The National Question - and its part in the fight for Socialism

‘The National Question - and its part in the fight for Socialism’ is the third in a series of books that have been published by Mentmore Press bringing together some of the many articles written by the late Peter Taaffe.

Peter devoted his life to the struggle to build a socialist world, as editor of the Militant newspaper, then as general secretary of the Socialist Party in England and Wales, as well as through being a leading member of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI).

As a Marxist, Peter had full confidence in the will and ability of the working class to struggle for a socialist future. However, he also understood that struggle alone is not enough to guarantee victory. It also needs a leadership that has learned from the past, and is able to apply the method of Marxism to work out a correct programme, strategy and tactics.

The first two books in this series - ‘Great Revolutionaries’ and ‘Collapse of Stalinism’ - are hopefully already helping a new generation of socialists to learn those lessons. This third book focuses on the ‘National Question’ – the approach that socialists should take to the oppression suffered by nations, and national, ethnic or religious minorities, under the rule of global capitalism. 

An incorrect position on the National Question can only too easily cut off revolutionaries from those workers and poor who are seeking to win national liberation, leaving them in the hands of nationalist forces that will seek to divide and mislead, so as to maintain the rule of capitalism. That’s why socialists need to apply the sensitive and flexible approach set out by Lenin, a national policy described by the other main leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, as being “among the eternal treasures of mankind”.

As this book explains, such an approach means opposing all forms of national and ethnic oppression and firmly supporting the right to self-determination for oppressed nations - including the right to full independence where so desired. However, while supporting that right, the aim is to secure the voluntary unity of the working class across borders, and to build a united struggle for a socialist world, as the only way to genuinely guarantee and defend national rights.

Such an approach cannot be learned by rote. There is no ‘one size fits all’ policy. Marxists must take into account the specific complexities of each national question. The book shows how Peter - along with the CWI as a whole - have always sought to do that, including by changing the demands we raise as circumstances change.  Neither has the CWI acted just as onlookers, but we have raised our programme while participating in, and supporting, struggle. 

Focusing on Five National Questions

The collection is drawn from articles written by Peter from the 1970s right up to 2018. For reasons of space, not all his articles on global struggles could be selected. Instead, the book focuses on five specific areas: Scotland, the former Stalinist states, Israel/Palestine, Black Nationalism, and Ireland. To put those articles in context, and also to discuss changes that have taken place since they were first written, each section is accompanied by comprehensive endnotes and an introductory overview. 

An overarching introduction to the whole book, written by Philip Stott of Socialist Party Scotland, explains how bourgeois-democratic revolutions smashed the previous feudal elites, paving the way for capitalist relations. They laid the basis for the development of nation states as we know them today, establishing the national markets needed by each nation’s rising capitalist class. In turn, the new ruling class created a national consciousness to underpin their state. 

Those revolutions included a struggle for land reform, the introduction of limited forms of parliamentary democracy, as well as the establishment of unitary states and language rights. However, as Trotsky explained in his ‘Theory of Permanent Revolution’, the capitalist class, in large parts of the world, have proved unwilling and unable to carry through the historic tasks of their own revolution. Across the neo-colonial world, as a consequence of their weakness and domination by imperialism, they were unable to play the independent role that their counterparts played in Western Europe or the United States. 

This means that today, in nations encompassing billions of people, the bourgeois-democratic tasks have not been completed, including the distribution of land to the peasants, as well as the resolution of numerous national questions and the expulsion of imperialism. Instead, it falls to the working class to lead the struggle to overthrow both landlordism and capitalism, merging these unfinished tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution with socialist tasks as well. Only a socialist society will be able to guarantee the fullest democratic and economic rights for all religious, ethnic and national groupings, and end oppression.

A capitalist world in crisis

As Philip puts it, “in other words, the right of nations to self-determination - and the national question overall - must also be part of the programme of the workers' movement today, as must other crucial democratic tasks that capitalism has been unable to either fulfil or maintain as its rule has entered systemic crisis”. 

But Philip also stresses that we now live in a capitalist world that is in a deep historical crisis. In its decline, capitalism has created generations who suffer unending poverty, increasing inequality, and are threatened by economic destruction and war: “For the masses of the neocolonial world, capitalist crises, and the incapacity of the bourgeois to resolve any of the problems of its rule, has meant burgeoning national, ethnic and religious conflicts”. 

