Leninism and party democracy
Finally, the claim that the organisational character of the Bolshevik party prevented the development of internal party democracy and that this in turn led to the bureaucratic monolithism of the Stalinist regimes, is false on a number of counts.
Firstly, in as much as Lenin's principles of organisation restricted the membership of the Bolshevik party to revolutionary activists operating under democratic control, that is, majority rule, they actually expanded rather than reduced the scope of internal party democracy. The alternative to the Leninist concept — a Marxist party based upon a mere "paper" membership of dues-payers — will for long periods of its existence be a party of passive members. All who have experience of mass parties of this sort know that they are much more apt to be manipulated by leaders, and more easily bureaucratised, than are revolutionary organisations in which insistence on unity in action by the membership, and a stricter ideological selection of the latter, greatly reduce the gap between the "leaders" and the "rank-and-file", create more conditions for an equality which is not merely formal but effectual between all party members, and thus make possible a greater degree of internal democracy.
Secondly, in practice, Lenin's party enjoyed, as British historian E.H. Carr notes in his three-volume
History of the Bolshevik Revolution, "a freedom and publicity of discussion rarely practised by any party on vital issues of public policy".
[20]
The unity in action of the Bolshevik party was totally the opposite of the monolithic conformism based on fear and uncritical toadying to an uncontrolled bureaucracy that characterised Stalinist commandism. The discipline of the Bolshevik party depended on its internal democracy, on its members' mutual confidence in each other born out of common political experience in fighting to implement a revolutionary program. It reflected the loyalty of the membership toward their party and their
confidence in its democratic procedures and its democratically-elected leadership.
As the historical evidence clearly shows, the bureaucratisation of the Bolshevik party was the result, not of the Leninist theory of party organisation, but of the disappearance of a decisive element of this concept: The presence of a broad layer of worker cadres, schooled in revolutionary politics and maintaining a high degree of political activity, with a close relationship to the masses. Large numbers of these cadres were killed in the Civil War imposed on Soviet Russia by the landlord-capitalist counterrevolution and its imperialist backers, or left the factories to be incorporated into the state apparatus where they became corrupted by the careerist, self-seeking outlook of the large numbers of former tsarist officials that surrounded them.
The Russian Revolution
and its degeneration proved that a Leninist-type party, i.e., a self-disciplined party of revolutionary cadres educated in the Marxist program and tested in mass struggles, is the decisive instrument needed by the working class to take and hold power. The defence of Lenin's conception of the party was at the heart of the program of those who led the fight against Stalinist bureaucratisation in the 1920s. Conversely, in order to usurp power from the workers, and to expand its privileges, the rising bureaucratic caste had to destroy the Bolshevik party and overturn its program and organisational principles.
Nationalisation and the market
A second aspect of the ideological offensive mounted by the capitalists in the wake of the collapse of "communism" in the USSR is the attempt to discredit the very idea of socialist planning, to convince us of the "civilising values" of the market and production for private profit.
Of course, this ideological campaign began nearly a decade before the fall of Stalinism — in the late 1970s. It reflected the need of the capitalist rulers to discredit the Keynesian model of state intervention and welfare institutions that had developed during the long postwar capitalist boom and which had become an obstacle to overcoming the long depression that began in the 1970s.
But as the bankruptcy of bureaucratically centralised planning in the East became more and more obvious in the 1980s, increasing sections of the Western left, above all left Social-Democrats and Eurocommunists, began to accept the neoliberal cult of the "free" market and to reject the very possibility of conscious social planning. The identification of Marxism and Leninism with Stalinism led to the false idea that the bureaucratic "command" economies created by the Stalinists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe — with their administrative suppression of residual market relations and all-pervasive state ownership — were examples of "Marxian socialism".
The Stalinist "command" economies, however, represented a reactionary departure from the economic measures Marx and the Bolsheviks advocated in the transition period from capitalism to socialism.
Marx and Engels, for example, never advocated the expropriation of all private property by the proletarian revolution. In the
Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels stated that the "distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property in general, but the abolition of bourgeois property",
[21] that is, the abolition of private ownership of means of production that had already been effectively socialised by capitalism.
In his 1894 article, "The Peasant Question in France and Germany", Engels pointed out that "when we are in possession of state power we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants … Our task relative to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise and private possession to cooperative ones, not forcibly, but by dint of example and the proffer of social assistance for this purpose".
