On Ernest Mandel’s contributions

By Paul Le Blanc

Published date 4 January, 2026\

“On Ernest Mandel’s Contributions,” by Paul Le Blanc, appeared first on Against the Current (A Socialist Journal), issue 240, January-February 2026. It is reprinted with permission from both the author and ATC and, as such, appearing simultaneously on LINKS and Communis.

Against Capitalism and Bureaucracy: Ernest Mandel’s Theoretical Contributions. 
By Manuel Kellner, translated by Maceij Zurowski; with a Foreword to the English Edition by Michael Löwy. 
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024, 465 pages including index. $40 paperback.

An accumulation of global crises and catastrophes have been generating powerful stirrings of radicalization throughout the world that are causing increasing numbers of young activists to reach out for examples and insights from revolutionary fighters and thinkers who have gone before. Many have come to the reasonable conclusion that there is much to learn from the past that can help us comprehend the present and shape the future.

For some of us (particularly in the aging and diminishing ranks of the generation of 1968), central among such figures — as an inspiration, a mentor, and a comrade — was Ernest Mandel (1923-1995), whose contributions have begun to attract some well-deserved attention.

An outstanding, critical-minded study by one of Mandel’s German comrades (from the generation of ’68) — Manuel Kellner — has now appeared, accomplishing what the earlier studies on Mandel did not provide: a systematic examination and assessment of his wide-ranging theoretical contributions.

Published under the auspices of the remarkable Historical Materialism book series, it is a gift for scholars and activists seeking to engage with and make use of the vibrant work of a brilliant theorist who was serious about revolutionary change. We will focus here on some of what Kellner has to say, although this volume — like the corpus of Mandel’s contributions — deserves further (collective, critical-minded) discussion.

Revolutionary theorist of the Fourth International

One cannot comprehend Mandel’s theoretical development without understanding his deep commitment to the Fourth International. This is a transnational organization of left-wing parties and groups, founded in 1938 after a five-year preliminary process, by Leon Trotsky and other revolutionary Marxists from a number of countries.

They were driven by the need for a revolutionary alternative to the Second International (or Socialist International, which they felt had been corrupted by social-democratic reformism) and to the Third International (or Communist International, which they felt had been corrupted by Stalinist authoritarianism).1

“At a young age,” Kellner tells us, “just after World War II, Ernest Mandel was already a leading figure in the Fourth International,” regarded at the time “as a kind of prodigy, owing to his intellectual proficiency, his already vast knowledge, and his ability to think independently, offering captivating analyses of social processes, and articulate revolutionary socialist perspectives in a compelling fashion.”

Beginning in this period, and for the next fifty years, “he played an important role in the development of the Fourth International’s positions” on a variety of issues. (Kellner, 215)

Kellner notes that Mandel “always endeavored to ensure continuity with Trotsky’s most important positions and the programmatic legacy of the Fourth International.”

This had two outcomes: (1) “anything ‘new’ was [deemed] best analyzed with the Trotskyist ‘grid,’” and consequently (2) when his writings are examined, “his own theoretical contribution … is not always easy to discern,” although Kellner argues that Mandel did indeed make independent contributions.

Also running through his thought is an incredibly fruitful tension — “a tension between ‘openness’ and the insistence on ‘coherence.’” (215, 407)

Kellner identifies a link between Mandel’s openness/coherence approach and the Fourth International to which he had committed his life. One aspect of this involves an insistence on theory not as an open-ended idea fest, but as a guide to action. This means a determination to advance the revolutionary socialist cause in a manner that can culminate in successful revolution. Another aspect, however, signifies a sectarian danger.

Positives and negatives

Kellner opens his examination of the positive in this way: “The emphasis on the coherence of his own edifice of ideas … springs from deep-seated needs. The cohesion of an organization that is imparted to an extremely modest degree by successes in practical action depends not least on the idea that the doctrine that the organization stands for is in line with social reality and its tendencies of development.” He adds: “On what else can it base its hope of becoming a relevant political factor someday?” (408)

In the next breath he notes the negative:

If categories from the programmatic “canon” (such as “permanent revolution”) prove to be inadequate for interpreting such processes [that are unfolding in the world], the cohesion of one’s own organization appears to be at stake. In such cases, however, theory serves less as a guide to action than as a means of reassuring oneself about the validity of one’s own basic positions. Thus there is a certain “apologetic” aspect of Mandel’s Marxism too. (409)

And yet the positive certainly moved to the foreground at a key moment in history:

Mandel … correctly predicted at the beginning of the 1960s, on the basis of his analysis of contemporary capitalism as well as some major tendencies with respect to social forces and struggles, not only the turn to a “long wave” with a stagnant and depressive tendency, but also a new upsurge of anti-imperialist struggles, anti-bureaucratic struggles, and class struggles in the developed industrial capitalist countries.

In all of this, his predictions were vindicated by the actual development. In this he gave the members of the Fourth International and a number of activists in the left and workers’ movements new hope: the perspective he offered them was that real tendencies in society would soon converge with their ideas of a process of universal emancipation.

In particular, “the dialectic of the three sectors of the world revolution,” which may have seemed speculative and over-optimistic to observers in 1963, seemed to begin to materialize in the late ’60s. The left in general, and the FI in particular, emerged stronger from this process of radical change. (409-410)

Much has changed since the late 1960s, and since Mandel’s death in 1995. In that dramatically changing context, the once-massive workers’ movement and the organizations of the labor-left, in different ways and for more than one reason, have largely disintegrated. The Fourth International has endured, but it too has changed.

When first founded, the FI projected itself as the World Party of Socialist Revolution, and this was evident in Mandel’s own perspectives to the very end of his life. As Kellner notes, “for Mandel the FI, the organization that authentically preserved and developed the revolutionary Marxist tradition, was the nucleus of the future great force” that would bring a socialist revolution.

In the year of Mandel’s death, however, a World Congress of the Fourth International declared “rather more modestly,” as Kellner sums it up, “that it is one of several international organized tendencies wishing to make a contribution to the renewal of the workers’ movement, the reformation of an anti-capitalist left, and the formation of revolutionary parties and a mass revolutionary international.” (436)

Breadth of thought, focus of purpose

The scope of Mandel’s thought and contributions is indicated by the topics of the book’s chapters. “Theory and Practice” (Chapter 1) outlines his early life. It focuses on his initial intellectual, political, and activist development, including in the face of the Nazi invasion — and resistance to it — in his native Belgium during World War II, culminating in his precocious rise to the leadership ranks of the Fourth International.

“Critique of Contemporary Capitalism” (Chapter 2) explores his pathbreaking contributions to Marxist economic theory, particularly regarding the structure and dynamics of capitalism in the post-World War II period but also placing this in the long view of history.

“Socialism: The Utopian Dimension in Mandel’s Work” (Chapter 3) presents specifics on Mandel’s vision of the alternative to capitalism — profoundly humanistic and democratic, while at the same time striving for a tough-minded realism. Post-revolutionary experience in the wake of Russia’s socialist revolution of 1917 yielded a quite different outcome, and Mandel focused considerable attention to an ongoing and intensive examination of how and why this was the case, and its meaning for theorists and activists of his own time, summarized in “Critique of Bureaucracy” (Chapter 4).

The orientation that Mandel projected on how to move from the oppressive realities of the capitalist present to the hoped-for socialist future is presented in “Socialist Strategy” (Chapter 5).