Democratic rights, including the right of nations to self-determination, have been repressed and unfulfilled, as the struggle of the Palestinians for statehood makes so graphically clear. Neither has capitalism been able to resolve the long-standing national question in Ireland, among many other examples.

But the decay of world capitalism has meant that the national question has also reemerged in nations where it appeared to have been pushed into the background. This includes advanced capitalist nations such as the UK and the Spanish state where the ‘glue’ of capitalist economic development has started to come unstuck. Long repressed national tensions also re-emerged with a vengeance following the collapse of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. 

In other words, as Philip puts it, “the national question is far more complex today than at any time since the emergence of scientific socialism in 1848. However, our starting point is the same as it was for Lenin and the other great Marxists who developed the fundamentally correct socialist and internationalist approach to the national question: there is no capitalist solution. Only the struggle for socialism, led by the working class, can genuinely liberate the world's peoples from oppression and truly allow for the right to self-determination. … The role of a Marxist programme is to skilfully take up, and to be among the best fighters for, national rights and self-determination where that demand applies. … weaving into our programme demands that reflect those desires, while putting forward slogans that make central the necessity of the working class taking the lead in the struggle to achieve democratic rights - and that only the ending of capitalism can guarantee those rights permanently”.

Scotland

However, truth is concrete. As Peter Taaffe explains in his 1992 article ‘Nationalism, Scotland and the Marxist Approach’, “Abstract propaganda is absolutely insufficient in the sphere of the national question. Of course, Marxists are in general in favour of maintaining the maximum unity and are against the unnecessary ‘Balkanisation’ of formerly unified states. But what is absolutely decisive in deciding our position, is not our wishes but concrete historical circumstances and above all the experience of the masses and their desires.”     

A correct position requires differentiating between the bourgeois nationalism of those, like the Scottish National Party, who reflect the interests of a section of the capitalist class, and the moods and desires of the working class whose nationalism, in the words of Trotsky in his ‘History of the Russian Revolution’, can express “the outer shell of an immature Bolshevism.” 

As Peter’s articles explain, mass deindustrialisation and the brutality of Thatcherism reawakened national consciousness amongst the Scottish working class. Our former slogan for a socialist Britain, with autonomy for Scotland, no longer reflected the outlook of the most conscious workers. So, from 1998, the CWI called for an independent socialist Scotland, as part of a socialist confederation with England, Wales and Ireland. 

In 2014, the accumulated anger resulted in a 45% ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum for an independent state, in the teeth of a ferocious campaign of opposition by the ruling class. Socialist Party Scotland described it as an “electoral uprising against austerity and the political establishment”.

In contrast, as the book explains, the Communist Party of Britain opposed the call for a ‘Yes’ vote, as did the International Marxist Tendency who declared that “Scottish nationalism lacks any progressive element” - before reversing their position after the fact!

The book explains how, frightened by how close they came to defeat in 2014, the British ruling class will do all they can to block a second referendum. Their refusal can only be answered by “mobilising the power of the workers’ movement” to win “an independent Scotland that ends all cuts, poverty and wealth inequality. In other words, a socialist society”.

The former Stalinist states

This section of the book includes articles by Peter Taaffe on Armenia, written while Stalinism was in its final years, and on Bosnia, where that collapse had led to ethnic cleansing and civil war. A third article, from 2014, discusses the military conflict between the two newly formed capitalist states of Russia and Ukraine, a conflict that is, of course, still ongoing.

As the book explains, “instead of being cheerleaders for the reactionary bourgeois nationalism of one or other oligarchical-capitalist regime, a clear, independent class approach is required, one that recognises that only a socialist solution based on working-class unity can resolve these apparently intractable issues”.

Peter contrasts the policies of the likes of Gorbachev, Stalin and Putin with those of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Lenin understood that winning the confidence and support of the oppressed minorities who made up a majority of the ‘prison house of nationalities’ of Tsarist Russia meant guaranteeing their democratic rights to self-determination, up to and including the right to secession. Without this sensitive approach, with no hint of compulsion, there would have been no successful October 1917 revolution. At the same time the Bolsheviks stood unequivocally for the unity of the working class, expressed through the idea of a voluntary socialist federation of states. 

Israel / Palestine

From the 1917 British government declaration of support for establishing a ‘national home’ for Jewish people, to the mass expulsion of the Nakba, right up to today’s genocidal actions, including the outright destruction of most of the Gaza strip, the national oppression of the Palestinians remains one of the most brutal examples of the denial of national rights. 

