From Acción Proletaria
Organ of the Communist Party of Chile (Proletarian Action)
Nov. - Dec., 1996

Saluting a new anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, we have prepared this article, which places on a deserved plane the role played by one of its clearest and firmest leaders, Comrade Stalin.

The campaign of hatred led by the bourgeoisie

gives reason to defend the life and work of

J.V. Stalin

It is often said (sometimes in jest, other times as a joke), that the question of Stalin is the dividing line between true and false communists. When one puts the question in a superficial form of "for or against Stalin," it often does not lead to a very deep political discussion.

But it is very important for communists to understand the reason why the legacy of Stalin continues to be one of the touchstones of Marxism-Leninism. Nowhere is the hatred of the bourgeoisie towards socialism clearer that in its attack on Stalin and "Stalinism." After the death of Lenin, it was Stalin who directed the struggle against the mistaken and dangerous ideas of Trotsky, whose principal idea was to assure control of the workers by imposing military discipline in the trade unions and placing them under state control. On the contrary, Lenin and Stalin fought for the method of convincing by means of example.

Stalin directed the construction of socialism and the enormous advances of the USSR in the 1930s. At the same time he was at the head of the struggle against growing fascism and Nazism in Europe at that time. It was Stalin's task to prepare the Soviet people for a new and brutal war of the imperialist invaders against the young USSR. After the Trotskyites and other elements opposed to popular power were defeated, the Soviet Union became even stronger. The unity of the people was consolidated and the contradictions between the different nationalities were less than they had been in the times of the tsar, and than they would become after the revisionists seized power after the death of Stalin.

The new constitution of 1936 was a proud expression of the socialist Soviet Union which, several years later, was able to resist the attack of German imperialism, defeating it and leading the Soviet Union to victory in the Great Patriotic War.

After the war, Stalin headed the struggle against the revisionist currents in the party and the state. But his death was the beginning of a violent counter-revolutionary offensive on the part of the revisionists. Ten years after Stalin's death, the revisionists had left socialism in the Soviet Union in ruins. They led Soviet society to the most profound crisis, which has lasted to our time. Attacking socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the revisionists tried to weaken the tendency of a rebellion of a socialist character against the regime.

The Communists and Stalin

The principal point of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to defend the construction of socialism, by means of repressing the forces of the bourgeoisie in society, who will never stop working for the reestablishment of capitalism. Those who condemn the dictatorship of the proletariat for taking up this task in a serious manner have no right to call themselves communists or adherents of socialism. For this reason we Marxist-Leninists defend the work of Stalin. Although socialism in Russia is defeated, there still remain the memories of the teachings of Stalin, as the bourgeoisie knows, they know that the revolutionary line and the construction of socialism in the USSR, as was done under the leadership of Stalin, is the most dangerous threat to their own rule and existence as a class, Joseph Stalin showed the way and the means to reinforce the dictatorship of the proletariat and to construct socialism to a higher level.

For all this, we the communists of today salute the memory of Stalin.

From Norway
Alfredo Guzman

Click here to return to Chile Index