The concluding chapters — “Emancipation and Social Catastrophe” (Chapter 6) and “Evaluation and Prospects” (Chapter 7) — offer incisive discussions of Mandel’s (and Trotsky’s) analysis of fascism, and Mandel’s effort to comprehend the Holocaust. Also in these last seventy pages are succinct discussions of a variety of matters, and here we will very briefly touch on three.

One involves the question of optimism vs. pessimism. A quotation attributed to Antonio Gramsci (but actually originating from one of his literary heroes, Romain Rolland) is a call for “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” which can be understood in more than one way.2

For Gramsci, a pessimistic intellect could be utilized to make one more effective in the struggle for socialism, with an optimistic will that refuses to allow one to give up. On the other hand, for all-too-many tired or lazy activists in recent years, it seems to justify having become immobilized by an “optimistic” will pulling toward an effective socialist movement and a “pessimistic” intellect perceiving its seeming impossibility.

Using the phrase in its strictly Gramscian sense, Michael Löwy — cited at length by Kellner — observed in regard to Mandel that “when it ceased to be ‘optimism of the will’ in the Gramscian meaning (i.e. coupled with ‘pessimism of the intellect’) to become a sort of ungrounded ‘optimism of the intellect,’ or just plain and simple over-optimism, oracular predictions, so often repeated and so often falsified, about the ‘impetuous rise of the masses,’ and the immanent revolutionary upsurge, in the USSR, in Spain, in Germany, in France, in Europe and in the whole world.”

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mandel supported the perspective of a continental strategy of guerrilla warfare which could lead — he over-optimistically thought — to socialist revolutions throughout Latin America. He fleetingly speculated, in 1969, that revolution might even be made in the United States by 1979-1984.3

In some ways more profound is Kellner’s discussion of a sort of “moral imperative” animating Mandel (and which “united him with a number of devoted socialists of various tendencies”) which Kellner describes in this way:

Mandel makes the point that taking sides with the exploited and oppressed is a moral duty, even if all hopes of achieving the desired social liberation are shattered: “Today, in bourgeois society, this implies siding with the working class and other oppressed strata of the population, poor peasants in the third world, oppressed women, oppressed youth, etc. This is a moral duty, a matter of conscience that does not stem from any certainty that socialism will prevail. Even if one is convinced that barbarism will triumph, one must not for a second abandon this moral, categorical imperative.” (429-430)

This brings us to a distinguishing element in Mandel’s thought. For Mandel (as for Marx) this categorical imperative was inseparable from a deep commitment to the condition, the experience, and the future of the working class.

Working-class commitment

Kellner refers to “Mandel’s last extensive piece of writing — [which] in a sense . . . can be defined as his ‘political testament’.” This was part of a public confrontation (which some of his closest comrades had strongly urged against) in New York City with the hyper-sectarian Spartacist League.

For years it had been denouncing Mandel and the Fourth International with the accusation that it systematically and always, always betrayed the Trotskyist cause — and he wanted to provide an answer. In close consultation with Mandel, I agreed to help organize and co-chair the event.4

According to Kellner, “Mandel’s political-strategic thinking is permeated by a tension between his orientation towards a class movement of wage earners and the entire range of emancipatory social movements, on the one hand, and his strong identification with his own, largely marginal organization.” These sensibilities permeated his remarks during the debate with the Spartacists. Of enduring relevance, however, were the more general points he offered regarding the working class, its evolution, and its struggles. (433)

Mandel begins his political testament with these five sentences.

The birth act of Marxism is the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to change it.” While a correct theoretical understanding of capitalism is indispensable for its overthrow, it is not enough. This task has to be realized in practice. Only the working class — as it is defined by the first program of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party written by Lenin and Plekhanov, all those who are under the economic compulsion to sell their labor power — only the working class is capable of breaking the hold of the bourgeoisie over the main means of production and exchange.5

Of course, the working class had been undergoing dramatic changes — along with the dramatically changing capitalist system — over the nine decades since Lenin and Plekhanov wrote that program, and Mandel had been engaging with the study of that evolution for at least three decades prior to the debate with the Spartacists, describing in 1968, for example,

[the] growing integration of intellectual labor into the productive process; growing standardization, uniformity and mechanization of intellectual labor; growing transformation of university graduates from independent professionals and capitalist entrepreneurs into salary earners appearing in a specialized labor market — the market for skilled intellectual labor where supply and demand make salaries fluctuate as they did on the manual labor market before unionization but fluctuate around an axis which is the reproduction cost of skilled intellectual labor.

What do these trends mean but the growing proletarianization of intellectual labor, its tendency to become part and parcel of the working class?6

Over the years Mandel observed a global process which, through diverse and contradictory developments, was making the working class larger and stronger than ever. In his words:

It is true that the billion-strong army of wage-earners throughout the world is not growing at the same rate in every country at all times, nor are their living standards and working conditions bringing them closer together than they were at all times in the past. The development of the working class does not progress in a linear way. It declines (and becomes de-skilled) in certain sectors, regions, or even countries while progressing and becoming more skilled in others. But there are no data that prove that the long-term, world-wide tendency is one of [numerical] decline, far from it. (357)

Kellner describes Mandel’s “take” on new developments in the class struggle:

The greater role of the “new social movements” does not contradict the role of wage earners as the potentially revolutionary subject. The base of these movements is generally ‘proletarian’ according to the aforementioned definition [by Lenin and Plekhanov]. Nor [is] its alleged petty-bourgeois composition [a reality], but [instead reflects] a process of alienation from a largely conservative official labor movement, which is unattractive on many issues linked to emancipation, has led it to constitute itself “outside.” (357)

Kellner offers the following critical appreciation: “One hopes that many more people will be inspired by Mandel’s verve and let themselves be motivated to live his kind of life, yet without succumbing to ungrounded political confidence or to some of his more questionable ideas.”

He adds: “Ultimately, any other than critical approval would not be in Mandel’s spirit.” In the final paragraph of his study, he emphasizes that “Mandel’s attempt to critically revive the Marxist tradition as a whole, based on extensive empirical findings, can only be continued through collective work …” (439, 445)

And inseparable from such collective theoretical development, of course is its dynamic interplay with the experience of mass struggle for a livable future and a better world.

Paul Le Blanc has been active in the socialist movement for six decades, identifying with the Fourth International since 1972. He is a member of Solidarity, the Tempest Collective, and Democratic Socialists of America. A retired professor of history, he serves on the editorial board of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso). His most recent book is Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (Pluto, 2023).

• 1

  For informative, more or less non-polemical accounts, see: Pierre Frank and Daniel Bensaïd, The Long March of the Trotskyists: Contributions to the History of the Fourth International (London: Resistance Books, 2014); Robert J. Alexander, International Trotskyism 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Livio Maitan, Memoirs of a Critical Communist: Towards a History of the Fourth International (London: Resistance Books, 2019); Daniel Bensaïd, An Impatient Life: A Memoir (London: Verso, 2014).

• 2

  See my essay “Antonio Gramsci and the Modern Prince,” in Paul Le Blanc, The Revolutionary Collective: Comrades, Critics, and Dynamics in the Struggle for Socialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022, 116-117).

• 3

  Kellner, p. 432. On the Latin America experience, see Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, 109-142. At the conclusion of his very interesting 1969 survey of the U.S., Mandel concluded that “the political radicalization of the working class, and therewith socialism, will become a practical proposition in the United States within the next 10 or 15 years, under the combined impact of all these forces which have been examined here.” See Ernest Mandel, “Where is America Going?” New Left Review I/54, March-April, 1969 — https://newleftreview.org/issues/i54/articles/ernest-mandel-where-is-america-going. 

