This volume, dedicated to lifelong Trotskyist Jack Gale (1931-80) examines Stalinism’s counter-revolutionary theory of socialism in one country, as implemented by the Communist Party of Australia (CPA).
The real history of the CPA, from early communism inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution to the slavish adoption of the policies of the Stalinised Comintern is reviewed in the book.
The CPA backed to the hilt the political genocide in the Moscow Trials of the 1930s and applauded the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939, during which it opposed the war drive of the ‘democratic’ imperialist powers including Australia. In 1941 it performed an about face when the Nazis invaded the USSR, to act as the industrial police for the national bourgeoisie and strike breakers for the “people’s war” – the new front of the Soviet Union with the Allies. In 1945 it supported the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States ruling class, which it termed a “Jappy Ending.”
The book reviews the period post-world War II, including the CPA’s support for the Stalinist suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, the defeat of the Indonesian working class in the Coup of 1965, the betrayal of the Stalinist “peaceful road to socialism” in Chile in 1973, Stalinist support for Zionism and the Sino-Soviet split as part of the international schism in the world Stalinist movement. It also explains the CPA’s break from the Soviet bureaucracy over Czechoslovakia in 1968 on the same counter revolutionary program of socialism in on country, from which it never broke.
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