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Post by dodger on Oct 17, 2013 12:04:39 GMT
Robust demolition of Trotskyists' lies about the Soviet Union, 28 Jan 2013
This Will Podmore review is from: Six Trotskyite Lies Every Would-Be Radical Should Know (Paperback)
The six big Trotskyist lies that Borsella chooses to explore are these. That compared to Trotsky, Stalin played little part in the October revolution and the war of intervention. That Trotsky, not Stalin, was supposed to be Lenin's `heir apparent'. That Stalin corrupted Marxism-Leninism: Trotsky was the true Bolshevik. That Soviet industrialisation under Stalin was a disaster. That collectivisation was disastrous and genocidal. That Stalin inflicted a genocidal famine on the Ukraine.
In each case, Borsella presents the evidence that refutes these claims. For example, Trotskyists echo the Foreign Office propagandist (and Thatcher speech-writer) Robert Conquest, who lied that Stalin killed 6.5 million Ukrainians, a number he chose in order to back his lie that Stalin killed more people than Hitler did. Conquest devoted just one sentence to the genocidal Nazi occupation of the Ukraine, calling it `a period between two waves of Red Terror'. His `scholarly' references included 15 to a novel!
In fact, all the Trotskyist lies echo, where they did not launch, State Department and Foreign Office lies about the Soviet Union. Generally, Borsella's book is a useful, if all too brief, exposure of these lies.
Those who want to find out more about Stalin are advised to read Ludo Martens' Another view of Stalin, Grover Furr's Khrushchev lied, and Stalin's own writings, including the classic collections, On the opposition and Problems of Leninism.
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Post by dodger on Oct 19, 2013 13:33:04 GMT
For some a joke. Others find them to be beyond parody. The S W P. 
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Post by dodger on Oct 20, 2013 1:27:29 GMT
A Trotskyist, i.e. false, view of history, 13 Dec 2011
This Will Podmore review is from: A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (Paperback)
The late Chris Harman was the editor of the Socialist Workers Party's paper. In this book, he attempted to write a Marxist history of the world.
His method was to rely on good Marxists who did the best studies of each period of history. So for the rise of class societies, he relied on V. Gordon Childe, for the ancient world, on Geoffrey De Ste Croix, for the Middle Ages, on Rodney Hilton, for the great transformation, on Christopher Hill and J. V. Polisensky, for the spread of the new order, on George Rudé, and for the world turned upside down, on Albert Soboul, Marx and Engels. Unfortunately, when it came to the 20th century, he relied only on Trotsky and Tony Cliff.
How did Harman, this self-proclaimed revolutionary, deal with the 20th century's defining revolution, the great October revolution? He wrote that in 1926 Stalin adopted `a completely new doctrine known as `socialism in one country''. This ignored Lenin's article The United States of Europe slogan, where he wrote, "Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country taken separately. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organised its own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world."
Harman wrote that Stalin represented a ruling group whose `chief characteristic was inertia and complacency'. Yet this inert and complacent group "did break the backbone of private capitalism in Russia, and later did the same in Eastern Europe and China." Even Harman had to acknowledge `the economic success of the USSR' in the 1930s and its `rapid industrial advance' in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Harman's account of World War Two is provably false (see Grover Furr's Khrushchev lied for details). Harman wrongly wrote that Stalin ignored the Nazi threat and the warnings of war, that the Red Army was `utterly unprepared', that Stalin `panicked' when the Nazis attacked, that he turned to `chauvinism', that he `deported whole peoples' for no good reason, and that he ordered Soviet forces to stand back from Warsaw when the Nazis crushed the rising. Harman denied that World War Two was a war between progress and reaction, between democracy and fascism, and even doubted that the Grand Alliance was anti-fascist.
His analysis of revolution is fatally flawed by his embrace of the counter-revolutionary notion of state capitalism. Capitalist classes have used the state to develop the economy, but when a working class used the state to develop the economy, the SWP denounced it as practising capitalism. Any use of the state has, apparently, to be capitalist. This dogmatic opposition to the state is anarchism, the polar opposite of Marxism.
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Post by dodger on Oct 20, 2013 16:19:12 GMT
Useful corrective to Deutscher's hagiography, 24 May 2010
This Will Podmore review is from: Trotsky: A Biography (Paperback)
This biography of Leon Trotsky is a useful corrective to Isaac Deutscher's hagiography.
Service points out just how hostile Trotsky was to Lenin over the years. In 1912, Trotsky called Lenin an `intriguer', a `disorganiser' and an `exploiter of Russian backwardness'. Trotsky wrote in 1913, "the entire edifice of Leninism at the present time is built on lies and falsification and carries within itself the poisonous inception of its own dissolution."
Service shows how Trotsky betrayed the Revolution and the Soviet Union. Just to take one example of Trotsky's treachery: in April 1939, he called for an independent Ukraine, separated from the Soviet Union. As Service pointed out, "Any Ukrainian political revolution would inevitably have weakened the USSR's defensive capacity." At the same time, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was also proposing an independent Ukraine.