• 4

  Kellner, 433-439; “Spartacist League Debates Ernest Mandel,” Spartacist, No. 52, Autumn 1995, 9-23. A substantially expanded version of his talk can be found in Ernest Mandel, “World Socialist Revolution Today. Sectarianism vs. Revolutionary Marxism,” Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, 125, May/June 1995, 18-41; this can be located through the Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/bidom/index.htm.

• 5

  Mandel, Spartacist, No. 52, 10.

• 6

  Ernest Mandel, “Workers Under Neo-Capitalism,” International Socialist Review, November-December 1968, https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/19xx/xx/neocap.htm.

Dancing with the Devil: Is It Possible to Evaluate Stalin Dialectically?

LONG READ

by Bruce Lerro / August 11th, 2025

Orientation

Boogey men on parade
“How can you like Putin? He is a dictator who has been in power for 20 years. There is no democracy in Russia. Besides, Russia is not a socialist country, so why are you rooting for him?” Here is another one. “Venezuela is a failed country run by drug cartels. There is no democracy. Maduro is an incompetent strongman who suppresses freedom of speech. Finally, Gaddafi: “He dresses like a king and wants to control all the African gold. He murders his own people”. Here we have three different countries on three different continents but the leaders have the same characteristics: authoritarian, one party, lacking democracy, poverty stricken, lacking human rights. In fact all these terms are loaded vice words concocted by the CIA in the early 1950s and still being circulated though their application applies less and less. In this article I will do an in-depth analysis of perhaps the biggest boogey man in the world, Joseph Stalin. My purpose is to show that if we understand the complexities of the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1956 we might better understand what Putin and Maduro are up against now as well as what Gaddafi was up against before he was murdered. So too, the real evolution of these men and their states will predicably be distorted, exaggerated, denied and censored.

Fights between socialists
Among Marxists there is no more polarizing revolutionary than Vladimir Lenin. The social democrats draw the line with him and claim that Leninism was authoritarian and undemocratic. The anarchists point to the killing and betrayal of their comrades during the Russian and Spanish revolutions.
Council communists like Pannekoek and Gorter claimed that Leninism had little to do with Marxism. They say that Marxism is about worker-self organization and that Marx never talked about a vanguard party. All three groups claim that what took place in Russia was not socialism.

For Marxist-Leninists, the key figure is Stalin. To what extent did he follow Marxist practice and in what ways did he depart? Trotskyists imagine that Stalin took Marxist-Leninism in the wrong direction and they claim they are the true inheritors of Lenin’s legacy. Stalinists claim that Social Democrats are not real socialists because they compromise with capitalism by advocating for a market even within socialism, and siding with imperialists internationally. Anarchists are dismissed as being unrealistic in expecting a revolution to occur without parties, hierarchies or the state. Council communists are dismissed because they don’t see the importance of a vanguard party. Lenin’s book Left-Wing Communism: An infantile Disorder deals fully council communism.

Liberal and conservative anti-communism
For liberals and conservatives Stalin is the devil incarnate. He is a monster who advocated for a totalitarian, one party rule. They say Stalin caused peasant famines, was responsible for the infamous show trials of the 1930s and killed millions of people. In this article I try to take the heat out of Stalinism. I attempt to say, most of the claims made by liberal and conservative historians against Stalin are either exaggerated or completely wrong, products of anti-communism. The book I will use to defend Stalin against his attackers is Ludo Martens’ book Another View of Stalin. But neither will I claim that Stalin did nothing wrong. I will save council communist criticism of Stalin until the end of this article.

Lenin’s Legacy
Lenin was a great politician in the 20  years he was most active from 1903 to his death in 1924. He was manipulative and very realistic about what was possible for communism. He was very smart in how he dealt with the Western powers when he took Russia out of World War I. It was under the lead of Lenin and Trotsky that Russia was pulled out of the Czarist Middle Ages. A Communist party could only be secret in a country that had no constitution and not even a liberal party. It took 10 years, but the lives of peasants and workers improved compared to life under the Czars. Martens says that compared to Belgium and France, the majority of peasants in 1900 lived as if they were in the fourteenth century. One third did not have a horse or oxen to work the land. The harvest was done with a scythe.

Socialism in One Country vs Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution
There  was a major struggle between Stalin and Trotsky as to who would inherit the leadership of the Bolshevik party after Lenin. Both agreed that in the best possible world there would be a revolution in Germany because then Germany could help Russia industrialize. When the German revolution failed, Russians were on their own. Stalin took the stance of attempting to build socialism in one country as best he could. This meant normalizing relations with capitalist countries. Trotsky wanted to foment revolution all over the world. Trotsky did not want to give up on Russia, but he had no illusions about the limitations of socialism without a strong industrial base coming from the West. In hindsight, Stalin was right. The life for workers in Russia would improve faster if the socialist state could pay full attention to them. Socialism would be much harder to build anywhere if there was no home base and simply batches of revolutionary parties and their followers isolated inside capitalist states. However, because Russia was the only socialist country in the world at the time, most of Stalin’s industrialization process was producing for real and anticipated wars with capitalist imperialists. Much industry for consumer was not implemented.

Lenin’s Will
Trotsky tried to denigrate Stalin’s revolutionary past but Stalin did have a revolutionary past. He met Lenin in 1905 and he led the radical wing of socialist democracy in Russia. He was arrested five times and he was imprisoned for five years between 1912-1917. Trotsky only joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. Before than he was sympathetic to the Mensheviks (social democrats). As far back as 1904, Trotsky called Lenin a fanatic, a dictator who wanted to substitute himself for the proletariat. Trotsky did everything he could to depict Stalin as a dictator ruling over the party. Yet when Lenin created the Bolshevik party, Trotsky accused him of creating an orthodox theocracy and autocratic Asiatic centralism. Martens says Trotsky was individualistic and had disdain for cadres. His leadership was authoritarian and his taste for military discipline frightened many party members. Lenin picked no clear successor.

Trotsky had his moment in 1919 commanding the Red Army during the Civil War. Besides fighting the imperialist countries of the West, Trotsky led the suppression of the sailors’ strike in Kronstadt and fought a civil war in the countryside against Nestor Makhno and the anarcho-peasants. Trotsky was a great military leader but he was not shrewd politically. Between 1921-1923 Stalin was second in command in Russia. Lenin suffered his first stroke in 1922 and another in December of that year. The doctors told Bukharin, Stalin and Kamenev that any further excitement would be fatal. The Politburo made Stalin responsible for relations with Lenin, not Trotsky. Lenin judged the five main leaders of the party and criticized them all. Stalin was perceived by Lenin as too heavy-handed; Trotsky was too bureaucratic; Bukharin the most capable theorist, but scholastic in his theoretical orientation. The relations between Stalin and Lenin’s partner, Krupskaya, were not good. She complained about Stalin that he needed to be more polite and less blunt in dealing with the ailing Lenin. However, because Lenin or Krupskaya might have found Stalin psychologically crude does not mean Lenin favored Trotsky to lead the party. Lenin was critical of all the major leaders.

