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?

McCarthyism — and Stalinist gangsterism

By Sean Matgamna In the 1940s, so recently-released government papers show, the BBC discriminated against “Communists”, among them Ewan MacColl, the Stalinist folk-singer, and his wife, who would later become well known as the theatrical director Joan Littlewood. The recently-released and much-acclaimed film, Good Night And Good Luck, is about Edward R Murrow, a famous radio and TV journalists of the time, standing up to the arch commie-hunter, Senator Joe McCarthy. It is a very good film, which incorporates fascinating old footage of McCarthy in action. “Witch-hunting”... It was the crude and...

Afghanistan, Marxism, And The Shape Of The 20th Century

In this study in depth, Sean Matgamna examines the political and social history of Afghanistan, especially in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, and what the experience of Stalinism there, the 1978 Stalinist-Armed Forces Revolution and then the Russian invasion, tells us about Stalinism in history. Click here to read the article.

Workers in the Chinese revolution of 1926-7

The story of the Chinese revolution of 1927, is a story of how a working class developed in China, how its struggles interlaced with those of the nationalist bourgeoisie, how the young Chinese Communist Party misled those struggles and why, ultimately, they were defeated. At the beginning of the 20th century, China bore little relationship economically or politically to the countries of the west. The vast majority of the population were peasants — by the 1920s over 90% of the population still lived outside towns and only 6% lived in cities of over 50,000. The urban proletariat was tiny...

The history of Bolshevism: did Leninism turn into Stalinism?

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part The organisation of the party will take the place of the party; the Central Committee will take the place of the organisation; and finally the dictator will take the place of the Central Committee. Leon Trotsky, 1904 Predictions like this, Trotsky's, in a polemic written in 1904, have often been used to “explain” Stalinism as a logical continuation of Bolshevism. In this polemic against the book “Three Who Made A Revolution”, by Bertram D Wolfe (which has been continuously in print since it was first published...

The fate of Max Shachtman: a critical assessment

"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 obligated to become a Marxist; no one is obligated 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...

'Apparatus Marxism', Impoverished Twin of 'Academic Marxism'

“You who have really done something, must have noticed yourself how few of the young literary men who attach themselves to the Party take the trouble to study economics, the history of trade, of industry, of agriculture, of the social formations… The self-conceit of the journalist must therefore accomplish everything and the result looks like it…" — Friedrich Engels Introduction Watching the accelerating political and moral degeneration of the Stalinised “Communist International" in the mid-1930s, Leon Trotsky entitled one of his commentaries “Is There No End To The Fall?" Had he been forced...

Is Cuba Socialist?

This book is a pseudo-debate between Peter Taaffe of the Socialist Party and CWI (formerly Militant) in Britain and Doug Lorimer of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party (DSP). It is also, I guess, an attempt to check the recent rash of Castro-worship in the Scottish Socialist Party, with whom Taaffe maintains a strained relationship. The DSP, following the lead of the American SWP, rejects Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, preferring Lenin’s blurred and outmoded formula of a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” as the programme for revolutions in countries of less...

Henry Suss: A tragic old Stalinist militant dies; what his life says to allies of Islamic clerical fascism now

"Even such is time, that takes on trust Our youth, our joys, our all we have, And pays us but with earth and dust; Who, in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days..." — Sir Walter Raleigh Henry Suss, who was for 70 years a member of the Communist Party, has died at the age of 91. Suss’s political experience was representative of a whole, Jewish, layer of the Manchester working class, and of many others. Last year a big book of interviews with Suss, by Dave Chapple, about his years in the Communist Party, was published:"Henry Suss and the...

The French Communist Party - Rise of the Stalinist behemoth

By David Broder At a recent conference in France I spoke to a young man who was a member of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF, French Communist Party). When I asked him why any young activist would join an ossified party now in terminal decline, he replied that “I intervene in the PCF because I am a Luxemburgist. I can see the difference between the leadership of an organisation and its membership.” A strange time to see it. But the PCF was indeed a mass Communist Party, largely composed of genuine working-class militants, whose political and trade union experience was skewed by an ideology...

The Lies Against Socialism Answered

For most of the 20th century, the common image of "socialism" was the USSR and the other states modelled on it, China, Cuba, and so on. There were always socialists who were critical of Stalin's or Khrushchev's USSR, seeing it as an unacceptably bureaucratic version of socialism, and keen to create a more democratic version in their own countries. By the late 1960s or early 1970s, a big majority even in the official Communist Parties was highly critical of Brezhnev's USSR. But most of those who criticised the USSR clung to the idea that some other USSR-model state - China, Vietnam, Cuba.... -...

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