This is the third part of what is now a four-part series reflecting on Douglas Greene’s, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024). The review-essay examines the New Kautskyists, Trotskyism, Stalinism, and the challenges facing socialists in the 21^st Century. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Red Spark.

PART THREE: NEOLIBERALISM, STALINISM AND THE EMBATTLED LEFT

Douglas Greene’s book The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge provides an important defence of revolutionary Marxism. The book begins with a survey of Kautsky’s life and work, includes valuable surveys of the critiques made by Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky of Kautsky, and concludes by confronting the New Kautskyists directly. Along the way, it reaffirms that Lenin was indeed the theorist of a “party of a new type,” rejects their challenge to Trotsky’s narrative of 1917, refutes Eric Blanc’s account of the failed Finnish Revolution and his political projects, asserts that Lenin’s study of Hegel after 1914 did signal a break from the mechanical evolutionism of the Second International. That is to say: Greene rejects practically every innovative challenge that the New Kautskyists have proposed (see Part One of this series). We have already seen (in Part Two) how Greene’s methodology and consequent structure limits his ability to defend Leninism, as both a strategy and the organisational conclusions this implies, and drives him to mistakenly cling to, among other things, Trotsky’s account of the 1917 revolution. Still, Greene’s defence of the revolutionary projects remains substantial.

For all the claims and counterclaims of the decade-and-a-half debate, the perceptive reader can’t help but finish Greene’s book with a vague sense of disquiet something feels missing. And indeed, something is missing. Any theoretical revival, after all, is typically a response to problems of the moment, challenges in the here and now. Assessing a revival is thus never simply a matter of adequate “understanding.” People do not come to their positions by logic alone. In fact, compelling argument is mostly a secondary factor in the political opinions of the broad masses, which are also responses to the problems of the day. Research indicates that social networks (understood through network theory) are usually central to most people’s worldviews. So, there’s something more than a little idealist in all the close reading and quote swapping, to which I’ve contributed not a few words myself. For the same reason, no one in this debate is likely to change their mind through argument alone. If the argument in this series is at all convincing, it is because it also speaks to problems posed by the reader’s own context and political practice, perhaps because it clarifies what has otherwise sat uncomfortably for the reader beforehand, or because it aligns with certain other conclusions or opinions they have already adopted. For a Marxist then, no comprehensive riposte can operate purely on the level of text and history, since there are other motives and drives at play on all sides. Lenin’s original ascendancy over Kautsky came not only at the hands of his arguments but because the October revolution lent those arguments a decisive materiality.

In the absence of such political victories, a more properly materialist assessment must turn to the questions the Kautsky revival is seeking to answer. Some of these are openly posed, others remain unspoken, existing as a kind of political unconscious an entire complex of problems and questions which are ever-present. They include: Can mass action, protest in the public sphere (the streets, the city squares, public institutions and workplaces) bring about social change? If so, should it be a central focus or an auxiliary plank in a representative (through elected structures, institutional forms) rather than direct-democracy strategy (where every participant is encouraged to become an active agent). Is the working-class a convincing agent for socialism? What has happened to this class in the last fifty years? Can we even speak of it as a unitary subject (“the working class), when it is so fractured and stratified, so marginal to people’s own sense of identity? What explains the failures (and more contained successes) of the socialist movement in the Twentieth Century? Is it possible (and under what specific conditions?) to build a “combat party” as the Third International described Leninist parties?¹ Where are the examples of such successful parties and why has it proved so difficult to build them? What changes to the capitalist structure and the landscape of political possibility has neoliberalism wrought? Is the neoliberal age a new phase of capitalism, with its own structures of political practice, or are the questions and answers fundamentally the same as a hundred years ago?

What follows can only be a cursory sketch of these problems, which requires an historical account, however brief. This is mounted in the spirit of curiosity rather than fixed certainty, an open approach rather than a closed one. Lenin himself was himself a great rethinker, applying his fundamental principles (the core propositions of a “research program” as Imre Lakatos would call it; in his case the critique of opportunism, say) in new and arresting contexts. None of us is a Lenin. We can only do our best.

