I attended a recent conference where a lot of Trotskyite groups tabled. Nothing is assured just because the proletariat has seized state power.įast forward a bit. But why did it 'fail' and where did that leave us? It was only much later that I came to understand the particulars of the sequence of events and what Mao Zedong calls the 'two line struggle,' whereby in the transitional society that socialism is (not what Marx calls a 'mode of production' but something between the capitalist and communist modes) contradictions are intensified and class struggle along with it. Through a more thorough study of Marxism and of history, I came to see that Stalin was a great Marxist-Leninist and that the USSR, at least until the Krushchev years, provided a shining example of what Marxism was when applied. Whatever his errors may have been, Mao was a breath of fresh air, so clear and simple, yet sharp as a razor - so practical and useful! And yet Mao was a 'Stalinist.' So I had to ask, was Stalin a deviation from 'true' Marxism and even from Leninism (and where did that leave Mao?), or was Stalin a genuine Marxist-Leninist? What did this say about socialism, what it is and what it isn't? What did this say about what socialism could be? It was only when I came to Mao Zedong's writings and the experience of the Chinese Revolution that I could begin to reappraise Stalin, the USSR, and the world communist movement as a whole.

Later my utopianism became more nuanced and sophisticated as I studied philosophy formally. As a young man, a teenager just coming to Marxism, I remember people would say, 'but Socialism didn't work,' and I would reply, with a fine mixture of youthful optimism and naivete, 'but it was never really tried!' Any scientific socialist should be able to see such a statement for the utopianism that it is. I read Adorno, Jameson, and Critical Theory. I came from a petit-bourgeois intellectual Marxism, distanced from practice and tied in rather closely to to the humanist/individualist ideologies of the U.S. It is a weapon for communists to use in the ideological front.įor a long time I didn't understand Comrade Stalin. For us, working in the United States where anticommunism is so institutionalized, it is an important book. This book by Ludo Martens of the Worker's Party of Belgium, Another View of Stalin (EPO, Antwerp: 1994.), is pretty incredible.

Another view of stalin ludo martens