This is the third in a four-part series on Domenico Losurdo’s and Gabriel Rockhill’s critiques of Western Marxism. The first part showed that Losurdo and Rockhill’s arguments relied on an unsustainable misrepresentation of many Marxists. Part Two claimed that Losurdo and Rockhill’s misjudgements find their source in dubious methodologies and a resistance to any historical materialist account of Stalinism.

This part proposes that Western Marxism is best understood as Stalinism’s self-critique as it was forced to deal with the events of 1956. However, many Western Marxists accepted the Stalinist claim that Leninism and Stalinism are synonymous, one factor in their slow drift to the Right. This occurred in part because Lenin’s own critique and battle against Stalinism remained unknown – something briefly recalled here.

The Fourth and concluding Part will outline the fortunes of Lenin’s critique and examine the alternatives available for Marxists who wish to retain some form of Leninism and possess a materialist critique of Stalinism. It will conclude by reflecting on Losurdo and Rockhill’s work and its place in Marxism today.

Stalinism’s Self-Critique And The Problems Of Strategy

The Birth of Western Marxism – 1956

In 1956, two immense earthquakes cracked the continent of the “official communist movement.” The first was Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the 20th Congress, called “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” In the speech, Khrushchev gave an account of Stalin as a monstrous dictator buttressed by a “cult of personality.” The speech is not itself a Marxist account of Stalinism – it could not be – but it was a public acknowledgement of the crimes committed, coming from the highest authorities. The speech was meant to remain secret, but it leaked out and turned into an international sensation. The official communist movement was plunged into a profound crisis. Its members had spent their lives denying these accusations, denying any truth to claims that Russia was repressive, believing Stalin to be part prophetic genius, part Santa Claus – good old “Uncle Joe.” Khrushchev suggested de-Stalinisation and, in a second speech at the same congress, argued that there might be many roads to socialism,” appropriate to various national conditions, different from the “Russian model” – most importantly that the movement might be capable of “winning a stable majority in parliament and transforming parliament from an organ of bourgeois democracy into a genuine instrument of the people’s will.”¹

This new liberal mood had unpredictable consequences. Rumbles began to be heard from distant quarters. In Hungary, it helped foster the second great challenge to the international communist movement in 1956. Caught up in a spirit of de-Stalinisation and independence, the population took to the streets, with between 100,000-200,000 surrounding the Parliament building on 23 October. They demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops (i.e., national independence against “Great Russian Chauvinism”) and the replacement of the hardline Soviet-imposed leader with the moderate Hungarian socialist Imre Nagy (Georg Lukacs was a member of the Nagy Government). Emerging workers councils indicated an opening for a more humane and democratic socialism. But the idea of independence from the Eastern Bloc raised unresolved questions about Hungary’s future social order. While the workers’ councils pointed toward a democratic socialist alternative, other forces – liberal and nationalist— sought parliamentary democracy, neutrality, or a return to market relations. After a brief period of Hungarian independence, the Russian leadership ordered troops to crush the uprising for fear that the Eastern Bloc would collapse. Imre Nagy was executed two years later for his part in the Hungarian uprising. The Soviets justified this with their usual claims of “fascist conspiracies” and “CIA agents.” There had been some fascists involved (along with other forces) in the Republic Square lynchings that occurred on 30 October, when the crowd stormed the headquarters of the Hungarian Working People’s Party and killed around 20-25 people, but most serious scholars consider them basically marginal.² How could they be representative of a movement of 200,000 students, workers, and intellectuals – or of the workers’ councils that arose at the time? There was, in historian Charles Gati’s account, only one CIA agent in Hungary at the time.³ No doubt the uprising contained contradictory dynamics, natural since it was spontaneous and decentralised, but at its core was a democratic reform movement. The question for historical materialists isn’t whether marginal fascists or Western ideologues (Radio Free Europe) attempted to turn the movement in their direction – this is obvious – it’s why did hundreds of thousands of workers, students, and ordinary Hungarians revolt?

