[In place of Lenin's subordination of the national…]
Socialist Organiser1983 1983-03-17Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 10 →
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In place of Lenin's subordination of the national to the international revolution, the Stalinists chopped and changed the politics of the Communist International in line with the national requirements of the Kremlin bureaucrats. Thus the 1928-34 Third Period' of crash industrialisation and enforced collectivisation was characterised internationally as a period of 'class against class', in which CPs were pushed into abandonment of the early Comintern's tactic of the united front, and took up wild sectarian denunciations of social democratic leaders and their tank and file as 'social fascists' - a policy which divided the working class and opened the door for Hitler's rise to power in Germany.
The shifting needs of Soviet diplomacy, now fully committed to deals and alliances with capitalist governments, brought a similarly abrupt and arbitrary shift of the line of the Comintern in 1935, to adopt the tactic of the 'Popular Front' of Communists with social democrats and so-called "progressive sections of the bourgeoisie' against fascism. This policy, accompanied by the cynical manoeuvres of the Kremlin, eventually brought the defeat of the Spanish working class by Franco in 1939.
And while show trials and mass imprisonment hounded and murdered Trotskyists as 'fascists' in the Soviet Union, Stalin himself was moving towards an attempted accommodation with the high priest of fascism, Adolf Hitler, signed in 1939.
Each of these actions was explained and rationalised in phrases which almost seem designed 1o parody Marxism, and took place at the bands of a leadership formally committed to 'Marxism" as official state ideology.
Stali tary apparatus installed over the working class.
Marx's conception of the leading role of the working class to complete the struggle even for democratic demands, drawn from the experiences of the 1848 revolutions, and developed by Lenin in the struggle for the October revolution, has been ousted in favour of the Stalinist notion of the 'two stage' revolution in economically backward .. countries, in which workers should in the first "stage' subordinate their demands to the politics ofe bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalists.