LETTER TO 'THE WEEKLY WORKER':

A REPLY TO HILLEL TICKTIN.

Tony Clark.

IN his otherwise laudable article on anti-Semitism, “Expressions of Decline”, Weekly Worker, February 3, 2005, Hillel Ticktin regards it as appropriate to castigate “Stalinism”. Like some anti-communist bourgeois historians he compares the Holocaust to the Stalinist purges, which without any modicum of evidence, he claims

 

‘... numbered many millions more than those who died in the Nazi camps’.

 

It is hard to see how this was the case since, in the main, the purges were directed against those Soviet institutions and organisations deemed to be nests of counterrevolution, and usually at the top echelons, and also those who had joined the communist movement for opportunist reasons.

 

Ticktin’s contribution gets worst when he copies the usual bourgeois conclusions, suggesting that Stalin

 

 ‘may have intended to emulate Hitler at the time of his death, by deporting all Soviet Jews to Siberia, but he died before he could do so’.

 

The reply to this is that, many bourgeois historians have always striven to paint Stalin in anti-Semitic colours, almost comparable to Hitler, but mostly forgetting to inform their readers that some of Stalin’s closest collaborators, people who he had worked with for years, were Jews, like Kaganovich for instance.

 

It is true that in the build-up to the biggest and most dangerous confrontation the Soviet Union would face with fascism, many rightists and pseudo-leftists were purged. However, this was hardly the expression of a failed transition, as Ticktin suggests, but rather an attempt to undermine counterrevolution.

 

On the question of the relationship between monopoly capitalism and fascism, using his Holocaust article to attack Stalin, Ticktin informs us that

 

‘The Stalinists defined fascism as the rule of monopoly capital by force, implying therefore, that it is a natural stage of capitalism’.

 

The reply to this is that, decay and decline is a natural stage of capitalism, as Lenin pointed out in his 1916 work, Imperialism the highest stage of capitalism, so that Marxist-Leninists, (Ticktin’s Stalinists) are perfectly right to view fascism as an inevitable stage in capitalism’s decline. In its decline, the capitalists attempt to suppress the proletarian revolution by fascism, which, by the way, need not necessarily take the overtly racist form as Nazism.

 

All this does not mean that the bourgeoisie love the fascists, as Ticktin goes out of his way to point out. The truth is, when it comes to saving capitalism, the bourgeoisie are placed in a situation where it may have no other option than utilising the services of a reactionary mass political movement, in other words, fascism. History shows that in times of genuine revolutions the army and police cannot be relied on, and usually melts away.

 

The most outrageous of Ticktin’s claims is one which we are all familiar with and amounts to blaming “Stalinism” for ‘preventing the working class revolution’.

 

But why does Ticktin fail to mention the role of social democracy? To blame the communists for preventing the working class revolution rather than the social democracy is to carry absurdity  and anti-Leninism to its extreme. Any analysis of the betrayal of the working class must start with the pivotal role of the pro-imperialist social democracy.

 

Rather than wasting too much precious time remembering in a one-sided way those negative features in the Soviet Union, it would perhaps be more productive, in view of the attempts of fascism to stage a comeback, to raise a memorial to anti-fascism. There is no more fitting symbol than “Stalingrad”, where fascism was stopped on its march to world domination. The name “Stalingrad”, this great symbol of anti-fascism, was criminally changed by the Khrushchevite revisionists. The communist, anti-fascist, labour and progressive movement everywhere should campaign for the restoration of Stalingrad as a lasting symbol of anti-fascism.

 

If Ticktin wishes to join the committee for the restoration of Stalingrad as a symbol of anti-fascism he can write to: Stalingrad Restoration Committee, c/o BM LEO London WC1N 3XX.

 

The aim of this committee is to build support in the international working class and progressive movement for the restoration of Stalingrad as the symbol for the defeat of fascism and is open to all progressive, anti-fascists people who support this aim.

 

 

T. Clark, February 2005.