THE POST 1990 WASTELAND AND THE FLIGHT OF THE MARXISTS

Not by accident did the New Kautskyism arise in the post-1990 epoch. The years 1989-91 marked the collapse of the Eastern bloc, which provided a devastating blow to the slow and ongoing disintegration of “traditional communist” (Stalinist and Moscow-oriented) parties in the imperialist core, many of whom voluntarily dissolved themselves. Capitalism won an ideological ascendancy unseen for perhaps a century. Socialism was “dead,” nothing but an extremist folly, at best a nice idea that would never work in practice, at worst the ideology of psychopaths and sociopaths, intent of plunging humanity into a new dark age for their own nefarious desires. Unpalatable anti-communist biographies of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin flooded the scene (including those by Dmitri Volkoganov, Robert Service, Victor Sebestyen). This was the “end of history,” as Fukuyama famously declared. From now on it was capitalism all down the line. Intoxicated by their ascendancy, the entire Western Establishment (the political and institutional “ideological apparatuses” of parties, media, public and private institutions, etc) adopted neoliberalism with the kind of relish of a relapsed addict purchasing their coveted drug.

The neoliberal era dated from just over a decade earlier, in the Thatcher-Reagan years, as both a response to the end of the long boom in the 1970s. Economic rationalism was at that time combined by the progressive wing of the elites with a strategy of integration/destruction the radicalism that had defined the “long Sixties” (1958-1975 roughly). Certain social democratic parties initiated the process of combining socially progressive policies with economic rationalism, the Australian Labour Party in the vanguard, inspiring others in the 1990s such as the Blair “third way” British Labour Party to abandon all pretence to traditional left reformism. These social-democratic parties transformed themselves into “neoliberal progressive” ones, helping to drive the process where unions were marginalised and attacked, layers of 1960s activists, now reaching middle age, were sucked into the Establishment institutions on the condition that they abandoned all reference to class and socialism. The task was to develop legislation and legal reform (equal opportunity legislation), government policy, educational frameworks and trainings, affirmative action and cultural recognition rather than institutional change all to improve the position of marginalised groups (women, gays and lesbians, First Nations people, etc). What eventually became “Contemporary Identity Politics” known in recent times as “woke” was born in the Faustian pact of former Sixties radicals with the former social democratic parties. Neoliberal progressivism was born.

Demobilised or bought off, disoriented by the collapse of communism, the radical Left seemed down for the count. When there appeared to be a radical resurgence in the imperial core around 2000-2001, in the form of the anti-Globalisation protests that began in Seattle and led to a “summit hopping” movement, the 11 September World Trade Centre attacks shifted the terrain once more. Mainstream focus now fell on the War on Terror, spurring a renewed ideological crusade by the Right, led by the US and used to justify new bloody imperial wars (Iraq, Afghanistan). The anti-Globalisation movement evaporated and a generation of potential activists were deflected away from Left politics. A decade later, the Occupy movement fought over the same terrain of increasing wealth inequality and global injustice. But bereft of long-term Left cultures and organisations, absent at least one generation of socialist activists, it was unable to sustain itself. The Black Lives Matters campaign burned bright for a time. While more recently, the Free Palestine movement has rumbled to life. Apart from university occupations, particularly in the US, this campaign has faced the same historic conundrum: without ongoing Left cultures of activism, it has not been able to elevate itself above a respectable campaign. In Australia at least, it has been characterised by a strategic deficit, a lack of a sense of direction or goal, and has remained principally a manner of bearing witness. All this is to say, the general trend in the imperialist core, over the three and a half decades from 1990, has been one of retreat for the Left, marked by a decline in activism and a great historical forgetting of Left traditions and experiences, of strategy and tactics, of the principles and goals of movement activity. In this period of political quietude, politics has occurred mostly through representational forms, not on the streets but in parliament and in boardrooms, through negotiations between representatives. The age of wars remains but the age of revolutions appears to have passed. From where we stand, the pre-1990 world is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Neoliberalism’s political blitzkrieg, utilising a never-ending flood of pro-capitalist propaganda, much of which documented in forensic detail the horrors of the Stalinist show trials, the Gulag, the purges (but not the improvements in health care and education, the elimination of unemployment, the contradictory but visible capacity to modernise) forged a new ideological “common sense.” Leninism and Marxism were to blame for Stalinism’s failures. This didn’t need to be stated; it was a starting point for most, instinctually felt rather than consciously adopted. Every socialist felt the pressure to soften one’s radicalism, to take on softer edges, to not be too strident. For the few clinging to some sort of Marxism, the opportunity was in alternately playful or pitiless high theory, as in Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou, divorced from practical political projects. For such cases, Marxism has become a little like your favourite fiction genre (“I’m into crime and you’re into science fiction; I’m into Zizek but you’re into Badiou”). The majority fled to post-Marxism, to the ideas of Antonio Negri or Ernesto Laclau and Chantelle Mouffe, farewelled “class” since now we lived in a world without fixed subject positions, without the “essentialist” and “reductive” ideas like “objective class interest.” Modern social space was a discursively constructive landscape, open and free.² The post-Marxists provided the theoretical inspiration for various projects of some significance: Podemos in Spain (for whom Laclau was especially important), the French Left Front (Mouffe is known as an “intellectual” inspiration)³, and other “third party” projects around the world Die Linke, El Bloco, the Finnish Left Party, the Australian Greens. The most important of these new Left formations, Syriza, experienced a breathtaking ascent in the shadows of the 2008 financial crisis, followed by an equally vertiginous collapse as it capitulated to the neoliberal “Troika” (the European Commission, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund).