The Hungarian events in 1956 revealed how deeply unpopular the Soviet-installed regimes were, how the satellite nations within the Eastern bloc felt the weight of Great Russian chauvinism – i.e., of national oppression. It showed these peripheral nations were not headed by independent soviet governments, voluntarily part of a greater union, but they were captive ones trapped within a centralised bureaucratic system (similar events had occurred in East Germany in 1953, without the international effect, and another occurred during the “Prague Spring” of 1968, which called for socialism “with a human face” and was similarly crushed by Russian tanks).

British communist Peter Fryer, correspondent for the British Communist Party’s The Daily Worker, provided a first-hand account of these events in The Hungarian Tragedy. Having witnessed the emergence of workers councils, he concluded it was “not a well-prepared plot by counter-revolutionary forces, but a genuine upsurge of the overwhelming majority of the Hungarian people, for whom life had become intolerable – an upsurge prepared for by the past thirty-seven years and called forth in particular by the blunders, crimes and trickery of the Stalinist leaders of the Communist Party” (a similar argument was made by Lukacs in his Record of a Life).⁴ Fryer concluded: 

Hungary was Stalinism incarnate. Here in one small, tormented country was the picture, complete in every detail: the abandonment of humanism, the attachment of primary importance not to living, breathing, suffering, hoping human beings but to machines, targets, statistics, tractors, steel mills, plan fulfilment figures … and, of course, tanks … Stalinism is Marxism with the heart cut out, de-humanised, dried, frozen, petrified, rigid, barren. It is concerned with ‘the line’, not with the tears of Hungarian children. It is preoccupied with abstract power, with strategy and tactics, not with the dictates of conscience and common humanity. The whole future of the world Communist movement depends on putting an end to Stalinism. The whole future of the British Communist Party depends on a return to Socialist principles.⁵

Under the pressure of these two seismic challenges – Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and events in Hungary – the international communist movement split and splintered. Most Communist parties leaked members who felt betrayed and deceived, many of them lost to socialism altogether. The Communist Party of Great Britain reportedly lost around a third of its membership; the US party was almost destroyed.⁶ In a panicked response, many party leaderships moved to more liberal and democratic strategies for socialism, to more internally pluralist regimes, to looser membership criteria. For many of these parties, this was the beginning of a long, slow process of Rightward drift, transitioning from “national paths to socialism” to Eurocommunism in the 1970s and eventually capitulating to neoliberalism by the 1980s and 1990s before finally dissolving. The terminal decline of official communism could be plausibly dated, in this account, to 1956. Traditionalists like Losurdo rejected this trajectory, and in the 1960s, some formed rival parties that oriented toward China, who rejected the “revisionism” of the Soviet leadership and their doctrine of “peaceful coexistence” (we see this division reflected in the conflict between Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan mentioned earlier).

If the events of 1956 were a tremendous political shock to the official communist movement, they also posed stark theoretical questions. Both party-affiliated and independent Marxists were asked to face Stalinism front-on, where before they had only seen it as if through a glass darkly. The questions were profound: Were Leninism and Stalinism synonymous? What role did the Soviet Diamat (Dialectical Materialism) play in the ideology of Stalinism? How does one assess the work of Stalin, whose Foundations of Leninism was a plain summary of his version of Leninism, useful for mass education and yet unremarkable in style and content? How does one assess the later Problems of Leninism (1926), which was more obviously shaped by pragmatic needs? How does one respond to the wildly distorted Short Course History of the CPSU, published in 1938 and directly overseen by Stalin, which justified the elimination, through mock trials and purges, of much of the Bolshevik leadership – the very things Khrushchev’s speech denounced? Where had things gone wrong in the USSR, and what did this say about prospects for socialism in the Global South and the imperial core?

