weekly
worker 760 March 12
i
2009
SUPPLEMENT
Dead Russians
Jack Conrad defends Lenin and Trotsky, and issues a health warning about Arthur Scargill, George Galloway,
Robert Griffiths and others who want to forget, belittle or maintain silence over the crimes of Stalin
G
eorge Galloway, the Respect leader and
MP, does not want us to talk about them.
Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the
Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain,
does not want us to talk about them. Arthur
Scargill, leader of the Socialist Labour Party,
does not want us to talk about them either.
Dead Russians.
No, not only the 10 to 20 million who
unnecessarily died in the Soviet Union between
1928 and 1953 because of forced collectivisation,
political famine, the purges and the gulag
system, the casual disregard for life, etc. Three
names in particular should be put aside and go
unmentioned. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Leon
Davidovich Trotsky and Joseph Vissarionovich
Stalin. Forget them, keep them to yourself, deny
them any contemporary relevance - especially
in front of new members, electors and the
mainstream media. That is the plea, the
instruction, the credo.
Addressing Respect’s 2008 annual
conference, Galloway - author of the Fidel
Castro handbook (2006) - recommended
populism, the red, white and blue of social
patriotism, and with feigned regret told
assembled delegates that: “Dead Russians,
I’m afraid, must be discussed in private”. 1
Nevertheless, Galloway mourns the
“disappearance of the Soviet Union” in his
autobiography I’m not the only one (2004). The
“biggest catastrophe of my life,” he caterwauls.
And, of course, unforgettably he saluted the
“courage”, “strength” and “indefatigability” of
Saddam Hussein, the Stalin of Iraq, on Arab TV.
No less to the point, Galloway has a long record
of expressing a visceral dislike of “Trots”.
A short while later, Griffiths, speaking as the
CPB’s fraternal representative at the abovementioned Respect conference, fulsomely
agreed with Galloway. Keep dead Russians
“private”. Ordinary people will not understand
talk about Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. Yet over a
pint or three, ensconced in his favourite pub in
the Cathays area of Cardiff, Griffiths tells anyone
who cares to listen about Stalin’s inspiring
mission, his great foresight in carrying out forced
collectivisation and how the purges put paid to
a fifth column of traitors, hirelings and spies.
Few bother nowadays with Scargill and his
SLP rump. Its triennial congress took place on
November 15 2008, safely hidden away in
Blackpool (Claremont Hotel, North Promenade,
Blackpool, FY1 1SA). The thumbnail report on
the SLP’s website assures us that Scargill made
a “rousing speech”.2 But - surprise, surprise no details are given. So what King Arthur said
this time round remains a mystery. Nevertheless,
when the SLP did matter - in 1996 and 1997 this would-be labour dictator routinely ‘joked’;
and with the supreme confidence that comes
from having 3,000 congress votes ready in
one’s back pocket (just in case there is a danger
of losing a vote). “Nobody cares”, he would
scornfully pronounce, what “one dead Russian
said to another dead Russian on a wet
Wednesday in 1917.”
However, Scargill is another committed Stalin
partisan. In his case alcohol and lack of sobriety
has nothing to do with it. As far as I know he is
teetotal. Anyway, according to Scargill speaking in 1997 at a rally organised by the proStalin Committee to Celebrate the October
Revolution - the “ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin
and Stalin” explain the “real world”. Despite that,
it is a “mistake to talk about the events” which
led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bizarre.
And, going on to say far more about himself
than his ‘four great teachers’, he claims that “if
Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin” were alive today,
they “wouldn’t be talking about theoretical
problems”, but discussing what the “real
struggle is about”. 3 For Scargill that means
supporting trade union disputes and giving
them a political coloration. And, perfectly in tune
with Scargill’s unreconstructed Stalinite politics,
we find him demanding a revival of British deep
coal production, retention of the British pound
sterling, a British withdrawal from the European
Union and a British road to national socialism.
Why the shying away from history by
Galloway, Griffiths and Scargill? The staggering
hypocrisy, the arrogant condescension, the
promotion of ignorance and the attempt to
impose silence? The warnings against others
discussing Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and openly,
unambiguously and fearlessly stating their
viewpoint when it comes to what, after all, are
world-historic personalities? It may be done
in the name of so-called ordinary people,
winning their votes and guarding against
confusing, unnecessary and potentially
divisive mixed messages, but there is clearly
another agenda at work.
Leave aside those in the labour movement who
are politically educated, politically engaged,
politically experienced. Those whom Marxists
call the vanguard or advanced workers (eg,
readers or potential readers of the Weekly
Worker). So-called ordinary people are not
stupid, unable to take a moral stand; nor are
they so easily hoodwinked or uninterested. On
the contrary, certainly when it comes to Lenin,
Trotsky and Stalin, they - certainly most of
them - show a keen interest. At least that is
my experience.
Tell someone you happen to get into
conversation with on a long train journey, the
workplace canteen, your favourite pub, the local
coffee shop, at a family gathering, etc, that you
are a Marxist, a communist, a revolutionary
socialist. How do they typically respond?
A few snarl with bigoted hostility. Others offer
indifferent condolences. But on average there
will be a definite, if guarded, sympathy and a
willingness to discuss and find out. Especially
since the economic downturn, the bail-out of the
banking system and the ideological collapse of
the ‘You can’t buck the market’ version of
bourgeois economics. Karl Marx - voted thinker
of the millennium by Radio 4 listeners commands an ever higher reputation. Above all
amongst the ever growing number who angrily
denounce the iniquities of capitalism, the greedy
bankers, the dozy trade union officials and the
bankrupt political establishment, and who one
way or another favour radical global change.
That said, most so-called ordinary people
instantly ask about Stalin, the mass killings, the
complete absence of elementary freedoms in
the Soviet Union, the lies, the grey poverty, the
1989-91 collapse, etc. Tell them you are antiStalin and implacably opposed to Stalin’s
system of bureaucratic socialism. Four out of
10 will say that the October Revolution and the
theory and practice of Lenin and Trotsky led
directly to Stalin.
Tell them, no; show them that this is untrue.
That, while Lenin and Trotsky made mistakes,
they were committed body and soul to the
overthrow of capitalism and did their utmost to
achieve human liberation. That in his last year
of life Lenin wanted first to curb Stalin’s power
and then to crush him politically. That from the
mid-1920s till he was killed by Stalin’s assassin,
Trotsky devoted himself to exposing Stalin’s
system, to upholding the internationalist
programme of Bolshevism and trying to rescue
the October Revolution from degeneration
through a political revolution.
