Not Enough Freedom?

I consider myself an anti-Stalinist – however, I could not be further from mainstream opposition to Stalinism. Most self-proclaimed anti-Stalinists approach the issue from an anti-authoritarian – most often, syndicalist – perspective which, upon closer inspection, is little more than reactionary phrasemongering – the defence of ‘democracy’, of ‘liberty’, in the abstract.

Yet, to what amounts this ‘democracy’, this ‘freedom’? To one thing only: political freedom, the right to free speech and press, the right to pursue one’s class aims – as politics is nothing more than class struggle. This is guaranteed to the proletariat, in the fullest sense, only under the most tyrannical, most totalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat, which represses the bourgeoisie and thus allows the absolute domination of the proletariat – and, as I have discussed in a previous article, it is exactly the perfection of this totalitarian dictatorship which leads to the abolition of classes en bloc, and thus to the end of the class dictatorship, too.

And this is all fine and dandy, but our anti-authoritarians preach not proletarian democracy, not proletarian freedom, but freedom in the abstract, i.e. non-intervention by the proletarian state – simply put, the non-disturbance of bourgeois society, and therefore the oppression of the proletariat.

Therefore, we can say that not only is critiquing Stalinism from the perspective of anti-authoritarianism a mistake, it is also fundamentally a right-wing approach.