The left in disarray - Softcover

Sean Matgamna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1909639362 ISBN 13: 9781909639362

Publisher: Phoenix Press, 2017

Synopsis

There is a quickening of life on the left. But, politically, the left is still very weak and disoriented. This book traces the turns and realignments imprinted on this left over many decades by the ascendancy of Stalinism and by the post-Stalinist global reshufflings after 1989-9. Independent working-class politics needs a sense of its own path and its own compass. The left needs to emerge from defining itself primarily in a negative and reactive way, and rediscover what, positively, the real left must be for. This book is a companion volume to Can Socialism Make Sense?. which makes the case for unabridged socialist and anti-capitalist aims.

About this title

Review

Why is the revolutionary left in such a mess today, despite the economic problems of the last decade, the crises of many neoliberal states, the enormous size of the global waged working class, the potential power of the trade union movement and the signs of revival in left politics? The answers to why the Marxist left is in such a state are comprehensively hammered home in this collection of essays. The book is a tour de force history of the revolutionary left over the past one hundred years. The short answer is: Stalinism. But the syphilis of Stalinism is not only about the states that were or still are ruled by Stalinists. It is also about how the ideology of Stalinism has taken root even among the anti-Stalinist and social democratic left. Sloughing off this Stalinism is an essential prerequisite for reviving the authentic Marxist left. Why disarray? Matgamna tells the story of the degeneration of the revolutionary left with great verve. The revolutionary left that emerged from the 1917 Russian revolution was essentially healthy. It had opposed the First World War and arose triumphant to lead the Russian workers to power. These revolutionaries formed the Communist International, a school of revolutionary strategy that by the early 1920s had built mass communist parties made up of the finest working class militants internationally. The principal blow came with the isolation of the Russian workers state, already depleted by three years of bitter civil war and compounded by the backwardness of the inherited Russian social formation. Concomitantly, no communist party was able to lead the workers to power outside Russia. The result was the bureaucratisation of the Russian workers state. The bureaucratic tentacles strangled the organs of soviet democracy, the trade unions and finally the Bolshevik party the last living mechanism through which the Russian workers could exercise their rule. The Stalinists revolution from above defeated the Left Opposition, imposed forced industrialisation and collectivisation, and destroyed democratic, national and civil rights. After 1928 the new bureaucratic ruling class held the levers of control over the surplus product and inaugurated a totalitarian semi-slave state. After that, the Communist Parties acted as the overseas agents of Russian foreign policy, as well as incipient bureaucratic ruling classes in places where they got a foothold. The monstrous form of the Stalinist counter-revolution threw most of the revolutionary left back to a state of reactionary anti-capitalism, shorn of working class agency and of the consistently democratic programme they had once espoused. The tiny forces that coalesced around Trotsky put up a spirited rearguard action, keeping alive the flame of authentic Marxism during the 1920s and 1930s. But the Trotskyist movement itself was wrecked on the cusp of the Second World War, its main forces unable to explain the expansion of Stalinism outside of the USSR and later to understand the revival of capitalism in the post-war epoch. Most of the post-Trotsky Trotskyists embraced the Stalinist advance into Eastern Europe, China and beyond as somehow creating workers states (without the active intervention of workers), or painted despotic post-colonial regimes as somehow the embodiment of permanent revolution. [Incomplete, read full review online] --http://www.workersliberty.org/node/31285

Edition details

• Publisher: Phoenix Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1909639362
• ISBN 13: 9781909639362
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 408