1. Introduction

Wellred

Core Argument

Chapter 1: Introduction

This opening chapter establishes the polemical terrain for a Marxist re-examination of Stalin and Trotsky, taking Monty Johnstone's article in the Young Communist League journal Cogito as its immediate target. The author welcomes Johnstone's stated aim of a "full discussion" on these questions, long overdue after four decades of suppression, but immediately exposes the contradiction between Johnstone's professed objectivity and his actual method.

The central argument is that Johnstone has posed the question in an un-Marxist way. He presents the issue as a choice between "fixed adherence" to Stalin or Trotsky, offering himself as a balanced alternative. The author counters that the real question is whether the basic ideas of Marxism itself still hold—on internationalism, the role of the working class, and the nature of socialist society. Under the guise of modern, scientific objectivity, Johnstone isolates these ideas as "Trotskyism," alien to Marxism, and in doing so returns to the "old position" of Bernstein, Kautsky, and the Mensheviks.

The chapter draws on the tradition of Marxist polemics, invoking Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky as models of scrupulous honesty in quotation and argument. It contrasts this with Johnstone's own language, which substitutes "saccharine abuse and innuendo of the seminar room" for the earlier Stalinist gutter slander of "Trotsky-Fascists" and "agents of Hitler." A catalogue of Johnstone's supposedly objective phrases—"swashbuckling rhetoric," "flights of fancy," "dogmatic shibboleth"—is presented to demonstrate that personal abuse persists in refined form.

A major polemic is directed against the 20th Congress of the CPSU and its "Cult of Personality" explanation for Stalinism. The author rejects this as a travesty of Marxism: it is inconceivable that one man imposed his ideas on society through sheer personality. The Marxist method explains history through social classes and their interests, not individual whims. If Stalin's ideas became a force, they must have represented a section of society. Johnstone is challenged to answer whose interests Stalin served. The chapter concludes by accusing Johnstone of reducing Marxism to a Jesuitical method of stringing together isolated quotations from Lenin to justify every twist and turn, avoiding any analysis of the fundamental social processes that alone can illuminate the ideas of Trotsky and Lenin.