This great wave swept over the entire left, eroding all, and eventually reaching the last bastions of revolutionary intransigence in imperialist countries finally striking Stalinism’s Jungian shadow, the Trotskyist movement. After 1990, Trotskyists had faced an unprecedented situation: their historic opponents, the official Communists had either dissolved themselves or shrunk to ineffectual networks or irrelevant shadow memories. The field was now open, a path cleared for them to take centre stage, as the Trotskyists had often claimed was all they needed. In this a moment of unprecedented opportunity, the Trotskyist movement had a crisis of confidence. Without a Stalinist antagonist, so central to Trotskyism’s self-narrative, against whom their practical activity had typically revolved (like a satellite orbiting a planet), they lacked a compass. Used to intervening from the margins against a more dominant opponent, they faced the responsibility of finding their way to actual leadership. Now words (critiques, texts, written programs) were less important than the practical capacity to judge the conjuncture, the potential of the moment, and from here to assess what to do next. Since the movements were at a low ebb, this often took the form of short-term projects and collaborations, of initiatives and patient construction of new activists (not just those of your group, but of a wider layer too). The questions when in this situation were very different. The answers needed to be also.

TOWARD THE BROAD LEFT WORKERS PARTY: ZINOVIEVISM AND KAUTSKYISM

Those who took their newfound responsibility seriously avoided the dangers of sectarianism at a much heavier cost. The answers they generated came not as developments and enrichments of their historic “programs” but rather from the abandonment of them. On a theoretical plane, this took the form of a debate around “Zinovievism” around 2003. Playing a central role was the late Louis Proyect, a former member of the United States Socialist Workers Party (once the jewel in the crown of international Trotskyism), organiser of the “Marxmail” discussion list, and known for an anti-sectarianism so strident that it practically turned into the very thing it critiqued. Proyect and others “discovered” that the “Leninism” was a myth, an invention of the Third International (Comintern) in 1924-5, under the leadership of Gregory Zinoviev, a part of the policy of “Bolshevisation.” According to this view, an early Stalinist movement, and its Trotskyist opponent, encouraged communist parties to embrace a new homogeneous and monolithic form, secured by new organisational structures and norms. This inflexible and undemocratic “party of a new type” was, they insisted, contrary to the practice of the Bolsheviks’ under Lenin, who were open to multiple currents within one party, who permitted open debate and conflict, carried out in front of the broader movement. Proyect began his article with: “There really is no such thing as ‘Leninism’. This was a term coined in the 3rd International almost based on a caricature of the Bolshevik Party.”⁴

This argument was the intellectual correlate to a more general movement toward “open,” broad party formations. A leader of the orthodox Trotskyist Fourth International, Murray Smith, was prominent in this charge. Smith held up the experience of the Scottish Socialist Party, which for a few years experienced stunning success, as a path for small Marxist groups to break free from their isolation. The SSP was led by former members of the Militant tradition, who had already played a leading role in the anti-poll tax movement, and with tactical nouse initiated a broad socialist party that, in the conditions of Scotland, grew rapidly and won six positions in Parliament. No serious socialist could afford not to take notice of the success and in a period of isolation, it was impossible not to feel the siren’s lure of a tactical path to quick success.⁵ This example seemed to suggest there was space for “strategically non-delimited” socialist organisations i.e., ones that held the question of reform and revolution in suspended animation a question for a later time, as things played out through the struggle. In the new open political field, so the reasoning went, this type of party would capture disillusioned Leftists flooding from the former “Social Democratic” parties, and “new left” movement activists such as those around the anti-globalisation campaign, looking for a home. When the SSP imploded in 2004, sparked by a personal scandal surrounding its figurehead, this was interpreted as an unlucky event rather than indicative of any problems with the project, the most obvious one being that the historic Marxist cadre had been drawn entirely into the responsibilities of leading the group, of being parliamentary representatives, and the tasks of Marxist activist development (education, propaganda, on-the-ground political development and training, conscious development of new layers of leadership) were abandoned. If this foundational work, that is an ever-present task for Leninists that can never be abandoned, has occurred, then a Leninist group should be able to weather a reversal and reconsolidate. Assuming it honestly assesses the changed conditions.