[22]
Engels went on to explain that "we shall do everything at all permissible to make his lot more bearable, to facilitate his transition to the cooperative should he decide to do so, and even to make it possible for him to remain on his small holding for a protracted length of time to think the matter over".
[23]
"We do this", Engels argued, "not only because we consider the small peasant living by his own labour as virtually belonging to us, but also in the direct interest of the party. The greater the number of peasants whom we can save from being actually hurled down into the proletariat, whom we can win over to our side while they are still peasants, the more quickly and easily the social transformation will be accomplished."
[24]
Marx and Engels advocated the same approach toward other petty proprietors — artisans, shopkeepers, etc.
This question of the attitude of the socialist proletariat toward the petty-proprietors was of course a more pressing one for the Bolsheviks, who had to lead the workers to power in a predominantly peasant country.
The New Economic Policy
The program of the early Soviet government did not envisage rapid nationalisations. Rather it promoted the universal establishment of workers' control in industry, the nationalisation of the banks and the big capitalist monopolies that also exploited the petty-bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks were later ****** to abandon this program and to nationalise all industry, trade and commerce, to suppress the money economy and impose a crude "command" economy in order to meet the needs of the Red Army in the Civil War. At the end of the Civil War, they retreated from "War Communism", as this policy was called, and adopted what became known as the New Economic Policy.
In his report on the NEP to the fourth congress of the Communist International in November 1922, Trotsky pointed out that "by vanquishing the bourgeoisie in the field of politics and war, we gained the possibility of coming to grips with economic life and we found ourselves constrained to reintroduce the market forms of relations between city and village, between different branches of industry and between the individual enterprises themselves".
"Failing a free market", Trotsky explained, " the peasant would be unable to find his place in economic life …"
[25]
Lenin put it even more dramatically in his report to the 11th congress of the Bolshevik party held earlier in 1922:
We must organise things in such a way as to make possible the customary operation of capitalist economy and capitalist exchange, because this is essential for the people. Without it, existence is impossible.
[26]
This policy of restoring market relations was dictated not simply by the necessity to meet the needs of the peasantry. As Trotsky explained in his report:
… the New Economic Policy does not flow solely from the interrelations between the city and the village. This policy is a necessary stage in the growth of state-owned industry …
Before each enterprise can function planfully as a component cell of the socialist organism, we shall have to engage in large-scale transitional activities of operating the economy through the market over a period of many years …
Only in this way will nationalised industry learn to function properly. There is no other way of our reaching this goal. Neither a priori economic plans hatched within the hermetically sealed four office walls, nor abstract communist sermons will secure it for us.
Trotsky added that the Bolsheviks did not "renounce planned economy in toto, that is, of introducing deliberate and imperative corrections into the operations of the market".
"But in so doing", he pointed out, "our state does not take as its point of departure some a priori calculation, or an abstract and extremely inexact plan-hypothesis, as was the case under War Communism. Its point of departure is the actual operation of this very same market …"
[27]
Lenin, in his characteristic style, put the matter more succinctly, when he said: "A complete, integrated, real plan for us at present = 'a bureaucratic utopia'."
[28]
Nor did the Bolsheviks see the NEP as an expedient ****** on them by the devastating effects of the Civil War on Russian industry. They pointed out that its general aspects, that is, the partial maintenance of a market economy under the regulation of a workers' state, was a necessity for every victorious workers' revolution including in the industrially developed countries.
In a speech to members of the Moscow organisation of the Bolshevik party on the eve of the fourth Comintern congress, Trotsky pointed out that:
In all our old books, written by our teachers and by us, we always said and wrote that the working class, having conquered state power, will nationalise step by step, beginning with the best prepared means of production … Will the working class on conquering power in Germany or in France have to begin by smashing the apparatus for organising the technical means, the machinery of money economy …? No, the working class must master the methods of capitalist circulation, the methods of accounting, the methods of stock market turnover, the methods of banking turnover and gradually, in consonance with its own technical resources and degree of preparation, pass over to the planned beginnings …
[29]
And he added, "This is the fundamental lesson which we must once again teach the workers of the whole world, a lesson we were taught by our teachers".