Three out of 10, those who have some
knowledge, some acquaintance with what calls
itself the far left, no matter how passing or
superficial, will then point to its Stalinite forms
of organisation, lack of democracy, horrible
mistreatment of young recruits, the craziness
and self-imposed marginality.
That cannot be just my own experience. And
it most definitely underlines for me the
correctness and urgency of fulfilling the task
we have set ourselves - overcoming illusions
in halfway house projects, dissolving the
bureaucratic centralism, dogmatic stupidity and
artificial divisions of the sects and uniting the
Marxist vanguard as the Marxist vanguard. If we
could do that, a party of many millions would
soon be within our reach. Then we could turn
the world upside down. So-called ordinary
people are clearly more and more ready, if only
there was a solid organisational framework, a
trained body of cadre and programmatic unity
and clarity.
Replying to honest questioning evasively, with
obfuscation, saying, in effect, that history does
not matter or should be put aside, is certainly seen
- yes, by those so-called ordinary people - for
exactly what it is. A crude attempt to gag awkward
critics, a way to shrug off mass killings and a flimsy
cover for an ongoing admiration of Stalin and
bureaucratic socialism.
The truth will out. Not surprisingly so-called
ordinary people want nothing to do with any
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March 12 2009 760 worker
SUPPLEMENT
kind of neo-Stalinite project. After all, if by some
dreadful historical fluke its advocates were ever
to be catapulted into state power, we would see
either a British reformist damp squib or a British
version of China, Cuba and North Korea. No
wonder Respect, the Morning Star’s CPB and
the SLP are widely regarded with contempt.
They richly deserve oblivion.
Apologetics
Of course, if they are sufficiently pressed, if
stung, if forced, mealy-mouthed criticism of
Stalin comes from the Galloway-Griffiths-Scargill
camp. They and their friends, minions, cothinkers and imitators, as I have shown
elsewhere, should be categorised as “belittlers”,
not out-and-out approvers or deniers, when it
comes to the crimes of Stalinism.4
However, given the source, criticism
inevitably slides into, merges with and becomes
indistinguishable from apologetics. We saw a
sorry example from Kenny Coyle, writing in
these pages - former international secretary of
the CPB, he now resides in Hong Kong and
gains a living from Grub Street journalism and
serving as a loyal mouthpiece for the procapitalist Chinese bureaucracy.5
A short aside. The CPB has shifted from
collectively prostituting itself to the Soviet Union
to collectively prostituting itself to the People’s
Republic of China. Thus, in the run-up to the
August 2008 Olympics, the CPB formed itself into
a propaganda agency for the Beijing regime’s
‘enlightened’ rule of Tibet. Coyle was the pimp.
Five of his wretched Morning Star articles (plus
two editorials) were reproduced as a CPB
pamphlet: Tibet: colony or part of China?
Despite the new Chinese paymaster, there
remains an undying attachment to bureaucratic
socialism written in Cyrillic letters. Even in
its grudgingly reproachful goodbye to the
“command system” - its November 1992 41st
Congress resolution was a diluted, bowdlerised
and neutered plagiarisation of 1930s Trotsky
- the Soviet Union is remembered for “building
socialism in a backward country”, developing
“large-scale industry”, taking huge strides in
health, housing and social services and making
“a tremendous impact” on the struggles for
national liberation and peace (Stalin’s
counterrevolution, the terror and international
sabotage go unmentioned).6
“Avoidable” flaws appeared that went
uncorrected. But fundamentally the Soviet
Union was blocked from realising its full
potential by “hostile imperialist forces”, Nazi
invasion and the US cold war.
In a glowing introduction, Robert Griffiths
does touch upon Stalin. He even concedes that
there were “brutal crimes” and “thousands hundreds of thousands, if not millions - of
victims”. Many of them “loyal communists and
Soviet citizens”. On balance, however, “the
positive features” of the Soviet Union “far
outweigh the negative ones”. And, flying in the
face of history and showing that he has not
learnt a thing, Griffiths owns up that he “does
not accept” that building “socialism in one
country” was “impossible”. Astonishing.
Know them by their friends. Griffiths closes
his introduction boasting of the CPB’s
“comradely relations” with the Communist Party
of the Russian Federation.7 This ghastly redbrown outfit, led by Gennady Zyuganov, is
rabidly nationalistic, openly defends Stalin and
peddles anti-semitism.
Back to the main thread. Along with inspiring
“triumphs”, Stalin sometimes acted over hastily,
took badly misjudged decisions and, yes,
committed crimes that damaged socialism,
argues Coyle - exactly like a defence lawyer.7
Coyle’s tactics are to muddy, trivialise, divert,
plead for sympathy, blame others and thereby
create the shadow of doubt needed for acquittal.
Eg, Stalin and his leadership were “not allknowing, all-seeing and all-powerful” and cannot
therefore bear prime responsibility for the
collectivisation famine of 1932-33 that devastated
the Soviet Union (with Ukraine, Kazakhstan and
the northern Caucasus republics being
particularly affected). Yet Stalin was undoubtedly
an autocrat, wielding powers the tsars would have
envied. He is on record as flatly denying that there
was anything amiss - the official line at home and
abroad - and the Soviet regime successfully
duped, misled or simply purchased a range of
western journalists so that they repeated the lie.
Stalin certainly refused to listen to pleas from
local officials in Ukraine requesting the release
of food stocks and a reduction of grain
procurement quotas. Robert Conquest concludes
that the probable motive “was to break the spirit
of the most recalcitrant regions of peasant
resentment at collectivisation”.8 But - genocidal
conspiracy or bureaucratic cock-up - around eight
to 12 million are said to have perished.
Naturally, Coyle latches upon anyone who
can ‘authoritatively’ discredit such accounts.
His main ‘expert witness’ on the 1932-33 famine
is more than a little suspect, however - the
Canadian journalist, Douglas Tottle. In 1987 his
Fraud, famine and fascism: the Ukrainian
genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard was
published by Progress Publishers in Toronto
(linked to the ‘official’ Communist Party of
Canada). According to Coyle, this “superb”
book “provided the most far-reaching
demolition job of the ‘terror-famine’”.9
Tottle fixes upon how William Randolph
Hearst’s yellow press, Nazi propagandists and
Ukrainian nationalists seized hold of, manipulated
and embellished the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine.