The book outlines how the CWI, often alone on the left, has stressed the need to build mass workers’ organisations on both sides of the national divide, as the basis of forging a socialist solution to the conflict which, alone, can resolve the national oppression of the Palestinian people. In his articles – stretching from 1973 to 2018 - Peter consistently explains why, without in any way downplaying the difficulties of the task, a successful struggle has to adopt the strategic aim of splitting Israeli workers away from its ruling class. 

Our approach is summarised in the introduction by Judy Beishon in a way that mirrors, although in a very different context, Lenin’s recognition of the need to win workers to the idea of a socialist federation, instead of forcing them into it against their will. Judy writes: “The Israeli state is an oppressor state and the Palestinians are brutally oppressed, but in the situation of today’s national consciousness, a political programme is needed that wouldn’t compel workers on either side to be part of a shared state. Whatever the state forms and boundaries, they will need to be entered into on a fully voluntary basis”.

Ireland

Similarly, the CWI has also held a largely unique position on the Left on how to resolve the sectarian legacy created by the partition of Ireland by British imperialism in 1921. Peter Taaffe made a major contribution to developing a programme that consistently emphasised the need to build working-class unity of Catholic and Protestant workers in a common struggle for a socialist solution to the national question, as well as to class oppression. 

Four of the five articles on Ireland in the book date from the 1970s, when Peter wrote extensively on Ireland, while working to build support for Marxist ideas there. Peter describes how he first visited Derry in 1969, where the Young Socialists were able to put forward arguments for workers’ unity from behind the barricades, and how the supporters of the CWI continued to patiently explain their analysis throughout the years of the ‘Troubles’.

Whilst exact demands always have to reflect concrete circumstances, the core analysis and programme developed by Peter Taaffe and the CWI in Ireland at that time remains valid today.

Black Nationalism

Another section of the book contains two articles by Peter Taaffe written at the start of the 1970s on the Black Panther Party, a movement whose growing strength had alarmed the United States ruling class, who had responded with vicious repression. They explain how the movement, organising in working class urban Black communities against the twin problems of grinding poverty and systematic harassment, was grasping towards a socialist solution.  

Unfortunately, the Panthers failed to recognise the need to build a mass movement of the working class as a whole, especially through the trade unions, as argued for by Peter at the time. Since then, the US ruling class has attempted to promote a new Black middle class, to create a more stable base for its rule. However, as Hugo Pierre explains in his introduction, poverty conditions remain for the majority and: “the declining position of US capitalism will produce new class battles in which these Black workers and youth will play a critical role.”

A Treasure Trove

Just as Philip Stott’s introduction concludes, “Peter Taaffe's immense contribution to defending and advancing Marxist theory and practice on the national question deserves to be studied by the new generation. It is indeed a treasure trove, embedded with sensitivity, flexibility and political clarity that deserves its place alongside the great Marxists who have dealt with this vital question”. 

This book will help that new generation – and the not so new as well – in the task of applying the Marxist approach to the National Question to the struggle for socialism today. It will be officially launched at the ‘Socialism 2026’ event hosted by the Socialist Party in London this November.

Fight for our Futures, Not their Wars

The November 20 Europe-wide International Youth Strike has been called at a time when, for many people – young and old – there is growing anger at governments that are cutting our services while they boost funding on war – and who will willingly send thousands off to their deaths in wars to be fought for their interests – not for ours.

November 20^th was also agreed as the date for the walkouts by the 20 different youth organisations involved – at the suggestion of Socialist Students – because it coincides with the last day of the next round of COP talks – where the global politicians will get together to let off yet more hot air, instead of agreeing on the decisive action needed to stop a climate crisis whose dire effects are now becoming starkly obvious, even in countries that thought it was just somebody else’s problem.

As socialists, we understand that all those issues – war, cuts and climate crisis – are an inevitable result of a capitalist system in terminal decline where, in order to protect their profits, the super-rich want to steal away everything that the working class organised to win from them in the past – like council homes, free education, the NHS and, now latest in their crosshairs, disability benefits.

The capitalist classes of the world act in the interest of their own individual nation states, so they won’t enact the global plan needed to tackle climate change. Instead, they just look to short-term profit, competing with other nations to get a bigger share of the pie. That doesn’t stop at just tariffs and trade wars, now it will increasingly mean actual wars – if not yet nuclear world war - as even they realise that will be the end even for them - but certainly the kind of regional conflicts we already see, and there will be more to come.

