Bolsheviks

Lousy night in Georgia

Eric Lee predictably and wrongly seizes on my recent review on the Russian civil war to rehash fairy tales about Georgia’s Menshevik government ( Solidarity 642 , 27 July 2022). Lee’s apologetics ignore the reality of the period – include materials from his own book, The Experiment (2017). Rather than put the Russian civil war in its international context, he prefers the fantasy oasis of social democracy in one country. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks led the working class to make a socialist revolution in Russia. They led a revolutionary workers’ government. The Bolsheviks faced White...

Sylvia Pankhurst and "the first of its kind"

A new pamphlet from Workers’ Liberty, Sylvia, can be bought online here (£3 single copies, five copies for £11). It tells the story of the political journey of Sylvia Pankhurst, the member of the suffragette Pankhurst family who moved to working-class organising and revolutionary socialism while her sister Christabel and mother Emmeline moved to support for World War One and for Toryism. Sylvia’s Workers’ Suffrage Federation were the sharpest and boldest supporters in the British left of the workers’ revolution in Russia in October 1917. Their paper Workers’ Dreadnought of 17 November 1917...

Putin vs Lenin

Vladimir Putin has been extremely explicit and vocal in condemning the Bolsheviks’ policy of national self-determination and their policy for Ukraine in particular. Condemnation of the Bolsheviks is central to his absurd argument that there is essentially no Ukrainian nation, that it is a somehow an artificial construction. As has been widely noted, Putin regrets the collapse of the USSR. But it is the Russian empire the Stalinist USSR represented, not “communism” and certainly not the Russian revolution, that he views positively. For the obvious reasons, Putin is against workers' struggle and...

Paul Mason, China and Marxism

Paul Mason’s reply to John Ross of Socialist Action on Xi Jinping’s China annihilates Ross’ apologism and makes many valuable points. Mason sets himself the task of defending Marxism against its traducement by the Chinese elite. But his own comments about Marxism are confused. “Stalin faced no significant alternative form of Marxism”, claims Mason. “Even his opponents within the Soviet bureaucracy, from Leon Trotsky to Nikolai Bukharin, adhered to the same rigid historical method that was killing them. They knew nothing of Marx the humanist, Marx the philosopher of alienation, Marx the eco...

Use the coming weeks to study

The coming weeks, as labour movement activity dwindles in the second half of December and in early January, are a good time to catch up on reading. Workers’ Liberty is running a half-price offer on all our older books, aiming to redress the backlog in circulation caused by the lack of in-person political meetings over the last two years. We also offer special deals if you buy a few books — for example, both The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1, and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism , for £10 post free. It’s an especially good time to read the longer books, more difficult to work...

Malm: Further into the swamp

Second in a series of articles about the writings on climate politics of Andreas Malm. More here . Since the publication of his celebrated book Fossil Capital (2016), Andreas Malm has continued to expound his views on climate change. He has published several books, including The Progress of This Storm (2018), Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency (2020) and How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021), along with numerous journal articles. Malm’s evolution has been erratic, consistent only with his pseudo-profound pontification. His advice to the climate movement has veered from geoscience to acts of...

Was Stalinism the new barbarism?

Published in Workers' Liberty Series 1 No. 66 January 2001. 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. This is the second part of an article whose first part appeared in Workers’ Liberty 62. By the late forties Shachtman came to the conclusion that Stalinism was “the new barbarism”. Cliff understood that there were two meanings of the term “barbarism’; the first sense meant a description of the period since 1917, given the belatedness of the socialist...

Stalinism in theory and history

Published in Workers' Liberty Series 1 No. 62 March 2000 In theories of Stalinism, as Haberkern comments in his review of The Fate of the Russian Revolution (WL59-60), plainly there are many nuances, and valuable contributions from the likes of Burnham, Carter and Draper which ought to be more widely known. But the book, criticised by Ernie for its failure to include more such texts, was not intended as a compilation of theories of bureaucratic collectivism. It is rather a critique of the ideas of latter-day Trotskyism, from the premises of Trotsky and by his most ardent followers. Many...

The dynamics of bureaucratism

Left Oppositionists in Siberian exile, late 1920s Published in Workers Liberty Series 1 No.59/60 December 1999 / January 2000 The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Volume One is a significant contribution to the literature of the anti-Stalinist left. Long buried in the archives the polemics and analyses of those socialists who refused to accept the definition of Stalin’s barbaric regime as a “workers’ state” simply because property was nationalised and private property, large and small, was obliterated, deserve to see the light. My criticism of this anthology...

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