Doubtless true. But what Tottle sought to do
was no less problematic. Alibi the Soviet system
and towards that end downgrade or explain away
the collectivisation famine - planning was
“amateurish”, there were Ukrainian “saboteurs”,
unnecessary “Stalinist excesses”, etc, etc.10
Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, the Soviet Union’s
boss in Ukraine from 1972-89, publicly
acknowledged the fact, extraordinary scale and
political exacerbation of the collectivisation
famine in December 1987. A bombshell for
‘official communists’ everywhere. Tottle’s book,
which had just been published, was quickly
withdrawn in pained embarrassment (and
presumably remaining stocks pulped). Hence
today it is a prized possession … for some.
Fraud, famine and fascism sells at a premium
over the internet (when I accessed Amazon it
was offering a single used copy for Canadian
$413.50). Giving such a work gushing praise,
treating it as a reliable authority, following its
agenda, speaks volumes.
Coyle not only defends. He has Stalin’s
programme, politics and lack of moral scruple as
his operative method. That much must already
be clear. He is, however, simultaneously
ashamed of Stalin and Stalinism. Like most other
Stalinists, Coyle wants to dissociate himself from
the crimes of Stalin and towards that end he uses
Stalinism as a political swear word. A kind of
psychological displacement follows.
Eg, my “tirade” against his apologetics “go
some way to helping to answer the question:
‘How did Stalinism happen?’” An ‘official
communist’ variant of Karl Popper’s hoary old
thesis: Marxism’s “denunciation”, “dogmatism”
and “polemical excess” against opponents
inexorably leads to the gulag. 11 Palpable
nonsense, of course. No, for Marxism harsh
polemics are simply a means of laying bare and
calling attention to the truth.
Coyle even has the nerve to accuse me of
‘third period’ Stalinism. ‘Third period idiocies’
is the self-chosen title of his Weekly Worker
piece. Pitiful. In the late 1920s and early 30s
‘official communism’ branded the Labour Party
as just another bourgeois party. Furthermore,
it actually equated social democrats with
fascists. “Twin brothers,” quipped Stalin.
Hence they were ferociously denounced as
social-fascists. ‘Official communists’ also
started to label Trotskyites agents of Hitler not that that stopped in 1935, as Coyle, with
airbrush in hand, guiltily implies (the CPB is
joined at the hip with the Socialist Workers
Party in the Stop the War Coalition). Anyway,
as a result of the refusal to distinguish between
fascists and social democrats, the Communist
Party of Germany was instructed to shun the
united front tactics that might have prevented
Hitler’s rise to power. That was ‘third period’
Stalinism.
Coyle has the perfect right to denounce this
sorry chapter in the sorry history of ‘official
communism’, but he has no right to attribute to
me such tarnished, pernicious and quite frankly
repulsive views. Clearly though, Coyle and his
CPB have some explaining to do.
After all, Rob Griffiths privately revels in proStalin braggadocio. And does he not consider
the Labour Party a straightforward bourgeois
party nowadays, or something very close
to it? Certainly the CPB sees itself as the
“re-establishment” of the old ‘official’ CPGB,
which only dared criticise Stalin with
hindsight, when he was safely in his grave,
after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 ‘secret speech’
- and then only in the most wretched, equivocal
and canting manner. By contrast the Provisional
Central Committee of the CPGB and its precursor,
the Leninists of the CPGB - founded 30 years
ago in 1979 - place themselves historically in the
tradition of the left and united oppositions of
the 1920s, albeit critically.
Such incompetent attempts at counterattack
not only backfire. Coyle reveals himself to be a
moral pygmy. He was replying to my Weekly
Worker supplement devoted to the question of
“how many died because of Stalin’s system”
(incidentally the supplement disputed the figures
of the anti-communist ‘exaggerators’).
The blinkered nitpicker Coyle makes great
play of disputing footnote 24. Here I wrote that
his “two-part” article in the CPB’s Communist
Review had been reproduced as a CPB
pamphlet. In fact, he went on to write a third
part. A mistake on my part, sure, but nothing to
get excited about. I was entirely concerned with
his second part, ‘Bodycount politics’, which,
as the title suggests, dealt with how the death
toll under Stalin is politically exploited by cold
war and rightwing opinion-makers.12
Because of his Stalinite affiliations, method
and apologetic intentions, Coyle feels obliged
to pounce on this trivial error in order to
throw doubt over my “antiquated” statistics
concerning the scale of the 1928-53 death toll.
In Coyle’s words, “given his article’s emphasis
on arithmetical accuracy, Conrad does not get
off to a great start”.13 Putting aside the quibble
that this is simply innumerate, note 24 (there
were 35 in total) can hardly be considered a
“start” in anybody’s language. I continue to
estimate that there were something like 10-20
million premature deaths in the Soviet Union
between 1928-53.
My necessarily indirect way of arriving at that
admittedly inexact figure - the political criteria
employed, choice of sources and approach to
demographic and other statistics - was fully
explained in my ‘Dripping from head to foot with
blood and dirt’ supplement and does not need
repeating here. Albeit over a longer period of
time, I concluded that Stalin oversaw a system
which was responsible for more deaths than the
Nazi killing machine within the Third Reich. These
are the numbers that matter.
Revisionists
An unmistakable lacuna exists in Coyle’s reply.
No alternative figure for the number of
premature deaths under Stalin is offered. He can
only play puerile games, cast feeble aspersions
and turn to authors who serve to minimise.
Towards that end Coyle tries another, rather
stronger, line of defence. The Soviet studies
revisionists in bourgeois academia - Robert
Thurston, J Arch Getty, Sheila Fitzpatrick, etc.
Members of this loose school of thought
managed to secure some well remunerated
university chairs in the 1970s and 80s and thereby
gained some wider political influence. This suited
the interests of a broad coalition of forces - rogue
businessmen, transnational corporations,
mainstream liberal politicians, left reformists and
‘official communists’ - those who wished to
boost commercial relations, promote global
cooperation, peaceful co-existence or even
convergence with the Soviet Union.
Arms limitations agreements under Jimmy
Carter were enthusiastically welcomed as a
breakthrough of sanity, while talk from Ronald
Reagan and his administration about an ‘evil
empire’ was derided as madness. Ditto Reagan’s
highly publicised pledge to consign
“communism” to the “ash heap of history”. In
comparative terms the US conservative right
were therefore revolutionaries when it came to
the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. The
Soviet studies revisionists were inclined to
accept the status quo and argue for piecemeal
reform. They certainly thought that, while the
Soviet Union faced problems, it would last long
into the future.
