HARRY SLOAN'S article 'Don't blame Lenin for Stalinism!' (SO 2) over-simplifies the question of the relationship between Leninism and Stalinism.
I think Sloan secretly posits the fiction that the actions of Lenin and 'other defenders of Leninist principles', prior to the rise of Stalinism, always embodied (except when they made the odd mistake like banning internal factions) fundamental tenets of socialist democracy.
But the idea of a small unit of revolutionary marxists unswayed by alien class pressures or, for that matter, Sloan's 'shortages and queues', in a largely peasant society is, I think, an idealistic one.
Marx called for a ruthless critique of everything existing. Sloan urges us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If 'angry intellectuals and workers' in Eastern Europe are subjecting all of the decisions of the Leninists to the same ruthless critique that Trotskyists traditionally Your coverage of NUS Conreserve for the decisions of Stalinists, what have revolutionary marxists to fear?
Sloan says 'In consolidating his the debates that took place I FIND much of the 'Madonna' debate perplexing.
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