Democratic planning versus the 'free market'
Today, after the evident failure of bureaucratically centralised planning, we face a somewhat different challenge — to defend the necessity of conscious, democratic, social planning against the new cult of the "free market". Our critique of total reliance on the market, however, corresponds to aspirations of working people that cannot be satisfied by either the market or bureaucratic planning — control over the environmental impact of modern industry, restructuring to guarantee full employment, public services of adequate quality and quantity, and in general, a desire for popular control over the strategic choices for society's future. These are aspirations that can only be met by democratic planning of central social priorities.
We must distinguish between the necessary use of partial market mechanisms, subordinated to conscious choices and democratic control, and recourse to generalised regulation by the market. The latter approach is not only incompatible with genuine democracy, but also with the very survival of humanity's ecology.
We have to make it clear that the socialist democracy we fight for has nothing in common with all-pervasive state ownership, any more than socialist planning has to centralise control of everything. The existence of several forms of property — collective, cooperative and small private or individual property — is a necessity in post-capitalist societies. Alongside efficient large-scale production many needs are still best met by small businesses.
Within this framework, material incentives should not aim at encouraging a retreat into individualism, but at ensuring a general increase in wellbeing through collective improvements in productivity. It is this logic of solidarity that we need to counterpose to blind market relations and their laws of the jungle.
The experience of Stalinism demonstrates that nationalised property in a post-capitalist society has no automatic bias towards socialism. The expropriation of capitalist property is a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for advancing toward socialism. It is necessary in order to create the conditions for conscious planning of social and economic priorities. But the building of socialism is not an engineering task of administering state property and planning, regardless of how committed and socialist-minded the administrators are. The construction of socialism depends fundamentally on the increasing involvement of working people themselves in the administration of all aspects of social life, on the deepening of their socialist consciousness, and on advances in the world revolution.
The NEP and perestroika
In outlining the NEP in his 1921 article "The Tax in Kind" Lenin pointed out that:
The correct policy of the proletariat exercising its dictatorship in a small-peasant country is to obtain grain in exchange for the manufactured goods the peasant needs. That is only kind of food policy that corresponds to the tasks of the proletariat, and can strengthen the foundations of socialism and lead to its complete victory …
But we cannot supply
all the goods, very far from it; nor shall we be able to do so very soon — at all events not until we complete the first stage of the electrification of the whole country. What is to be done? One way is to try to prohibit entirely, to put a lock on all development of private, non-state exchange, i.e., trade, i.e., capitalism, which is inevitable with millions of small producers. But such a policy would be foolish and suicidal for the party that tried to apply it. It would be foolish because it is economically impossible. It would be suicidal because the party that tried to apply it would meet with inevitable disaster.
[30]
Well, Lenin was both wrong and right about this. The administrative prohibition on the development of capitalism was not economically impossible — the Stalinists did it for 60 years; but he was right when he said the party that applied it would meet inevitable disaster. Continuing, Lenin explained that:
The alternative (and this is the only sensible and the last
possible policy) is not to try to prohibit or put the lock on the development of capitalism, but to channel it into
state capitalism …
The whole problem — in theoretical and practical terms — is to find the correct methods of directing the development of capitalism (which is to some extent and for some time inevitable) into the channels of state capitalism, and to determine how we are to hedge it about with conditions to ensure its transformation into socialism in the near future.
[31]
Of course, Lenin's view that Soviet state capitalism, i.e., capitalism controlled and regulated by the Soviet workers' state, could be transformed into a predominantly socialised economy "in the near future" was predicated on the assumption that socialist revolutions would occur in the most industrially developed capitalist West "in the near future".
In his conclusion, Lenin emphasised that the "proletarian power is in no danger, as long as the proletariat firmly holds power in its hands …"
[32]
But we know that in the 1920s, under conditions in which the Soviet working class retreated from political activity and the majority of the leadership and cadres of the CPSU adapted to the growing influence of the bureaucracy and the new bourgeoisie — the "Nepmen" — the danger of capitalist restoration increased.
A key aim of perestroika, as it was presented in 1987-88, was to overcome the structural crisis caused by bureaucratically centralised planning by replacing the "command" system with an NEP-type policy of limited privatisation and state-regulated market mechanisms. But this program began to be implemented in a political context in which the Soviet working class did not hold political power and its socialist consciousness had been seriously eroded by six decades of bureaucratic rule.
