9. Conclusion¶
Core Argument¶
This concluding chapter delivers a polemical broadside against Monty Johnstone’s critique of Trotsky, arguing that Johnstone’s method is fundamentally un-Marxist. The core charge is that Johnstone does not engage honestly with Trotsky’s positions but instead distorts them to enable surreptitious ridicule. The author contrasts this with the approach of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, who are said to have always provided clear and honest characterisations of their opponents’ ideas before answering them.
The chapter’s most devastating point is drawn from Johnstone’s own admission that “a fundamental Marxist criticism of Stalinism… which still remains to be made, will not proceed from Trotsky’s premises.” The author seizes on this to expose the bankruptcy of Johnstone’s position: sixteen years after Stalin’s death and thirteen years after Khrushchev’s secret speech, the Communist Party’s theoretician admits that no such critique yet exists. Trotsky’s analysis is dismissed as “fundamentally false,” yet Johnstone offers no alternative model. The author invites Communist Party and Young Communist League members to demand from their leadership an explanation of Stalinism, predicting none will be forthcoming, and points to the Kremlin’s rehabilitation of Stalin as evidence that even the limited concessions of the 1950s are being rolled back.
The chapter situates this theoretical dispute within the convulsions shaking world Stalinism in the late 1960s: the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the French general strike and its betrayal by the Stalinist-led Communist Party, and the Sino-Soviet split. These events, the author argues, have forced open discussion within Communist Parties despite bureaucratic resistance. The sell-out of the French workers’ movement is cited as having provoked opposition among rank-and-file Communists who retain their class consciousness. Similar stirrings are noted in Britain, Italy and elsewhere.
The closing passages shift to a revolutionary perspective. The post-war boom has prepared fresh forces untainted by older generations’ cynicism. The question is posed starkly: which will come first, socialist revolution in the West or political revolution in the East? The author insists that theory is not the preserve of party intellectuals but a weapon all Marxists must master through study of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. The final vision is of a united, harmonious Socialist World Federation, where the productive forces blossom under democratic planning, and humanity is freed from war, poverty and oppression. The chapter is dated August/October 1969.