Starmer’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review spelt out how, in the view of the military tops, the UK could no longer plan for only having to fight distant overseas conflicts against ‘non-state’ forces – like the Taliban in Afghanistan - but that direct “state-on-state war” was back on the agenda. The war between Russia and Ukraine was, not without justification,  identified as a turning-point pointing the way for the wars to come. The so-called post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ when, after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe, military spending fell, is well and truly over.

That’s the background to why the recent NATO summit agreed to commit its members to boosting military-related spending to 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035 – 3.5% on ‘hard defence’ and another 1.5% on top on military-related infrastructure and ‘civil preparedness’. And Burnham’s government is fully behind that target. In fact, his new Chancellor, John Healey, was one of those that put the final knives into Starmer, resigning as his Defence Secretary, complaining that Starmer’s defence investment plan didn’t go far enough. Now Healey will be preparing for an October Budget that will increase military spending, while making cuts elsewhere.

Even to meet Starmer’s original defence investment plan means finding £6.8 billion from unidentified cuts to other departments’ previously agreed capital budgets and another entirely unfunded £4.7 billion on top. To raise military spending to the full 3.5% of GDP would mean an extra £25 billion a year. Reaching the 5% target would produce a ‘security budget’ of £151 billion in today’s values, bigger for example than the combined government budgets for housing and education from pre-school to university.

How do we stop this drive towards war? Well, working-class struggle can limit what the capitalists are able to get away with. The memories of Vietnam still weigh on even a President like Trump in pulling back from sending ‘boots on the ground’ into Iran. In 2025, Italian dockers took strike action against the Gaza genocide. The Youth Strike is an initial step towards building mass opposition here.

But, in building that movement, whatever the horrors of war, we don’t make just a pacifist appeal for ‘peace’. We understand that war is an inevitable consequence of capitalism and that only a movement that aims at a complete change of system, to win a democratic world socialist planned economy that takes control of society out of the capitalists’ hands across the globe, can really end the threat of war.

But we also recognise that there will be many workers – including even some of the youth we come across at the schools and colleges – who will be swayed by the growing pro-war propaganda that Britain needs to defend itself, with Putin’s Russia being held up as the main threat. Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Putin hasn’t even been able to defeat Ukraine, let alone go further, say into the Baltic States. The war, and the failure of his initial supposedly speedy invasion plans – when the first Russian divisions had dress uniforms packed in their bags ready for their victory parades in Kyiv – has exposed Russia’s weakness, not its strength.

However, that war continues ever on, adding to workers’ fears, ones that are certainly being played on in countries nearer Russia, like Germany, where the government is looking to reintroduce military conscription. That is not yet on the cards here – at least not for the army, perhaps only as unpaid labour for the likes of Sainsburys! Those rising fears also explain the turnaround in public opinion in Finland from opposing NATO membership to overwhelmingly supporting it.

But the UK defence plans require building personnel numbers back up again – there’s now only 74,000 in the British army. Hence, the army recruitment videos and the moves to boost cadets in schools – as well as the “Defence Universities Alliance” being developed to strengthen links between universities and the arms companies.

There will be a mixed consciousness amongst workers we meet, one where we will have to be sensitive to people’s fears. Genuine socialists have always had to do so, especially of course at the start of an actual war, when the general mood will understandably be to fight against an invader. That was the mood of the Ukrainian workers that Putin underestimated when he first sent in his tanks.

Lenin’s position in World War One has often been caricatured as being just one of ‘defeatism’ – using his 1915 quote that “during a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government” – and that military defeats eventually lead to revolutionary upheavals (which did indeed prove to be the case). But this was Lenin bending the stick in speaking to his own Party members, to cut across the tide of wartime patriotism that had already seen Europe’s various socialist parties line up with their own imperialist governments.

In speaking to the wider working class, Lenin took a different approach, one that stressed that, in order to really fight for their freedom, workers needed to fight the capitalists too. And those capitalists couldn’t be trusted to fight the war, they were too busy making profits while sending soldiers to die in the trenches. But if the banks, industry and arms companies were nationalised under workers’ control, then not only would workers be in a better position to defend Russia, they would also be defending a Russia that they owned and controlled - a workers’ state not a bosses’ one – from which they could appeal to the workers of other countries to do the same, and agree a genuine peace.