Not that this should be taken as a suggestion
that what they produced was entirely worthless.
Far from it. Useful work was done. Archives
were investigated, facts and figures were
collated, along with lots of new translation
work. Soviet studies revisionists put a
corrective methodological stress on the role of
interest groups, including the broad mass of the
population, as opposed to high politics, official
ideology and international relations.
On the positive side the revisionists
challenged the standard academic account of
the 1950s and early 60s which dismissed the
1917 October Revolution as a historical
aberration, a mere coup, which prevented Russia
from developing into a ‘normal’ liberal
democracy - see Leonard Schapiro, Robert
Daniels, Richard Pipes, Martin Malia, etc. The
authorities in Moscow were not displeased.
Under Mikhail Gorbachev a number of their
books and articles were published. There were
critical plaudits. Even awards.
Throughout its history under Stalinism
the Soviet Union saw extraordinary levels
of repression, along with state control
over every sphere of life. Nonetheless,
people determinedly, often showing great
ingenuity, pursued their own individual, family
and sectional interests. With that in mind the
revisionists brought to the fore the “chaotic
administration, indecision, lack of planning, a
wide disparity between central pronouncements
and local outcomes, the relative autonomy of
some social processes”, etc.14
T he revi si oni sts w ere det erm i ned t o
‘normalise’ Soviet society. Interest groups in
the Soviet Union were equated with those in
the west. The idea of the country being run by
a single leader was contemptuously rejected for
many centres of influence and power. Experts
in particular were said to shape policy. There
were those who in the name of even handedness
foolishly talked about the post-Stalin regime
seeing a mass level of political participation
through trade unions, the Komsomol,
elections, etc. The case was even made that
the Stalin regime relied on mass support and
was pushed by those below into
intensifying the purges so as to eliminate
unpopular managers, grasping kulaks, rivals
for accommodation, etc.15 A grain of truth, of
course, but no more.
There follows a corresponding concentration
on the small scale, the empirically measurable
and what was going on with everyday lives
rather than a searching out of the underlying
laws that governed the Soviet Union and
painstaking construction of a general theory
adequate to the task of explaining and predicting
its movement through history. Quite obviously
that would require Marxism.
Naturally, issue was taken with the totalitarian
paradigm that dominated Soviet studies in
academia from the 1950s through to the early
60s - undergoing a revival after the 1989-91
collapse. Totalitarianism as a concept, it
should be noted, was first popularised by
Benito Mussolini and the Italian fascists in the
1920s, but widely used by Marxists such as
Trotsky in the 1930s. However, it was colonised
by the conservative right after World War II and
claimed as uniquely theirs.
Many differences exist within this school, but
its representatives were united in their basic
approach - worship of the market and a
corresponding hostility to the October
Revolution. While some saw the Soviet Union
as a continuation of tsarism and others a break
from it, no distinction was drawn between the
Soviet leadership of the early 20s and the Stalin
regime.16 The Soviet Union was unforgivably
run along non-market lines, and dreadful
consequences were seen as ineluctably
following.
Nonetheless, whereas the revisionists saw the
Soviet Union, especially post-Stalin, as some
kind of normal society, the rightwing totalitarian
school was unremitting in its denunciations of
the repression. And, once again, it has to be said
that the right wing were more revolutionary here.
No alternative power, no spark of democracy, no
public expression of opposition was brooked in
the Soviet Union - either from privileged CPSU
functionaries, plant managers, trade union
officials, intellectuals, churches or popular
associations of any kind. That is, till things
started to come apart at the seams in the late 80s
and the system began to disintegrate.
Repression enabled the Stalinist state to
disorganise workers to the point of atomisation.
Not that the totalitarian school was at all
concerned about the inability of workers to fight
for their long-term historic interests by forming
themselves into a party - why 1989-91 produced
Boris Yeltsin, not socialism. Paradoxically the
atomisation of workers was facilitated by the anticapitalist nationalisations inherited from the
October Revolution. The state was the employer,
the trade union as well as the gendarme, and state
power reached down to each and every shop
floor. The workforce was spied upon and lived in
constant fear. The KGB was ubiquitous.
Meanwhile, workers subsisted on very low living
standards, endured constant shortages, pokey
apartments, poor-quality consumer goods
and endless frustrations with petty-minded
officialdom.
Obviously revealing its cold war agenda,
however, the rightwing totalitarian paradigm
insisted that the Soviet leadership was driven
by its so-called Marxist-Leninist ideology to
constantly expand abroad - see Adam Ulam,
Robert Conquest, Leszek Kolakowski, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, etc. That went hand in hand with
vastly exaggerating the Soviet Union’s internal
cohesion and the military threat it posed. The
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STWC
essential defensiveness of Soviet foreign policy
was entirely missed or deliberately ignored.17
Inevitably then, as with the Soviet studies
revisionists, the rightwing Sovietologists completely failed to locate the Soviet Union’s inherent and inescapable structural weaknesses and
contradictions: use-value and target-value, quality and quantity, the drive to maximise outputs and inability to control the pace of
individual labour, the waste, the limits imposed
by population numbers, etc. The dynamism that
seduced so many in the 1930s thereby gave way
to the stagnation of the 1970s and finally the 1991
downfall.18
Deaths
Because of the constricting positivism and the
resulting theoretical poverty of the revisionists,
the Russian archives are turned into something
o f a cu l t - d es p i t e re s tr ic te d acc es s,
inbuilt biases and incomplete and withheld
files. But another excuse for number-crunching,
translation work and, when all is said and done,
second-rate analysis. Not that I ignore, dismiss
or decry the use of these archives - as Coyle
stupidly claims (and, revealing the vacuum at
the heart of his account, he tries to turn this
non-issue into another cheap comedy show
because I did in fact quote them on a number
of occasions in my ‘Dripping from head to foot’
supplement - sad and, given the subject,
decidedly not funny).
