Anti-Stalinist left

The anti-Stalinist left comprises various kinds of left-wing politics opposing Joseph Stalin, Stalinism and the actual system of governance Stalin implemented as leader of the Soviet Union between 1927–1953.

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It may also refer to centre-left wing opposition to dictatorships, cults of personality, totalitarianism and police states, all being features commonly attributed to Stalinist regimes such as Kim Il-sung, Enver Hoxha and others, including in the former Eastern Bloc.[1][2][3]

Trotskyism
Main article: Trotskyism
A Diego Rivera mural (Man, Controller of the Universe) depicts Trotsky with Marx and Engels as a true champion of the workers' struggle.

Associates and followers of Leon Trotsky were organized in the Left Opposition within the Communist parties before they were purged in the Moscow Trials in the 1930s. Trotskyists differ from most other ideological manifestations on the "anti-Stalinist left" in that they, like Marxist–Leninists, also claim to be Leninists. Subsequently, his followers formed the Fourth International in opposition to the Stalinist Third International. Trotsky saw the Stalinist states as deformed workers' states, where a political structure gave most workers very little power in decision making.[4]

Trotsky and his followers were very critical of the lack of internal debate among Stalinist organizations and societies and political repression enacted by Stalinist governments (i.e. the Great Purge); nationalist elements of Stalinist theory (the Socialism in One Country thesis, for example, adopted by Stalin as state policy), that led to a very poor revolutionary strategy in an international contest (and breaking with the internationalist traditions of Marxism); and its totalitarian, bureaucratic, obscurantist, personalistic, and high repressive methods (which Trotsky called "inquisitorial", in a speech that was read and broadcast in English). Less orthodox Trotskyists and other critics of Stalin have seen it as a new form of class state, called bureaucratic collectivism (James Burnham, Milovan Đilas and Max Shachtman) or as state capitalist (Tony Cliff, C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya).[5]

Left communism and libertarian Marxism
Main articles: Left communism and Libertarian Marxism

The communist left was initially enthusiastic about the Bolshevik Revolution, but lines of tension between the communist left and the leadership of the Communist International opened up very soon. Left communists and libertarian Marxists such as Sylvia Pankhurst and Rosa Luxemburg were among the first left-wing critics of Bolshevism.[6][7][8][9]

Anarchism
Main article: Anarchism

Anarchists such as Emma Goldman were initially enthusiastic about the Bolsheviks, particularly after dissemination of Vladimir Lenin's pamphlet State and Revolution which had painted Bolshevism in a libertarian light. However, the relations between the anarchists and the Bolsheviks soured in Soviet Russia (for example, in the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion and the Makhnovist movement). Anarchists and Stalinist Communists were also in armed conflict during the Spanish civil war. Anarchists are critical of the statist, totalitarian nature of Stalinism and Marxism–Leninism in general as well as its cult of personality around Stalin and subsequent leaders seen by anarchists as Stalinists such as Kim Il-sung or Mao Zedong.

Democratic socialism
Main article: Democratic socialism

A significant current of the democratic socialist movement has defined itself in opposition to Stalinism. This includes George Orwell, H. N. Brailsford,[10] Fenner Brockway,[11][12] Michael Harrington[13] and the Independent Labour Party in Britain (particularly after World War II). There were also a number of anti-Stalinist socialists in France, including writers such as Simone Weil[14] and Albert Camus[15] as well as the group around Marceau Pivert. In America, the New York Intellectuals around the journals New Leader, Partisan Review and Dissent saw Soviet Communism as a form of totalitarianism in some ways mirroring fascism.[16][17]

Titoism
Main article: Titoism

At first, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the regime it established through the successful war of liberation against the Axis invaders by the partizans was modeled on that of Soviet Union, and Tito was considered to be "Stalin's most faithful pupil". However, in 1948, the two leaders broke apart and Tito's aides (most notably Edvard Kardelj, Milovan Đilas, and Moša Pijade) began a theoretical effort to develop a new brand of Socialism that would be both Marxist–Leninist in nature and anti-Stalinist in practice. The result was the Yugoslav system of socialist workers' self-management, also known as Titoism, based on the organizing of every productive activities of society into "self-managed units".