In Britain in World War Two, the supporters of Trotsky’s Left Opposition in the Workers International League – who played an important role not publicised in our school history books (!) – like campaigning for London Underground stations to be opened as bomb shelters – argued in the same way, that you couldn’t trust a reactionary Tory like Churchill to defeat Hitler and that what was needed was:

·      the arming and organising of the workers under their own control;

·      the election of officers by the workers;

·      control of production by the workers to end the chaos in the war industries;

·      the immediate nationalisation of the armament industry, mines, banks, railways, and big industry;

·      the granting of freedom and self-determination to India and the colonies and a Socialist appeal to the workers of Germany and Europe.

When we were in the leadership of the LPYS in the 1980s, we made similar demands, pointing out that the Tories had been supplying the Argentine dictatorship with arms only 10 days before the Falklands conflict, and calling for trade union rights for servicemen and women; the abolition of Courts Martial; the right to refuse to be used to break strikes; and to leave on contractual notice when you want to – like any other worker.

These are demands that might again be important ones to raise when a layer of young workers are conscripted to the army – not militarily but through having no other job prospects – particularly when, as in the past, they will be called upon to put down the strikes and unrest which will break out in working class communities. And, of course, there will also be workers in the arms industry themselves where the demand to protect jobs through a transition to other skilled work – not least in climate jobs – has to be linked to a demand for workers’ control and nationalisation.

That’s the background to the tumultuous period we are entering – and the November 20 ‘Fight For Our Futures, Not Their Wars’ walkout can be a step in building the forces needed to help fight for such a programme.

See also: 

Resisting the new militarism plans from the latest 'Socialism Today' magazine

and the Socialist Students website.

'Net zero’ is a trade union issue

In Britain and beyond, the summer of 2026 has been marked by record temperatures, deadly wildfires and drought, the inevitable consequences of climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels.

The UK Met Office reported that “daytime maximum temperatures across England and Wales are now roughly 3-4°C hotter than they would have been without human-induced climate change”, adding that “more than 2,700 people are thought to have died from heat-related causes during the May and June heatwaves in England and Wales”.Those figures will have been added to further by the ongoing high temperatures in July and August.

Not surprisingly, the latest IPSOS survey taken in the UK at the start of August found that three quarters of those polled expressed concern about climate change “with the majority of the population reporting personal daily disruption and anticipating recurring extreme weather events”.

Economists are warning of the effect on crop yields across Europe, adding further impetus to rising global food prices. More widely, continual global warming is a growing factor in the forced migration of millions of the world’s poor away from regions where their lives have become unsustainable.

Against this background, alongside the dwindling of North Sea oil and gas reserves, it has dawned on wide sections of the British capitalist class that a change of energy and climate policy is needed. In 2019, the then Conservative prime minister Theresa May first committed the UK to achieving a ‘net zero’ contribution to climate change by 2050. However, five prime ministers later, only limited steps have been taken to achieve this aim, despite even this target being insufficiently urgent given the scale of the global climate crisis.

In this context, the comments made by the leaders of two of Britain’s biggest trade unions, the GMB and Unite, back in June, could seem at odds with growing public concerns about climate change. They both spoke out against the possible appointment of Ed Miliband as chancellor in the new Andy Burnham government, suggesting he was too entrenched in his support for ‘net-zero’.

Gary Smith, GMB general secretary, took particular aim at how Miliband, as Energy Secretary in the Starmer government, had imposed at least a temporary ban on new drilling licences for gas and oil under the North Sea. Smith blamed Labour’s energy policy as being one of the reasons why some of his members were voting for Reform, claiming that “sacking thousands of workers who currently work in the North Sea is economic madness. It’s more akin to Thatcher and what she did to Middlesbrough in the 1980s”.

Sharon Graham, newly re-elected general secretary of Unite, told the Observer newspaper that Miliband “would be a noose around the neck of what we need to do on jobs”, adding that “if you’ve got somebody in there close to the decision-making where they’re not pro-worker in their gut, then that’s a problem for a party that’s supposed to be the party of workers. A lot of the left has now become a middle-class project. It now needs to work for the working class”.

In making those comments, both union leaders risk aligning themselves with the pro-fossil fuel sections of big business, including Tony Blair, who have been lobbying for the Burnham government to lift the North Sea drilling moratorium. Their argument, that a drilling ban just means relying on more expensive gas and oil imports instead, is being heavily promoted in sections of the media.

