Lair of the Red Squirrel recently posted about the non-Stalinist left’s attitude towards Stalinism, and I think there’s a lot there for the radical Left to consider. As someone relatively new to the socialist left (refugee from social democracy), and trying to navigate the waters of radical politics trying to avoid sectarianism while not losing sight of my vision of socialism, there’s a lot to be said for avoiding a knee-jerk anti-Stalinism. Not only is this crucial to an accurate historical narrative, but more importantly:
…Stalinism/the bureaucracy is still treated as a thing that is separate from the proletariat, a distinct body that usurps power because of the latter’s weakness. Stalinism is seen as something foreign to the socialist movement, conquering it from the outside.
and further…
We must mercilessly criticise and scrutinise Stalinism. But this criticism must be directed towards the proletarian movement itself, not some fantastical foreign entity. We must understand and most important of all, accept, that Stalinism was part of our movement.
Absolutely true. It is an unfortunate aspect of the left that we must be burdened, as it were, with the combined historical weight of the cock-ups and poor choices of the left’s past, and while we can (and should) attempt to break cleanly with our past in how we act today, we also need to acknowledge (and, ultimately, try to understand and even respect) the choice of leftists to support the Soviet Union throughout its most ugly episodes. Trying to avoid doing so will only result in the same mistakes made in the past. Without becoming too deterministic, we need to acknowledge the material and social reasons those on the left identified with Stalin/Stalinism, and work at learning how to avoid those in the present. As one comment on the post states, there are certainly examples of hard-core Trotskyists who, if given the same opprotunity Stalin was given, would not act fundamentally different. I don’t necessarily agree with the argument that “the only difference between Stalin and Trotsky was whether the icepick was in their hand or in their head”, but there is some truth to the argument that many anti-Stalinist groups on the left have (unconsciously, I would hope) replicated many of the characteristics of what we would consider Stalinism. Of course, no one should be surprised by this:
As long as the the contradiction between mental and manual labour dominates society, it will manifest in our movement as well, whether in the form of personality cults or excessive bureaucracy. Within the context of a revolutionary society, as was Soviet Russia, where even the tiniest element of society is mobilised to its fullest intensity, this shortcomings of our movement can be amplified to reach huge proportions, with tragic consequences.
The attitude of many Greens (and others) to ‘reject ideology’ and argue they are neither left nor right, is not the right path. We cannot ignore our past. We need to recognize that hindsight, in this case the ability to criticize past ideologies that have come and gone, is a luxury afforded by our position in history. We still need to, and will always need to, criticize those ‘disasters of the left’ such as Stalinism, but simplistic answers and the like will only bring the genuine, socialist, democratic left increasingly shrunken influence and power.