Đilas, particularly, wrote extensively against Stalinism and was radically critical of the bureaucratic apparatus built by Bolshevism in the Soviet Union. He later grew critical of his own regime as well and became a dissident in Yugoslavia. He was imprisoned but later pardoned.

Non-Communist Left

The Non-Communist Left (NCL) was a designation used in the United States Department of State and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) referring mainly to leftist intellectuals who had become disillusioned by Stalin.[18] Arthur Schlesinger Jr. highlighted the group's growing power in a popular 1948 essay titled "Not Right, Not Left, But a Vital Center".[19] Another such publication was The God that Failed (1948), a collection consisting of six essays from former Communists who remained on the left which was edited by R.H.S. Crossman.

Winning over and harnessing the power of the NCL became central to the US propaganda struggle against the USSR during the early Cold War.[20] This strategy directly inspired the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), as well as international journals like Der Monat and Encounter; it also influenced existing publications such as the Partisan Review.[21]

Under these auspices and consequently in fashionable intellectual circles in the United States and Europe, anti-Stalinism became "almost a professional stance", "a total outlook on life, no less, or even a philosophy of history."[22] Prominent figures in this group include Arthur Koestler, Melvin J. Lasky, Dwight Macdonald, Sidney Hook, Stephen Spender, Nicolas Nabokov, and Isaiah Berlin. (The NCL notably excluded Jean-Paul Sartre because it could not accept his individualistic existentialist views.)[23] Key organizers of the CIA's Non-Communist Left operation, titled QKOPERA, included Frank Wisner, Lawrence de Neufville, Thomas Braden, Charles Douglas Jackson and Michael Josselson.[24] Other supporters within the intelligence community included George F. Kennan, W. Averell Harriman and General Lucius D. Clay.[25]

The NCL began to lose its cohesion and its appeal to the CIA during the radicalism of the late 1960s. Opposition to the Vietnam War fractured the coalition, and 1967 revelations of CIA funding (by Ramparts and others) were embarrassing for many of the intellectuals involved. Soon after the story broke, Braden (with tacit support from the CIA) wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post which exposed CIA involvement with the Non-Communist Left and organized labor.[26][27] Some argued that this article represented an intentional and final break of the CIA with the NCL.[28]

New Left

The emergence of the New Left and the new social movements in the 1950s and 1960s led to a revival of interest in alternative forms of Marxism. Figures associated with British cultural studies (e.g. Raymond Williams), Italian autonomism and workerism (e.g. Antonio Negri), French groups like the Situationist International (e.g. Guy Debord) and Socialisme ou Barbarie (e.g. Cornelius Castoriadis) as well as the magazine Telos in the United States, were examples of this.

An anti-Stalinist left emerged in the former Soviet bloc in the early 1990s.[29][30]