But, as well as just further delaying the urgent action needed on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, in a world market where prices are set globally, allowing the fossil fuel giants to keep drilling under the North Sea will do nothing to bring down workers’ energy bills (see Socialism Today No.299, July-August 2026).

It would temporarily retain some limited employment in the North Sea industries, but these jobs will inevitably continue to decline since the main gas and oil reserves have long since been exhausted. However, millions of well-paid, secure and vitally necessary jobs could be created by mass investment in green energy, transport, insulation and associated manufacturing sectors. That is the investment that trade union leaders should be calling for, and mobilising their members to demand.

It is also wrong to give any credence to the idea that taking action on global warming is somehow being ‘middle-class’ or ‘anti-worker’. It is the working class and poor who will continue to suffer worst from the dire effects of climate crisis. The costs of food inflation will soon be hitting the pockets of union members, to follow the months of summer heat.

It is true that too many environmental campaigners look to individual consumption as being the cause of the crisis. Such an approach puts the blame on working-class consumers who are simply struggling to get themselves to work in their polluting second-hand cars or to heat their poorly insulated homes, despite rising fuel bills.

Instead, the key to action on climate change is winning a change in who owns and controls production. It requires an end to private capitalist ownership governed by short-term profit and the limits of individual nation states, and its replacement by public ownership under democratic workers’ control that would allow a socialist planned global economy where investment could be directed to the millions of ‘climate jobs’ that are so urgently needed.

Trade unionists and socialists shouldn’t be seen to be supporting any of the competing wings of the capitalist class, neither the pro-‘Big Oil’ right populists playing on workers’ fears – like Trump and Farage – nor the supposedly ‘green’ capitalists represented by politicians such as Miliband.

After all, Miliband may have overseen an increase in contracts being issued for renewable energy projects, but only after the Starmer government had halved its initial ‘green investment’ plans. This included slashing plans for a major home insulation scheme which could have directly benefited many working-class families, and the workers implementing the scheme.

Ailing British capitalism, and crisis-ridden world capitalism as a whole, will never be able to provide the planned investment required to repair the catastrophic climate damage that its anarchic production has produced.

In that sense, Sharon Graham was right to criticise Miliband for wanting “to let go of one rope before we get hold of another… Ed only seems to be interested in one part of the equation, which is to reach the target, but doesn’t seem to be interested at all, in any way shape or form, in the jobs that will replace those that go”.

But it would be a mistake to raise any expectations that somehow Burnham will be different and that there is any prospect of a Burnham government being any more ‘pro-worker’ than Starmer’s was. As another pro-capitalist politician, Burnham will end up attacking jobs, pay and conditions at the behest of British big business.

The only way to promote both vital needs – protecting working-class living standards at the same time as protecting the environment – is for trade union leaders to break with all of the pro-capitalist politicians and help ensure that the working class has its own political voice, and can elect workers’ representatives who will demand the socialist plan of production that our future depends upon.

Martin Powell-Davies

Published in 'Socialism Today' Issue 300 September 2026

Also see the accompanying article: https://socialismtoday.org/global-warning-the-environmental-record-of-greens-in-power

The Collapse of Stalinism - Its Causes and Consequences

‘The Collapse of Stalinism – its Causes and Consequences’ is the latest book to be published by Mentmore Press. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the dictatorial, bureaucratic Stalinist regimes of Russia, Central and Eastern Europe foundered, allowing capitalism to be restored. It also explains how that collapse fuelled a global ideological offensive against the ideas of socialism, one that still weighs heavily on working class consciousness and organisation today.

At the time, capitalist journalists, politicians and academics gleefully proclaimed that socialism had been beaten once and for all. The American writer, Frances Fukuyama, declared that it marked “the end of history … the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.

However, in today’s unstable world, that capitalist triumphalism has been replaced by pessimism for the future of their system. The task for the world’s working-class is to rebuild the mass parties needed to organise a united struggle for a socialist world. It also requires learning from the horrors of Stalinism, to ensure that capitalism is replaced by genuinely democratic planned economies, this time freed from top-down bureaucratic control.

Stalinism, the negation of Bolshevism

This book is written to help workers learn those lessons. Like last year’s well-received publication ‘Great Revolutionaries’, it brings together a collection of articles by Peter Taaffe, the former general secretary of the Socialist Party. They are presented in three sections, tracing the rise and fall of the Stalinist regimes, before analysing the ‘post-Stalinist’ world of today.