In the same banal manner, Coyle lambastes me
for not realising that Soviet studies revisionists
do not “downplay the crimes of Stalinism”. But
that is exactly what they do and why Coyle and
co are attracted like flies to shit. Having
burrowed away in the archives, the revisionists
have discovered no lists of 10-20 million deaths
or anything like it. But does anyone seriously
expect the FSB - successor of the KGB and
NKVD - to hand over such information? If, that
is, it was fully collected in the first place
(unlikely), and if what was collected has not been
held back, censored or shredded (likely). As is
well known, there is an ongoing campaign being
conducted from the Kremlin to rehabilitate
Stalin. The stated aim of Vladimir Putin is to make
Russians proud of their history once more.
Under these conditions the revisionists have
produced death tolls that widely vary from less
than a million to four million, five million and more.
Coyle and his type instinctively prefer, as one
would expect, the lower figures.
Hence his general secretary, Griffiths, finds a
strange sort of comfort in the “evidence of
Moscow state, party and Comintern archives” as seen through the minimising lens of J Arch
Getty, etc. “The number executed when the
purge was at its height, in 1937 and 1938, totalled
slightly under 700,000.” That is a “shocking and
unforgivable figure,” sighs Griffiths, “but it is
not the tens of millions claimed by anti-Soviet
propagandists down the decades”.19
But, as I have shown, even the higher figures
produced by the Soviet studies revisionists
are almost certainly a gross underestimate. Just
because they are not detailed in the files handed
over by archivists and administrators of the State
Archives of the Russian Federation, Central
Archives of the Security Service of the Russian
Federation, Archive of the Administration of the
President of the Russian Federation, etc does not
mean that many, many more did not die. They did.
Though to show how many requires an indirect
approach - census returns, population projections,
estimates of famine victims, those who died
because of deportation, maltreated in the
gulags, the cannon fodder driven to their
deaths in the Finnish war, etc. Arithmetic
precision is impossible.
Sadly, it is still only too easy to find
unreconstructed Stalinites. Needless to say,
they deny that there is anything questionable
about Stalin’s great show trials, forced
collectivisation, the gulag system, the
deportation of whole national groups during
World War II, etc.
Surely most prominent is Prachanda, the
mono-named leader of the Communist Party of
Nepal (Maoist). With much, often bemused,
global media coverage, he was sworn in as the
kingdom’s prime minister in August 2008. Then
there is José María Sison of the Communist Party
of the Philippines. The CPP continues to
conduct a low-key guerrilla struggle. Nor should
we forget ‘president’ Gonzalo, aka Abimael
Guzmán, leader of Peru’s Shining Path. Though
captured and imprisoned, he continues to be the
object of a certain kind of fascination. Another
denier is Ludo Martens, leader of the Belgium
Party of Labour and author of a string of proStalin books and pamphlets - a few wonderfully
(mis)translated into English.
In Britain the most notable ultra-Stalinite is
Harpal Brar. Once a member of the SLP’s
executive committee, he is now chair of the
CPGB (Marxist-Leninist). Brar fronts the
unashamedly named Stalin Society. His
publication, Lalkar, savages Griffiths for being
a lily-livered liberal because he accepts that
Stalin was responsible for any crimes at all.
As to Griffiths’ admission of 700,000 deaths,
this is just anti-Stalin propaganda, snorts
Lalkar. Only 100,000 people were sentenced
to death, it maintains. However, many of them
“had committed violent crimes such as murder
and rape”.20 Even then, sentences were often
commuted to various terms in the gulag. On
the basis of this type of reasoning, Stalin’s
penal system is compared favourably with the
situation in the US today.
As I have remarked, and continue to maintain,
“when it comes to Stalin’s terror system”, these
absolute deniers “exhibit an eerie similarity to
rightwing deniers of the Nazi holocaust”.21 In
actual fact, because they claim to represent the
left, the Stalinites and ultra-Stalinites are worse
politically, as far as we should be concerned,
than far-right nutters. Exactly in that spirit
Trotsky remarked that Stalinism serves as the
“most powerful factor” in demoralising workers
living under fascist dictatorships and “in this
respect, as in others, Stalin acts merely as
Goebbels’ assistant”.22
Coyle fumes, snarls and protests. He only
succeeds in making himself look completely
contemptible. Rushing to the side of the
absolute deniers, he furiously exclaims: “Conrad
is not the first charlatan to equate communists
and fascists.” This is not “forgivable polemical
excess”; it is a “political provocation”. Merely
to note the “eerie similarity” between Harpal
Brar, “a prominent Asian leftist”, and Nick
Griffin, BNP leader, when it comes to denying
mass murder (the former under Stalin, the latter
under Hitler), apparently shows a “scandalous
detachment from the realities of race in
imperialist Britain” (sic).
On the contrary, it shows that Coyle will resort
to the ‘race card’ in order to defend a fellow
Stalinite. I know Brar a little and he would be the
last to duck the question of Stalin and his system
using such a pathetic device. Brar is a UK citizen,
a member of a British organisation, intelligent
and in his own way an honest opponent when
it comes to debate. He certainly makes no bones
about his affinity with other ultra-Stalinites,
whatever their skin colour, whatever state
they happen to live under, whatever their
country of origin. As for Coyle, I say he shows
a “scandalous detachment” from the inhuman
suffering witnessed under Stalin, which, as
with Hitler’s holocaust, no-one should deny,
belittle or excuse.
What John Rees has in
common with Galloway,
Griffiths and Scargill
What is really significant, what is really
disturbing, what is really worrying about the
Galloway-Griffiths-Scargill denial of history and
promotion of forgetting, is not the miserable
apologetics of Coyle and co.
Many, far too many, on the contemporary left,
be they loyal rank and filers, experienced cadre,
licensed web masters or favoured thinkers,
go along with the Galloway-Griffiths-Scargillimposed bar on Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin,
effectively concur that the history of
revolutionary Marxism is “mostly bunk” and
abide by the injunction against even referencing
the terror, the gulags and the millions of deaths
in ‘united front’ publications. Testimony to
unforgivable programmatic, political and
moral surrender.
John Rees - when he rode high as national
secretary of Respect, stood for a European
parliamentary seat in the West Midlands,
preeningly appeared on BBC2’s Newsnight and
directed the SWP according to his latest whim
or hunch - displayed all the morbid symptoms.
