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?

Not the “people’s daily”

Some of the best people I have ever encountered in the labour movement — or anywhere else, for that matter — were CPers, that is, Stalinists, in one degree or another. These were people who had dedicated themselves mind and limb to a cause which in its broad points of reference and ultimate goals is our own cause, the cause of socialism, and who had given everything they had to it. They were not “selfless” in any narrow ascetic sense, but people who rejected the values and concerns of the bourgeois world around them with disdain, and who had organised their own lives around the working-class...

Werner Scholem: Trotskyism, Zinovievism, antisemitism

The socialist life of Werner Scholem deserves to be better known. The publication of Ralf Hoffrogge’s exhaustive biography, A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany (Haymarket 2018), means that English readers now have the opportunity to appreciate his contribution. Werner Scholem was born in Germany in December 1895. He joined the Socialist Workers’ Youth group as a teenager in 1912 and then the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on turning 18. Scholem opposed the First World War but was conscripted, wounded on the Eastern front and then imprisoned for anti-war activities. He was sent to the Western...

Ágnes Heller 1929-2019

With the death of Ágnes Heller on 19 July an era in Hungarian politics has come to an end. She was one of the last links to the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács and the so-called Budapest School of the 1960s, which consisted of a number of his former students, including Heller’s husband Ferenc Feher. Born to a Jewish family in Budapest, Heller survived the Holocaust. Her father – an inspirational figure who helped many Jews to survive – perished in the final months of the war. After 1945 she enrolled at university and joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1947 after hearing Lukács give a...

The "Bolshevisation" of the KPD, 1924-5

Werner Scholem, Ruth Fischer, Arkadi Maslow - leaders of the KPD in 1924-5 Hermann Weber's Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus gives a detailed account of "Bolshevisation" in 1924-5 in the German Communist Party (KPD). The KPD was then an authentic revolutionary-socialist party, not the Stalinist organisation it later became. It was the biggest communist party outside the USSR. It was also morally and intellectually the most weighty, with many activists and writers trained in Rosa Luxemburg's "left-radical" wing of the old German Social Democracy. In November 1918 it had been the first...

Serbs, Kosova and Stalinist lies

One Liz Payne, of something called the British Peace Assembly, was given an entire page in the 23 March Morning Star in which to propagate a pack of lies about the war in Kosovo and NATO’s intervention twenty years ago. Yes, a pack of lies — not just a biased or one-sided account: “In Yugoslavia, imperialism saw not only the opportunity of ridding Europe of any last vestiges of socialism, splitting the country into controllable and exploitable statelets and securing access to high quantities of mineral resources, including the valuable lignite deposits of Kosovo, but also of testing the...

George Orwell, Spain, and revolution

In his 1947 essay, “Why I Write”, George Orwell explained: “The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it…” Homage to Catalonia, in which Orwell bore witness to the murder of the Spanish Revolution, was the product of this defining period of Orwell’s life, at least the literary and political equal of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the February 1936 Spanish...

Stalinists “under siege”?

The Morning Star ought to be feeling well pleased with itself. After all, it has a former contributor who remains a public supporter leading the Labour Party. It has at least two political supporters (Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray) in the most powerful positions of influence within the Leader’s Office. Its pro-Brexit stance appears to have helped a (so far) effective effort to discourage Labour from enacting agreed conference policy regarding a second referendum. And yet, despite all this, the paper is full of self-pity and paranoia. It even claims to be “under siege”. It’s not clear by whom...

Invite of Chinese "Communist" Official is an insult to Chinese workers and to Marx

The Marx Memorial Library’s annual oration at the grave of Karl Marx will be given, bizarrely, by Minister Ma Hui a senior official from the Chinese Embassy in the UK. The Chinese government is by no stretch of the imagination Marxist or socialist. China’s crackdown on the Uyghur population has made the headlines recently with the UN reporting nearly a million Uyghurs are currently held in internment camps. The Uyghur people are a Turkic, majority-Sunni Muslim ethnic minority group in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Despite the Communist Party’s claims of equality...

Women fighting Stalinism: the story of Anna Walentynowicz and the Solidarność movement

How does a woman who adamantly refused to call herself a feminist and was vehemently “anti-communist”, who was a passionate Roman Catholic and held Pope John Paul II as one her heroes, and later friend, become an inspirational hero for socialist feminists? She does so by being astonishingly courageous; by organising an underground workers’ group; and by challenging the Stalinist, anti-working class bureaucracy in her workplace over two long decades. Anna Walentynowicz (1929-2010) was a crane operator in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, where she had worked for thirty years and where she was a...

Richard Wright and Stalinism

Richard Wright, the American author of the novels Native Son and Black Boy, was born on a plantation in Roxie, near Natchez, Mississippi in 1908. He died of a heart attack in Paris, in 1960, aged 52. For a while, especially in the early 1940s, he was an enormously prominent and important leftwing author. Native Son was a ground-breaking book with a young Black hoodlum, Bigger Thomas, as its anti-hero. It was criticised by some activists at the time for not presenting a positive view of Black people. Indeed, Native Son is a gruelling read. Wright wanted to present Thomas, who murders two women...

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