April 2022
Presentation of the book

STALINISM, A COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL AND POLITICAL FORCE:
SPAIN 1936 AND HUNGARY 1956

Benito Toribio Morales *

PRESENTATION:

From the Rudolph Klement Publishing House we present this book that contains the political essays "Stalin's International Brigades against the Revolution" and "The Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The workers' revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy that Trotsky predicted". These two texts were written by Benito Toribio Morales within the framework of the 85th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish revolution and civil war and the 65th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution, respectively.
This work deals with revolution and counter-revolution. What both revolutions, the Spanish of 1936 and the Hungarian of 1956, have in common is that the protagonist is the working class and that Stalinism was situated in the opposite trench, in that of the counterrevolution.
Reading this book, the reader will be able to understand that Stalinism represents the counterrevolution in two different political systems: one in the capitalist one, like that of the Spanish state in the 1930s, and another in a bureaucratically degenerated workers' state, like the Hungarian in the 1950s. The counterrevolutionary objective of Stalinism was to put an end to two exemplary revolutions, one social, that of the revolutionary committees of the Spanish state in the civil war, and another political, that of the Hungarian workers' councils. As explained in the two texts that make up this work, Stalinism vilely used for its objectives, in the first case, the honest workers of the International Brigades in the Spain of the civil war, and in the Hungarian case the once heroic Army Red as counterrevolutionary elements. In both cases, both Stalin's International Brigades and Khrushchev's Red Army were directed by the Stalinist bureaucratic caste, in which his secret police, the NKVD (former GPU and future KGB), played a prominent role. The Stalinist bureaucracy used the International Brigades in 1936 and the invading Red Army in 1956 as two military forces at the service of a political objective that was counterrevolutionary.
Stalinism, as the agent of imperialism and the bourgeois order that it is, is synonymous with counterrevolution and a Trojan horse against the world working class. That is why historiography related to Stalinism has consciously hidden the existence of the Spanish and Hungarian workers' revolutions, just as bourgeois historians also do.
The conscious concealment of the Spanish revolution at the beginning of the civil war was carried out in favor of the Popular Front policy, of republican-bourgeois and Stalinists, which tried to rebuild the bourgeois state that the revolution born as a response to the military-fascist coup had shatternered to pieces. In the Hungarian case, a campaign of intoxication of imperialism and Stalinism concealed the fact that the workers were fighting for the factories to belong to the proletariat and for a workers' democracy in the great Hungarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy. Thus they wanted to tie the international working class to the plans of peaceful coexistence of imperialism and the usurping bureaucracy of the conquests of the October revolution.
After Stalin's weapons to the Spanish Republic and its International Brigades and after the Kremlin's tanks occupying Eastern Europe came the counter-revolution, not the revolution of the heirs of October 1917, the vast majority of whom had already been killed by Stalinist assassins or shot after the farce trials in Moscow.
The role of international Stalinism was to prevent the spread of the revolution. And the rest of the reformist left sided with this policy, including, on the one hand, the exTrotskyist Poumists in the Spanish revolution, who participated in the Popular Front and the bourgeois government in Catalonia, and, on the other, In the 1950s, the ex-Trotskyist Pabloite-Mandelists, who brought their militancy into Stalin's "communist" parties and said that the Hungarian revolution should not be supported because it played into the hands of capitalism.
In the 1930s, only the Bolshevik-Leninists (Trotskyists), supporters of the Fourth International, did not capitulate to the Stalinist counterrevolution in the Spanish state. And in 1956 only the principled Trotskyists maintained a class and internationalist position alongside the workers of Hungary occupied by the Kremlin's tanks.
In this book, all these lessons of Trotskyism against Stalinism are reflected, which acquire enormous relevance.
Stalinism was the necessary collaborator to rescue world capitalism and prevent the workers' revolutions from spreading internationally. His role was socially and politically counterrevolutionary. It was a socially counterrevolutionary force as an agent within a social revolution like the Spanish one within the republican camp, as a representative of the labor aristocracy. And it was a politically counterrevolutionary force in the Hungarian political revolution, as a national and international political party in power in the workers' states, such as the Hungarian and the Russian, deformed by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Stalinism continued betraying the international revolution for decades, and continues to this day, being a key piece for capitalism to remain standing. Today, when the Stalinist bureaucracies have handed over the former workers' states to world capitalism after 1989, the political and social force that are the "communist" (Stalinist) Parties have become true bourgeois forces that manage and guarantee the capitalist restoration and the businesses of the bourgeoisie in counterrevolutionary governments, like in China, Vietnam, Cuba...
In countries where there have never been degenerated workers' states, Stalinism also plays a role: it is today a counterrevolutionary political and social force that the world bourgeoisie has preserved to act as internal police in the leaderships of the unions. The counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism, as enemies of the social revolution, is clearly seen in any world event. Two sample buttons are Syria and Ukraine.
Everything that happened in 1936 in Spain and in 1956 in Hungary in two heroic revolutions terrified to the extreme the perfidious Stalinist bureaucracy that feared losing its privileges. That is why they had to work hard to put an end to these revolutions.
We Trotskyist revolutionaries do not forget, we do not forgive and we do not reconcile: we know that between the revolution and Stalinism there is a river of blood.
Benito Toribio Morales *
(*) Benito Toribio Morales, Trotskyist militant from Madrid, member of the international leadership of the FLTI (Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International), of the Editorial Committee of the newspaper International Workers’ Organizer and of Democraci Obrera - Spanish State. He combines his militant trajectory in the Trotskyist movement and in the social movements with his written intellectual production, as an inseparable part of his Trotskyist militancy.