“Shibboleths”, such as proletarian socialism,
republican democracy, secularism, open borders,
gay and women’s rights, and a workers’
representative taking only the average worker’s
pay should not be allowed to stand in the way
of what people out there “want” and of “making
a difference” by getting elected.23 A classic right
Labour argument fielded in almost exactly the
same way by the likes of Ramsay MacDonald,
Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson,
Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Without a shadow of doubt, comrade Rees
was subordinating the SWP to Galloway and
their mutual allies in the Muslim ‘community’ and
the labour bureaucracy (and therefore in the last
analysis to the bourgeoisie). Respect, let me
emphasise, was not a ‘united front’ or even a
‘united front of a special kind’. The latter being
a sneaky term coined by Rees and the SWP in
order to provide an ‘orthodox’ cover for their
crass right opportunism.
Note, in the texts of the third (June-July
1921) and fourth congress (November 1922)
of Comintern - the Communist International a un i te d fr ont i s a te m po ra ry fi gh t in g
agreement with social democrats which gives
the communist minority enhanced access
to the reformist majority of workers. And,
whatever its particular configuration, the
united front expressly does not involve
communists suspending their duty to criticise
reformist leaders.
Respect was an unpopular popular front of a
special kind. A pact between a sect and a few trade
union tops, mosques, celebrities, businessmen,
etc, but taken to the level of a registered political
party. Respect was therefore implicitly premised
on the absurd pretension of eventually forming
a government, presumably with a view to
establishing a British socialism. A concentrated
variant of the grand cross-class coalitions
recommended, fought for and supported by the
post-1935 Comintern and fourth period ‘official
communism’. Which did see Georgi Dimitrov general secretary of Comintern from 1934-43 expressly promising that communists would
indeed suspend criticism of reformist leaders. In
other words, Respect was a revival, a re-invention
of Stalinite politics.
To put such a monstrosity together, to stop
Respect instantly flying apart, to get it speaking
and moving as one during election times, the left
majority (the SWP) gagged itself and allowed
the right minority to set the political agenda.
Otherwise the right would simply walk away and
thus cut off its social connections, standing with
the bourgeois media and financial contributions.
The right would certainly not accept a
conference vote in the disciplined manner
normally expected in democratic organisations.
What resulted was endless backroom deals and
concession after concession from the SWP. A
modus operandi encoded in Respect from its
very inception.
Neither the Muslim Association of Britain nor
the Birmingham central mosque would dream of
championing secularism and gay rights. Bengali
businessmen would hardly rush to embrace
proletarian socialism. On religious grounds
Galloway opposes women having the freedom
to choose whether or not to have an abortion.
He is also a committed national socialist. So no
free movement of workers. No opposition to
immigration controls. Nor did he exhibit any
enthusiasm for handing over two-thirds of his
parliamentary salary (plus generous allowances)
to the movement and living like an ordinary
member of the working class. As for trade union
officialdom, it was unlikely to bless republican
democracy, proletarian internationalism and the
equalisation of wages.
Hence, when it came to Respect’s annual
conferences, Rees tub-thumpingly demanded
that all such principles should be put on hold,
muddied or simply rejected. He got his way too.
SWP members, from high to low, raised not a
murmur, not a whisper, not a hint of public
protest. Instead, they lined up to speak against
their own ‘principles’ from the podium and en
masse they raised their hands as instructed.
More, those very same SWPers clapped and
cheered comrade Rees to the rafters. Till, that is,
the knives came out on the central committee and
Alex Callinicos, Chris Harman and Martin Smith
moved to deliver the fatal blow. Shakespearian
perhaps, but thoroughly revealing about the
complete absence of anything approaching a
democratic culture in the SWP.
A welcome development. With the SWP
divided above, those below began to question,
think and rebel - thankfully overwhelmingly from
the left - and to change. Eg, former drone Elane
Heffernan defiantly writes: “I fear we have
broken entirely with the traditions of the
Bolsheviks, who, even in the worst periods of
having to organise as a hunted underground
force, had much greater traditions of debate,
criticism and recall of its leaders.”24 On this
occasion she is absolutely right. Except that the
SWP, since its foundation, never had anything
much to do with the pre-1917 Bolshevik tradition
- especially when it comes to “debate, criticism
and recall of its leaders.”
October
Looking back to the Bolsheviks and the Russian
experience is entirely justified. It is easy to
appreciate why.
Man is by “nature a political animal”,
according to Aristotle.25 We can also say human
beings are historical animals. Society - that
includes every family and every individual on
the face of the planet - can only be properly
understood on a level of determination above,
though not separate from, the biological,
chemical, atomic, etc.
History - not Georg Hegel’s History with a
capital ‘H’, but inherited productive technique,
class and national relations, ownership forms,
language, competing organisations, jurisprudence, common custom, accumulated political,
cultural and economic battles and billions upon
billions of daily decisions - exercise a profound
influence on the present and therefore form a
unity between the past and the future. People live
from history.
Not that history simply or automatically
repeats itself. There is quantitative and
qualitative change. Also the growth of
knowledge and awareness. Our species
possesses self-consciousness. It has free
will. Besides acting instinctively or under a
compulsive routine, we seek to achieve our
ends according to some plan first hatched in
our imaginations.
Trying to satisfy artificial wants, pursuing ever
larger financial bonuses, climbing the greasy
political ladder, guarding holy truths, huddling
up to patriotic values, building international
working class solidarity, chasing wild dreams
and even studiously researching the past all
have their effect - of course, under material
conditions bequeathed from the past.
With regard to the latter - that is, historical
study - a quote from Niccolò Machiavelli is
apposite: “Whoever wishes to foresee the
future must consult the past.” But, when it
comes to actually making the future - a future
really worthy of human beings, a future where
each is free because all are free - Marxist political,
economic and class analysis, and the resulting
party programmes, easily provide the most
persuasive, flexible, rounded and far-sighted
guide to practice. Proudhonism, Greenism, left
Labourism, third worldism, Chomskyism, ‘official
communism’ and their many and various hybrids
and offshoots are inferior on every count.
History is Marxism’s laboratory. Not for
nothing has Marxism been described as
dialectical and historical materialism. Moreover,
while the proletariat’s Einstein is undoubtedly
Marx, its Cern is Russia.
Obviously Russia had its specifics. But
general laws too. Here after all, is where the
global contradictions of capitalism found acutest
expression. Every programme. Every theory.
Every party was, as a result, tested to its limits.
Alone Bolshevism passed … and it did so with
flying colours.
Tsarism was rotten to the core and collapsed
due to the weight of accumulated contradictions.
But that does not mean that the role, actions
and convictions of so-called ordinary people
were not decisive. They were. International
working women’s day (February 23 1917 in the
old Russian calendar) was to be marked in the
capital city with leaflets, speeches and meetings.
