BOOK BY COMRADE MAITAN ANALYZES STALINIST POLICY uals, have greeted the appearance of the latest book b Fourth International, Teoria e politica comunista del dopo guerra (Postwar Communist Theory and Policy), published by Schwarz of Milan. It is a volume that will give all literate Stalinists cause for some serious thinking and rethinking; and is of interest to all revolutionaries who wish to increase their understanding of the fatal role of stalinism in the restabilization of European capitalism.
It is a systematic and richly documented study. Comrade Maitan demonstrates and minutely explains, with all the necessary references to the texts, the CP's activities, and the objective data: the successive Stalinist conceptions of "antifascist unity" and "progressive democracy" that were current during and immediately after the war; the "democratic path" and the revolutionary path to socialism, with all necessary references to the germane texts, both of the Italian CP and the CP S U, and to the classics of Marxism, as well as in the light of the experiences lived through in Jugoslavia, China, Labour Britain, the workers' states, the colonial revolution, and in the context of the Italian social and economic reality; the problem of the middle classes and the policy of alliances; the conceptions prevalent in the Italian CP on the agrarian question and the Mezzogiorno; the nature and function of the Italian CP. Other chapters are devoted to more general problems such as automation, and the prospects of the labor movement
Western Europe.
Though the main examples in the volume are drawn from Italian experiences, the parallels are so many that the book has a great value for other countries as well. It is to be hoped, however, that other similar volumes for other countries will be worked up soon by the cadres of our international movement.
In our next issue, we shall publish a chapter from this valuable volume.
USSR