En Passant

As fascism organises in Australia today, Trotsky’s thinking about the squaddism of the German Communist Party in the early 1930s seems to me to contain important lessons for the left today.

In a wide ranging and thought provoking article in RS21, Mike Gonzalez charts the recent deal between Washington and Havana and asks if this really is the end of an era with the lifting of the embargo. He concludes:

For socialists there is nothing to be gained from pretending, as some international commentators have done, that nothing has really changed and that the agreement is a victory for Cuban socialism. Nor can we associate ourselves with the gloating of a global capitalist class which, sadly, will be the beneficiary of the decision. From the Cochabamba water wars of 2000 onwards, a new understanding of what socialism means has been on the agenda, active on the historical stage. And it is a very different understanding from the centralized, bureaucratic state structures of the Soviet era, which Cuba reproduced. The new vision is of a society run and controlled directly by its majority, shaped by their priorities, and defined by its transparent, democratic processes. That is some way ahead, but it is present and alive in the logic of the movements that have brought change to Latin America in this last exciting decade and a half and that will continue to organize, in a complex reality, for the realisation of the dream of a better world.

To read the whole article click here.

Here is a snippet from a good article in Solidarity in Australia about the fall of the Berlin Wall. It describes the Stalinist regimes as state capitalist. I would urge those interested in understanding how ‘socialism’ could be overthrown by the very workers it supposedly ruled for to read this. I would especially urge members of Socialist Alternative in Australia to read it to help re-discover their hidden history and analysis.

It is this political vision advocating for the democratic self-management of Cuban society that can shape a compelling resistance for what is likely to come writes Sam Farber in Jacobin magazine. Through cultivating solidarity with those most vulnerable and calling for class, racial, and gender equality, a future movement can build a united front against old and emerging oppressors.

In that vision lies hope for the people of Cuba and the broader region.

The best way to defend the Left from successful ruling class attacks in Australia on our right to organise is to politically destroy Stalinism in Australia by building a left absolutely free from any of its influences. The immediate task in doing that paradoxically is to defend the rights of the new Stalinists like Tim Anderson to organise, to speak and to work.

I posted this article a month ago.

Paul D’Amato explains why those countries that call themselves socialist are nothing of the sort, as part of his series on the ISO’s “Where We Stand” statement in Socialist Worker US.

In this article in Marxist Left Review, Red Flag editor Corey Oakley in 2011 makes the socialist case against Stalinism and its rotten heritage for and impact even today on the Left.

On the 60th anniversary of the death of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, Ian Birchall in Socialist Worker UK looks at his life and how his politics damaged the idea of socialism for decades. Stalinism offers a bleak image of what socialism is not. But the early years of workers’ power in Russia, and the traditions of those who resisted Stalin’s rise, often at the cost of their lives, offer a vision that can inspire and teach us.

There was a reason why Stalin wanted to kill Trotsky, even in exile. Trotsky and his ideas represented a real alternative to the dictatorship against the workers that Stalin had set up.

If we on the left are about human liberation we must reject the Stalinist legacy and its physical and intellectual walls and turn once again to Marx and the working class. The emancipation of the working class as the act of the working class, and with it the emancipation of humanity, must become again our watchword and guide to action and activity.