Notable figures

See also

References
  1. Dennis H Wrong The American Left and Cuba Commentary FEB. 1, 1962
  2. Julius Jacobson Reflections on Fascism and Communism. Socialist Perspectives, Edited by Phyllis Jacobson and Julius Jacobson, 1983.
  3. Samuel Farber, Cuba since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011
  4. "Class Nature of Eastern Europe" Resolution Adopted by the Third Congress of the Fourth International—Paris, April 1951
  5. Martin Oppenheimer The “Russian Question” and the U.S. Left, Digger Journal, 2014
  6. Weitz, Eric D. “‘Rosa Luxemburg Belongs to Us!" German Communism and the Luxemburg Legacy.” Central European History, vol. 27, no. 1, 1994, pp. 27–64. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4546390.
  7. Schurer, H. “Some Reflections on Rosa Luxemburg and the Bolshevik Revolution.” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 40, no. 95, 1962, pp. 356–372. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4205366.
  8. PIETER C. VAN DUIN. "'Political life is dying out': Rosa Luxemburg's critique of Bolshevism and the Bolshevik revolution". Studia Politica Slovaca. XI (1): 20–34. ISSN 1337-8163. Retrieved 3 June 2019.
  9. Paul Mattick (27 July 2005). "Rosa Luxemburg in retrospect". libcom.org. Retrieved 3 June 2019.
  10. F. M. Leventhal, The Last Dissenter: H.N. Brailsford and His World, Oxford University Press, 1985, ISBN 0-19-820055-2 (pp. 248–49).
  11. "Brockway ... sought to articulate a socialism distinct from the pragmatism of Labour and the Stalinism of the "Communist Party".David Howell, "Brockway, (Archibald) Fenner, Baron Brockway" in H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds.) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000. ISBN 0-19-861411-X (Volume Seven, pp. 765–66)
  12. Paul Corthorn, In the shadow of the dictators: the British Left in the 1930s. Tauris Academic Studies, 2006, ISBN 1-85043-843-9, (p. 125).
  13. Isserman, M. (1996), MICHAEL HARRINGTON AND THE VIETNAM WAR: THE FAILURE OF ANTI‐STALINISM IN THE 1960S. Peace & Change, 21: 383-408. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0130.1996.tb00279.x
  14. "In August 1933 Weil carried these reflections further in a widely read article in the avant-garde, anti-Stalinist Communist review Revolution proletarienne... John Hellman, Simone Weil:An Introduction to her thought. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982 ISBN 0-88920-121-8 (p.21)
  15. "From well before the Algerian war the Communists in particular held against Camus not so much his anti-Stalinism as his growing refusal to share political "positions" or get into public arguments..." Quoted in Tony Judt,The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century. University of Chicago Press, 2007 ISBN 0-226-41419-1 (p. 92)
  16. Maurice Isserman Steady Work: Sixty Years of Dissent: A history of Dissent magazine, Dissent, January 23, 2014
  17. Wilford, Hugh (2003). "Playing the CIA's Tune? The New Leader and the Cultural Cold War". Diplomatic History. Oxford University Press (OUP). 27 (1): 15–34. doi:10.1111/1467-7709.00337. ISSN 0145-2096.
  18. Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), pp. 62–63. "The Agency had been toying with an idea for a while now: who better to fight the Communists than former Communists? In consultation with Koestler, this idea now began to take shape. The destruction of the Communist mythos, he argued, could only be achieved by mobilizing those figures on the left who were non-Communist in a campaign of persuasion. The people of whom Koestler spoke were already designated as a group—the Non-Communist Left—in the State Department and intelligence circles."
  19. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. (4 April 1948). "Not Right, Not Left, But a Vital Center". New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 19 September 2012.
  20. Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), p 63.
  21. Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), pp. 162. "The headquarters of 'professional' anti-Stalinism was the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, and the magazines whose editors who sat on its board, namely Commentary, the New Leader and Partisan Review."
  22. Philip Rahv, quoted in: Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), pp. 161–2.