After decades of bureaucratic repression and miseducation, it would take time for the Soviet workers to overcome their political passivity and ideological confusion. It was our recognition of this that led us to support the political reforms initiated by the Gorbachev leadership. These reforms, particularly the weakening of the bureaucracy's all-pervasive thought-control mechanisms and its repression of independent political activity, provided an opening for the working class to re-enter political life, to begin to overcome its political atomisation.
However, the disintegration of the "command" economy accelerated the social crisis in the Soviet Union at a more rapid pace than the limited political reforms allowed the working class to recover from the experience of Stalinism. As the crisis deepened, decisive sections of the bureaucracy, recognising that there could be no return to the old "command" system, opted for a course toward the only alternative that would allow them to preserve their privileges — the restoration of capitalism, with themselves as the new capitalist owners.
Growth of the 'mafia'
At first this took the form of the growth of the influence of the "mafia" — a term reflecting the popular perception of collusion between a section of the bureaucracy, particularly the economic administrators, and the black marketeers, to illicitly divert goods from the state sector into private hands.
Of course, the "mafia" did not emerge under Gorbachev. The roots of the "mafia" lie in the absence of control over the country's economic administrators, who after the revolution usurped the decision-making power of the state economy's official owner, the working class, without becoming owners themselves.
Under the bureaucratically-centralised "command" economy introduced by Stalin in the early 1930s, economic administrators were subject to control from above. Managers who failed to carry out their tasks, or who illicitly appropriated state resources for their own private enrichment, were subject to sanctions from the central authorities, often severe sanctions — including execution.
Nikita Khrushchev eliminated Stalin's system of terror, but did not replace it with any system of democratic control over economic administrators. His reliance on legalistic, but still bureaucratic, methods to control the economic administration eventually led to his ouster by the bureaucracy.
Under Leonid Brezhnev, central political control over the economic administrators was increasingly diminished.
The originally proclaimed aims of glasnost and perestroika were to introduce "control from below". But the actual way the reform process was implemented did not lead to the establishment of popular control over and involvement in administration and management.
Central control over economic administrators was dismantled, but it was not replaced by popular control from below. As a result, the centre became as powerless as the people themselves.
The national question
A key factor accelerating this process was the Gorbachev leadership's failure to put into practice its verbal commitment to the Leninist policy on the national question.
The October 1917 Revolution gave a powerful impulse to the struggle of the oppressed non-Russian nationalities to put an end to the "prisonhouse of nations" that tsarism had created. The Bolsheviks recognised that the advance to socialism was possible only on the basis of guaranteeing the right of national self-determination to all oppressed nations, and through the creation of a voluntary federation of workers' republics.
But the Bolsheviks' policy of national self-determination and voluntary federation was reversed in the early 1920s by the emerging bureaucratic caste led by Stalin.
Lenin had insisted that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had to be based, not only on formal equality between the Soviet republics that joined it, but on affirmative action to develop the economies and culture of the oppressed nations in order to close the historical gap in social and economic conditions between them and the former oppressor Russian nation. But with the consolidation of the power of the Stalinist regime in the 1920s the USSR became a new "prisonhouse of nations" dominated by the central bureaucracy in Moscow with its Great-Russian chauvinist outlook.
As glasnost removed the totalitarian grip of the central bureaucracy over the Soviet Union, the long-suppressed resentment against the national oppression began to give rise to national movements in many of the non-Russian republics. These movements — which were supported by the overwhelming majority of the workers and collective farmers in many of the non-Russian republics, particularly Georgia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia — demanded recognition of the rights of the various national republics, including the right formally proclaimed in the USSR constitution to secede from the Union.
The failure, indeed, refusal, of the Gorbachev leadership to agree to the demands for national self-determination enabled the leadership of these popular movements to come under the political hegemony of openly pro-capitalist forces. The central bureaucracy's use of military ******* and economic blackmail against the national aspirations of the Baltic republics in particular, deepened the desire of the masses in these republics to leave the Soviet Union.
As a result, the disintegration of the Soviet Union became inevitable. Its breakup, however, is the only way to open the road once again to a voluntary federation of Soviet republics.