Infected by the same mood, and with close connections to the SSP, the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia (DSP) launched into a regroupment of the radical and activist Left called Socialist Alliance. Enthusiasm was sufficient to draw in various smaller groups, a significant number of independent socialists, a few union leaders. But the project collapsed rapidly. The DSP, disoriented by the rapid shrinking of the alliance until they were the last standing, behaved as if nothing had changed. The idea of regroupment somehow transitioned into an argument for a broad left party (like the SSP, they abandoned the task of cadre development). Since that space was already taken by the Australian Greens, the consequence was eerily familiar: the liquidation of the party into something resembling a network and the consequent liquidation of the Leninist politics into softer and more socially acceptable ones. This political hara-kiri of the once largest Marxist group in Australia was unnerving to watch. Unlike with hara-kiri, sadly, honour was not restored.⁶ Others went through almost identical steps: the Ligue Communist R volutionnaire plunged into the broad Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste in 2009. With the space for a Broad Left Party already taken by Melanchon’s Left Front, the results were predictable: collapse rather than extension, and eventually a split in 2023 under the pressure of this failure.

None of this, of course, is an argument against tactical involvement in broad left parties who wouldn’t want to operate in a context of a mass workers party like the SPD at the turn of the Twentieth Century, before the conservatisation settled in? Nor is it an argument for Leninists to stand aside when such parties burst onto the scene as in the case of Syriza before its collapse. In this sense, broad parties are somewhat akin to movements in general, and the role of Leninist groups would be to become their best builders and here, there is no reason why Leninists and Kautskyists might not find themselves comrades in the same group. But for Leninists, the Broad Left Party is a tactic to connect to broader forces that are emerging, and that allows a positive reconstruction of political forces at that moment. In other words, it is more appropriate in times of upsurge. It is not a strategy. Turning it into even a medium-term tactic when the conditions for it are absent will send you out on the ocean in a rudderless boat: only luck will save you from being swept away by the waves of history. What is interesting is not so much that this impulse to broader parties predates the New Kautskyists, since these intermediary formations seem to be one typical form that breaks from Establishment capitalist political arrangements take and hence must be central to Leninist’s theory and practice. Rather, what is interesting is that in the “Zinovievism” debate we find the same form of argument being made by those who lay claim to being orthodox Marxists: “Leninism” is an invention from around 1924 by the Stalinists and Trotskyists. The underlying effect was the same, to erase Leninism as a discrete theory, as a century-long sectarian diversion.

If Leninism appeared to be no option, “high theory” academic Marxism too fancy and disembodied, Post-Marxism too much of a capitulation to postmodernism and identity politics, where could a socialist look for theoretical answers?⁷ Who would offer us light in this dark passage? Who might offer inspiration that socialist politics, rather than post-modernist ones, has a future? From the shadows stepped the figure of Kautsky, who offered blessed relief for the lost, the battered, the uncertain. Kautsky offered something no other significant socialist thinker besides Marx and Engels could: an almost unique opportunity to neatly sidestep practically the entirety of Twentieth Century socialist history, with all the rivers of blood, the betrayals of socialists, the crimes and intermittent victories of Stalinism, the sectarianism of Trotskyism. That was a century of cruel historical ironies and confusing ambiguities, when revolutions had the maddeningly combined trait of victory in defeat or defeat in victory. Extreme sophistication was needed to simply understand, let alone to avoid error, complicity, or simplistic denunciation of everything or anything. After all, everything seemed compromised. Rather than constructing a nuanced account of the Spanish Civil War, to capture the complex contradictions at work, in which none of the anarchist, Stalinist or pseudo-Trotskyist forces were all good or bad but rather the situation was more complex and ambivalent, one could reframe the socialist dilemma in a way where this was set aside for good. Kautsky, after all, predated all this. He has no blood on his hands in his pre-1914 iteration at least. Like a bridge over troubled water, Kautsky laid himself down.

