The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

The Stalin-made “Trotskyist left”

In The Climate of Treason Andrew Boyle recounts a conversation which took place amongst a group of young communists in the summer of 1933, in Cambridge. Some of them would become the famous traitors who would be exposed in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, after having served the USSR as double agents within the British secret services for decades. Kim Philby had just come back from Germany, and he reported to his friends on what he had seen. There, at the beginning of the year, Hitler had been allowed to come to power peacefully. The powerful German Communist Party (KPD) could rely on four million...

Socialism versus Stalinism

In 1991, after the collapse of the USSR, we went on the streets with the headline: “Stand up for socialism”, and the strapline: “Stalinism was the opposite of socialism”. A common response, gleeful or sad, was: “Socialism is dead, darling!” But for years and decades before 1991, we had championed the underground workers’ movements and the oppressed nationalities in the Stalinist states. We had waged war on the idea — which used to be held by many in the labour movement — that states like the USSR, China, or Cuba were socialist in any sense or in any degree. Stalinism was as distant from...

The origins of Bolshevism: Plekhanov's "The Tasks of the Social-Democrats in the Famine"

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part Introduction, by Sean Matgamna: How “many ideas to few people” serves mass agitation . Earlier articles have recounted the pre-history of the Russian Marxist movement in revolutionary populism. Before we go on to describe the work of the first Russian Marxist groups, the Group for the Emancipation of Labour and later its offshoot, the Iskra/Zarya group, we will first ask, with George Plekhanov: what is the socialist movement, and what do socialists do? Plekhanov, the pioneer of the Russian Marxist movement...

The Two Souls of the Comintern part 2

Communism and philistinism This is the second part of an obituary article of James Patrick Cannon, one of the founders of the international Trotskyist movement. It was first published at the beginning of 1975 in Permanent Revolution, a magazine of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty tendency. We reprint it here to mark the 30th anniversary of Cannon’s death. The AWL has criticisms of Cannon’s political career (see Solidarity 3/57) but honours and respects the great contribution he made to the struggle against capitalism and Stalinism. The article contrasts Cannon’s political life with that of...

Chapter 4: Superstition or struggle?

Chapter 4: Superstition or struggle? The workers against Stalinism The search for the original sin of Bolshevism has exercised tired and demoralised socialists for at least 50 years. Like characters in an ancient Greek drama, they seek the explanation for the Stalinist plague in some violated taboo. Was not the sin in the way the Bolshevik Party organised itself? That has always been a popular explanation, and shows signs of life now among some tired ex-radicals in the Labour Party and on its fringes. For Foot, the great sin was revolutionary violence. The diagnosis of what exactly was...

Chapter 3: The scarecrow of Stalinism

Chapter 3: The scarecrow of Stalinism Can the tiger be skinned claw by claw? In part 2 of his written oration on parliamentary democracy and those whom he denounces as its enemies (Observer, January 17 1982), Michael Foot attempts to answer the challenge he had posed to himself in part one. There, he ended by promising to undertake the difficult task of replying to those whose rejection of the idea that there can be a peaceful parliamentary road to socialism in Britain was expressed in RH Tawney's brilliant image which Foot quoted thus: "Onions can be eaten leaf by leaf, but you cannot skin a...

CPGB-WW polemic

Debate between the AWL and the CPGB (Weekly Worker)

Kabul 1978 and Petrograd 1917: In defence of the October Revolution by Sean Matgamna. An analysis of the claim by The Leninist and the Weekly Worker that the Stalinist coup in Kabul in April 1978 was a great and authentic revolution (pdf, 338k).

Open letter to the CPGB, by Martyn Hudson and Lawrie Coombs, Solidarity 3/30, 15 May 2003

Crazies of the world unite, Solidarity 3/30, 15 May 2003

Weekly Worker goes ballistic on Iraq, by Martin Thomas, 16 April 2003

On the coat-tails of the SWP, by Martyn Hudson, Solidarity 3/27, 3 April 2003

Under the sign of the oxymoron: the contradictions of the CPGB/WW on Stalinism and democracy, by Sean Matgamna, Solidarity 3/22, 25 January 2003

Marxism and karaoke-Leninism: selected documents from debates between the AWL and CPGB/WW (pdf, 108k)


Fantasy opportunism and the Muslim Association, by Clive Bradley. (For a briefing on the Muslim Association, click here.)


The Socialist Alliance and the labour movement - debate between the AWL and the CPGB, May 2001


Weekly Worker on Afghanistan, October 2001


AWL letter to the CPGB about a joint paper, 22 February 2002

Reply from Jack Conrad of the CPGB

Stalinism and the return of the repressed: Reply by Martin Thomas to Jack Conrad, 12 March 2002

AWL calls for debate on new paper, Solidarity 16 March 2002

Jack Conrad's reply to "Return of the Repressed?"


Critical Notes on the CPGB/WW


Leeds and the politics of the apolitical, by Sean Matgamna

Never Stalinist?, by Martin Thomas

Weekly Worker report on the 29 September 2002 CPGB aggregate held to discuss their relations with the AWL

AWL comment: snap out of it!, by Martin Thomas

Jack Conrad's seven-part polemic against AWL, parts (November 2002 to January 2003) one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven.


Schema or banality: the CPGB and "federal republic"

Notes on Ellen Meiksins Wood, by Clive Bradley

Marxist Theory and History
Around the world
The AWL, Labour and the Left

The roots of Bolshevism. Plekhanov: father of Russian Marxism

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part "The task of our revolutionary intelligentsia therefore comes, in the opinion of the Russian Social Democrats, to the following: they must adopt the views of modern scientific socialism, spread them among the workers and, with the help of the workers, storm the stronghold of autocracy. The revolutionary movement in Russia can triumph only as the revolutionary movement of the workers. There is not and cannot be any other way out for us." George Valentinovich Plekhanov, speaking at the Founding Congress of the...

The background to Lenin's Iskra

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part By John O'Mahony The 'Tsar Liberator', Alexander II, was on the eve of his death ready to make some concessions to the reform-minded liberals. The work of the Narodnaya Volya assassins put an end to reform from above for a generation. In the 1880s and 90s, the Tsarist regime was a frozen ice-cap on top of Russian society. Underneath that inert political regime, Russian capitalism expanded. Market relations became dominant in more and more of Russian life. The working class grew with the growth of industry. Great...

Trotsky: The Russian Populists - Advancing Through Heroism and Agony

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part In previous issues of Solidarity, we have outlined in some detail the history of revolutionary populism in 19th-century Russia. We will later discuss the development of the early Marxist critique of this populism and examine the process in which Marxism came in the 1880s and 1890s, in part, to displace populism. This brilliant and concise account by Leon Trotsky, written in the 1930s, of the history we have covered sums up. It has been abridged from Trotsky's account, in The Young Lenin. The movement of...

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