Germany, the overthrow of Stalinism and the left

The dream died when the revolution failed to spread and the backwardness of Russian society saw Stalin rise to power. By 1930, with his first five-year “plan” and the elimination of almost all dissent, Stalin had set up a regime that eventually killed off most of the old revolutionary Bolsheviks, forced the peasantry off its land into the newly created workplaces and attacked workers to industrialise the country rapidly.

Stalin defeated the revolution from within and established a form of capitalism in which the state became the embodiment of all bosses - economic, political and ideological. In this he mirrored the trend to the merger of the state and capital that Lenin and Bukharin had identified as the logical development of competitive capitalism and the basis of imperialism.

Marx also wrote (this time in the Communist Manifesto) that capitalism breeds its own gravedigger - the working class. By building a strong working class on the back of the peasantry in Russia, and doing so in the space of a decade rather than centuries, Stalin and his henchmen laid the basis for the revolutions of 1989 to 1991 across Europe.

These revolutions overthrew the Stalinist version of capitalism and moved sideways economically to the misnamed neoliberal or free market version.

The inefficiency of State capitalism compared to its Western cousin saw it become uncompetitive and the seemingly strong state collapse.

While it was a sideways step economically in terms of the essential nature of the capitalism and wage slavery remaining, it showed the power of ordinary people in confronting and overthrowing the seemingly invincible dictatorships that ruled their lives.

The Western bourgeoisie saw in the East a reflection of the weakness of its own rule. The propaganda barrage that followed was a pack of lies about the superiority of Western capitalism, but it resonated strongly with people who had suffered the political and economic privations of the Stalinist dictatorship.

There was no organised working class movement with enough political clarity to lead a workers’ revolution against either form of capitalism. In Hungary in 1956 the Stalinists sent in their troops to defeat a workers’ revolution against Stalinism, and the West cheered them on, silently.

In Poland the magnificent Solidarity movement shook the dictatorship to its core but did not go that further step and set up its own system of rule over capitalism. It tipped into the dustbin of history the Stalinist regime only to see many of the apparatchiks take over the mantel of the new state and industry and continue the expropriation of social surplus for the purpose of accumulation in its private rather than nationalised guise.

The Stalinists in China, shaken by the working class and student movement of 1989 in their own country and the mass movements in Europe, opened up the economy to the market in a bid (to date successful) to maintain their own power and privilege.

In Cuba the Castro clique have now begun the same process with a further reaching out to the market and double speak about “socialist efficiency” which like all lies under exploitative regimes is really about making the working class and poor peasantry pay for the crises that flow from the capitalist accumulation process.

We on the left should celebrate the overthrow of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and Russia as laying the groundwork for the next stage in the liberation of humanity - genuine democratic socialism where workers themselves decide what is to be produced to satisfy human need and where the idea and practice of profit - statised or private - becomes a curio in the museum of history.