The book’s first section, ‘Stalinism, the negation of Bolshevism’, exposes the brutal character of these dictatorial, bureaucratic regimes. They had nothing in common with the workers’ democracy being built after the victory of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Sadly, in the absence of successful socialist revolutions taking place in more economically developed countries, the Russian workers’ state was left isolated. It was left to try and develop a socialist plan with an already weak economy, one then further weakened by civil war, as imperialism sought to strangle the revolution at birth.

The book outlines how civil war stretched the economy and the Red Army to its limits. It also severely undermined the fledgling Soviet democracy too. With many of its worker delegates killed on the front lines, the soviets – or workers’ councils - were no longer able to keep the officials and bureaucrats in charge of state administration sufficiently in check.

Growing in confidence, the bureaucracy then manoeuvred to ensure the Communist Party met their needs, not those of the workers and poor peasants. In Stalin, they found a leader that would deliver for them.

The book includes reviews of the memoirs of Leopold Trepper and Petro Grigorenko, who both became opponents of the regime. They chillingly spell out how the bureaucracy were so fearful of the working class moving to overthrow them, that anyone suspected of providing even the mildest opposition was brutally suppressed.

Trepper’s memoirs confirm that the remaining genuine revolutionaries, the supporters of Leon Trotsky in the ‘Left Opposition’, “fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did”. But, Trepper adds, “they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism.”

The Revolution Betrayed

The book summarises Trotsky’s analysis of the rise of the bureaucracy, stressing that Stalinism was only able to consolidate its power by purging all traces of genuine Bolshevism. 

In 1936, in ‘Revolution Betrayed’, Trotsky described how “two opposite tendencies are growing up out of the depth of the Soviet regime. To the extent that, in contrast to a decaying capitalism, it develops the productive forces, it is preparing the economic basis of socialism. To the extent that, for the benefit of an upper stratum, it carries to more and more extreme expression bourgeois norms of distribution, it is preparing a capitalist restoration”.

The hopes of socialists basing themselves on Trotsky’s analysis was always that it would be the progressive tendency, towards socialism, that would prove dominant. Indeed, while the productive forces within the Stalinist states still appeared to be growing, it was not just with hope, but with a degree of expectation, that Marxists predicted that the working-class would push aside the parasitic bureaucrats and carry out a political revolution.

Indeed, as the book describes, the workers’ revolt that shook the foundations of the Stalinist regimes in 1989 started by raising demands for democratic reform, not capitalist restoration. That had also been the case in earlier struggles, such as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and those raised at the height of the ‘Solidarity’ movement in Poland in 1980.

However, not least because of Stalin’s mass purges, the forces that could have provided these movements with the necessary revolutionary leadership had been wiped out. As Peter puts it, “the collective memory of the masses and their ability to gather themselves together to challenge the Stalinist regime in a conscious way was eliminated”.

By the 1980s, bureaucratic misrule had brought economic growth in the Stalinist states to a complete standstill. In comparison, the capitalist economies ‘over the wall’, then going through a temporary economic upswing, appeared to a growing layer of workers to offer a better chance of prosperity and freedom of expression. In these circumstances, the opposite tendency identified by Trotsky, towards capitalist restoration, grew ever stronger.

Why did Stalinism collapse?

The articles in the second section, ‘Why did Stalinism collapse?’, describe the growing crisis within the Stalinist regimes and how Mikhail Gorbachev stumbled around to try and find a way of preventing an uprising from below. 

Right up until the 1960s, despite the overheads of bureaucratic mismanagement, the advantages of a planned economy meant that the Soviet Union experienced economic growth that easily outstripped world capitalism.

The main ‘Achilles heel’ of the Stalinist economies was quality. Without workers and consumers being able to influence production through workers’ democracy, substandard goods were churned out. Thanks to the bungling, corruption and bad planning inherent in the undemocratic top-down system of economic management, there was also huge wastage and massive uncontrolled environmental degradation.

Such ‘commandism’ could achieve some success when the main task was to develop an initial industrial infrastructure, but it was impossible to plan and set the prices of thousands of commodities from on high in a more developed economy.

Genuine socialist planning requires genuine workers’ democracy. As Peter explains, “That would mean workers’ control in the factories and workers’ management at national, regional and local levels. This would harness all the talents, ideas and views for the future development of society by the producers, consumers, and by society as a whole.” He adds a telling warning that a top-down approach, borrowed from Stalinism, risked undermining workers’ support for the Chávez government in Venezuela.

