In his subsequent article, Socialist aspirations and the victory of Stalinism by their support for realities, an edited version of which we publish here, Joe authoritarian policies.
Stalin in Red Square with Molotov (left) and Kruschev (right)
in 1990 Joe Slovo, until recently General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), published his well known pamphlet Has Socialism failed? which heavily criticised the Stalinist legacy of the official communist movement. Left-wing critics of Slovo pointed out that he failed in his pamphlet to situate the rise of Stalinism in the victory of the bureaucratic caste which usurped power in the 1920s. of the proletariat. Slovo rejoined the debate. He insisted that the roots of Stalinism lie deep in Leninism, especially the notion of the vanguard party and the concept of the dictatorship In an article written for the SACP's journal African Communist, veteran South African Trotskyist Charlie van Gelderen replies to Slovo; in doing so he examines the charge that Trotsky and other oppositionists helped