The Struggle Against a Bureaucracy
It was filled with reactionaries and careerists

To lead a giant, complex country still trying to catch up on its industrial backwardness was an extremely difficult task. Trotsky invented the term bureaucracy in 1927. He called it the “Soviet Thermidor”, analogous to the French counter- revolution where right-wing Jacobins executed the left-wing Jacobins. Quoting Trotsky, the higher levels of the bureaucracy lived approximately the same kind of life as the well-to-do bourgeois of the US and other capitalist countries. The enemy is the new aristocracy, the new Bolshevik bourgeoise. In reality, Russia was a poor country. They hardly produced enough material wealth to live high on the hog as the Western upper classes. The Russian bureaucracy contained Tsarist elements and other reactionary classes, but those classes’ presence was not Stalin’s fault. The Soviet Union desperately needed people who could read and write to build up a coherent state. Stalin could not renounce them for revolutionary purity. He had to take what he could get. In fact, as was pointed out, Stalin’s purges were designed to get rid of these hangers-on.

What Trotsky ignored in his analysis of the Russian bureaucracy was that the Bolsheviks had to retake part of the old Tsarist state apparatus which had only partially been transformed in a socialist direction. Those with a certain capacity for organization were immediately accepted into the party. In 1917 the party had 30k members; 1922, 600k; 1929, 1.5 million and in 1932 2.5 million. One fourth of the members did not meet the most elementary requirements of a communist. Communists could not be fussy about who was helping to run the state. Trotsky would have faced the same dilemma had he come to power.

The Charge of Totalitarianism
The term “totalitarian” was an anti-communism word that was used after World War II to equate Communism and fascism. The term has been discredited in research theories of politics but still circulates in mass media and the CIA which ignores the scientific research. Usually the charge of “totalitarianism” includes at least the following:

• Abolition of the right to freedom of speech, assembly and religious worship
• Elimination of all political parties other than the ruling party
• Subordination of all economic and social life to structural control of the single party bureaucracy
• Liquidation of free enterprise
• Destruction of all independent trade unions and creation of labor organizations servile to the totalitarian state
• Establishment of concentration camps and the use of slave labor
• Utter disregard for an independent judicial system
• Social demagogy around race and class
• Expansion of the military
• Reduction of parliamentary bodies to rubber-stamp status
• Establishment of a system of nationwide espionage and secret police
• Censorship of the press and media
• Disregard for the rights of other nations and disregard of treaties
• Maintenance and encouragement of fifth columns abroad

It could be argued that Soviet Russia aspired to do some of these things and to some extent it was successful. But the charge of totalitarianism as having iron control over all these processes is ludicrous — in Russia or anywhere else. Take a look at a map of Russia. Far and away, it is the largest country in the world. Russia had neither the communication system nor a transportation system to pull this off. The Communist party may have exercised control over some of the largest Russian cities but they had little control of the peasantry over vast tracks of land. Their spying systems and secret police might have some control over cities but most of Russian land is agricultural and the Communist Party had some influence over peasant life. However, as we shall see, much of peasant life remained untouched just as before the Czar. Try as they might the Communist Party could not abolish capitalism. Many of the other characteristics above, like international and domestic espionage, expansion of military and control of mass media are just as prevalent in the United States and Western Europe. In fact the control over mass media in the United States is for more totalitarian in breadth and depth than anything the Communist party came up with. By comparison, the Catholic Church had a much more expanded and integrated totalitarian system.

The Collective Farms
Did Stalin destroy the peasantry in his drive towards collectivization?
According to Martens, collectivization began in 1929, a period of bitter and complex struggles. To begin with, there were three kind of peasants who were subjected to the collectivization process. The kulaks were the highest class of peasants who had better farms, better horses and better machinery. They hired agricultural workers. Below them were the middle and poor peasants. Why liquidate the kulaks as a class?

The kulaks aggressively resisted collectivization. In response they burned crops and houses, set buildings on fire and killed militant Bolsheviks. All the work done on the farm was with draft animals. The kulaks killed half the draft animals rather than cede their cattle to the collectives. They killed them and incited middle peasants to do the same. There were over 34 million horses in the country in 1928.  There remained 15 million in 1932. By Martens’ perspective the Communist party was justified in putting an end to this. I agree

How many upper middle class kulaks were killed?
Robert Conquest (a self-described “cold warrior” who worked with the CIA) calculated 6.5 million kulaks were massacred and 3.5 million in Siberian camps. Martens  says these figures are ridiculous. During the most violent period of the collectivization in 1930-31, the peasants expropriated 381,000 kulaks and sent their families to unplowed land in the East. The number of kulaks  in the colonies never exceeded 1,317,000. The repression of this class and the reactionaries who supported them was absolutely necessary for collectivization to have taken place. Furthermore, only those who were guilty of terrorist or counter-revolutionary activity would be executed. Even with all this, Stalin and Molotov signed an agreement to liberate 50% of the people sent to work camps during collectivization. Furthermore, once collectivism was firmly established, peasants were allowed to cultivate a private plot and raise livestock. This is are hardly a process of a crazed, totalitarian dictator.

Additionally, the essential urge for collectivization came from the most oppressed peasants. The party could not prevent deep antagonisms (of the lower classes) against the kulaks who oppressed them long before the revolution and the backward state of the countryside. What the party did was to destroy the economic bases for the kulaks. In 1928 the state seized the wheat of the kulaks to avoid famine in the cities. The liquidation of the kulaks as a class was due to their capitalist exploitations, not the physical end kulaks as peoples.

Was collectivization imposed by the party leadership and by Stalin and implemented through terror?
The state had neither the organizational infrastructure nor the manpower to enforce its voice or ensure its best implementation policy. Between 1929-1933 the Soviet State did not have the technical means, the required personnel and the sufficient Communist leadership to direct collectivization in a planned and orderly manner. In 1930 there were 339,000 communists among a rural population of about 120 million people. That meant there were 28 Communists for a region of 10,000 inhabitants. The Communist Party was in no position to impose its will. They had their hands full with the kulaks alone.

Treachery of social democrats and Trotsky in relationship to collectivization
The kulaks were supported by social democrats in Belgian, German and French Social Democracy. Kautsky, turned right-wing social democrat said that a democratic revolution was necessary against the Soviet aristocracy. He called for a wide, united front with the Russian right for a democratic, parliamentary republic. Trotsky’s domestic program in the 1920s after being expelled from the party, was to systematically chose positions opposed to that of the Party. He denounced accelerated collectivization and liquidation of kulaks.

Peasant Economic and social creativity
The central committee of the Communist Party called up 25,000 experienced industrial workers from the large factories to go to the countryside and help with collectivization. They were told they were the eyes and ears of the central committee, thanks to their physical presence on the front lines. They were told they would have to judge the Communist quality of the party functionaries and if necessary, purge the party of undesirable elements. The decision was in the hands of industrial workers within the party not the upper echelons of the Communist Party.