The dead were rising, and it didn’t look like it would stop. The question of Stalinism raised a further theoretical problem, one which Lenin, Trotsky, and Gramsci had all put on the table: if the structure of imperialism makes socialist victory in the West more difficult and protracted, what strategy and tactics are necessary? How viable is the Russian “model”? For Perry Anderson – outlined most directly in his 1976 The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci – the problem is the structure and function of liberal and parliamentary democracy, never adequately theorised by the Third International. This same argument is posed in Fernando Claudin’s The Communist Movement. This question continues today in the concerns of the New Kautskyists, who reject Lenin’s strategic orientation as inappropriate to conditions in the “West.” That is to say: there remain real, unanswered questions about the strategic difficulties facing the socialist movement in the advanced capitalist nations. During the communist crisis of 1956, these two issues – Stalinism and the question of political strategy – became intertwined.

Confronting the Theoretical Challenges: Humanism, Structuralism, Strategy

Theoreticians in the Western official communist movement responded in various ways, though two main currents were dominant. France is here paradigmatic. Following the liberation in 1945, there had already existed outside of the French Communist Party a group of Existentialists, whose humanism had moved increasingly toward Marxism. This convergence was mirrored within the party, where a humanist current emerged that included Henri Lefebvre and Roger Garaudy. Faced with the crises of 1956, Humanist Marxists looked to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, with its focus on the human (species-being) and alienation, and there found the core of the socialist project. Others garnered support for humanism in Lukács or Gramsci. In England, a group including E.P. Thompson formed the first New Left, whose historical and cultural studies remain classics. They were driven by, as Matt McManus writes in a review of Rockhill, “a desire to speak truthfully about the world without having one’s work reprimanded for not toeing the orthodox party line. Or worse, having your writing manipulated and censored to demonize its author.”⁷

For these Humanist Marxists, Stalinism was to be criticised for its bogus “scientificity,” resulting in instrumental rationality, a turning of the human into the statistic, and the fostering of widespread alienation. Socialism was not a scientific formula but an open, creative human endeavour. E.P Thompson wrote in 1957 that: “The ideologies of capitalism and Stalinism are both forms of ‘self-alienation’: men stumble in their minds and lose themselves in abstractions: capitalism sees human labour as a commodity and the satisfaction of his ‘needs’ as the production and distribution of commodities: Stalinism sees labour as an economic-physical act in satisfying economic-physical needs. Socialist humanism declares: liberate men from slavery to things, to the pursuit of profit or servitude to ‘economic necessity.’ Liberate man, as a creative being – and he will create, not only new values, but things in super-abundance.”⁸ In Italy, the Italian Communist Party had already begun to develop a “national path” to socialism, built around Togliatti’s interpretation of Gramsci, now presented as a humanist transcendence of Lenin; Togliatti proposed a “polycentric” communist movement rather than one centred in Moscow.⁹

Others disagreed. French Communist Party theorist Lucien Sève agreed that Stalinism needed to be rejected but defended Marxism’s scientificity against Garaudy’s “mushy” humanism. Behind Sève stood a powerful emerging current which critiqued Stalinism from a structuralist approach (though in E.P. Thompson’s view, only to rehabilitate it). Its key figure was Louis Althusser, who took aim at both the humanists and Soviet Diamat together. Soviet Diamat, in his eyes, was crudely economistic, with its simplistic formulations of the economic “base” determining the superstructure “in the last instance” (“the lonely hour of the last instance never comes,” he wrote). Althusser’s intricate theoretical system aimed to reconceive the structural complexity of social formations. For him, Marxism was not about people but about structures. The problem with Stalinism, he thought, was that it was also a humanism, since it collapsed into a great man theory of history. Althusser’s goal, he wrote in 1975, was to “make a start on the first left-wing critique of Stalinism, a critique that would make it possible to reflect not only on Khrushchev and Stalin but also on Prague and Lin Piao: that would above all help put some substance back into the revolutionary project here in the West.”¹⁰ The rejection of Stalinism became fused with the problems of the capitalist social formation in the imperial core. The Greek Nicos Poulantzas would employ a heterodox structuralist approach to develop sophisticated theories of the state and fascism – and his State, Power, Socialism is perhaps the definitive “Left Eurocommunist” text, arguing for a socialist path through a combination of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary strategy.

