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?

A childhood in Stalinist Albania

On a bookshelf in our front room there’s a picture of my partner and me, half-empty glasses raised in the air. It is New Year’s Eve, 1989, and we are drinking to celebrate the death of Stalinism across much of Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall had just come down and the dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, had just been put against a wall and shot, during a brief civil war as Romanian Stalinism crashed. The bourgeois revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were liberations, for sure. The new freedom meant elections, new political parties, the ability to form free trade unions and an end to...

Permanent revolution and working-class politics

The articles reprinted here, from a dispute in the Irish Workers’ Group (IWG) in 1967-8, are important for seeing how the term “permanent revolution” has been used in certain ways to rationalise a world-view on the radical left, and how the political trend represented today by Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty dug our way out of those misuses.

The real “Money Heist”

The hit Netflix series La Casa de Papel ( Money Heist ) tells the story of two spectacular robberies. One involved the seizure and occupation of the Spanish Mint (where paper currency is printed). The other took place in the Bank of Spain, where the country’s gold supply is kept. The second heist story imagined the melting down of all the gold ingots stored in the Bank of Spain’s basement. These were then cleverly transferred to the group’s confederates miles away. This story has a remarkable parallel to the real history of Spain — and the Soviet Union. In 1936 when the danger of Franco’s...

The invention of tradition on Marxist ecology

In his influential book The Invention of Tradition , Eric Hobsbawm explained the process by which historians seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, attempting to establish continuity with a suitable historic past. Marxism is not exempt from the manufacture of tradition. In fact the battle of ideas is often fought around the legitimacy of decisions made by individuals and parties at crucial times in the past. Thus we openly proclaim our affinity with the methods, theories and practices of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci, the foremost...

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...

More on our half-price book offer

The coming weeks of fewer labour-movement meetings and activities are a good time to read our longer books, and within our general half-price offer we’re doing a special deal on The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1 and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism : both large books for £10 post free. If you’ve already read those, or want something easier, the half-price offer also makes many shorter texts more available. Socialism Makes Sense is an attempt to allow anti-socialist ideas full voice and then refute them in favour of the idea of socialism which was advocated by the mass socialist...

Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed

Quite what TV audiences in the Soviet Union were expecting on 25 Dec 1991 when news was released of a special broadcast by Mikhail Gorbachev is hard to gauge. It is probably safe to say that most viewers did not expect him to resign or that the state of which he was head would cease to exist. Nevertheless, after a brief speech, the flag of the Soviet Union, which had flown over the Kremlin since 1922, was taken down. He didn’t have much choice, four of the 15 Republics of the USSR had already broken away, he was President of a state that didn’t even exist on paper. After his short speech he...

The Stalinist history of Maoism

“The predominating type among the present ‘Communist’ bureaucrats is the political careerist, and in consequence the polar opposite of the revolutionist. Their ideal is to attain in their own country the same position that the Kremlin oligarchy gained in the USSR. They are not the revolutionary leaders of the proletariat but aspirants to totalitarian rule. They dream of gaining success with the aid of this same Soviet bureaucracy and its GPU. They view with admiration and envy the invasion of Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia by the Red Army because these invasions immediately...

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...

Stalinism: not so “external”

Urte March, in their review of Corbynism: What Went Wrong? in Solidarity 614 cites their own comrade Tim Nailsea’s review of the Communist Party’s re-issued Britain’s Road to Socialism. This is to hammer their argument that Martin Thomas is wrong to blame Stalinism for many of Corbynism’s weak points when the finger should be pointed at the reformist character of the Labour party itself. But, as Nailsea says in their review: “ Britain’s Road to Socialism is, in fact, probably one of the clearest blueprints for reformist socialism one might find on the British left”. Since its publication in...

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