Why? Both Trotsky and Chamberlain sought to use the Ukraine as bait to encourage Hitler to attack the Soviet Union, just as Chamberlain at the Munich conference had used the Sudetenland to help Hitler to destroy Czechoslovakia.
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Post by dodger on Nov 5, 2013 9:29:35 GMT
Counter-revolutionary attack on Leninism, 14 July 2009
This Will Podmore review is from: All Power to the Soviets : Lenin 1914-1917 (Vol. 2) (Paperback)
Trotskyists like Cliff claim to be the only real, orthodox Leninists. They claim that all Marxists were for `international socialism', `international revolutions', until Stalin in 1924 suddenly adopted the `socialism in one country' approach. But on this key question, Trotskyists suppress what Lenin actually did and wrote.
In 1915, Lenin wrote, "Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country taken separately. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organised its own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world." (The `United States of Europe Slogan', Collected Works, Vol. 18, p. 232.)
In 1918, Lenin wrote, "I know that there are, of course, sages who think they are very clever and even call themselves Socialists, who assert that power should not have been seized until the revolution had broken out in all countries. They do not suspect that by speaking in this way they are deserting the revolution and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the toiling classes bring about a revolution on an international scale means that everybody should stand stock-still in expectation. That is nonsense." (Speech delivered at a joint meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Moscow Soviet, 14th May 1918, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 9.)
These statements prove that Lenin, not Stalin, originated the idea that workers would have to build socialism in one country.
Cliff, and his acolytes, are examples of the 'sages' "who think they are very clever and even call themselves Socialists, who assert that power should not have been seized until the revolution had broken out in all countries."
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Post by dodger on Jan 6, 2014 15:17:10 GMT
Trotskyist approach to history of the period 1935 to 1945, 6 Jan 2014
This Will Podmore review is from: Two Steps Back: Communists and the Wider Labour Movement, 1935-1945 (Paperback)
This little book is an attack on the CPSU, which at the time led the only socialist country in the world.
The CPSU changed its line when the facts changed. Before Hitler's attack, it did all it could to prevent such an attack, proposing an alliance against Hitler.
From November 1939 to March 1940, the Chamberlain government sent more arms to Nazi-backed Finland to fight the Soviet Union than it sent to France, Belgium and Holland to resist the Nazis. As Conservative MP Leo Amery said, Chamberlain's `major Finnish plan' was supposed to lead to `a sort of glorified Crimean War brought up to date', that is, all united against the Soviet Union. As late as 28 August 1939, the British Ambassador to Germany, Nevile Henderson, told Hitler that the British government `would be willing to accept an alliance with Germany'.
So when the Chamberlain government rejected the Soviet Union's proposal of an alliance against Hitler, the Soviet government signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany. The Pact broke the general Western blockade of the Soviet Union, maintained ever since 1917. It gave the Soviet Union time to strengthen its defences and to get equipment previously unavailable.
The Trotskyists, echoing the bourgeoisie, at once denounced this Pact. It was never an alliance, despite the lies of bourgeois historians - and Trotskyists - ever since.
When Hitler attacked, the Soviet Union united everyone it could to defeat the attack. The Trotskyists continued to denounce the war as imperialist.
The British working class made huge sacrifices to defeat the Nazi threat to Britain's freedom, working long hours, in poor conditions, under intense bombing, to produce the goods needed to win the war. At the same time, workers organised to improve their wages and conditions, and made plans to create a better Britain after the war was won. During the war, AEU membership rose from 354,000 to 635,884.
Workers took unprecedented steps to assert control of their workplaces, and engineering workers took the lead. Workers at Napiers were, in August 1941, the first to demand Joint Production Committees of workers and management to improve production for the war effort. By 1943, engineering workers had set up 4,500 committees in the industry, undercutting the employers' vaunted `right to manage'. Stafford Cripps, the Minister of Aircraft Production, later reported that the Committees made `a significant contribution to the war effort'. In 1944 Reg Birch of the AEU called for Production Committees in every factory to determine what needed to be done to rebuild Britain after the ravages of war. The Trotskyists denounced the JPCs as class collaboration.
Throughout the Second World War, the CPGB pushed for production above all, overriding union rights. Some CP members even got OBEs for their efforts. General Secretary Harry Pollitt in particular played right into the employers' hands. He asked in 1944, "How can any decent man voluntarily lose work at a time like this! To do so is a crime. ... Avoidable absenteeism, lock-outs, or strike stoppages ... are daggers in the back of the men in our own class in Europe, of the workers and soldiers of the Soviet Union, of the people in Britain who depend on us ..." He told striking Welsh miners to be less `selfish'. In 1942, he told CPGB members in Tyneside not only to vote against strikes, but also to break strikes: local members would have advised their shop stewards to come out on strike with the rest of the union members, but Pollitt came and instructed them to blackleg.
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