Letter: By their works we know them (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

By their works we know them

Although I appreciate the candid openness of the article "Why I joined the SPGB” in the July Socialist Standard, it must be said that on a few points it verges on the naive. For example, his assertion in paragraph 8: “Lenin’s books (I’ve read the complete works) are little more than a verbal attack on Kautsky, on Bernstein, and of course any Russian who opposed him. Hitler’s Mein Kampf is also a tirade of abuse against Jews and Communists.

It must be pointed out that Lenin’s works differ both in quality and quantity from Hitler’s works or work, which in Mein Kampf is a short tirade against Communism, with a few short superficial chapters on Germany’s defeat in the first world war. On the other hand, Lenin’s works range from the twenty-odd books in his Collected Works. These range from dozens of speeches to Russian workers and peasants, to hybrid works such as Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism and The State and Revolution. This comparison can be made in any good public library.

On the positive side, I would agree with his personal revulsion with the degeneration of the Russian Soviet State and the political culmination of this process in trials of the old Bolshevik guard in 1936-38. The result being Stalinism for decades after this period.

Mike Whalen, 

Edinburgh

Reply:

We think that in the context of the article, where the writer summarizes what he chiefly found in Lenin, the statements are adequate.

You appear to believe that “Stalinism” was all the trouble in Russia. The writer of the article said nothing about “the degeneration of the Russian Soviet State”. We hold the different view that the Bolshevik revolution led inevitably to the growth of state capitalism in Russia; indeed, we — alone — said so from the regime’s earliest years. In a one-party state the rivalries and struggles for power take place among individuals instead of political parties, and this was the cause of the purges in Russia in the nineteen-thirties and in Russia and other countries since then. It was not degeneration but development, once the capitalist basis was established.

Editors.