Poor peasants had no idea about how to implement collectivization. There was no inventory of machinery, tools or spare parts, no stables or fodder reserves. The city workers introduced regular work days with morning roll call. They invented a system of payment by piecework and wage levels. They set up worker tribunals where violation of rule and negligence were judged. These workers would send agricultural equipment, generators, books and newspapers to the peasants. Needless to say, their system had problems but the problems were due to inexperience and the fact they were trying to set up an entirely different social system, not one to be of a terroristic Stalinist bureaucracy. Nevertheless, it did end the periodic crises which characterized earlier market relations between city and countryside

Instead, revolutionary creativity was shown by the workers, peasants, the cadres and party leaders. Most of the traits were invented during the 1929-31 period. By 1929 most of the tractors were in the hands of the agricultural cooperatives.  A decree dated in 1933 placed the different agricultural tasks in seven renumeration categories. The most difficult or arduous work paid three times as much as the easiest or lighter work. The total number of tractors increased steadily during the 1930s, from 210,900 in 1933 to 276,400 in 1934; 360,000 in 1935; 422,700 in 1936 and 522,000 in 1940. Collectivization was not imposed by force. Even the Catholic Church, operating over the centuries, with more money, a highly developed bureaucracy, deployed all over Europe was unable to stomp out magic in the countryside. The Communist Party with less than 20 years of state control under its belt could never have turned the peasants into mindless Communists. In 1930-1935 the Soviet Union was short of labor. Why would they kill men who were working the land by sending them to Siberia or Kazakhstan?

Famine and Black Propaganda
The causes of the famine
The first cause was due to kulaks and the treachery of lingering aristocrats hoping for the return of the czar. There was a famine in 1932-1933 caused by the struggle that the Ukrainian far right was leading against socialism and the collectivization of agriculture—the  killing of horses and cattle—to attack Soviet agriculture. Horses dwindled from 30 million to less than 15 million; cattle from 79 million to 38 million. A similar proportionate of numbers was lost numbers in sheep, goat and hogs. The second cause of the famine was a drought that hit certain areas of Ukraine in 1930. The third cause was typhoid epidemic that ravaged Ukraine. The fourth cause of the famine was the inevitable disorder provoked by the reorganization of agriculture and the upheaval of economic and social relations. Lastly, there was a lack of experience which resulted in improvisation and a lack of preparation.

The number of deaths during the famine
Martens reports that the numbers of one to two million dead from the famine are clearly important. However, they are largely due to the ferocious opposition of the exploiting classes to the reorganization and modernization of agriculture on a socialist basis. The figure of one to two million should be compared to the 9 million dead caused by the 1921-1922 famine that was provoked by military intervention of eight imperialist powers and the support they gave to reactionary armed groups. These figures of the death of communists at the hands of white reactionary forces is conveniently left off of bourgeois statistics as to why things were so difficult under communist rule.

Bourgeois reliance on fascist sources on Soviet famine
Robert Conquest had worked for the disinformation services of the British secret service. In his book the Great Terror he claimed collectivization accounted for 5-6 million dead. During the Reagan years of anti-communist hysteria, they needed figures exceeding most of those 6 million Jews to make Stalin appear worse than Hitler. Conquest dutifully revised his estimate to 14 million dead. One problem with Conquest’s sources is that over half the references came from extreme right wing Ukrainian emigres including the youth movement of Stefan Bandera. Furthermore, Conquest cites interviews from Harvard Refugee Interview Project which was financed by the CIA. In short, lies about Stalin. The holocaust of Ukrainian people was created by Hitler.

Suppressed Neo-Nazi crimes against Russians
Furthermore  Neo-Nazi revisionism around the world revises history to justify above all the barbaric crimes of fascism against communists.

• It denies the crimes it committed against the Soviet Jews.
• They invent holocausts supposedly perpetuated by communists.

Thousands of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators entered the US and testified as victims of communist barbarity. In one book, Black Deeds of the Kremlin, fake photographs of Tsarist killings were transferred to Stalin. He gave high estimates of 4-7 million dead. But the two low estimates came from US journalists in Moscow known for their professionalism. One spoke of 1 million-2 million due to famine.

Conquest’s film propaganda
The 1983 Film Harvest of Despair was made for the masses. However, the 1986 Harvest of Sorrow was made for the intellectuals by Robert Conquest. The eye witness accounts are made by German Nazis who hate communists. This disproves the fact of the anti-Ukrainian genocide by Russians that could parallel Hitler’s antisemitic holocaust. Ludens points out:

The formula against Hitler and against Stalin served to invent Stalin’s crimes and holocausts to better cover up and deny Hitler’s monstrous crimes against Russians. To anyone who understands the Soviets’ desperate need for manpower shortage in these years, the notion that its leaders would deliberately reduce that scarce resource of people is absurd. (103)

The Purges
Purge of 1928-1931
Between 1928-1931 the Party accepted 1.4 million new members — including political illiterates, kulaks, and old Tsarist officers who easily succeeded in infiltrating the party. These factors all lend to problems with bureaucratic degeneration. What bureaucratic degeneration existed was not Stalin’s fault. It was at the intermediate level that careerists and opportunists could most easily set up and hide. Stalin called on the leadership and base to mobilize and hound out the bureaucrats from above and below.  According to Ludens, Stalin devoted a lot of energy to the struggle against bureaucracy within the party and the state apparatus.

1933 Purge
In 1933 there was a new purge of bureaucrats which lasted two years. The Party’s control mechanisms were so weak that it wasn’t even possible to plan and effect a verification campaign. Eventually 18% of the party was expelled. They included:

• Kulaks, white officers, counter-revolutionaries
• Corrupt and overly ambitious people
• People who ignored party discipline and the Central committee
• People who had committed crimes like drunkenness and sexual abuse

In order to organize a new society, culture and education were necessary. So Intellectuals from the old society, both young and old who were sufficiently able and flexible people recognized the opportunities. Yet many of these people were trojan horses who had infiltrated the communist fortress with no intention of building socialism. J. Arch Getty, in his brilliant study, Origins of the Great Purges, writes that local party leaders were no longer political leaders but economic administrators. They resisted political control from above and below.

At the regional level, since the beginning of the twenties, individuals and clans had solidly entrenched themselves in the Party Even massive anti-bureaucratic campaigns could not budge them. Cadres had forgotten the capitalist encirclement at the beginning of the revolution and the increasing bitterness of the class struggle. Many had become submerged by little management questions and no longer preoccupied themselves with the major issues of national and international struggle. The bureaucratic and arbitrary attitude of the men in provincial apparatuses was enforced by petty management questions and had virtual monopoly on administrative experience. In sum the real danger of bureaucratization came from the parts of the administration that were in no sense communist that wanted to get rid of the party controlling it and acquire privileges and benefits of all kinds for itself.

The anti-bureaucratic revolution
Geographical conditions made centralization unrealistic as much as the Party tried. In a regional committee, there was lack of attention to the economic development of the region, and the leadership had with no connection with the base. In the May 1937 electoral campaign there were 54,000 Party base for which we have data and 55% of the directing committee was replaced. In the Leningrad region, 48% were replaced. According to Getty, this was the most important, most general and most effective anti-bureaucratic campaign that the Party ever affected. This was crucial for the Red Army to later defeat fascist Germany. Stalin’s second consideration was to deepen the political education within the party. Training had to be increased from four to eight months for all the cadres, from cell leaders all the way to the highest leaders.  Stalin also attacked the “family atmosphere” of the bureaucracy in which there can be no place for criticism for defects in the work or for self-criticism of the work.

The Great Purge of 1937-1938
No episode in Soviet history has provoked more rage from the old bourgeois world than the purge of 1937-38. Yet there are few periods of Soviet history that have been studied so superficially including Conquest, Deutscher, Schapiro, and Fainsod. This purge of 1937-38 was completely different from the previous periods. It focused mainly on cadres. During the previous years, elements that have nothing to do with communism–common criminals, drunkards and undisciplined people constituted the majority of the expelled. Ludens points out that just because someone is an “old Bolshevik” doesn’t mean that they can’t change for the worse. Certain party leaders proved to be careless, complacent, naïve and lacked vigilance with response to enemies of communists who had infiltrated the party.

