But the efforts of the Halls, Berlinguers to clean up the image of the can't overcome the contradictions of a decaying Stalinism. These continue to untold inexorably. In the post-capitalist countries, there is, first of all, the contradiction between the nationalised means of production and bureaucratic plan -ning by the government which produces disproportions and dislocations owing to unfulfilled production goals, agricultural crises, waste etc. There can be no basic solution to these deepgoing problems other than the democratic control of economic planning by the workers themselves through their own councils.
A second contradiction is created by the very success of a planned economy, which brings a higher standard of living for the great mass of people and a rising cultural and political level. Their ability and desire to democratically govern themselves comes into growing conflict with the unbridled domination of the bureaucratic caste and its material privileges.
Third, each Stalinist party in power has its own material base and narrow interests, and in the struggle to maintain its own privileges, it must inevitably come into conflict with the bureaucratic castes of other countries. Once the guideline of national socialism - socialism one country - is adopted, and once there exists a voracious social caste that draws its tribute and privileges from the monopolisation of power in one workers state, by its very nature this caste must come into conflict with comparable This makes intelligible the Tito break, the Sino-Soviet dispute, the conflicts between the USSR and the Eastern European states. Far from being 'inexplicable accidents', they were inevitable. Such breaks are a fundamental feature of world Stalinism...
The fourth contradiction is that the sum of class-collaborationist policies in the world, in whatever guise, cannot control or stop the class struggle for any length of time. It continues to surge beyond the grasp of every bureaucrat, dictator.. or class-collaborationist.
Finally, another contradiction continues to trouble the Stalinist bureaucracies. This is the false claim that they 'represent! the Russian revolution... Their refusal to explicitly disown the teachings of the great founders of scientific socialism, their insistence on rationalising each iwist and turn of their endeavours with some bowdlerised quotation from Marx & Lenin, continually generates interest in genuine Marxism and Leninism. The challenge to go back to live up to Marx or Lenin is one of the ideological spurs to the coming political revolution. Meanwhile, twentieth-century history keeps pointing a silent finger towards the one name that can't be invoked by the Stalinists - that of Trotsky. Regardless of how much a Communist Party scrubs its surface, or with what bright new image it adorns itself, there is one thing it cannot do. It cannot genuinely rehabilitate Trotsky and the full range of his ideas. The rehabilitation of Trotsky would not simply mean the rehabilitation of a dead marxist, but the rehabilitation of living marxism. And that is a mortal menace to Stalinism, in any of its variants. New Left With this clarification of the characteristics of Stalinism, it is easier to evaluate some of the misconceptions concerning it. Many erroneous ideas are circulated in the 'new left', as people try to grapple with changing events and shifting alignments, the actions of the French and Italian CPs, the threats by the American rulers etc. 1. Stalinism is not synonymous with its origin in the rule of the parasitic Soviet bureaucracy in the late 1920s and 1930s, a period of great defeats in the international class struggle. The basis of Stalinism is determined by the needs and interests of a caste, not by conditions that gave rise to such a social formation. 2. Stalinism does not simply refer to that period when the subordination of CPs to the Kremlin was complete and total, when no-one could demur at Stalinis decisions no matter how brutal or irrational they might be. 3. Stalinism is not simply a term designating the kind of police-state apparatus that existed during the worst period of the Moscow trials and purges. 4. The phenomenon of Stalinism is not rest -ricted to the period of extreme poverty in the Soviet Union. That poverty was crucial to its origins but not to its maintenance. 5. The criticisms of the Italian and French leaders do not represent a qualitative turn, but the continuation of a process bound up with the weakening of world Stalinism. They represent an attempt by parties that remain Stalinist to the core to attract radicalising workers and io compete more effectively with the Social Democracy as labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, interested in maintaining the status. quo. 6. We have seen no transformation of Communist parties into either Social Democratic or centrist parties. Short of a deep - going split with Moscow (or Peking), both of these roads are blocked off. To move too far in either of these directions would mean the disintegration of a Stalinist party.