Instead it became the first day of revolution.
Proletarian women took to the streets against the
advice of the left, demanding bread, peace and
freedom - clearly influenced by Marxism, but
clearly following no particular strategic road map.
Masses of other workers struck in solidarity. St
Petersburg was flooded with demonstrators.
Though some 200 were shot, soldiers in various
regiments refused to obey orders or simply fired
into the air. Old certainties, assumptions and fears
began to melt away. Militant workers were soon
distributing rifles from looted government
arsenals. This breathed courage into army units.
Mutiny by 60,000 soldiers and general strike
merged to become insurrection. Tsar Nicholas
II abdicated in March 1917. The days of the
Romanov dynasty were over.
Throughout the Russian empire a living torrent
burst from the depths into the thrilling light
of revolutionary activity. Aspirations soared.
Popular organisations multiplied over and again:
trade unions, soviets, factory committees, political
parties and red guards.
Power shifted from the tsarist autocracy to
those below. However, the dominant parties
in the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets
(councils) were determined to give power to
the bourgeoisie. One result was the hastily
put together, self-appointed and cross-class
provisional government (initially headed by a
prince, it included 10 capitalist ministers).
Another was the spectacular growth of
weekly
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March 12 2009 760 worker
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Bolshevik influence.
Under conditions of dual power, class
struggles moved with breathtaking speed. Time
concertinaed. More, the whole political
spectrum shifted radically to the left. Aristocratic
landlords, military top brass, church patriarchs
and bureaucratic bigwigs defensively posed as
democrats. The Cadets, the mainstream liberal
bourgeois party, camouflaged themselves with
Narodnik socialist and later Marxist tinges and
hues. Most people, however, were not so easily
fooled. In Soviet elections the right got nowhere.
The Socialist Revolutionary Party formed a
soggy middle ground. Theoretically eclectic,
adopting the terminology of Marxism when
needed, it gained the votes of the immature,
uninformed or narrow-mindedly confused.
Crucially, the peasants. T h e S R s w e r e ,
t h o u g h , t o i r r e d e e m a b l y compromise
themselves by doggedly continuing within the
provisional government and trying to shield it
from popular anger and criticism. Ministerial
portfolios, influence at the top, chauffeurdriven cars, fat salaries and splendid offices,
yes. But no end to the slaughter at the front. No
break with the rapacious Anglo-French Entente.
No halt to the mounting economic
breakdown. No land to the tillers.
This huge party lost unified direction, slid into
confusion and then in autumn 1917 cleaved into
two completely separate organisations. Left
SRs aligning themselves with the Bolsheviks.
Right SRs becoming a creature of the Entente,
the bourgeoisie and counterrevolution. The
centre could not hold. Soon the SRs were to
disappear into history, leaving hardly a trace.
What of the Mensheviks? Steeped in a
mechanical Marxism, they managed to
simultaneously speak for the extreme left of the
bourgeois intelligentsia and the moderate,
privileged and inexperienced layers of the
working class. A precarious balancing act. This
produced a large membership in the cities and
many first-rate writers and talented speakers. Yet
the tectonic pressures of 1917 fractured and
reduced them time and time again. While far-left
branches, personalities and groupings defected
to the Bolsheviks and the right stuck limpet-like
to Alexander Kerensky’s increasingly impotent
provisional government, the soft left around
Jules Martov, the Menshevik Internationalists,
dithered and dithered and finally dithered into
total paralysis.
In the birthplace of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter
Kropotkin, the anarchists proved entirely
marginal. Always revolutionary, they had few if
any other worthwhile ideas. The best of the
anarchist milieu broke with anarchism.
Meanwhile, the proletariat itself became a
collectivity embodied in the Bolsheviks. Virtually
everything in the working class that was selfconfident, forward-looking and aspired to bring
about the world revolution enrolled in Lenin’s
party. By the summer of 1917 the Bolsheviks had
240,000 members and formed the biggest bloc
in the workers’ soviets. By the autumn there was
a clear majority in Russia for the Bolshevik
slogan, ‘All power to the soviets’.
The October Revolution broke the unity of
the global capitalist order. So no mere political
revolution, but a full-blown social revolution
and arguably the most important world-historic
event since the transition to the Neolithic which saw the defeat of the female sex, the
division of society into classes and the shift
to agricultural production.
When soviet power was triumphantly
proclaimed and the right socialist Kerensky
finally scuttled away into obscurity, it proved
that, if formed into a political party, the working
class can seize state power. Proved that
peasants would rally round the revolutionary
proletariat. Proved that capitalism has an end as
well as a beginning. Proved that humanity, if led
by the working class, can realistically aspire to
general freedom.
Nothing was the same thereafter. And not
only in Russia. The mass workers’ parties in
Europe split. One wing - those who called
themselves communists - looked to follow the
example of the Bolsheviks. The other - those who
kept the soiled name, ‘social democrat’ - to
gaining reforms on the back of the Bolsheviks.
The dominant bourgeois political parties, core
business circles and the military-bureaucratic elite
in the advanced capitalist countries were willing
to pay whatever it took to ensure that there would
be no more Octobers. An obvious symptom of
capitalist decline. Blindly, fearfully, stumblingly
they rushed to grant concessions across the
board in a desperate act of self-preservation:
widened suffrage, social democratic governments,
binding arbitration boards with the trade unions,
welfare benefits, increased living standards for
those in employment, etc.
If they had foreknowledge of the 1929-32
economic collapse, the coming to power of
Nazism, World War II, etc - which the best
Marxist theory did vaguely warn of - things
would undoubtedly have been very different.
Yet, given the self-confessed limits of
Marxism’s ability to predict the future, the
relatively shallow penetration of Marxist culture
and the open-endedness of history itself, the
majority of the working class in the west
myopically, but understandably, followed the
line of least resistance. At the urging of their
traditional parties, elected leaders and trusted
intellectuals - mostly still calling themselves
Marxists - they opted for continuing along the
broad avenues of reform.
As far as most were concerned, it was that
or the huge risks of following in the footsteps
of a war-wracked, impoverished, hungry and
increasingly undemocratic Russia. While a
palpable sympathy existed for the Russian
experiment, there was no corresponding wish to
emulate 1917.
That notwithstanding, it is surely no
exaggeration to say that what bourgeois
ideologues smugly call liberal democracy owes
its existence in great measure to the self-sacrifice,
creativity and daring of those who made the
October Revolution. Reforms gained in the
west were a modern Danegeld. Eventually,
though, a cul-de-sac.