Failure of Gorbachev reform process
The main reason for the failure of perestroika was that the Gorbachev leadership continued to rely on the Communist Party to be the driving ******* of the democratisation process, rather than promoting the independent self-organisation of the Soviet masses. The problem with such an approach was that the CPSU was not only thoroughly bureaucratised, it was the linchpin of the whole system of bureaucratic rule. As Roy Medvedev put it in his 1972 book
On Socialist Democracy:
The one-party system, the absence of genuine worker control, the lack of independent newspapers or publishers, etc., mean that virtually the entire economic and social life of our vast country is run from a single centre. The smallest organisation, even a club of dog lovers or cactus growers, is supervised by an appropriate body of the CPSU.
[33]
Moreover, the CPSU was an organisation whose members had been conditioned to accept unquestioning and blind obedience in exchange for access to better paid jobs, or entry to and advance up the hierarchy of the
nomenklatura, with its institutionalised privileges.
Only a small minority of the Communist Party's members were genuinely committed to the ideals of the October Revolution. The great majority were bureaucrats concerned only with preserving their privileged positions, or politically apathetic people who joined because it was the only way to secure a decent job.
Gorbachev's course toward reform was based on holding the Communist party together. This inevitably led to a policy of compromise with the
nomenklatura officials. One of the major compromises he made was not to challenge their special privileges, which by 1988 were no longer hidden from the Soviet masses. Given the scale of these privileges and the waste of social resources they represented, it would be impossible to win the confidence of the Soviet workers without a clear policy opposed to them. Just to cite one example of the scale of the
nomenklatura's privileges: In 1990, the annual cost of maintenance of official cars for functionaries personal use was six times the total amount spent by the Soviet Union on its space program that year.
In refusing to challenge the bureaucracy's official privileges Gorbachev undermined his own credibility as an opponent of bureaucratic rule in the eyes of the Soviet masses. As the economic and social crisis deepened, he began to rely more and more on the very system of bureaucratic power he had proclaimed he sought to dismantle. His push to give the new presidency dictatorial powers was a key indicator of this.
Meaning of August 19, 1991 coup
With the coming to governmental power of openly pro-capitalist politicians in the wake of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, there was a decisive shift in the outlook and orientation of the Soviet bureaucracy. The administrators of the central ministries, planning agencies, and big state trusts joined the lower-level administrators, technical functionaries, and the intellectual elite that formed the social base of the "democrats" led by Boris Yeltsin, in opting for capitalist restoration. They saw this as the only way to secure their material privileges in the face of the disintegrating "command" system.
But while these two wings of the Soviet elite shared the same goals, they were in conflict over how to achieve their bourgeois ambitions. This conflict was what lay behind the August 19, 1991 coup and the Yeltsinites' counter-coup.
The Emergency Committee which attempted to seize power in August 1991 did not in any way represent forces seeking to restore the old Stalinist system. The inclusion of Soviet Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov within the Emergency Committee was one indicator of this group's aims. Pavlov was responsible for the compromise economic program agreed to by Gorbachev and Yeltsin as part of the April 23 agreement on a new Union treaty. This program projected massive privatisations, in the first place in trade, services and light industry, followed by the transformation of large enterprises into joint-stock companies.
Another indicator of the Emergency Committee's aims was its own public statements which did not even pay lip-service to "socialism", but declared its would "support private enterprise, granting it necessary opportunities for the development of production and services".
The Emergency Committee's central aim was to ensure that the spoils of privatising state property would go mainly to the central bureaucracy. This conflicted with the project supported by the Yeltsinites, which aimed to ensure that these spoils would go mainly to the bureaucrats controlling the republican and municipal apparatuses, as well as the technical and intellectual elites.
The failure of the Soviet workers to mobilise in any significant way against the Emergency Committee's coup attempt — in marked contrast to the widespread strikes and street protests against the price rises decreed in early April 1991 — was perhaps due to their correct perception that neither the Emergency Committee's aims nor those of the Yeltsinites had much to offer them. However, the refusal of army commanders and most KGB personnel to act against the relatively limited mobilisations that did oppose the Emergency Committee enabled the Yeltsinites to temporarily settle the question of which wing of the bureaucracy will be in the best position to take the spoils of privatisation.