The articles also show how, as events developed, Peter, alongside the majority of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), recognised that, rather than events leading to a political revolution to restore a democratically planned socialist economy, there was an increasing danger of capitalist restoration.

For many workers, comparing their lives with what could be glimpsed through the shop windows of the West after the fall of the ‘Berlin Wall’, the attractions of capitalism appeared to be overwhelming. It led to a social counter-revolution with the liquidation of what remained of the planned economies of Russia and Eastern Europe.

The consequences of Stalinism’s collapse

The third section of the book, ‘The consequences of Stalinism’s collapse’, discusses the consequences of this return to capitalism.

For the working class of Russia, what followed was not the improvements that they had hoped for, but an unprecedented economic collapse. Peter’s book explains the ‘gangster capitalism’ that emerged as Putin and other members of the former regime fought with each other for control of the nation’s wealth and natural resources.

The working class internationally also paid a heavy price. The collapse of the planned economies dealt a heavy blow to the idea that society could ever be organised in a different way to capitalism.

Some former ‘lefts’, such as Paul Mason, concluded that Stalinism’s collapse meant the end of any prospect of socialism. One of the articles in the book answers Mason, noting that, yes, the immediate effect had been to strengthen world capitalism, providing new markets and a source of cheap skilled labour. But, as Peter writes, “reality always has two sides. The other side of this development was the enormously increased potential power of the working class, which has already been glimpsed but will be shown dramatically in the mass upheavals to come”.

As is increasingly obvious today, the collapse of Stalinism in no way resolved the crisis facing global capitalism. Nor did workers suffer the kind of crushing defeat inflicted by fascism in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the ideological effects of the collapse of Stalinism still need to be overcome.

The book explains how it led to the wholesale political collapse of the leaders of the workers’ organisations. They abandoned socialism - even as a historic aim - and fully embraced capitalist ideas. Internationally, former workers’ parties imploded into openly pro-capitalist formations. In Britain, that took the form of Blair’s ‘New Labour’.

In the trade unions too, most leaderships sought to accommodate themselves to the system, adopting ‘social partnership’ with the employers, to the detriment of their members. This timidity from the union leaders, together with the abandonment of the historic aim of socialism by the leaders of the workers’ organisations, enormously bolstered the confidence and the power of the capitalists. It allowed them to restrict the share of the world’s wealth going to the working class back to levels not seen since before the first world war.

Peter points out that “It is true, as Lenin argued, that the Labour Party through its pro-capitalist leadership has always been a ‘bourgeois’ party … However, Lenin also emphasised that … through its trade union base in particular, it was also a working-class party. … In office it was subject to the pressure of the unions and therefore could potentially endanger the interests of capitalism”.  He gives the examples of the unions refusing to allow Ramsay MacDonald to impose ‘austerity’ under the 1931 Labour Government and, similarly, preventing Harold Wilson’s 1969 government from introducing the ‘In Place of Strife’ anti-trade union legislation.

Mass workers’ parties bring workers together to build struggles and reach conclusions together. Their absence has made it harder for working-class consciousness to catch up with the severity of today’s capitalist crisis, let alone to understand the need to overthrow it. The kind of mass socialist and communist parties that existed in the 1930s, at least formally standing in opposition to capitalism, do not exist at the present time.

That’s why in the articles in this book, and in the pages of ‘the Socialist’, we have consistently stressed the importance of rebuilding mass workers’ parties, and for them to include a firm Marxist current too. Such a core is vital to provide the theoretical clarity needed to stand up to right-wing leaderships and to oppose the damaging influence that supporters of capitalism will seek to introduce into them.

Peter concludes the introductory article to the book by saying: “As the most optimistic but also the most realistic trend within the labour movement, we recognised what had occurred was a significant setback for the workers’ movement. But we were not thrown off balance. The collapse of Stalinism did not eliminate the inherent contradictions of capitalism … But the very weakness of the labour movement encouraged the confidence, indeed the overweening arrogance of the ruling class, which overreached itself in the bubble economies of the last two decades. …

“1989 did not bury socialism or Marxism. It temporarily blurred the vision of the working class, which is now being cleared through the present crisis and the incapacity of this system to solve even the basic requirements of the mass of the peoples of the planet”.

This book can hopefully play a role in helping to clear that fog.