Marxism and Stalinism

A century ago, an international communist women’s movement began to develop a perspective for women’s self-liberation that still resonates today. The record of those early struggles has been translated into English for the first time by Mike Taber and Daria Dyakonova, The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-1922 (Brill 2023). The book provides a history of the greatest working class-based women’s movement to date, through the voices of the women involved and one that has great relevance for today’s socialist feminists. Communist Women’s Movement In 1917, the Russian working class took power led...

Arkadij Maslow was a prominent revolutionary socialist a century ago in Germany.

In May 1934, Joseph Stalin received a letter from a Scottish communist called Harry Whyte. Whyte was a journalist, working for the USSR ’s English-language paper in Moscow. He was also a gay man whose boyfriend had recently gone missing. His letter opened with a question, whose answer would shape the future of the Soviet gay community: “can a homosexual be considered a worthy member of the Communist Party?” Whyte’s decision to move to the Soviet Union in 1932 had partly been an attempt to escape Scotland’s anti-sodomy laws. The world’s first socialist state had removed all homophobic laws...

The following letter was written to Joseph Stalin by Scottish communist Harry Whyte, in May 1934. Whyte lived in Moscow, and at the time of writing he led the editorial board of the English-language newspaper Moscow Daily News . Whyte was a gay man, and shortly before this letter a man he had been seeing for a while had gone missing. Whyte was born to a working-class family in Edinburgh, in 1907. He left school at 16 to pursue a career in journalism, and in 1927, in the aftermath of the general strike, he joined the Independent Labour Party. In 1931, he left the ILP for the Communist Party of...

The Ruling Clawss , by A. Redfield, was originally published by the Daily Worker (US) in 1935. It is now republished as The Ruling Clawss: The Socialist Cartoons of Syd Hoff . Hoff was unknown to me. But after a career as a cartoonist for the New Yorker and Hearst publications from the 1930s he found fame in the USA as a children’s author and illustrator, with Danny and the Dinosaur (1958) selling more than ten million copies. The cartoons in The Ruling Clawss are from 1933-35. They appeared in the Daily Worker as a single panel strip poking fun at the wealthy and ruling class during the...

Jim Denham's column ( Solidarity 673 ) justifiably attacked a travelogue-style article by John Pateman from the Morning Star which painted the dreadful police dictatorship in Hungary after 1945 as some kind of socialist nirvana. Pateman failed to explain that if life was so good in “socialist” Hungary why then did the vast multitude of the population rise in revolt against it in 1956, their target principally being the AVO — hated secret police of the Stalinist regime? If he was really interested in finding this out during his time in Budapest he could have gone to the House of Terror Museum...

From Workers’ Liberty 12-13 The Chinese Communist Party [after its defeats in 1926-7 thanks to Stalin’s policy, and then its conversion from a working-class socialist party, however misled, into a Stalinist political machine] more and more it withdrew from the towns, until by the mid-30s it had no influence or implantation in the towns worth speaking of. Because of the weakness of the central state, the poor communications and transport, and the vast distances, the Maoist “warlords” could resist the central state’s drives against them. Chiang [and the GMD], who saw the Maoists for the threat...

In recent years it has become widely accepted, even by Communist Party members, that Hungary 1956 was no counter-revolution, and that the Russian invasion was wrong. So it came as a genuine shock to read a piece in the Morning Star of 15 May, headed: “Despite its best efforts, you can still see socialism in Budapest” with a sub-heading that includes the words “Infamous for the misunderstood events of 1956”. By “misunderstood” it’s clear that the author (one John Pateman) does not mean the Stalinist lies about a “counter-revolution” — quite the contrary. The piece is a sort of travel guide to...

Workers’ industrial struggle has revived in recent months on a scale not seen for decades. That is cause for great hopes. Left-wing political mobilisation, though, has failed to match it. On issues like the NHS, new anti-strike laws, asylum rights, and the environment, activity on the streets has been small in proportion to the number of people opposed to official policies. That reflects a low ebb of socialist activity in the broadest sense. The activist socialist groups are often not very active and have little cooperation and little dialogue. Many people see themselves as socialists and yet...

The early history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is shrouded in myths.