'Bourgeois' character of Stalinist bureaucracy
The wholesale shift of the Soviet bureaucracy toward supporting the restoration of capitalism should not come as a surprise to those who understand the contradictory nature of the bureaucratic caste, as analysed by Leon Trotsky. In his 1936 book
The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky pointed out that the Soviet bureaucracy was the "bourgeois organ of the workers' state", the defender of the bourgeois norms of distribution that were unavoidable in the transition period between capitalism and socialism:
The bourgeois norms of distribution, by hastening the growth of material power, ought to serve socialist aims — but only in the last analysis. The [workers'] state assumes directly and from the very beginning a dual character: socialistic, insofar as it defends social property in the means of production; bourgeois, insofar as the distribution of life's goods is carried out with a capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences ensuring therefrom … If for the defence of socialised property against bourgeois counterrevolution a "state of armed workers" was fully adequate, it was a very different matter to regulate inequalities in the sphere of consumption … For the defence of "bourgeois law" the workers' state was compelled to create a "bourgeois" type of instrument — that is, the same old gendarme, although in a new uniform.
[34]
Trotsky explained that two opposite tendencies grew out of the Stalinist regime:
To the extent that … it develops the productive forces, it is preparing the economic basis of socialism. To the extent that, for the benefit of an upper stratum, it carries to more and more extreme expression bourgeois norms of distribution, it is preparing a capitalist restoration.
[35]
He went on to warn that this "contrast between forms of property and norms of distribution cannot grow indefinitely. Either the bourgeois norm must in one form or another spread to the means of production, or the norms of distribution must be brought into correspondence with the socialist property system." And he warned that:
A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead inevitably to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus to the abolition of state property. The bond of compulsion between the trusts and factories within them would fall away. The more successful enterprises would succeed in coming out on the road of independence. They might convert themselves into stock companies, or they might find other transitional form of property … The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.
[36]
Trotsky added that a pro-capitalist government "would find no small number of ready servants among the present bureaucrats, administrators, technicians, directors, party secretaries and privileged upper circles in general".
[37]
Nature of 'post-Stalinist' regimes
With the exception of East Germany which has been annexed by the (West) German imperialist state, the present regimes in the former Soviet bloc countries are not a qualitative break from their predecessors. They remain dominated by a bureaucratic oligarchy, with some reshuffling of personnel and power, and with the incorporation of previously disaffected intellectuals — most of whom are past members of the
nomenklatura.
The bureaucratic elite has abandoned the defence of the socialist property forms, which were the source of its power and privileges under the Stalinist regime. The orientation of this bureaucracy is now openly toward capitalist restoration, toward bringing the property forms into correspondence with the bourgeois norms of distribution.
These "new" regimes represent a further step in the bourgeois degeneration of the ruling bureaucracies, a new stage in the counterrevolution initiated in the 1920s by the bureaucratic usurpation of the political power of the Soviet working class. Now, this counterrevolution is being extended from the political superstructure to the economic basis of these societies, to their relations of production. But this social counterrevolution still has a long way to go before it succeeds in fully restoring capitalist economies, that is, economies in which both the means of production and labour power are commodities and in which the allocation of productive resources is determined by competition for private profit.
The pro-capitalist governments in all of the ex-Soviet bloc countries will be in permanent crisis, facing growing working-class discontent and opposition as they attempt to reimpose capitalism. The moves by all of these governments — from Yeltsin to Walesa — to recreate highly centralised, authoritarian regimes shows that they understand that capitalist restoration and popular democracy are fundamentally incompatible. As Lech Walesa was quoted as saying in the September 18, 1991
Wall Street Journal: "Very often I have doubts whether evolution from the communist system is possible … [Perhaps Poland needs] tough, strong, revolutionary methods — and fear — to reorient the economy."
A few days after the victory of the Russian "democrats" over the "hard-line Communists", a pro-Yeltsin journalist put the issue more bluntly in
Izvestiya's weekly supplement:
Yes, in Russia we need a harsh, and in many ways, authoritarian government. The President of Russia will soon have to confront that which is more dangerous than any elite junta — unemployment, the immiseration of millions of people. Destructive strikes are inevitable and explosions of violence are possible. In these circumstances, it will be necessary to do unpleasant things — to forbid, maybe even to disperse, to introduce order.
The failure of the August 1991 coup — largely due to the refusal of the army and the KGB to suppress the limited popular protests the coup provoked — indicates the difficulties the "democrats" will have in introducing "order".