A revived Kautsky became suddenly attractive to some lost souls of socialism particularly in the brief flashes of excitement generated by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn as British Labour Party leader and the challenge of Bernie Sanders to the Establishment Democrats. For a moment there seemed to be a parliamentary break from the neoliberal Establishment, through which socialist activists might engage. For these few (and here Lars Lih is the exception), Kautsky’s rediscovery seems more akin to a revelation. Recalling Yeats, they cry out: “Surely some revelation is at hand! Surely the Second Coming is at hand!” Like all revelations, the new vision is connected to their sense of loss and dislocation, to the unanchored and heeling ship of Twenty First century socialism, at the very same moment it tries to sweep that world view with its troubled sensitivity, away.

To carry this off, they present a more developed version of the “Zinovievist” argument that Leninism was an invention of Stalinism, Trotskyism, and now, in the new iteration, also of the Hegelian Marxists like Korsch, Lukacs, Gramsci, and, from a later generation, Lucio Colletti. One account dates the “myth” to Stalinism’s historically falsified 1938 The Short Course in Party History. Another to the 1920 “Twenty-One Conditions” adopted by the Third International designed to separate revolutionary parties from reformist ones.⁸ Lars T. Lih, in the vanguard of the New Kautskyists as always, suggests that three books “laid the ideological groundwork for the Lenin cult by turning Lenin into a theoretical innovator of genius and a heroic rebel against his own socialist camp.” These were “all published in 1924: Foundations of Leninism by Iosif Stalin, Lenin by Georg Luk cs, and Lessons of October by Lev Trotsky.”⁹ Leninism is thus a concocted “myth,” invented in kind of bad faith, for pragmatic and factional reasons serving each inventor. Leninism is idolatry. The Twentieth Century can be effectively bracketed as a series of misadventures and diversions away from the “orthodox Marxism” of Marx, Engels, Kautsky. In this view, it was a tragic Leninist detour into disaster from which we have now been liberated. Wouldn’t that be a nice story to tell?

LOCATING THE BREAK: WHAT WAS STALINISM?

The New Kautskyists are right to assume there were significant political and theoretical breaks occurring in the early years of the Twentieth Century socialist movement. They offer us formulations like: Lenin didn’t break with Kautsky, Kautsky broke with Kautsky (around the First World War). Or that Lenin may have broken with Kautsky, but only when he took a sectarian turn in the early years of the Comintern. Since Leninism as a discrete theory here disappears, in someone like Lars T. Lih’s view, Stalinism and Trotskyism are really breaks from Kautskyism (we should here remember Lih’s claim that 1917 was a “victory for Kautskyism.”)

This break in 1924 is quite different to the one the Kautskyists locate, and to understand it, we must start with Lenin’s last political battle, which began in 1922 and was cut short by his premature ill-health. During these years, Lenin had already started to reassess some of his presuppositions, most clearly his overconfidence (shared by all) that there would be impending revolutionary victories on the continent. In Russia, he became concerned about the disengagement of the working class, which for his entire adult life had been a motor force of activity, and the consequent bureaucratisation of the Russian State and the Communist (formerly Bolshevik) party.¹⁰ His last engagements were with this rising bureaucratic caste. He had come into conflict with Stalin on the Georgian question, when Lenin had accused Stalin of being a Great Russian Nationalist, a terrible presentiment of what was to come. On the Georgian “incident” Lenin had written that, “The Georgian [Stalin] who is neglectful of this aspect of the question, or who carelessly flings about accusations of “nationalist-socialism” (whereas he himself is a real and true “nationalist-socialist”, and even a vulgar Great-Russian bully), violates, in substance, the interests of proletarian class solidarity” and that “The political responsibility for all this truly Great-Russian nationalist campaign [in Georgia] must, of course, be laid on Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.”¹¹ Krupskaya, Lenin’s closed comrade and wife then clashed with Stalin, who was attempting to limit Lenin’s knowledge of events, which caused Lenin to break off personal relations with Stalin. Finally, Lenin wrote in his “Testament”: “I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc.”¹² Before he could adequately prepare, let alone launch, his planned political assault on this rising bureaucratic trend, Lenin suffered his last stroke. Having battled ill-health, for once he hadn’t built around himself a core of fellow-thinkers.¹³ Krupskaya had of course been central, but otherwise, only Trotsky had been briefly brought into fold. When the 1923 Congress came around, Trotsky made a fatal mistake: he compromised with the rising Stalinist faction, accepting political adjustments on formal policy (such as the national question) without insisting on organisational changes to reflect these (i.e., the removal of Stalin or any of his apparatchiks, etc). That is, he took no significant steps in the organisational battle over the leadership bodies and apparatus. By 1924 the fight was over. The Stalin faction had won decisive control of the upper reaches of power, from which they continued to break politically and organisationally from Leninism.

