I find Solidarity’s obsessive anti-Stalinism extremely tiresome. Dishonest too.
You can’t be blaming everything bad that has happened to socialism on “Stalinism”. Who says that Stalinism was not a form of socialism? Of course it was! State socialism. Dictatorial socialism. Totalitarian socialism. Or, as those who struggled against it in Eastern Europe in the 70s and 80s put it — “actually existing socialism”.
Solidarity’s idea of socialism as some immaculate conception outside of the real world is simply a fantasy. A day dream. It is in fact what anti-socialists like Herbert Spencer said socialism would be — state tyranny. That is exactly what in the 20th century it turned out to be. In Hillaire Belloc’s expression: “the servile state”. History shows that this is exactly what socialism was. Commonsense says that then is all it ever can be.
Alfred Plover
