Marxism v Stalinism

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even 'fascist' - opposition ist' line of the bureaucrats.

The 'theory' of socialism in one country heralded the practical abandonment of the struggle for international revolution. From 1924 onwards the leaderships of the Communist International and the main Communist Parties • were purged from above by the Stalinists, to replace their potential opponents and supporters of Trotsky with loyal adherents to the new, official 'Marxism' In place of the development of revolutionary, proletarian leaderships, there came the cultivation of pliable placemen and diplomatic relations with 'left' bureaucrats such as those in the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee in Britain (who sold out the 1926 General Strike) and with the 'anti-imperialist' Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai Shek, who ordered the literal decapitation of the Chinese Communists in 1927.

In the same period emerged a whole generation of new forces - not all of them cynical careerists, some being honest militants miseducated by the official pronouncements and by the practical actions of the Stalinist bureaucracy, but destined just the same to carry forward Stalinist politics into the postwar period.

Marx's doctrine of the class struggle as a continuing international struggle was replaced by theories of class collaboration and compromises with national chauvinism. Marx's insistence upon the need not to reform but to smash the capitalist state apparatus and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat was supplanted in the western CPs by notions of 'peaceful' parliamentary roads to socialism, while the post-war Stalinist bureaucracies "have interpreted the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as the ruthless suppression of all forms of political opposition by a dictatorial police/miliBEthüi APOMETAPI:

HEDY PA. KO CBETA

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