After 1924, Trotsky built on Lenin’s embryonic analysis of the rising bureaucracy, developing a fully-fledged materialist understanding of the phenomenon. At its best it was a subtle and sophisticated attempt to defend the gains of the Revolution and the workers’ state and at the same time to explain its dictatorial and undemocratic form, its excesses and horrors. That is: there was something to be defended here and also something to be critiqued. Stalinism played this same contradictory role internationally, as the bureaucratic regime often subordinated international revolutionary movements to their own caste and national interests, which included both defending and developing various struggles at times and at others limiting or hindering them. Stalinism’s history is thus not unremittingly negative: it fought many important battles, won many important gains, created important cultures of anti-capitalism. But it also undermined many movements, played an undemocratic role in many struggles, obscured the truth and distorted the past, presided over historic defeats (such as in Germany in 1933 and Spain in 1936-9). Over the Post-War period, many Communist parties transitioned toward mass organisations that resembled the German SPD rather than the Bolshevik party. Many were bland affairs, such as the French or the CP USA. They were typically more two-sided than the Trotskyist movement claimed, both constructive and destructive at the same time in similar ways to the SPD and other Second International parties. From 1924 onward, then, Leninism could not be the theory du jour of Stalinism without significant distortion. Thus, we see the widespread dissemination of Lenin’s works accompanied by a systematic departure or rejection of them.¹⁴ This is the break that begins in 1924.

Though the Trotskyist movement documented many of the ways the Stalinists enacted this break, it would be wrong to describe this as simply a Trotskyist concern. As we have noted, Lenin was the first to sense the significant danger in the form of the rising bureaucracy. At some point in Russia, practically the entire Bolshevik leadership besides Stalin himself tried to resist the rising bureaucratisation. The majority paid with their life, as a quick glance at the fates of the 1917 Bolshevik central committee membership reveals.¹⁵ Elsewhere, as significant a figure as Gramsci increasingly opposed the Stalinist policies, first in his famous 1926 letter sent to Russia that defended Trotsky, however diplomatically, which led to his rupture with Palmiro Togliatti, the PCI representative in Moscow who argued against it (and perhaps didn’t pass it on). Togliatti’s response enraged Gramsci, who left a furious message for Togliatti at the Russian Embassy in Rome, calling him, in an uncharacteristic outburst, a “maggot” (The story can be found in Rossana Rossanda’s The Comrade From Milan). After Gramsci’s arrest and imprisonment, his critique of Stalinism can be found in his writings against the “Third Period” of ultraleftism and in his lectures to PCI comrades in prison, which had to be cut short since it put him in danger at the hands of the increasingly Stalinised PCI.¹⁶ That is, every one of the three major figures of the Third International, as Tariq Ali puts it in The Dilemmas of Lenin, criticised Stalinism to one degree or another. From another continent, the Cubans have made their own, sometimes oblique critiques of Stalinism, including Guevara’s arguments for socialist humanism, their open attack on the early bureaucratic layer represented by their local “Stalin” (Anibal Escalante), their ongoing economic discussions.¹⁷ Internationally, the Cubans supported revolutionary movements in significantly less ambiguous terms to the Stalinists, sometimes against the local Communist party’s policies (Castro’s gift of an AK-47 to Allende was here symbolic, implicitly contradicting Chilean Communist Party’s popular front policy in Chile in 1973).¹⁸

TRANSCENDING HISTORIC SCHISMS: NON-SECTARIAN SOCIALISM

Since 1990, the socialist movement has faced the clear need to transcend its traditional schisms. If there were always more and less healthy forces associated with each current Stalinist, Maoist, Trotskyist, Marxist-Leninist, whatever the removal of the Eastern Bloc regimes has removed a significant barrier to greater unity. Now we find that the healthiest organisations come from all traditions and include “combat parties” and broader formations. They include former Maoist groups (Belgian Workers Party; several mass organisations in the Philippines), former official communist or Stalinist groups (important Indian parties) Trotskyist or ex-Trotskyist Groups (Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas in Argentina, NPA in France), radical reformist/socialist forces (Jacobin or the CPGB, the DSA or the Corbynites (while they lasted) La France Insoumise), broad left parties (NPA in France, El Bloco in Portugal or Die Linke in Germany), heterodox currents (the Party of Socialism and Liberation in the USA, groups in the Pink Tide in Latin America), the Cuban Communist Party, Luxemburgist groups (the IST in Australia and elsewhere) and others. More yet will emerge. Fidelity to only one tradition will, by its nature, cut you off from socialists leading struggles somewhere across the world this was the consequence of those who have tried to construct their own “international” following the collapse of the Third and this can only result in sectarianism.