Freed from the shackles of Stalinist orthodoxy, important work was produced by these Humanists, Structuralists, and New Leftists – work that remains of substantive value. After all, it was not only material developments but Stalinism’s theoretical crudity that allowed a more subtle and sophisticated Western Marxism to outflank it. Western Marxism could provide answers, however partial, for questions that Stalinism could barely admit. Before long, Western Marxism had become the dominant theoretical trend in the official communist parties as well as beyond them. This is the point that these trends and groups can be realistically called a specific form of Marxism – Western Marxism.¹¹ Some of the important figures who produced valuable work are: Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Tom Nairn, the Reclaim the Fragments feminist group (Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal in particular), Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Marleau-Ponty, Henri Lefebvre, Lucien Goldmann, Louis Althusser, Erich Fromm, Lucio Colletti, Sebastian Timpanaro, The Frankfurt School, Fredric Jameson, Ellen Meiksins-Wood.

Rockhill claims that these Western Marxists “indulge in bourgeois culture while abandoning praxis, producing theories that have little to no use value for the struggles of the working and oppressed masses.”¹² But once we place these thinkers in their historical context, as attempts to reconceive Marxism in the face of Stalinism’s failures, this holds little weight. Leaving aside its dubious functionalism – does Marxist philosophy or literary criticism need to have such direct “use value”? – Rockhill writes as if all questions have been answered. He writes as if Stalinism has never failed, as if Marxist theory is complete in the form of the “Marxism-Leninism” of his imagination. This kind of theoreticist overconfidence typically comes from someone disengaged from the task of building a socialist political movement, for whom there are no real stakes, and who consequently has never experienced political defeat. But there are real problems to be wrestled with. There were in 1956, and there are now.

Marxism is a theory of praxis that must be applied to a constantly changing social system. Part of Lenin’s greatness was his ability to constantly rethink, to analyse changing conjunctures and develop effective lines of action within them. Capitalism continued to change after Lenin’s death: Fascism, World War Two, the post-war boom, the Sixties radicalisation, the advent of neo-liberalism, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, imperialist and anti-imperialist clashes, anti-colonial revolutions, and neo-colonialism. In their time, the Western Marxists grappled with many of the problems we face today: structural alterations to the nature of various classes, the dormancy of the working class and masses, the extension of the logic of commodification to all areas of social life, the attendant power of capitalist culture, the dominance of capitalist ideology (particularly neoliberalism today), the prevalence of alienation without rebellion, the problem of a seemingly unmovable liberal democratic state, in which politics is narrowed into acceptable channels and away from popular control, the presence of economic crisis without mass upsurge, the fragmentation of the working class into so many “identities,” the challenges of political organisation and agency, the rise of a new Far Right – and more.

Many Western Marxists did indeed turn their focus to the imperial core. For some, no doubt, this reflected an abandonment of support for struggles in the Global South. Others veered – like Sartre and De Beauvoir – further toward Third Worldism. Some – E.P. Thompson is an example – focused on the history or structure of advanced capitalism and also retained their commitment to anti-imperialism. Althusser’s theory was on a more general plane, applicable to all social formations, both historically and geographically. This meant his work became extremely influential across the Global South. There was no universal rule here. Rockhill is right – and here he follows Perry Anderson – that Western Marxists tended to develop in dialogue with various forms of bourgeois philosophy and theory. This tended to contribute both to their strengths and weaknesses, though arguably Marx’s writings are no different, having been constructed from English bourgeois economics, German bourgeois philosophy, and French petit-bourgeois socialism. Equally, Lenin’s theory of imperialism drew heavily on bourgeois economist Hobson; Gramsci’s by engagement with neo-Hegelian Croce. Many Western Marxists also retreated to the academy and away from practical politics, something that both Anderson and Rockhill both argue – though ironically, both are vulnerable to the very same charge. But once again, this was not universally the case – and certainly so with many of the thinkers Losurdo and Rockhill include in their category.

