THE DULL THUD of the hapless baby being thrown out with the bathwater has been heard all over eastern Europe as angry intellectuals and workers reject the shambolic bureaucratic parody of "communism", and increasingly blame Lenin for Stalinism. HARRY SLOAN looks into things a little more deeply. LENIN was no more to blame for Stalinism than Marx and Engels were responsible for Neil Kinnock, Felipe Gonzalez or the other luminaries of today's so-called 'Socialist International'.
In each case a revolutionary theory, a movement and a tradition were established, only to be taken over, distorted out of all recognition and turned into their very ooposites od others who responded to very different class pressures.
Marx and Engels fought for the First, and then the Second Internationalas an expression of class solidarity and the political independence of the working class from its capitalist rulers in each country.
But in many European contries the Second International's member sections became mass parties in which the leaderships were politically "bought off' by their own powerful imperialist ruling class. They abandoned revolutionary politics, to seek reforms within capitalism through parliamentary and trade union pressure.
By the outbreak of the First World War they had reneged on marxism and politically degenerated to such an extent that each major socialist party voted in Parliament to back the war efforts of its 'own ruling class.
Emerging in opposition to this degeneration in the left wing of the Russian social democratic party, Lenin's principal legacy consisted in his struggle to reassert the principles of marxism - the rigorous fight for the political inde pendence of the working class rom me bourgeolsie, tne un compromising defence of internationalism; and the concept of democratic centralism as the method for organising a vanguard party to lead the struggles of the working class.
Attack
Without these strengths, the Bolshevik Party would never have led the October Revolution of 1917, in which Tsarism and capitalism were overturned. And it was against precisely these traditions that Josef Stalin, emerging in 1922 as General Secretary of the CPSU, aimed his most deadly attack.
Like the leaders of the Second International, Stalin's strength was not as an individual, least of allasan advocate of wrongideas, but the fact that these ideas reflected and represented material class forces which threatened to undermine the October Revolution.
The backward Russian capitalist economy had been further dislocated by World War, and then by years of civil war and imperialist wars of intervention aimed at ousting the Bolsheviks. Stalin represented the bureaucratic administrative layer that emerged, using police powers to regulate the queues and shortages.
The Communist Party itself had grown rapidly in the revolutionary upsurge, but many of its best cadres were killed fighting, with others over-stretched in their efforts to fight the war, consolidate the revolution and develop the economy.
Careerists
Stalin's approach echoed both the more conservative layer of 'Old Bolsheviks' who had been reluctantly dragged into the October Revolution by Lenin, and a vast new influx into the Party of careerist elements with no marxist culture, keen to prosper by joining the side that had won.
ne arce peasant-based conomy had forced the Bol sheviks in 1921 to make a temporary retreat from premature communist economic policies, and to concede limited market freedoms to small peasants and producers to the New Economin Policy. Stalin in the years up to 1928-29 reflected the backwardness of these petty bourgeois torces It was from this power-base in the economy, the countryside and the Party that Stalin was able in the aftermath of Lenin's death to mount a major undeclared onslaught on Leninism.
Mummified
While ikonising Lenin's mummified remains, Stalin rejected his fight for internationalism and the concept of revolution. Lenin's consistent warnings of the dangers of bureaucratism and capitalist Testoration should the Soviet Union become isolated, Stalin insisted that it was possible to build 'socialism in a single country'.
In place of benin s empnasis on the USSR's obligation to