Old Bolsheviks Social Democratic tendencies in the 20s: Bukharin
The next great ideological struggle was led by Bukharin’s rightist deviation which developed during collectivism period. He put forth a social democratic line and class reconciliation protecting the kulaks. Bukharin’s group was a very powerful part of the party and his political influence was great. He had great influence in the Soviet scientific community and in the Academy of Sciences. During 1928-1930 Bukharin was bitterly criticized for his social democratic ideas, including:

• His opposition to collectivization (supporting individual ownership)
• His policy of social peace with the kulaks
• His attempt to slow down the industrialization process with light industry
• His advocation of state-capitalism

Bukharin and the military conspiracy
In 1935-36 Bukharin developed closer links with groups of military conspirators plotting to overthrow the party leadership. He admitted during his trial in front of the tribunal that in 1918 after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty there was a plan to arrest Lenin and Stalin and to form a new government composed of left communists and social revolutionaries. Bukharin colluded with all sorts of clandestine opponents some of whom were dedicated anti-communists. Incapable of leading open political struggle, he placed his hopes in a coup resulting from a military plot that might result from a mass revolt. Bukharin allowed himself to be approached by enemies who were planning to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. He did not take a principled stand against the prospect of a directed anti-Bolshevik attack from abroad. In Paris, he paid a visit to Menshevik Theodore Dan to whom he confided that “Stalin was not a man but a devil.” Martens says Bukharin’s confessions allow us to later understand the latter appearance of Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev.

Trotsky and military conspiracies
Martens claims that among others Trotsky was conducting negotiations with the Germans and promised them territorial concessions, including Ukraine. In 1932 there was an attempt to create an oppositional block that included Trotsky and Zinoviev. There was proof that a plot existed to overthrow the party and put into power the oppositional leadership

Oppositional leaders have their say
Despite all these machinations almost all oppositional leaders—Trotsky, Radek, Preobrazhensky, Zinoviev and Bukharin-who remained in important positions were invited to the 17th congress where they made speeches. It is patently false that Stalin did not allow other leaders to express themselves freely and that he ruled like a tyrant. Debates took place openly and over an extended period of time. Stalin really believed in the honesty of self-criticisms.

Were all old Bolsheviks eliminated?
In general, the purges within the Red Army are presented by anti-communists as acts of foolish, arbitrary and blind repression. The accusations were all set-ups, according to the anti-communists, and were diabolically prepared to ensure Stalin’s dictatorship. One of the best-known slanders claims that the purge was intended to eliminate the Old Bolsheviks. However, in 1934 there were 182,600 old Bolsheviks (members who joined no later than 1920). In 1939 there were 125,000. Therefore 69% were still in the party. Some died of natural causes, others were expelled and others executed.

According to Getty, from November 1936-39 there were fewer than 180,000 expulsions from the party. Before 1938 there were 53,000 appeals against expulsions. After 1938 there were 101,223 appeals. At that time, out of a total of 144,933, the party committees had examined 85,273 appeals and 54% were readmitted No other information could better give the lie to the statement that the purge was blind, terror, without appeal, organized by an irrational dictator.

The reality of the plot against the Stalin
Four years before the purges, in 1934 there was a plot to start a revolution by arresting the whole of the Stalinist-packed 17th Congress of the Party. A comrade from the group proposed in mid-1936 to kill Stalin. Tukhachevsky was pro-German. Even Deutscher admits there was a plot among the Germans. The discovery of such a plot at the head of the Red Army, which had links with the opportunistic factions within the party, provoked complete panic on Stalin’s part. Getty concludes that entrenched officeholders were destroyed from above and below in a chaotic wave of voluntarism and revolutionary puritanism. The actual purge was decided upon after the revelation of the Tukhachevsky military conspiracy. The decision to physically eliminate this fifth column was not a sign of a dictator’s paranoia.

The degree of anarchy within the purges
The purge was often characterized as maniacal and relentless which was hardly the case.

The purges were inefficient and chaotic. There were cadres of infiltrated enemies. These enemies hiding within the party led conspirators to expel the greatest possible numbers of loyal communist cadres. Lastly, there was the presence of communists who were only concerned with their careers.  Yes, some communists were unjustly hit and crimes were committed during the purge. Yet Stalin wanted to include an individualized approach to questions of expulsions.

Myths and reality about the purges
Martens points out that the 1934 Robert Conquest counted 5 million political detainees. In fact, there were between 127,000 and 170,000. The exact number of all detained in work camps, political and other security organizations combined was 510,307. The political prisoners formed only 25%-35% of the detainees. Conquest added 4,850,000. Annually Conquest estimated an average of 8 million detainees. Medvedev wrote it was 12-13 million. The reality was between 127,000 in 1934 to 500,000 during the two war years of 1941-42. The real figures were exaggerated by 15-26 times. As I said earlier, most of those politically detained were Nazi collaborators.

Necessity of purges before the showdown with Germany
The purge within the Red Army had a great deal to do with the imminent war with Germany.

Stalin was successful in getting rid of all the opposition circles within the army and he succeeded in making sure that there would be no counter-revolutionary currents within that army against the Germans. Yehova signed an executive order condemning to death 75,959 individuals whose hostility to the Soviet Union were known to be common criminals, kulaks counter-revolutionaries or spies. Most of the men and women in the Nazi 5th column fell during the purge. When the fascists attacked the USSR, there were few collaborates within the state or the party apparatus.

The great disarray and extreme confusion provoked by the first defeats against the Nazi invasion created a very precarious political situation. Bourgeois nationalists, anti-communist and anti-Jewish racists all thought that their time had come. What would have happened if the purge had not firmly been carried out, if an opportunist opposition had held important positions? The party launched a campaign educating the workers about what was going on in newspapers, films and theaters. It was precisely because of the purge and the education campaigns that accompanied it that the Soviet people found the strength to resist and defeat the fascists.

Trotsky’s Role on the Eve of Second World War
Trotsky was one of the first to put forward the Cold War liberal idea that Bolshevism and fascism were interchangeable. Secondly, he supported any opposition against Stalin. He made no distinction between capitalists, the heads of foreign states and military plotters and schemers. Despite not having much of a following in Russia, from 1934 on Trotsky called over and over for the overthrow of the Communist Party. He was calling on the Red Army to effect a coup. In fact, he planned his insurrection for when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.

Western Treachery Against the Soviet Union During the Two World Wars
Western historians and their naïve publics present the Soviet-Hitlerian pact as a bolt-from-the-blue, a betrayal that had neither rhyme not reason. Here we  are told we have the secret truth we’ve should have known all along: Fascism and Communism were the same thing. In truth, before Hitler even came to power, Great Britain had led the crusade against the Soviet Union. It was in 1918 that Churchill mobilized armies in 14 countries to attack the Soviet Union.

During the Spanish Civil war, Italy and Germany sent their troops to Spain in support of fascism to fight the republican government. France and England adopted a non-intervention policy and did not help the Soviet Union fight in Spain. In fact, Britain and France reassured Hitler that he could march against Stalin without being worried about the West attacking Germany. In fact, from June to August of 1939 there were secret talks between Britain and Germany. The deal was:

• Germany promises not to interfere in British empire affairs
• Britain promises to give up the present negotiations for a pact with the Soviet Union

England’s ultimate goal was to embroil Russia and Germany with each other and thus escape scot-free herself. Even when France and Britain were forced to declare war on Germany, on the Western Front not single bomb was used against the Nazis. They kept hoping the Nazis could defeat the Russians. Stalin’s reached out to Germany only after having been rejected by the West. The Soviet Union had succeeded in signing with Japan a non-aggression pact that held until the defeat of fascism. Stalin’s pact with Germany was crucial to winning WWII. The pact was a turning point that allowed for the preparation of the necessary conditions in order for the German defeat when it was invaded.