Where does that leave us with the underlying questions with which we started? No answer to those fundamental problems of class and agency can occur without an adequate account of Stalinism.¹⁹ Yet this cannot provide the sole explanation, for reasons we will examine in Part Four, and that could imply that no positive socialist strategy could be applied while it lasted. But it is a crucial one. Stalinism does not feature in the New Kautskyists’ accounts, since it challenges the substance of their claims, which are based on an equation of Stalinism and Leninism. The failures of the Twentieth Century socialist movement, more properly due to the contradictory role played by Stalinism and its opponents, can be laid at the feet of Leninism, which is handily dated not from the 1902 What Is to Be Done? or Lenin’s 1912-16 tryptic of innovations (imperialism, labour aristocracy, bourgeois workers party/revolutionary party), but from the victory of Stalinism in 1924. This manoeuvre has its obvious attractions, not least in its consequent valorisation of Kautksy, Kautskyism and the parliamentary path to socialism. But as for my argument, this still doesn’t sweep away all the problems or questions facing the New Kautskyists themselves.

Leaving aside Stalinism itself, crucial problems of strategy remain around the issues of working-class agency, social structure, theories of crisis. These are problems all socialists still face. Gesturing toward the contradictory and at time deleterious role played by Stalinism is not positive proof of any alternative strategy. Negative critique is not the same as positive construction. Part Four of this series now turns to these questions which we all face. Perry Anderson once called the question of socialist strategy in the West the “riddle of the sphinx.” What walks in the morning on four legs, at midday on two, and in the evening on three? In the Greek myth, those who failed to answer correctly were devoured by the Sphinx. Such has been the fate so often in the socialist movement. If any answer must be conditional humility here is a virtue at least we can outline the question before we place our bets.

