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Home Complete List Stalinism, Revolution and Counter-Revolution

Stalinism, Revolution and Counter-Revolution

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Seven decades have elapsed since the brutal reality of Stalinism was revealed with the ugly spectacle of the Moscow Trials and the sabotage of the revolution and the repression of the left in the Spanish Civil War. This issue of Revolutionary History investigates the relationship of various political groups and personalities with Moscow. Readers will find accounts of 'Comrade Thomas', the shadowy Comintern agent of the 1920s who drifted away in response to Josef Stalin's rise to power, and of Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist Party leader who responded to that process by becoming an especially loyal Stalinist apparatchik.

 

It was not always an uncomplicated matter. The turbulent relationship between the anti-Stalinist Workers party of Marxist Unification (POUM) in Spain and Leon Trotsky in the face of Stalinist repression is shown in this issue. Having long been active in the British Trotskyist movement, John Lawrence nevertheless succumbed in the mid-1950s to the idea that the Soviet regime and the official communist movement represented a genuine revolutionary alternative to capitalism. The French anarchist Daniel Guerin engaged in a lengthy and intricate debate with Leninism, but was unable fully to extricate himself from the idea that Stalinism was a logical product of Bolshevism. Both these intriguing figures are discussed in depth.

 


To this very day, in the popular imagination, within mainstream politics and for many commentators and academics, Stalinism represents the inescapable result of attempting to go beyond capitalism. This issue of Revolutionary History aims to dispel this misconception, and shows that Stalinism is in fact a counterrevolutionary negation of revolutionary politics, a barrier to the struggle for socialism.

 

 

 

Additional product information

Binding Paperback
No. of Pages 256
Publisher Porcupine Press & Socialist Platform
Date of Publication 2006
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