Western Marxism: Stalinism’s Self-Critique

The limitations of Losurdo and Rockhill’s definition of Western Marxism are increasingly clear. They seem to avoid grappling with the historical context of these ideas, to explain their rise and subsequent evolution, because this would draw them in concrete detail to the problem they are trying to avoid – the very thing that Western Marxism emerges from and in some way rejects – Stalinism. Neither Losurdo nor Rockhill registers that Western Marxism is Stalinism’s self-critique; it is Stalinism’s attempt to come to terms with itself. Before 1956, Stalinism’s crimes could be waved away as bourgeois propaganda; with 1956, this was no longer possible, and some accounting had to be made.

This self-critique proved impossible when attempted from Western Marxism’s socio-political position. For while Khrushchev may have represented a certain liberalisation, the USSR remained structurally bureaucratised, with a privileged layer whose interests conflicted in crucial ways with those of the general population and the international movement. The USSR leadership had no interest in making a thorough Marxist account of Stalinism. Instead, Khrushchev laid the blame principally on Stalin as an individual and the “cult of personality,” truly a collapse into the great man theory of history. In one story, someone aware that Stalinism could not be individualised yelled out during Khrushchev’s speech, “Where were you when this was happening?” Khrushchev yelled back, “Who said that?!” There was a moment of silence as anxiety rippled through the hall. “That’s where I was,” Khrushchev said. The self-absolving nature of Khrushchev’s speech paved the way for a milder, post-Stalin bureaucratic regime with the very same contradictory essence, whose policies were no more dedicated to furthering the socialist cause than Stalin’s had been, and who consequently were never interested in returning to Leninism, whatever they claimed. They represented a Post-Stalinism (the word “Post” here meaning “after than but including”) or perhaps a “Late Stalinism.

The official communist movement internationally had reasons not to break from the USSR. After all, it could continue to draw legitimacy from the USSR and the legacy of 1917. They could still point toward the gains of the Soviet Union – its vast leaps in education and health – as justification. Without this allegiance to the USSR, how would they find their compass? What would they stand for? And hadn’t Khrushchev himself admitted Stalin’s crimes and opened the way for national roads to socialism? A thorough account was equally off the table for Western communist leaderships. In other words, Stalinism could not come to terms with itself, for it remained implicated in the very thing it was coming to terms with. It was like a person with a blind spot trying to see the thing they cannot see – only an external perspective could allow for such an account.

Born out of a still-closed political culture, formed by the idea that Leninism and Stalinism were synonymous, unaware of the real history of the Soviet party during the 1920s, Many Western Marxists took an anti-Leninist path. If Leninism=Stalinism, then Leninism must go too. The political consequences of this abandonment, when combined with their inability to harness Sixties radicalism and the general demobilisation of these movements during the 1960s, became apparent as Western Marxists drifted to the Right. The final step for many was a leap out of Marxism tout court. When they took this step during the 1980s and 1990s, many Humanist Marxists became humanist Post-Marxists, like Agnes Heller or Mihailo Marković, and many Structuralist Marxists became Post-Marxist discourse theorists, as with Ernesto Laclau and Chantelle Mouffe. Either path ended, whatever the origin, in some form of bourgeois liberalism. Independent Marxists often dissolved into the movements or retreated into inactivity, climbed the ladder in the academy, and usually failed to create any stable political current. In the official movement, leaderships often led their parties from the national path to socialism to Eurocommunism, then into Social Democracy, and all too often into neoliberalism. Thus, did they help destroy their own parties? In all of this, a principal truth was often overlooked: Leninism did not equal Stalinism at all.

