, in the Irish National Liberation Army, members of which gunned down people at random in a Pentecostal church in Darkley, Co Armagh, in 1983. They were in fact so condemned by the Provos, whose “devils” were Unionist shibboleths. It was strange to see the Unionists as only “pro...

The butchers collide: Stalingrad 80 years on

In the 20 September 1939 Evening Standard , the cartoonist David Low famously depicted Stalin and Hitler greeting each other. There is a dead body lying between them and dark clouds gathering in the background. They "greet" each other, the former says, "The bloody assassin of the workers" and the latter, "The scum of the earth". The Molotov-Ribbentrop (or Stalin-Hitler) pact had been signed a few weeks earlier and would last to June 1941. Only three days before Low's cartoon, the pact had demonstrated what it meant for the people for Europe. While the Nazis were completing their invasion of...

No heroes of ours! YCL celebrates the Stalinist tradition

On the 18 June 2022 TUC demonstration on the cost of living crisis, the Young Communist League sub-contingent, dressed in black with red facemasks, made an instructive and highly damaging intervention. Among their chants were: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! Che Guevara! Stalin!” On 29 June 2022, Andrew Murray wrote in the Morning Star , paper of Communist Party of Britain (CPB), defending the chant. He wrote: However, if there is to be a debate on the Soviet leader, let’s start with Che: “In the so-called mistakes of Stalin lies the difference between a revolutionary attitude and a revisionist attitude...

“I have always believed in discontent”

Part three of a series on Charlotte Despard, a feminist and socialist who became active in London in 1890, at the age of 46, and remained active until her death in 1939 at age 95. Previous articles have covered her activity in London to 1921 ( Solidarity 633 ), and in Dublin 1921-26 ( 634 ). After her dismay at the Civil War and the lack of social radicalism from Irish Republicans, in 1926 Charlotte Despard had perked up. Her optimism refuelled, she wrote “Communism is growing extraordinarily; we mean to try and start a group here; so far as Society is concerned, that is the only hope for this...

The tragedy of Paul Robeson

The question of who black American actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson was in anything beyond general outline hovered at the edge of my mind for several years. Earlier this year I googled for a book and found Australian journalist Jeff Sparrow’s No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson . I recommend it. It’s not a straight biography. Sparrow travelled to various parts of the US, Spain, London, South Wales and Moscow to engage with episodes and aspects of Robeson’s life (1898-1976), and a lot of No Way But This consists of his conversations with experts and activists in those places. At...

Kino Eye: A Ukrainian film about collectivisation

Earth (1930) by Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko was one of a number of films about the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture initiated by Stalin in the late twenties. As a result Earth has most of the standard ingredients of the deadening conformity which brought about the end of creative filmmaking in the Soviet Union: the heroic supporters of the collective versus dastardly kulaks (rich peasants), the totemic tractor, the martyrdom of Vasyl (the leader of the new collective) which ultimately galvanises the peasants and boosts their collective spirit. Yet, the film is much more than...

“Success” for China. And for China's workers?

Click on to the website of the Socialist Action group and the banner at the top of the Home page tells you what to expect. There is no place here for Marx, Trotsky, or Lenin. But enough space for pictures of Malcolm X, Chavez, Castro and Guevara. That certainly sets the scene nicely. Socialist Action was one of the splinters that emerged in the mid-1980s from the break-up of International Marxist Group (from 1982 renamed Socialist League). Inside the IMG the faction that eventually became the current Socialist Action group had traditionally been led by John Ross. Socialist Action was launched...

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