{"id":748,"date":"2013-05-29T09:19:16","date_gmt":"2013-05-29T08:19:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=748"},"modified":"2013-05-29T09:25:38","modified_gmt":"2013-05-29T08:25:38","slug":"confronting-stalinism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/confronting-stalinism\/","title":{"rendered":"Confronting Stalinism"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article appears in Solidarity<\/a>. It is a reply to a letter by Martin Thomas (“How to marginalise Stalin<\/a>“), who was replying to my original article<\/a>\u00a0three weeks ago.<\/p>\n

\n

Martin Thomas is opposed to kicking the Stalinists out of the May Day march in London. \u201cMuch better,\u201d he says, \u201cto deal with the Stalinists politically, by mobilisation and argument …\u201d<\/p>\n

He didn’t read my article, at least not until the end. I wrote: \u201cWe begin by debating and confronting the Stalinist Left, demolishing their arguments and educating their members and periphery. We fight them on their turf and we fight them seriously. This is a fight over historical memory, over truth, and it is a fight we must win in order to cleanse and revitalise the Left.\u201d<\/p>\n

So we agree on that.<\/p>\n

Here’s where we disagree: Martin says that the handful of people who carried the massive banners of Stalin at this year’s London May Day event \u201creckon themselves left-wingers\u201d which is, I think, about as irrelevant a point as one can make in this context.<\/p>\n

Who cares what they think about themselves? I have no doubt that all kinds of people with nasty politics \u201creckon themselves\u201d as having good politics, or even being \u201csocialists\u201d.<\/p>\n

What matters is, of course, their actual politics<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to the part of Martin’s argument I find most unappealing: the notion that this infinitesimal group \u2013 and I’m speaking in particular of the micro-sect in Britain that carried the very largest banners \u2013 \u201care in fact left-wingers, of a sort\u201d as Martin puts it.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf a sort?\u201d He adds: \u201con the direct struggle of workers against capitalists in Britain or in Turkey\u201d.<\/p>\n

In other words, on some historical, theoretical or otherwise meaningless level, they are of course rotten totalitarians. But in \u201cdirect struggles\u201d they are \u2013 what? Our allies? Surely the AWL doesn’t consider \u201cThe Stalin Society\u201d a legitimate part of the British Left, or does it?<\/p>\n

The counterposing of direct real-world struggles in which groups like the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) presumably play a positive role with irrelevant, theoretical issues (like democracy) is false and unworthy of the AWL.<\/p>\n

The CPGB(M-L), with its dozen or so members, seems to be mostly engaged in trying to win free trips to North Korea, not leading some fight against hospital cuts. The only time in recent memory when they made the news was when Kim’s ambassador to London used their platform to defend his regime’s threats to turn South Korea, Japan and Guam into nuclear wastelands.<\/p>\n

The last time I saw the Stalin Society in action was when they handed out an extraordinarily offensive leaflet at a showing of the Polish film \u201cKatyn\u201d. I should re-phrase that: not ‘they’ but ‘he’; I’m not sure this Society has more than a single member.<\/p>\n

A generation or two ago, I’d have understood Martin’s hesitation \u2013 I would not have agreed even then, but I’d have understood. Stalin was a revered figure to many decent people right up until his death, and even beyond. The Left was unfortunately full of Stalinists.<\/p>\n

But today, people who carry his banner on May Day demonstrations in the streets of London represent no one, and serve as a reminder of a disgraceful history for a part of the Left which has already acknowledged that Stalin was a monster and his regime monstrous.<\/p>\n

So we agree that Stalinism must be dealt with politically and I welcome any activity that raises awareness of this. But I also think it shows a real lack of political guts to refuse to confront the tiny remants of Stalin worshippers on the streets, and to tell them \u2013 go away, this is not your holiday, you are not part of our Left.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article appears in Solidarity. It is a reply to a letter by Martin Thomas (“How to marginalise Stalin“), who was replying to my original article\u00a0three weeks ago. Martin Thomas is opposed to kicking the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-solidarity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":750,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions\/750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}