  23. Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), p 121. "Sartre was the enemy not just because of his position on Communism, but because he preached a doctrine (or anti-doctrine) of individualism which rubbed against the federalist 'family of man' society which America, through organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was promoting. (The Soviet Union, by the way, found Sartre equally uncongenial, branding existentialism 'a nauseating and putrid concoction.')"
  24. Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), pp. 99.
  25. Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), pp. 66.
  26. Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), pp. 401–402. "Richard Helms, who was now director of the CIA, was, according to Rostow's memo, aware of the article, and conceivably of its contents also. The CIA had ample time to invoke its secrecy agreement with Braden, and prevent him publishing the piece."
  27. Braden, Thomas (20 May 1967). "I'm glad the CIA is 'immoral'". Saturday Evening Post. pp. 10–14. Retrieved 19 September 2012.
  28. Saunders, Cultural Cold War (1999), pp. 398–399.
  29. Andy Blunden 1993 The Class Struggle in Russia: III: The Left in Russia Stalinism: It's [sic] Origin and Future.
  30. Hillel H. Ticktin End of Stalinism, Beginning of Marxism May–June 1992, Against the Current 38
  31. Seymour Martin Lipset Neoconservatism: Myth and Reality John F. Kennedy-Institut tür Nordamerikastudien, der Freien Universität Berlin, p.8 "The anti-Stalinist left intellectuals on the whole continued to identify themselves as socialists or liberals during the post-war period. The cold war of the late forties and early fifties was led in the free world by liberals and leftists, e.g., Harry Truman, Clement Attlee, Ernie Bevan, Kurt Schumacher, Guy Mollet, and Haakon Lie."
  32. Brottman, Mikita (2014). The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Literary, Royal, Philosophical, and Artistic Dog Lovers and Their Exceptional Animals. Harper Collins. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-06-230463-6. Retrieved 20 June 2020.
  33. Birchall, Ian H. (2004). Sartre Against Stalinism. Berghahn Books. pp. 5–8. ISBN 978-1-78238-973-6. Retrieved 20 June 2020.
  34. Brick, Howard (1986). Daniel Bell and the decline of intellectual radicalism : social theory and political reconciliation in the 1940s. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 60–61, 90, 148. ISBN 978-0-299-10550-1. OCLC 12804502.
  35. Collins, Cath (2010). Post-Transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador. Penn State Press. p. 206. ISBN 978-0-271-03688-5. Retrieved 20 June 2020.
  36. Wasserstein, Bernard (2007). Barbarism and civilization: a history of Europe in our time. Oxford University Press. pp. 509. ISBN 978-0-19-873074-3.
  37. Michael HOCHGESCHWENDER "The cultural front of the Cold War: the Congress for cultural freedom as an experiment in transnational warfare" Ricerche di storia politica, issue 1/2003, pp. 35-60
  38. Birchall, Ian H. (2004). Sartre Against Stalinism. Berghahn Books. p. 17. ISBN 978-1-78238-973-6. Retrieved 20 June 2020.
  39. Milani, Tommaso (15 June 2020). Hendrik de Man and Social Democracy. Springer Nature. p. 109. ISBN 978-3-030-42534-0. Retrieved 22 June 2020.
  40. Birchall, Ian H. (2004). Sartre Against Stalinism. Berghahn Books. p. 15. ISBN 978-1-78238-973-6. Retrieved 20 June 2020.
  41. Christopher Phelps On Socialism and Sex: An Introduction New Politics Summer 2008 Vol:XII-1 Whole #: 45
  42. Wald, Alan M. (1987). The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. UNC Press Books. ISBN 978-0-8078-4169-3. Retrieved 12 June 2020.
  43. Dulles, John W. F. (2011). Brazilian Communism, 1935-1945: Repression During World Upheaval. University of Texas Press. p. 135. ISBN 978-0-292-72951-3. Retrieved 20 June 2020.
  44. Collins, Cath (2010). Post-Transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador. Penn State Press. p. 205. ISBN 978-0-271-03688-5. Retrieved 20 June 2020.
  45. Chapman, Rosemary (1992). Henry Poulaille and Proletarian Literature 1920-1939. Rodopi. p. 83. ISBN 978-90-5183-324-9. Retrieved 22 June 2020.
  46. Berry, David (2002). A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917-1945. Greenwood Press. p. 168. ISBN 978-0-313-32026-2.
  47. Fulton, Ann (1999). Apostles of Sartre: Existentialism in America, 1945-1963. Northwestern University Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-0-8101-1290-2. Retrieved 22 June 2020.
  48. Susan Weissman Victor Serge: `dishonest authoritarian', `anti-worker anarchist' or revolutionary Bolshevik?, Against the Current, issue 136, September–October 2008
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