Did Stain Prepare Poorly for the Anti-Fascist War?
This ludicrous claim is what Khrushchev said about Stalin. Stalin had to maneuver against all the Western powers who were anti-Russian. This included not only fascist Germany, Italy and Spain, but also, England, France and the United States. Against all of them Russia defeated Germany and preserved the Soviet Union. Does this sound like an incompetent leader? In 1921 in almost all areas of military production they had to start out from nothing. During the years of the first and second five year plans the party made sure that the war industries would grow faster than the other industries. During the third 5 year plan between 1938 and 1940, industrial production increased 13% annually. Furthermore, Stalin prepared the defense of the USSR by having more than 900 factories built between 1928-1941.

Khrushchev’s image of Stalin as a lone man who leans on no-one is falsified by an event during the war in the beginning of August 1941. In general, Stalin proceeded with extreme caution, weighing the pros and cons of what to do. Stalin called in responsible people directly in charge of the problem. The central committee politburo and army leadership always relied on collective decision-making. One general said Stalin did not like to decide for himself important questions about the war. Furthermore, he would not tolerate hit and miss answers or not being familiar with the situation on the map or in exaggerating situations. He wanted the utmost accuracy and clarity. He had a knack of detecting weak spots in reports and documents. He had a tenacious memory. He was extremely exacting, a quality essential during wartime. He never forgave carelessness in work or failure to finish a job the right way. Stalin fully criticized bureaucratic and formalist leadership methods. During the war Stalin firmly fought against any irresponsible or bureaucratic attitude. He insisted on real presence on the ground. He would demand that military action be carried out in a creative way, with a full account of military science. Even Averell Harriman, US imperialism’s representative, admitted his high intelligence, a fantastic grasp of detail, his shrewdness and his sensitivity. Harriman says, “I found him better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill. In some ways the most effective of the war leaders.” He was hardly the blind dictator.

Nazis’ Attack on Russia
On September 30, the Nazis began their final offensive to take Moscow. In Moscow, some 450,000 inhabitants of the city, including 75% women, were mobilized to build fortifications and anti-tank defensives. Moscow was bombed by German aviation. Panic began to seize the city population. The Nazis were only 80 kilometers away. Part of the administration was evacuated, but Stalin decided to remain in Moscow. He needed to stay at the general headquarters but he visited the fronts regularly. The battles became more and more fierce. The first extermination campaigns, in fact the biggest, were against the Soviet people, including Soviet Jews. The people of the USSR suffered the most and endured the greatest number of dead at 23 million. The Hitlerian aggression drenched the Soviet Union in a bath of blood and steel that surpassed all the horrors that the world had ever previously seen. The reality of the unbelievable terror that the Nazis practiced in the Soviet Union is almost systematically covered up or minimized in the bourgeois literature. Even this year, 2025, on the celebration of the Russia defeat of the Nazis, Western leaders boycotted the celebration. Clearly the West prefers fascism to communism.

Russia Defeats the Nazis
In early November, the Nazi offense was stopped. After having consulted all of his commanders, Stalin decided on a large counter-attack which began on December 5. Some 720,000 Red soldiers pushed back 800,000 fascists to 100—300 kilometers. For the first time, the invincible German troops were defeated. The fascists lost more than 500,000 men, 1300 tanks and 2,500 canons. The Russians showed utter determination and amazing heroism. These Germans has to face adversaries that were fighting to the last man

Germany’s Final Solution of Jews came about after German defeats in Russia

The exterminating rage of the Nazi’s emerged with their first massive losses. When the fascist beast started to bleed under the Red Army blows, it dreamed up a final solution for the Soviet people. In a remarkable book Arno Mayer explains that the extermination of the Jews only began once the Nazis suffered great losses. Without operation Barbarossa, there would and could have been no Jewish systematic annihilation. Once the Nazis had to face the defeats on the Russian front, they decided on a global and final solution of the Jewish population. Many rich Jews succeeded in escaping to the US. After the war they went to work for American imperialism and its beachhead, Israel. The great majority of poor Jews were gassed.

Russia 1947-1953
Positive aspects
Between 1939 and 1940 the Soviet Union had an annual rate of industrial production of 16.5 %. Some said it would take decades to recover from what the fascists did to its industrial apparatus. Yet after three incredible years, 1948 industrial production surpassed that of 1940. In 1950, at the end of the 4th year of a five year plan, industrial production was 73% above that of 1940. Stalin’s foreign policy with regard to western states was peaceful co-existence. The Communist parties throughout the world were not agitating to overthrow western rulers. In the United States, either Communists were to run their own candidates in elections or they were to support the Democratic Party. To the extent that it was possible Stalin helped revolutionary movements of different countries in providing arms, funding industrialization and offering technological know-how. Stalin supported colonized peoples who sought independence and encouraged a vast international movement for peace. During the same period the US military plans called for the building of numerous military bases. In reaction to this, in 1947 the Soviet Union built its own nuclear weapons, breaking US “nuclear nightmare” diplomacy.

Negative aspects
Despite the rapid industrialization it would have been better to have mixed some of this with lighter industry and more consumer goods. It is a great deal to ask of people to produce for war rather than for goods that would make their lives a little better. As early as 1951, Stalin was seriously worried about the state of the Party. The most important tendencies that Stalin had to fight against in the 20s and 30s were:

• Trotskyism
• Bukharinism
• Militarist professional tendencies within the army technocrats that were substantially reinforced
• Bourgeois Russian nationalism

They all continued between 1945-1953

Khrushchev’s Revisionist Groups and a Conservative Bureaucracy

With Stalin’s death, two revisionist tendencies within the Party arose. Beria wanted better international relations with the West and restoration of relations with Tito in Yugoslavia. Khrushchev had Beria executed after Stalin’s death and then assumed power. With the division of the Party leadership that followed, the control mechanisms over the bureaucracy were weakened, the military’s own interests and values emerged into the open and became stronger.

Under Khrushchev the bureaucrats no longer had to fear threats from either serious communist in the higher echelons of the party of from the working or middle classes from below. There was bureaucratic intolerance of criticism which came from below. The bureaucrats stifled criticism and settled scores with those who dared criticize them. They had a smug complacency. Leaders turned meetings into vainglorious displays, into cases of self-laudation. These were not communist revolutionaries. They strove for a self-satisfied and tranquil life. These bureaucrats forgot that they were running state enterprises and tried to turn them into their own private domain. They ignored any attempts to advance communism in the Soviet Union. Circles would form around Khrushchev and Brezhnev, completely estranged from revolutionary, popular action.

Meanwhile, the reformist socialist state rehabilitated opportunists and enemies who had been purged. Khrushchev allowed the resurrection of social democratic and Tsarist ideological currents. Enemies of Leninism who were sent to Siberia were rehabilitated by Khrushchev.  He fished Solzhenitsyn out from a work camp who made an alliance with Khrushchev to combat Stalinism. Solzhenitsyn has become the official voice of the 5% of Tsarists, bourgeois, speculators and kulaks.  He hated socialism. By the mid-1980s Gorbachev denounced the division of the world into socialism and capitalism and converted himself to universal values. He initiated social democracy while provoking the collapse of the Soviet State.