INDEX:

Part I:

"STALIN'S INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES AGAINST THE REVOLUTION"

- Dedication
- Introduction
- The betrayal of Stalin, the Popular Front and the PCE
- The international army of the Popular Front
- Andre Marty, the “butcher of Albacete”
- The International Brigades in the Battle of Madrid: a propaganda manipulation of Stalinism
- In the Battles of Teruel, Lopera and Jarama: internal repression, disenchantment with Stalinism and desertions
- Decline of the International Brigades and their "repopulation" with Spaniards
- Involvement of the International Brigades in the repression of the May events and the murder of Andreu Nin
- Interbrigade members, such as SIM spies, NKVD agents and Chekists, against the POUM and the Trotskyist SBLE
- Battle of Huesca and the dismantling of the Council of Aragon with the participation of the International Brigades
- Brunete and Belchite, the collapse of the International Brigades
- Fronts of Aragon and Levante while the infiltration of Stalinism in the state became hegemonic
- The sudden withdrawal of the International Brigades in the midst of the Battle of the Ebro
- The International Brigades as an appendage of the Stalinist police state: Cheks of Castelldefels Castle and Horta
- After the Civil War: Stalinist interbrigadists allied with Hitler (after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 1939-41) and then at the disposal of the US (after Pearl Harbor, 1941-45)
- Stalin paid traitors: Interbrigadists in governments and police after the Civil War and the Second World War

- ANNEX: Brigades, names of their Battalions, origin and date of formation

Part II:

 "THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION OF 1956. THE WORKERS' REVOLUTION AGAINST THE STALINIST BUREAUCRACY THAT TROTSKY PREDICTED"

- What is a political revolution according to Trotsky?
- After World War II: Workers’ States born bureaucratically deformed in Eastern Europe
- An Eastern block protected and exploited from the Stalinist bureaucrats of the Kremlin
- 1953-1956: Stalinism without Stalin against the revolutionary impetus. Background of the Hungarian Revolution
- An imposing classical political revolution in Hungary that terrified the Stalinist bureaucracy
- The tanks of the Stalinist bureaucracy brought the counterrevolution
- The revolutionaries did not want to return to capitalism. Imperialism was on the side of Stalinism
- Against the concealment of the worker and socialist character of the Hungarian revolution: The Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest
- The revolutionary party failed to take power and put an end to the situation of dual power