Lenin’s Last Fight: Historical Materialism in Practice

One of the great ironies of history is that Lenin was the first to attempt an analysis of Stalinism. True to his own political being, he was also the first to attempt to fight it. This process begins in 1920, in the debate over the Trade Unions (and specifically against both the Left Communists and their opponent Trotsky), when Lenin specifies that to call the Soviet Union a “workers’ state” is a bureaucratic abstraction. A concrete analysis of its social relations reveals something else, that it is “a workers’ state with a bureaucratic deformation,” (the term “бюрократическое извращение” is translated in the Progress Press edition as “bureaucratic twist,” and this minimises the force of the word “извращение,” which might also more accurately be translated as “distortion” or perhaps “perversion”).¹³ Lenin here understands that the civil war had eviscerated the revolutionary working class and left the state and party apparatus suspended in mid-air. In this context, it was crucial to protect democratic, bottom-up power against a workers’ state with a “bureaucratic deformation.” Independent trade unions were necessary to protect the workers against their own state and to protect the state for the workers. The crucial moment in Lenin’s line of thought appears two years later, in his speech to the 11th Party Congress (March–April 1922). Reflecting on the Soviet state, recently swollen with demobilised civil-war officers, Lenin reframed the problem:

If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth, they are not directing; they are being directed.¹⁴

Lenin here explicitly rejects the assumption that political control follows automatically from holding office or occupying leadership positions. His description of the apparatus as a “huge bureaucratic machine” is telling. The presence of Communists in key positions within the state does not guarantee socialist rule. Instead, they are being “directed.” Lenin asks: what is doing the directing? He answers: 

Something analogous happened here to what we were told in our history lessons when we were children: sometimes one nation conquers another, the nation that conquers is the conqueror and the nation that is vanquished is the conquered nation. This is simple and intelligible to all. But what happens to the culture of these nations? Here things are not so simple. If the conquering nation is more cultured than the vanquished nation, the former imposes its culture upon the latter; but if the opposite is the case, the vanquished nation imposes its culture upon the conqueror. Has not something like this happened in the capital of the R.S.F.S.R.? Have the 4,700 Communists (nearly a whole army division, and all of them the very best) come under the influence of an alien culture?¹⁵

What is this alien culture? For Lenin, it is a “miserable” bureaucratic culture – not even at the level of bourgeois culture – but a mixture of Tsarist and incipient bourgeois culture. Bureaucratisation is leading to an abandonment of Bolshevik principles, as communists are engulfed in the spontaneous consciousness of this Tsarist-bourgeois culture. The material conditions for this process include an eviscerated working class, a State populated in part by a bourgeois-intellectual stratum of experts and the “educated,” both surrounded by masses of petit-bourgeois peasants. Lenin’s solutions at this point are: 1. develop the cultural level of the nation to that of bourgeois culture. 2. Get the right people in the right positions and remove the wrong people. 3. Shrink the size of the apparatus. 4. Increase the size of the Communist Party’s Central Committee to ensure there is no petrification of the upper echelons.  

Lenin perceived this bureaucratic capitulation to “spontaneous consciousness” in the 1922 conflict over the national question. The conflict began when Stalin and fellow Georgian comrade Ordzhonikidze attempted to impose a centralised “autonomisation” plan on the non-Russian republics. This plan would subordinate the republics to the Russian centre – it was a rebirth of the old Tsarist idea of “Russia one and indivisible.” The Georgian Bolsheviks resisted, invoking Lenin’s long-standing defence of national self-determination and equality within the union. Stalin responded by denouncing the Georgians as “national socialists.” When one of the Georgian leaders accused Ordzhonikidze of corruption, Stalin’s lieutenant physically assaulted him; the Georgian leadership resigned en masse; Stalin’s allies replaced them (Robert C. Tucker, one of the more accurate biographers of Stalin, calls it a “purge”). 

