Marxism as retrograde dogma?

 This strikes a contrast with a great deal of “Marxist” writing on the war, not only by hardened post-Stalinists who deny that Russia is imperialist, but from others, who acknowledge that it is, but find ways to reinforce the illusion that “NATO expansion” caused the war, not the Russian elite.

For example, Alex Callinicos in a recent article starts from a general proposition — that a “developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers” is underway — and, where the particular case of Russia’s war on Ukraine does not fit his preconceptions, distorts or omits realities.14

The danger is that Marxism becomes a way of moulding analysis to justify political dogma, instead of developing ideas that can inform struggles to defeat and supersede capital. 

https://links.org.au/russias-bloody-shift-subimperialism-new-old-imperialism

You don't say

Stalin had his moments

 In World War I, 150 German soldiers were sentenced to death for serious crimes, of which a mere forty-eight were executed.  In World War II, thirty thousand death sentences were decreed by military courts, of which two-thirds were carried out, in addition to many more that took place without any judicial proceeding.  

By contrast the British executed forty men, the French 103, the Americans 146, almost all the condemned Allied soldiers having committed capital crimes as defined in civil law, rather than being sentenced for dereliction of military duty.  Meanwhile the Japanese executed 22,253 of their own men, and the Russians at least 150,000, possibly as many as 300,000.

Stalin the lesser

 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gregory-petrovich-maximoff-the-guillotine-at-work-vol-1#toc1

Lenin, according to Maximoff, “followed in the footsteps of the French Jacobins.”[2] He believed in the necessity and even desirability of terror to implement his programme, in himself and the legitimacy of his authority. 

Maximoff presents scores of quotations from Lenin’s published works in which Lenin urged shootings of political opponents, urged against sentimentality in the waging of political struggle and urged his fellow Bolsheviks to adopt unashamedly a policy of red terror. 

Maximoff charges that Lenin deliberately chose to provoke civil war in the countryside, to terrorise the peasantry and force their compliance with the forced grain requisitions, to subject them to state regimentation: “That we brought civil war to the village is something that we hold up as a merit,” wrote Lenin.

The smaller Stalin

 Marv Gandall

Lenin understood that working class consciousness and militancy is not fixed but fluid and that what was “realistic” and “practical” changed in accordance with  circumstances. He also lived in a period which was revolutionary, quite unlike our own.  The Russian workers, both Menshevik and Bolshevik, took up arms and went to the barricades twice during Lenin’s lifetime - in 1905 and again in 1917. They sought the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy and its replacement by a democratic republic and the development of capitalism modelled on Western lines. In April 1917 Lenin persuaded his reluctant party to change line and break with the Mensheviks and Provisional Government and to take power in the name of the Soviets. 

He did so not as a dreamy idealist who thought it a matter of “principle” to insistently call on the workers to seize power. His starting point was always the prevailing level of mass consciousness and relationship of forces. His strategic turn was based on the rapidly evolving consciousness of the industrial workers and garrison soldiers in Petrograd and elsewhere. In July, however, he opposed their spontaneous uprising and urged restraint because he did not yet consider the balance of power to be favourable. A few months later, he did and the Bolsheviks took power.  When it became necessary to again reverse course in 1921, a year before his incapacitating stroke, Lenin urged the party to abandon War Communism in favour of the New Economic Policy. He freely admitted it was “state capitalism”, but justified it as a necessary but temporary accommodation to peasants at home and foreign capital abroad to relieve discontent in the cities caused by food shortages and other privations. 

A resurrected Lenin would risk indictment by today’s ultra-left sectarians as a “Menshevik” if he were to declare that the Western working class, while restive, was not yet demonstrating the will or capacity to move beyond reform to revolution or even to break decisively to the left of their existing political and trade union leadership - in large part due to bourgeois democratic institutions and living conditions missing in his own time.

Peace, bread and life

 In Stalin's immortal time

https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487553470

Stalinists seize this day!

In March 2022 Students are calling for his disciplinary action, and colleagues are uneasy because of his support for Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine . Radio-Canada reports on messages posted on his now-suspended Twitter account in which he defended the Russian invasion and called for the cleansing of "  Ukrainian neo-Nazis  ," echoing terms used by Vladimir Putin , and calling him "  the president everyone wants  ." His name has been removed from the list of research members of the Centre for International Studies and Research at the University of Montreal 

Menshevik Gandall is an enemy of the working-class

Marv Gandall wrote:

the masses follow the lead only of those revolutionaries whose ideas and actions they regard as "practical" and "thinkable" at every level of the class struggle

The abstract adjectives and nouns here (practical, thinkable, every level of) can be bent any way you like. Lenin's work does not fit into this statement by ordinary understanding, but a Menshevik like Gandall could easily make it fit.

Idealistic bourgeois voluntarism - an adolescent disorder

 Marv Gandall

On Tue, Oct 13, 2026 at 08:54 AM, John Reimann wrote:

Anand Gopal wrote: “revolution is precisely one of those extraordinary events that can render impractical ideas workable and unthinkable ideas thinkable.” 

Revolutions are indeed extraordinary events. They and their causes can't be foreseen with any degree of precision or willed into existence by blueprints and inspirational exhortation. So long as the masses believe they can peaceably reform the system, they will reject as "impractical" and "unthinkable" calls for its forcible overthrow.

 

John Reimann and Anand Gopal err in their belief that, though they may be isolated today, they will be vindicated in the long run when the system finally collapses.  History has shown instead that the masses follow the lead only of those revolutionaries whose ideas and actions they regard as "practical" and "thinkable" at every level of the class struggle - from the lowest through to the very highest, the insurrectionary attempt to sieze state power. 

Marxist Communism for the Middle East!

 This article covers

*ultra left sectarian childish support for Hamas in the Palestine support movement;

*The anti-Zionist resolution of the UK Green Party which simply repeats a series of abstract formulae while it opens itself up to suspicion that it, too, supports Hamas or something like it;

*The reasons why the "two state solution" cannot work;

*The pro-capitalist failure of the "single state" solution;

*How the Arab Spring shows part of the way forward;

*Why the end of Zionist oppression cannot be achieved without a mass, working class socialist new Arab Spring.

We conclude: 'To those who say this is dreaming, we reply: “Every approach of yours in the last analysis is based on a capitalist solution. It has been a complete disaster. It is you who are engaging in fantasies.” In his book Days of Love and Rage, which is about the Syrian revolution, Anand Gopal wrote: “revolution is precisely one of those extraordinary events that can render impractical ideas workable and unthinkable ideas thinkable.” The same applies in this case.

'Let us stop reserving socialism for minor reforms and holiday speechifying. Let us apply working class revolutionary socialism to the very real problems of today, including in Israel-Palestine and in South West Asia North Africa as a whole. For a socialist Israel-Palestine as part of a socialist federation of the Middle East/SWANA.' https://oaklandsocialist.com/2026/10/13/palestine-support-for-a-revolutionary-working-class-socialist-approach/

Grover Furr outlines the Soviet efforts at creating an anti-Hitler alliance

https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43761

Consider the Chekists of the field