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?

Sectarian lessons from afar

By Martin Thomas Genuine socialists in Russia face hard times. All the traditional phrases and slogans of socialism are discredited by decades of Stalinist abuse; almost every-one looks to free-market economics; the working-class movement is extremely weak. The least they can ask from us their more fortunately-placed comrades in the West, is that we try to understand, to help, to criticise constructively. Yet the two biggest socialist newspapers in Britain, Socialist Worker and Militant, are offering the Russian socialists only peevish and arbitrary denunciations. Socialist Worker, in...

Transcending our fragmented tradition

By Chris Ford Click here for the debate around this contribution The latest Workers Liberty reproduces a number of articles by the American Marxists Max Shachtman and Hal Draper as evidence of the continued value of this material from this pivotal conjuncture in world history and international socialism, and poses some interesting questions. Yet it is the introductory essay What is Trotskyism? - Our fragmented tradition by John O’Mahony which was the most thought provoking. In particular his consideration: Today, we live in conditions where the tradition of revolutionary Marxism that “flowed”...

The end of the USSR: in the beginning was the critique of capitalism

Click here for pdf . [Editorial introduction to the symposium, WL16] The Russian socialist revolution is dead? It died long ago! It died not in December 1991, when the USSR formally ceased to exist, nor in August 1991, when the failure of the attempted coup finally broke the back of what power the "Communist Party" had left. It died more than six decades earlier, when Stalin led the state bureaucracy he personified to the final defeat of the working class and the destruction of the working-class communists led by Trotsky. It died in a bloody one-sided civil war in which the new bureaucratic...

The left's verdict on the USSR: was August 1991 a capitalist counter-revolution against a workers' state?

The left's verdict on the USSR: was August 1991 a capitalist counter-revolution against a workers' state? By Martin Thomas In the new Workers' Liberty magazine [no.16], a wide range of socialists offer their responses to the collapse of the USSR. This article by Martin Thomas surveys the responses from a narrower spectrum of the left, the Trotskyists. Leon Trotsky. right up to his death in 1940, reckoned that the USSR was a "degenerated workers' state". Some Trotskyists - the Alliance for Workers' Liberty and others - believe that events since 1940 have shown that the Stalinist states have...

Market madness in the ex-USSR: the triumph of unreason

Market madness in the ex-USSR: the triumph of unreason Editorial, Socialist Organiser, 9 January 1992 What is happening in the former USSR now is a grotesque triumph of unreason. In its destructiveness and senselessness, it will rank in history with the carnage of the First and Second World Wars as an almost inexplicable piece of 20th century madness. At the behest of men like Boris Yeltsin and other ex-Stalinists, men who have been through their whole lives members of the corrupt old Stalinist ruling class, nearly 300 million people are now being pitched into the maelstrom of deliberately...

Why the workers want to restore capitalism: the legacy of Stalinism

Why the workers want to restore capitalism: the legacy of Stalinism By Sean Matgamna Socialist Organiser 497, 29/08/91 Socialists like ourselves, watching the replacement of the Stalinist state economies not by socialist workers' power and a democratic collectivist system, but by capitalism, are in a position roughly similar to the pioneering Marxists George Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky when they watched the Russian workers take power although their dogmatic expectation was that only the bourgeoisie could replace the Tsar. In fact not the Russian bourgeoisie, but the working class led by the...

Stalin's system collapses

Stalin's system collapses Socialist Organiser 497, 29/08/91 Last week the system Stalin built in the old Tsarist empire collapsed irretrievably. The USSR is collapsing, too: most of its republics have now declared themselves independent. In most of those republics the so-called "Communist Party of the Soviet Union" has either been banned outright, or banned from activity in such institutions as the army and the KGB, and in factories. For decades the cells of the 17-million strong "party" - in reality the machinery of a vast privileged bureaucracy, not a political party - have been the local...

The Stalinist social system

By Max Shachtman IT is impossible to discuss any important political problem of our time, let alone take a part in resolving it, without a clear understanding of what Stalinism really signifies. It is just as impossible to get such an understanding from the writings and speeches of capitalists, their statesmen, politicians, hangers-on, apologists, or any other beneficiaries of their rule. They are quite capable of describing the notorious vices of Stalinism. Its true social significance, however, escapes them, and so also therefore does the simple secret of combating it effectively. For the...

The new Russian imperialism

By Max Shachtman The best way of facing the facts and, thereby, answering the question “What do the Russians want in the occupied countries” is to ask “What do the Russians do in the occupied countries?” Enough data has now been collected to establish the following outline of Russian economic policy in the occupied countries: 1. Russia strips the industries of machinery and other equipment and transports it to Russia. (Germany, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Korea and Manchuria.) 2. Russia imports large masses of slave labourers to add to the slave labour armies of Russians who make up a sizeable...

The October Revolution Was Made For Freedom in equality!

By Max Shachtman THE fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of November 7, 1917, has been celebrated all over Russia and in many other countries. The triumph of that revolution marked the most important dividing line in the history of mankind: between the end of the age of capitalism and the beginning of the age of socialism. That is how every thoughtful person judged it at the time, and the judgement remains fundamentally sound. The forty following years have shown, it is true, that this line is not as straight and clear as we first believed. It has often been twisted and tangled up...

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