News of these events were kept from Lenin, who was in physical decline, but eventually his suspicions were raised. When he realised their full significance on 30 December 1922, he responded emphatically against Stalin and the autonomisation plan:

It is said that a united apparatus [as represented in the autonomisation plan] was needed. Where did that assurance come from? Did it not come from that same Russian apparatus which…we took over from Tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil? There is no doubt that that measure should have been delayed somewhat until we could say that we vouched for our apparatus as our own. But now, we must, in all conscience, admit the contrary; the apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and Tsarist hotch-potch and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of the past five years without the help of other countries and because we have been “busy” most of the time with military engagements and the fight against famine. It is quite natural that in such circumstances the “freedom to secede from the union” by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist [i.e. Stalin], in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk…. I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious “nationalist-socialism”, played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.¹⁶

Thus, Lenin combined his analysis of bureaucracy – a manifestation of a State apparatus that was an “alien” Tsarist and Bourgeois hodgepodge – with the devolution into national chauvinism. He recognises that the two were fused in the figure of the “spiteful Stalin,” when in politics spite [“malice” is another reasonable interpretation of the Russian] is manifestly base (sordid, unscrupulous, unprincipled). A day later (31 December 1922), Lenin reiterated his opinion: 

“The Georgian [Stalin] 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…”¹⁷

If Lenin was right, and this bureaucratic apparatus was adopting the spontaneous consciousness of Tsarist-Bourgeois culture, we might also expect it to alter its political outlook on other questions: to retreat on women’s rights, the family and gay rights, to revert to antisemitism, to abandon commitment to institutional democracy and workers’ control, to turn toward opportunist strategies and tactics, ones that subordinate the international struggle to the needs of the bureaucracy (as in Spain), a turn away from a Leninist party to a “broad party” (the Lenin Levy). We would expect the rise of a new ruling group, products of the administration or originally opponents of the Bolshevik party (Mensheviks like Moscow trial prosecutor Vyshinsky), to replace the revolutionary generation (the Old Bolsheviks purged during the Moscow trials). Lenin does not himself outline these dangers, but they are implicit in his logic. They became features of Stalinism during the 1920s and 1930s.¹⁸

Much more could be written about Lenin’s break with Stalin.¹⁹ We can simply note that Lenin wrote his “testament,” in which he proposes that Stalin be removed as General Secretary (i.e., remove the wrong people from positions of power), in this larger context. Assuming his health would improve, Lenin planned to carry out a campaign against Stalin at the 1923 party congress. Only Lenin’s stroke in March 1923 saved Stalin, though this was no guarantee that Lenin’s broader anti-bureaucratic struggle would have been won in the long run. Stalin’s ascension to the most powerful member of the Politburo meant Lenin’s last campaign was hidden from the international communist movement. Lenin’s “Testament” was suppressed and is only found in later editions of his collected works.

Naturally, much of the international movement remained in the “innocent” state that Losurdo and Rockhill appear to have remained (Fernando Claudin notes this in his regretful criticism of the Spanish Communist party, quoted in Part 2). Losurdo and Rockhill’s work is tainted with a fatal naivety – typical of the official communist movement in the period before 1956.²⁰ Others, however, were able to transcend this state of naivety. 

The final part of this series will examine the current that developed Lenin’s theory after his death. It will reflect on the split between Stalinism and Trotskyism, two parts of an unhealed whole, both of which tended to invert each other’s strengths and weaknesses, neither of which could consistently provide a healthy path forward for the socialist movement. We will finally end with reflections on how to position Losurdo and Rockhill in the broader history and the tasks facing socialists today. 