Footnotes

1. The “Theses on the Organisational Structure of the Communist Parties” were drafted for the Third Congress in 1921 by Otto Kuusinen, central leader of the defeated Finnish Revolution, under the supervision of Lenin. The theses read, “The peace demonstrations during the War taught us that even when such an action has been repulsed, if the goal is urgent and overriding and is inherently of continued broad interest to the masses, a genuine proletarian combat party, even if underground and quite small, cannot turn aside or hold back.” And: “The Party members are obligated always to conduct themselves, in all their public activity, as disciplined members of a combat organisation.” For more, see: https://johnriddell.com/2020/11/08/party-organization-in-lenins-comintern/. In Australia, certain “undergraduate Marxists” the type, whether on campus or not, resemble first or second-year university students at the mercy of the Dunning-Kreuger effect have recently claimed the term “combat party” comes only from the Trotskyist movement. In fact, as part of one of the central Comintern documents, it later became widespread as a description for the party of “a new type,” and can be found in across the revolutionary Left. For example, Maoist groups like Brazil’s CP Red Fraction use the term “combat party” here: https://www.demvolkedienen.org/index.php/en/t-dokumente-en/3298-el-maoista-lenin-and-the-militarized-communist-party. Ignorance is not a virtue. ↑
2. The two essential Marxist ripostes to the post-Marxists are Norman Geras’s essays in Discourses of Extremity and Ellen Meiksins-Wood’s The Retreat from Class. ↑
3. See: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/3037-chantal-mouffe-the-philosopher-who-inspires-jean-luc-melenchon?srsltid=AfmBOornFAkGZgSxS2uGU8cy7CwCyEuerGOeVqexcr8VFgjGtU8VF9K7 ↑
4. For a Leninist response, see Doug Lorimer’s “The Bolshevik Party and Zinovievism: Comments on a Caricature of Leninism,” here: https://www.dsp-rsp.org/doug-lorimer/2003-12-01/the-bolshevik-party-and-zinovievism-comments-on-a-caricature-of-leninism ↑
5. At the height of their success, I discussed with SSP leader Colin Fox, then touring Australia, how such a party might further develop beyond the loose and mass organisation to a more entrenched activist group that retained its mass character and popular appeal. In this context, we discussed the PCI as an example, both positive and negative, but came to no conclusions. ↑
6. One faction, including key leaders of the party, fought a rearguard action against this dissolution. Their documents can be read here: https://www.dsp-rsp.org/category/debates-in-the-dsp-2005-2007. ↑
7. The rejection of High Theory Marxism and Post-Marxism by the New Kautskyists is here, I suspect, related to their concentration specifically in Anglophone nations. There has always been a more theoretically mundane socialist tradition in England, land of trade unionism and “bread and butter” issues, of working-class communitarianism, with its “working class culture,” its pub singing, its brass bands, its local football teams all increasingly destroyed by neoliberalism. This is the world not of cutting-edge philosophical debate more typical of the continent, but of Tony Benn and Bertrand Russell, of George Orwell’s reification of plain-speaking prose, as if this in and of itself didn’t contain its own political unconscious. America’s national philosopher is John Dewey, pragmatist paladin (who presided over the “Dewey Commission” which investigated the Moscow Trials). Here then lies one explanation for the debate around Lenin’s philosophical “break” from “Second International” Marxism. The New Kautskyists suggest this is nothing but a myth; Greene and some other important theorists (including one Trotskyist current) affirm the claim. This debate will be revisited in the forthcoming “The Curious Case of Comrade Kautsky.” ↑
8. See: https://johnriddell.com/2022/04/20/the-cominterns-twenty-one-conditions-1920/ ↑
9. Unsurprisingly, this article by Lih is published on the GPBG’s website: 
   https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1507/a-hundred-years-is-enough/ ↑
10. Some of Lenin’s last documents focus on this struggle. Several can be read here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/subject/last/index.htm ↑
11. Lenin, “‘The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation’“, which can be found here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm ↑
12. The Testament can be read here: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol02/no01/lenin.htm ↑
13. See Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Battle for an essential account of this last stage in Lenin’s political life and his later The Soviet Century for a wider and more comprehensive account of soviet history. ↑
14. An excellent general survey is The Stalinist Legacy edited by Tariq Ali, while the best theorisation of the Soviet state in the 1920s and 1930s (besides Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed) is perhaps Isaac Deutcher’s Stalin (the most important chapter of which can be found in Ali’s book and which Losurdo relies on almost entirely for the first chapter of his biography of Stalin), which (together with Perry Anderson’s essay found in the book) are essential reading. Ali does us the favour of extending the collection to theorists from outside the Trotskyist tradition. Many other theorists have contributed however, so the Left-Eurocommunist Fernando Claudin’s The Communist Movement provides excellent discussion not only of the challenges facing Lenin, the spontaneism of Trotsky, but also traces many Stalinist errors. ↑
15. See the chart here: https://marxist.com/moscow-trials-a-lesson-from-history.htm ↑
16. For some of this, see Rjurik Davidson’s forthcoming Historical Materialism article on Gramsci and Trotsky. Gramsci increasingly defended his version of Leninism against Stalinism in ways that indicate that a critique is not the province of Trotskyists specifically but of Leninists. ↑
17. Many of these were disseminated in excellent books published by Australia’s Ocean Press (founded initially by ex-DSP members) over the years. ↑
18. See Jorge Jorquera’s article on the “Lessons of the Coup” for an outline of events: https://redflag.org.au/article/chile-1973-lessons-coup ↑
19. We can’t afford to wave away the issue, in the way that “E.Y.” in Australia attempts to do. E.Y., basing themselves on Losurdo’s recent book, simply counterposes all previous critiques of Stalinism (including that of various “Trotskyists”) with a materialist analysis which apparently naturally ends up in a support of Stalin. With this putative “materialism” without actually engaging with the very first materialist analyses (starting, as we’ve noted, with Lenin’s) E.Y. manages to wave away the elimination of the Bolshevik C.C., the purges, the Gulags, the international failures. Imagine Lenin’s response had E.Y. argued that he shouldn’t describe the Mensheviks, or Kautsky, or the Liquidationists as “betrayers” or “apostates”, but that he should focus on a “materialist” analysis as if the two cannot coexist, as if Marx himself didn’t combine a sense of individual or group responsibility (and hence moral outrage) with a materialist analysis of various subject-positions and contexts. E.Y.’s position could only be made by someone who has is not actually familiar with the materialist critiques mentioned here by Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, or the contributors to Ali’s book such as Christian Rakovsky or Deutscher. Ignorance is not a virtue, and it certainly doesn’t help a socialist to stake out a sensible position. See E.Y.’s position here: https://redantcollective.org/2025/03/10/red-books-day-stalin-the-history-and-critique-of-a-black-legend-by-domenico-losurdo/ ↑

Source: https://red-spark.org/2025/03/20/kautskyism-and-trotskyism-reflections-on-doug-greenes-the-new-reformism-and-the-revival-of-karl-kautsky-part-three/