LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Stalinism
built 655 days ago
To understand Bolshevism, and in a narrower sense Stalinism, it is not enough to follow the superficial and often silly controversies between Stalinists and Trotskyites. After all, the Russian Revolution embraces mote than just the Bolshevik Party. It was not even initiated by organised political groups but by spontaneous reactions of the masses to the breakdown of an already precarious economic system in the wake of military defeat. The February upheavals 'started' with hunger riots in market places, protest strikes in factories, and the spontaneous declaration of solidarity with the rioters on the part of the soldiers. But all spontaneous movements in modern history have been accompanied by organised forces. As soon as the collapse of Czarism was' imminent, organisations came to the fore with directives and definite political goals.
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[T]he material situation in which Stalinism was born was almost the opposite of that expressed in its theoretical starting point. The Russian working class, which in 1917 had reached the highest level of consciousness and revolutionary struggle yet seen anywhere in the world, had, by 1921, virtually ceased to exist. In the course of the Civil War the vast majority of the most militant and politically conscious workers had either been killed in battle or raised to the position of state officials. Under the combined impact of the Civil War, the Revolution itself, and the World War that preceded it the Russian economy had collapsed utterly. Gross industrial production fell to 31 per cent of its 1913 level, large scale industrial production to 21 per cent, production of steel to 4.7 per cent, the transport system was in ruins, epidemics and famine raged. The total of industrial workers fell from about three million in 1917 to one and a quarter million in 1921, and those that remained were politically exhausted.
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The conception of a static Stalinism has serious political consequences. A society whose internal motion does not compel fundamental change offers little hope for socialism. The masses may rebel against hardship and despotism, but they are not driven to develop revolutionary forms of self-organization and acquire socialist consciousness.
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Stalinism today has less attractive power than it previously possessed. Before they fall victim to the wiles of Stalinism the masses will try again and again to find some alternative means of expression within the labour movement. The lag of events and the long delay in the development of a revolutionary mass movement in Britain, act as a fortunate historical accident in the given condition.
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In assessing Sartre’s writing, Sartre Against Stalinism does not attempt to examine Sartre’s philosophical ideas fully. One can, after all, either consult the texts themselves or look at one of the many commentaries devoted purely to explaining Sartre’s philosophy. However, Birchall does devote sections to discussing Sartre’s philosophy. First, Birchall looks at Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism, originally a 1945 lecture, which ... contains a debate that took place between Sartre and the Marxist Pierre Naville. Another section focuses on The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), its introduction The Problem of Method (1957), and shorter texts that were written during this period.
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The overthrow of Stalinism in the areas in which it holds sway will most likely be a long term process. It is true that Stalinism remains a regime of permanent crisis. In it, the element of socialism in the state economy is in permanent contradiction to the Bonapartist state apparatus and the privileged caste whose interests it serves. Thus, the regime of Stalinism in Russia itself bears a striking resemblance, even more than the Bonapartism of bourgeois origin, to the Caesarism of Ancient Rome in the epoch of the decay of the Empire. In that it bears a close resemblance to fascism. In the long run, the regime of Bonapartist autocracy is incompatible with the economic base set in being by the October Revolution.
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Stalinism