1. Nikita Khrushchev, Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the 20th Congress of the CPSU, p.45. Available here: https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/party-congress/20th/krushchev-reportcc20thcpsucongress.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com 
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2. See for example, Charles Gati, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, Stanford University Press, 2006. 
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3. Charles Gati, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, Stanford University Press, 2006, p.95. The CIA’s assessment of events, which dispel any rumour of their influence or leadership, can be read here: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0001302853.pdf 
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4. Peter Fyer, The Hungarian Tragedy: https://www.marxists.org/archive/fryer/1956/dec/8_revolution_and_counter.htm, and Georg Lukacs, Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch, Verso 1983. Lukacs overall assessment was that 1956 was a spontaneous movement lacking a worked-out ideology. 
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5. Peter Fyer, The Hungarian Tragedy, available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/fryer/1956/dec/index.htm
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6. For some accounts of CP USA members’ response, readers are encouraged to watch the documentary, Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists, available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltCKYrSa_uY&t=805s 
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7. Matt McManus, “Marxism Through the Looking Glass,” available here: https://www.damagemag.com/p/western-marxism-through-the-looking 
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8. E.P. Thompson, “Socialist Humanism,” available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1957/sochum.htm
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9. Togliatti is the one “Western” Marxist whom Losurdo comments admiringly of, which suggests that his “revolutionism” is significantly less robust than Rockhill claims. See pp. 198-199.
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10. Quoted in Gregory Eliot, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, Brill, 2006, p. 2.
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11. Before this, we have Left Communism, which is its own current, Gramsci, who is better thought of as a militant of the Third International, and the Frankfurt School, a relatively marginal group who are not part of any broader tendency. My own preference is for more granular distinctions than the term “Western Marxism”: Left Communism, Frankfurt School, Humanist Marxism, Structuralist Marxism, etc., since these more clearly distinguish specific types of Marxist methodology, specific concerns, and specific types of work, emerging from certain historical contexts, beyond the general critique of Stalinism. 
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12. Gabriel Rockhill in Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it Can be Reborn, p.14.
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13. The original phrase is “…у нас рабочее государство с бюрократическим извращением.” Lenin, V. I. 1973, The Trade Unions, The Present Situation and Trotsky’s Mistakes”, in Collected Works, vol. 32, Progress Publishers: Moscow, p. 24. 
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14. Lenin, V. I. 1922, ‘Speech to the Eleventh Congress of the RCP(b)’, March–April, in Collected Works, vol. 33, Moscow: Progress Publishers, p.288.
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15. Lenin, V. I. 1922, ‘Speech to the Eleventh Congress of the RCP(b)’, March–April, in Collected Works, vol. 33, Moscow: Progress Publishers, p.288.
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16. V.I. Lenin, 1977, “The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation” Progress Publishers, vol 36, pp. 605-606.
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17. V.I. Lenin, 1977, “The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation” Progress Publishers, vol 36, p.608
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18. On antisemitism, from an Australian radical’s personal experience of the Soviet Union after the Second World War, see Boris Frankel’s memoir, 2023 No Country for Idealists, The making of a family of subversives, Greenmeadows, Melbourne. For a review, see https://www.greenleft.org.au/2024/1399/culture/boris-frankels-memoir-soviet-life-raw. However, for a description of antisemitism in the leadership group in Stalin’s time, see Isaac Deutscher or Arno Mayer (Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (1988)).
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19. For an account of Lenin’s final political battle against bureaucracy, nationalism, and Stalin, see Moshe Lewin 1968, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Monthly Review Press. The book’s appendices contain some of the most relevant pieces by Lenin. Despite his Cold War anti-communism, Robert C Tucker gives a truthful and accurate chronicle in the chapter, “Conflict with Lenin,” in Stalin as Revolutionary. 
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20. Today, the situation is different. Most of Lenin’s texts eventually appeared in later editions of his Collected Works. Bourgeois historians often give reasonable accounts of the facts, through their interpretations are usually to be rejected. These include Robert. C. Tucker (for his account of Lenin’s fight with Stalin and the differences between them), Simon Sebag Montefiori (for his account of Stalin’s “court” or team and the destruction of the Old Bolsheviks, Orlando Figes (for his depiction of Russia (especially the peasantry)), Sheila Fitzpatrick (for a sociological understanding of life in the apparatus), and Marxist-influenced Ronald Grigor Suny (for the best biography of the young Stalin). Marxist historians will be discussed in Part Four.
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