The key obstacle to the workers in all of these countries successfully imposing a solution in their own interests to the accelerating social crisis caused by the slow and chaotic restoration of capitalism that is spontaneously underway, is their lack of socialist consciousness and political self-organisation. But the collapse of Stalinist totalitarianism and the political weakness of the bourgeois-
nomenklatura regimes that have succeeded it, provides an opening for them to reconstruct a working-class political alternative as they are ****** to defend their newly-won democratic rights and the social gains that still exist as a result of the past abolition of capitalism.
The International Impact of Stalinism
Even more significantly, the collapse of "communism" in the USSR, while initially creating enormous ideological confusion within the international workers' movement, clears away the central political agency that blocked the advance of the world revolution for most of this century.
In 1919 the Bolsheviks forecast that the world socialist revolution would involve a combination of proletarian revolutions in the industrialised capitalist countries with worker-peasant national liberation revolutions in the industrially underdeveloped colonies and semi-colonies. Through the Communist International they encouraged the formation of revolutionary parties to replace the bureaucratised and opportunist social-democratic parties.
Unable to understand the real nature of the struggle between the Stalinist bureaucracy and its Bolshevik opponents in the USSR, the great majority of Communist party members and radicalised workers around the world mistakenly accepted the Stalinist bureaucracy for what it proclaimed itself to be — the heir and continuator of Bolshevism. Through the stifling of dissent and the replacement of their original leaders by functionaries "educated" in Moscow, most of the Communist parties became servile instruments of the Stalinist bureaucracy's narrowly nationalistic foreign policy, the overriding aim of which was to secure deals with the imperialist powers that would enable the bureaucracy to be left in peace to enjoy its privileges.
Stalin's "theory" that socialism could be built in one country — the USSR — without revolutions abroad, became the ideological justification for making "defence of the Soviet Union" (as interpreted by the Kremlin) the number one task of the Communist parties.
The adoption of "socialism in one country" as the official ideology of the Communist International in 1928 changed the relationship between the USSR and the international working class.
For the Bolsheviks the Soviet Union had been a
base for the world revolution, a first conquest to be extended. It was a base they were even prepared to abandon temporarily, if such an action would bring greater victories elsewhere. Thus Lenin argued in 1918 that if the continuation of Russia's war with Germany would save a workers' revolution in Germany it "would not only be 'expedient' … but a downright
duty to accept the possibility of defeat and the possibility of the loss of Soviet power" in Russia.
[38]
But for the Russian "nationalist-socialist" bureaucrats headed by Stalin, the USSR was not a base but a
bastion, a fortress to be defended at all costs, including the sacrifice of revolutions in other countries in order to preserve or obtain diplomatic deals with imperialism.
Opportunist alliances
In the years 1925-27, the Stalinist bureaucracy sought out alliances with "progressives" in the capitalist countries. The Communist parties in these countries were instructed to secure and maintain such alliances irrespective of the political costs to themselves or the workers' movement in general.
In Britain, which was generally seen as the primary military threat to the USSR, the bureaucracy believed it could see a potential ally in the opportunist leadership of the Trades Union Congress which, while bitterly hostile to the Communist Party of Great Britain, had argued for increased trade with the Soviet Union as a means of alleviating unemployment in Britain. In 1925 an Anglo-Russian Committee, composed of representatives of the leaderships of the British and Soviet trade unions, was established.
Stalin saw the ARC as a bulwark against war, declaring that it should "organise a broad movement of the working class against new imperialist wars in general, and against intervention in our country by (especially) the most powerful of the European powers, by Britain in particular". That, however, was not how the TUC bureaucrats saw the purpose of the ARC. For them it was simply a means to give themselves "left" credentials so as to better contain the militancy of the British union rank and file and to block the CPGB's ability to make headway in the unions.
When British miners were faced with wage cuts in 1926, the TUC leadership was ****** by rank-and-file pressure to call a general strike. However, the TUC leaders soon capitulated to the Tory government, calling off the general strike after only nine days and leaving the miners to face the government alone. The TUC leaders used their alliance with the Soviet trade unions through the ARC as a shield against left-wing criticisms that they had betrayed the interests of British workers.