Summing Up

As I said in the introduction, the purpose of this evaluation is to move beyond dualistic arguments which either condemn Stalin as the worst political figure of the 20th century next to Hitler or blindly praise him as mindless dogmatic Stalinists are apt to do.  What I tried to do in this evaluation is to say that most of the bourgeois attacks on Stalin are the product of anti-communist propaganda which are either black propaganda lies or exaggerations compared to what really happened.

A second purpose of this evaluation is as a prediction that any leaders today, socialist or not who oppose decaying western capitalist imperialism will be called the same kind of names as Stalin. What are the similarities between the names Gaddafi was called and Stalin? What about the name calling of Stalin and Nicolas Maduro? What about Vladimir Putin: dictator, authoritarian, kills his own people? So we can expect that also the real evolution of these men and their states will be distorted, exaggerated, denied and censored just as Stalin was.

Nevertheless, author Ludo Martens failed to address the following criticisms coming from the left communists about the Soviet Union.

Left Communists’ Evaluation of Ludo Martens’ Book Stalin: Another View
Can workers only achieve trade union consciousness?
My first criticism of Stalinism is not focused on the specific political actions Stalin took as much as they are criticisms of Leninism in which Stalinism is a variant. The Bolsheviks claim that by themselves workers can only achieve a trade union consciousness has been disproven numerous times by the Paris Commune of 1871; the Russian Soviets in 1905, the Russian factories during the 1917 revolution and the anarcho-communism of the Ukrainian peasantry under Nestor Makhno. The greatest example of the workers self-management was in the cities and countryside of Spain during the revolution between 1936-1939. Martens mentions nothing about the contradiction between what the Bolsheviks said about workers on their own only achieving trade union consciousness and what the workers actually did.

Did Marx advocate the forming of a vanguard party?

The second problem is the presence of a secret vanguard party to lead the revolution. This is something that Marx and Engels never talked about. This is because they believed that the socialist revolution would break out in an advanced capitalist country first where socialist parties would be legal. For them the work of the Communist Party was to embed themselves in workers’ movements; organize and systematize all workers struggles under a single program, not lead the workers with a program of their own. I have no problem with Lenin developing a secret vanguard party in Russia because of the conditions in Russia at the time. At that time in Russia there was no constitution and not even a liberal party. My problem with a secret vanguard party is when it was applied to capitalist countries in the West when it was possible to organize in the open along with a mass political party, not a party with paid, full-time revolutionaries. Marx and Engels never talked about vanguard parties. In fact, as I recall, they made fun of the secret societies of Auguste Blanqui.

Socialism in one country and subordination of all Communist parties to Russia in peacetime

I agree with Stalin’s decision to build socialism in one country and against Trotsky’s naïve proposal for permanent revolution everywhere given that there was no industrial revolution in Germany. The Communist movement needed a home base to have a chance to really develop new forms even if they were limited because of being surrounded by hostile capitalist countries. I also agree that in times of war, communist parties around the world should subordinate themselves to the Russian Communist Party. My problem with Stalinism is to insist on subordination of communist parties in times of peace. Golden opportunities were missed for Communist parties all over the world to experiment with new forms based on local conditions.

This policy robbed the Communist parties all over the world of adapting themselves to local conditions rather than following a single country. An example of this was in the movie Reds, when John Reed argued fruitlessly with the Central Committee of the Communist Party that the Communist Party endorse working with the radical Industrial Workers of the World. Instead, the Russian Communist Party insisted that any proto-communist party in the United States join the AF of L, the most conservative of all American unions. Within the United States between 1926 and 1956 the American Communist Party was dragged through all of Moscow’s changed lines, swerves and backtracking with no opportunity to develop its own program based on its unique understanding of Yankee conditions. Up until the Russian Revolution, the Socialist Party of America had a much better understanding of the working conditions in Yankeedom. But the Russian Communist Party did not care to learn anything from the American Socialist party.

Undermining the Spanish Revolution

In Spain between 1936 and1939 during the revolution, under the direction of the CNT, the anarchists had Barcelona organized under worker self-management. In the countryside, the worker collectives involved one third of a million people. The Communist Party in Spain was small and not influential, and the Spanish revolutionaries were also fighting fascist Franco in their country. The Communist Party offered weapons to help the collectives fight the fascists in exchange for influence. The Communist Party of Russia was not interested in a socialist revolution in Spain, they just wanted to defeat fascism. As part of defeating the fascists they also turned on the self-management collectives and destroyed them. Since this hostility to workers’ self-management occurred during both Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin’s time it seems fair to say that hostility to workers councils is a characteristic of Leninism and cannot be laid solely at Stalin’s doorstep. Martens never writes about this or the international justification for the suppression of the collectives. It was clear that the self-managed collectives were absolutely committed to socialism and could not be manipulated by capitalists, either domestically or internationally. In my opinion the reason they were attacked is because the Communist Party imagined it had the lock and key to everything and saw socialist rivals as enemies. It is understandable that the social democrats (the Mensheviks) became enemies because part of their program was to restore capitalism, but the anarchist collectives posed no such threat.

Stalin’s short-sighted decree abolishing religion

Stalin showed very little understanding of why people are religious. If religion is the opium of the masses, the need for religion doesn’t disappear if you take away its forms. A real materialist policy would be to improve the standard of living and then expect that as heaven is gradually created on earth the need for religion would become less. On one hand an expansion of the number of atheists would be predictable. At the same time, those who continued to be religious would find their gods and goddesses immanent rather than transcendental. Just as primitive communism had earth spirits of rocks, rivers and trees, so under advanced communism the spirits would come back to earth because communists were in the process of creating heaven on earth

The dogmatic nature of dialectical materialism
Unfortunately Marx and Engels’ work cast a long shadow over future generations of Marxists and too many of them have never come out of the shadows. This is not unique to Leninism. For example, after Engels wrote The Family, Private property and the State it took 80 years for Marxists to stop repeating what Engels said about these subjects and accept that anthropologists were scientists that have discovered new processes about social evolution.

Even now, some Marxists who are otherwise very creative in their fields, repeat the tired old story of social evolution going from primitive communism to the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ to slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism and back to socialism.

Secondly, Marxist philosophers have mindlessly insisted that all philosophy can be divided into materialism and idealism. Please see my article Out on A Limb With Dialectical Materialism for six ways to categorize philosophy. In addition, these Leninist philosophers have crudely tried to directly link philosophy to political positions like fascism, imperialism and capitalism. So, for example, Maurice Cornforth, whom I’ve learned quite a bit from, tries to connect the pragmaticism of William James and Charles Sanders Peirce to imperialism because of what the United States was doing during World War II at the time they were writing.

Lastly, in the Lysenko affair, Soviet agricultural policy took a very bad turn because Soviet scientists were not allowed to favor in Mendelian genetics into their policy. This was because dialectical materialism had no place for how biological and social processers might interact in the raising of crops. The randomness of Mendelian genetics was attacked as “bourgeois” and dismissed in favor of Lamarckian causal laws. Random mutations were attacked as liberal a world view projected onto science and over 3,000 natural scientists were dismissed. This policy undermined the prospect of scientists solving agricultural problems using the best science in the world.FacebookTwitter

RedditEmail

Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.