[lbo-talk] Angela Davis a Stalinist?

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Thu Aug 13 04:39:39 PDT 2009


Sheldon writes:

'Perhaps we need other more general descriptive categories for these things? Like "authoritarian state socialist" or something like that? I guess "Stalinist" is a simpler stand in for a phrase like that regardless of how imprecise it is.'

'Stalinist' really was a Trotskyist term of abuse, and is a category of the Trotskyist critique of the official (or 'Stalinist) Communist movement (and of society in the USSR). Trotskyists did not really think that Khruschev's secret speech changed the fundamental character of the movement, which they continued to call Stalinist.

That irritated supporters of the (reformed) Communist parties, since they thought that they had addressed the problems of Stalinism.

The argument is falling into the past, now, but I think that Stalinism was a useful characterisation, turning not on authoritarianism (which was an effect not a cause) but on Stalin's adoption of the policy of 'Socialism in one country' which threw the development of the international communist movement into reverse. It was the substitution of the policy of stabilising the Russian economy for one of revolutionising capitalism that led to the repressive measures against the party and later against Russian society.

Davis was in the same position as a lot of radicals. Critical of their own societies, they invested the Soviet Union with virtues it did not possess. But that was a secondary question to the one of what policy to pursue in America, which is where one ought to begin to analyse the CPUSA's strengths and weaknesses.



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