Moreover, if the TUC leadership was unwilling to mount a struggle against wage cuts, it could hardly be relied upon to fight against a Tory war against the USSR. Nevertheless, Stalin insisted that the alliance be maintained.
In May 1927, when the British government adopted a strongly anti-Soviet policy and broke off diplomatic relations with Moscow, the TUC leadership made only a few mild protests. A few months later it followed the Tory lead and withdrew from the Anglo-Russian Committee.
In China similar policies produced a truly catastrophic result. In the face of a massive revolutionary uprising, involving millions of workers and peasants, the Comintern instructed the Chinese Communist Party to maintain its alliance with the increasingly right-wing Nationalist Party (KMT) government led by Chiang Kai-shek. The KMT, which controlled the independent Chinese government based in southern China, had established friendly relations with Moscow and had even been declared a "sympathising party" of the Comintern.
When, in 1926, Chiang Kai-shek insisted that the Chinese CP turn over a list of all its members inside the KMT and totally subordinate its policies and activities to KMT direction, the Comintern insisted that the CCP comply.
In March 1927, Chiang's armies scored their greatest victory by capturing Shanghai — a victory made possible by a city-wide general strike led by the Communists. The Shanghai Communists welcomed Chiang to the city with banners hailing the KMT and Chiang himself as liberators.
Having secured control of the city, Chiang, who since early 1926 had been made an "honorary member" of the Presidium of the Comintern's Executive Committee, turned on his Communist "allies". On April 12 his troops began arresting and murdering Communist Party members and sympathisers. According to conservative estimates, about 100,000 people were killed in the following months. The Chinese CP was all but annihilated — its membership fell from 60,000 in early 1927 to 4000 by the end of the year.
Following this disaster, Stalin and his supporters declared that the Comintern's policy in China had been correct but that the Chinese CP — which had faithfully carried out this policy — was to blame for any "errors".
Ultraleft binge
Having failed to court foreign "progressives" through a policy of opportunist alliances, the Stalin bureaucracy ordered the Communist parties to reverse course in 1928-29. The Comintern leaders announced that revolutionary uprisings were now on the order of the day everywhere throughout the capitalist world and that in order to lead these "imminent" uprisings the Communists had to reject all alliances with non-Communist leftists, who were depicted as one or another variety of fascists. As Max Shachtman observed in his introduction to Trotsky's book
The Third International After Lenin:
… in the nightmarish hysteria that characterised the Comintern in this period, every strike became a revolt, every demonstration a near-insurrection … There were no more social-democrats, but only "social-fascists". Anarchists became "anarcho-fascists" and syndicalists turned into "syndicalo-fascists" (to say nothing of the more treacherous variety of "left syndicalo-fascists who use radical phrases to hide their right deeds"). Even ordinary "counterrevolutionary Trotskyists" became "Trotskyo-fascists" or, as the German Stalinist, Heckert, called them, "social-Hitlerites".
[39]
While the real fascists gained in strength in Germany in the early 1930s, the German Communist Party (KPD) directed all its hostility against the "social-fascists", the Social Democrats (SPD). Together the KPD and the SPD had the support of over 40% of the German electorate. Together they could have stopped Hitler. But they refused to cooperate — the SPD leaders because they put their faith an alliance with the other liberal parties and the KPD leaders because of the sectarian ultraleftism of the Comintern's "social-fascist" line.
Leon Trotsky, in exile in Turkey, campaigned tirelessly for a united front of the KPD and the SPD to stop the Nazis. Ernst Thaelmann, leader of the KPD and a member of the Comintern Executive Committee replied:
… Trotsky gives one answer only, and it is this: the German Communist Party must join hands with the Social-Democratic Party … This, according to Trotsky, is the only way in which the German working class can save itself from fascism. Either, says he, the Communist Party makes common cause with the Social Democrats, or the German working class is lost for 10 or 20 years. This is the theory of an utter bankrupt fascist and counterrevolutionary. This is indeed the worst, the most dangerous, the most criminal theory that Trotsky has construed in these last years of his counterrevolutionary propaganda.
[40]
The German Communists did refuse to "join hands" with the Social-Democratic workers against the Nazis, and the German working class was indeed "lost for 10 or 20 years". The world is still paying for the defeat of March 1933, when Hitler triumphed over the German workers movement without firing a shot, without even a scuffle in the street.