I read the latest propaganda with a feeling of foreboding, and we must constantly remind ourselves as Marxists just what sort of thing we are up against on a daily basis from those spokespeople of capital.
The first statement this journalist makes about people who love socialism and hate Britain now running our Government, the schools, the civil service and broadcasting is a completely laughable comment in any context. What this statement clearly demonstrates is a total lack of any political understanding. If he thinks Tony Blair, and the Labour Party are socialists this clearly demonstrates a total lack of understanding of politics in general. Clearly Peter does not see that since Tony Blair was elected in 1997 he has been a loyal servant of the British Capitalist class. The attacks on living standards have continued. The bankrupt policies of privatisation and the Private Finance Initiative have continued. In fact if Peter had any understanding of events at all, he would realise that the present Labour Party leaders have been, and still are loyal servants of the British Ruling class. They are no more socialist than the Conservative Party themselves, in all their crowning glory. The Labour Party are also not Stalinist in nature. They do not advance the bankrupt ideas of a state bureaucracy. The commanding heights of the economy are still overwhelmingly in private hands, and the process of privatisation and the undermining of effective public services goes on, just as it did under the previous conservative administration. However what Stalinism did seek to do was re-write history, especially the history of the Russian Revolution and this has led to many incorrect analyses of what genuine socialism really is. People such as Philby were not heroes, but were corrupted by the false ideas of Stalinism, and their actions were the result of a complete lack of any true revolutionary and dialectic perspectives.
Peter clearly does not understand the difference between socialism and capitalism. He has no understanding of the fact that Stalin was not a socialist by any means. What Stalin set out to do was usurp power for himself and the Bureaucracy of the Soviet Communist Party. He ultimately achieved this by the drowning in blood of the genuine revolutionaries of 1917, namely the Bolshevik Party. Lenin and Trotsky were firm believers in the Soviets and workers democracy and never at any stage did they side with Stalin. The coming to power of Stalin and the bureaucracy was the result of a combination of events from 1917, through the 1920's, namely the death of Lenin due to ill health in 1924. The First World War which took a heavy toll on the Russian Working class, and the fighting off of 21 armies of foreign intervention. Plus the continued isolation of the Soviet State Internationally. The combination of all these events had left the Soviet working class drained, and had affected the organs of Soviet democracy, which ultimately led to the rise of Joseph Stalin and the monstrous bureaucratic clique that he built around himself. This resulted because of the material conditions of the time. Had Stalin not existed, then some other bureaucrat would have taken the Soviet Union down a similar road, because of the events and conditions that existed at the time. This fact, is completely missed by Peter Hitchens in his article. I would also note that the genuine Marxists predicted that this regime would collapse at some point and it did in 1991. However, what replaced it, i.e. Capitalism has been no better. Russian society is at a total impasse. The productive forces have all but been destroyed, and society is controlled by mafia gangsters, and criminals. That is what capitalism has given to Russia. What needs to happen in Russia is for the original ideas of the 1917 revolution to be carried through in a new political revolution to install workers democracy at the head of the planned economy.
The issue of the peasant kulaks in the Ukraine was answered by genuine Marxists at the time. Stalin proceeded to forcibly collectivise the land. This was never the original policy of the Bolsheviks who wanted to invite the Kulaks to participate in the Soviets on a voluntary and a democratic basis. It was never the policy of the Bolshevik Party to deny any section of Soviet society their democratic rights and freedoms. In Fact Lenin and Trotsky always took an Internationalist approach at all times. I feel this needs to be made clear to the spokespeople of the right who constantly harp on about the brutality of socialism. All their bleating demonstrates is their complete lack of understanding and perspectives, plus their genuine fear of Marxism to alter the course of human history, which will ultimately fly in the face of the exploiters that currently sit on top of the rest of us. I don't mean the elected parliament, I mean the real rulers of society, the privileged few in the boardrooms of multi-nationals who decide on a daily basis who lives and who dies, who eats and who starves. These are the real power in society, unaccountable and unelectable by the masses. Do you call this democracy Peter?
As for Stalin being a brutal and vicious dictator none of these facts are in doubt, but what the spokespeople of capital clearly forget is the brutality their own system dishes out on a daily basis. Namely, the masses in the so called third world who die in their thousands each day because they do not have enough to eat. The fighting of an imperialist war in Iraq that has cost thousands of Iraqis their lives, and now the "liberators" of US Imperialism are quite happy to plunder the region of it's assets. There has also been evidence that ancient artefacts have been plundered from the museums. Artefacts that go back thousands of years and are the only remains of once great cultures. All these pieces will no doubt end up in the private collections of our "democracy" loving art speculators in the west, who only see such items as commodities to be bought and sold on the International Art circuit. They have no interest in the fact these treasures should be preserved for the benefit of all humanity.
What Stalin did was proceed to re-write history, to suit the bureaucracy. This was done by a man who took no leading role in the 1917 revolution and only got to the position he did by bloodshed and murder on a massive scale. It is also acknowledged that Stalin collaborated with Hitler, and was instrumental in the betrayal of the German revolution which directly paved the way for fascist reaction to gain power in that country. You see Stalin could not afford a genuine successful proletarian revolution to succeed in any region of the world, as this would act as a beacon to the Soviet working class to carry through the political revolution which would have destroyed Stalin and his bureaucracy. Better then for Stalin to support the forces of reaction, which led to Hitler and ultimately the outbreak of the Second World War.
The facts of Berlin in 1953 and Budapest in 1956 are not in dispute, but the correct analysis of these events was that the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union did support the forces of reaction in other countries. They actively participated in de-railing genuine revolutionary movements, because one successful proletarian revolution would have led to the downfall of the Soviet Bureaucracy, so the movements in Berlin and Budapest were crushed by Soviet tanks.
The comments on the new BBC series Cambridge Spies I cannot yet answer as I have not seen the series in question, but as with all events we have to acknowledge that broadcasters rarely present things in the right context, and this has held true no matter what flavour of Government has been sitting in No 10 and the Houses of Parliament. I did feel though this article deserved a response from a genuine Marxist perspective, because we want the masses to learn from the mistakes of the past, so they are not ever repeated.
As for the proposed identity card system for civilians I do not support that principle either. The reason I do not support it, is because it could be used in the future to limit the freedom and liberty of individuals, especially people within the Labour and Trade Union movement who do not share the views of "New Labour". As the crisis in capitalism deepens and the working class move into struggle to preserve their livelihoods and conditions, schemes such as I'D cards and registration cards, call them what you will, will then come into their own. So called dissenters and "subversive" elements will be rounded up, and put in prison on trumped up charges. Similar sorts of situations to what were witnessed in the 1984/85 Miners Strike.
Capitalism has inherent and unsolvable contradictions, only a few of which I have illustrated here. What we have in Britain and the other countries of the west is the illusion of democracy and freedom when in reality we have very little of either. Wanting something better for the human race is not a crime, and neither should the genuine ideas of socialism and Marxism be likened to a monster like Stalin who had nothing in common with those ideals at all. The Cambridge Spies were but a sign of the conditions that existed at the time, and it is the task of Marxists to patiently explain that none of these individuals ever had anything in common with the genuine socialist movement, as Blair and his party have nothing in common with socialism today.