Socialist Organiser

The weekly of the fused Workers Socialist League, July 1981 to April 1984

"'Get rich"

Socialist Organiser no. 124, 17 March 1983 · scan p. 7 · about 292 words

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"Though the Stalinists opposed the essence of the writings of Marx and Lenin, they arose as an opportunist wing of a Marxist party in the new workers' state. Rather than overtly challenge Lenin's legacy and oppose Marxism, they sought to dress up their own views in "Maolitionary opponents of la and Lenind Trotsky and other critics as "counter### Careerists Instead they looked to consolidating the new state, through further concessions to the peasantry.

These views coincided with the needs of the careerist elements recruited to the Party after the revolution, and of the privileged sections of administrators and perty business people who feared Marx and Engels had drawn from the Paris Commune. became dominant, and by 1927 they were powerful enough to expel and then exile Trotsky, Lenin's co-leader in the October Revolution.

Though the Stalinists opposed the essence of the writings of Marx and Lenin, they arose as an opportunist wing of a Marxist dartv in the new workers' state. Rather than overtly challenge Thus it was that in 1924, immediately after Lenin's death, the Stalinist notion that it was possible to build socialism in one country', seized upon and eagerly sunnarted hu the bureaucrars horamo retailed as 'Marxism' " while Trotsky's the kulaks, and Bukharin's invitation for them to 'get rich' as a solution to the economic crisis, were portrayed as 'Marxism', while Trotsky's insistence on the need for a five-year plan of industrialisation and collectivisation 'by example' was castigated as 'underestimating the peasantry'.

As the impending crisis Trotsky had warned of erupted, and the bureaucrats lurched into panic measures to ram through a brutal pace of industrialisation, forcible collectivisation, and elimination of the kulaks, the Left Opposition was increasingly portrayed as a right wing pro-capitalist - eventually on

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