Lenin
For friend and foe alike, Lenin and Trotsky
were acknowledged as joint leaders of the
infant Soviet Republic. Frequently brilliant
theoretical insights and innovations came
through studying and absorbing the available
writings of Marx and Engels (and Hegel, etc).
Of course. But there was more to Lenin and
Trotsky than that.
Workers in Russia engaged in unprecedented
class struggles that took them far above humdrum
trade unionism. Yet they were a small minority
surrounded by a peasant sea. Of necessity, the
workers’ revolution had to gain hegemony over
the revolution in the countryside. Then there was
the question of what attitude to take towards the
left-talking parties of the bourgeoisie and petty
bourgeoisie, self-determination and the tsarist
prisonhouse of nations, the bloodbath of World
War I, the collapse of the Second International,
dual power. Etc, etc.
All demanded theoretical explanation and
practical answers and thus the development of
Marxism. That is where Lenin and Trotsky
excelled. However, to carry out that task the
educators themselves needed educating. Lenin
and Trotsky immeasurably enriched their
theoretical output by drawing on, engaging with
and submerging themselves into the forwardmoving revolutionary experience of the masses
(and therefore corresponding unity, rivalry and
conflict with other first-rate Marxist thinkers
such as Georgi Plekhanov, Jules Martov, Vera
Zasulich and Alexander Potresov).
The development of Marxism, as a theory for
changing the world, is inseparable from the pace,
direction, height and organic connections of the
real movement of the working class. In the
absence of that, cut off from the masses, at best
Marxism develops, inch by painful inch, as a
means of interpreting the world, mainly by
mining past intellectual achievements. That, or
what passes for Marxism, ossifies in the soporific
papers of the sects and the ivory towers of
academia (or turns into its opposite: ie, ceases
to be Marxism).
Five salient points which ought to debunk
some still far too common myths and
misconceptions about Lenin and Bolshevism.
1. Throughout their pre-October 1917 history that is, from unplanned beginnings in 1903 as
the majority faction at the 2nd Congress of the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party; then,
from 1912, formally as an entirely separate party
(though in some remote areas the split with the
Mensheviks was sometimes completed only
after the October Revolution) - the Bolsheviks
were committed to a minimum-maximum
programme closely modelled on the Erfurt
programme (1891) of the Social Democratic Party
in Germany.26
2. This programme concentrated on practical
demands and aims. Eg, the main goal of the
minimum programme was the overthrow of the
tsarist autocracy. Party members were required
to accept the programme as the basis of common
action, not agree with every passage, clause and
sentence. A vital distinction. The Bolsheviks had
no wish to create a confessional sect or a league
of the pure.
3. Organisationally too the SDP was the
template. Lenin sought to form the working class
into a party throughout the tsarist empire. To a
degree he succeeded amazingly quickly. The
Bolsheviks counted as a physical force from the
1905 revolution onwards. Including during their
1906-12 temporary reunification with the
Mensheviks and then after their final split with
them. This was proved by the 1912 elections to
the tsarist duma, when the Bolsheviks won the
entire workers’ curia. The outbreak of World
War I in August 1914 and the accompanying state
repression forced the Bolsheviks underground
once more. But they retained their base,
albeit in the form of widespread sympathy
amongst the most revolutionary sections of
the working class.
4. Lenin provided consistent theoretical and
political guidance. This enabled the Bolshevik
part of the working class to successfully
negotiate the many and varied hurdles that
appeared on the long road to the overthrow of
the provisional government and the formation
of the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ republic
in October (November) 1917. There was
theoretical, programmatic and organisational
development, but no break with the past; not in
1905, not in 1914, not in 1917.
5. Giving successful guidance did not mean
Lenin was dictator of the Bolsheviks. A cold war
caricature. Yes, the party was built top-down in
terms of theory. It could not be otherwise. But
there were heated central committee debates and
tight votes, self-willed editorial boards, regular
congresses and conferences, the election of
oppositional delegates and committees and the
formation of factions in the event of serious
political disagreement. Most importantly of all,
there was constant open debate at branch, city,
district and national level. Indeed, it is fair to say
that the Bolsheviks practised the maximum
democracy objective circumstances permitted.
Even under the most adverse conditions
disputes over strategy and tactics and between
rival leading personalities were never shamefully
hidden away. On the contrary, the Bolshevik
press was alive with controversy and argument.
Democratic centralism was not synonymous
with gagging minorities. Only unity in agreed
common actions.27
Trotsky
For his part Trotsky played a truly outstanding
role in the 1905 revolution. Despite Trotsky’s
young age (he was 26), effectively he led the St
Petersburg soviet. And he led it with exceptional
ability too. Trotsky was therefore at the storm
centre of events that were to unmistakably
imprint themselves upon the consciousness
of 1917 - hence it is clearly mistaken to see
the February revolution as being a purely
spontaneous eruption.
Trotsky’s name is also rightly spoken of
alongside the theory of permanent revolution.
Results and prospects (1906) is a masterly
application of the kind of strategy sketched out
by Marx and Engels for Germany in the mid-19th
century. Democratic and social revolutions
interweaving.
Though Trotsky sided with the Mensheviks
in the 1903 split, he cooperated with, and drew
exceedingly close to, the Bolsheviks during the
great year of 1905. Yet numerous factional
clashes and polemical disputes followed.
Trotsky chose to hold himself aloof from both
the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, the big
factions of the RSDLP. But he undoubtedly saw
Lenin as the main obstacle to his Sisyphean
project of cementing unity. In 1912 this saw
Trotsky help initiate the August Bloc, which
united the Menshevik liquidators and an
amorphous little band of Bolshevik and exBolshevik dissidents and malcontents.
Lenin countenanced, indeed energetically
fought for, the unity of pro-party, antiliquidationist Marxist forces. Not a halfway
house party, which, in the name of unity with
the right, votes with the right and abandons
effective party discipline, along with basic
principles, and has reformism and trade
unionism as its model. Here was the source of
Lenin’s intransigent opposition to the majority
of Menshevik leaders.
Trotsky thought that mass struggles would
overcome what he wrongly saw as superficial
differences between the Bolsheviks and
Mensheviks. Both factions, he confidently
predicted, would be swept along by the sheer
force of cascading events, converge under the
pressure of the self-activating working class
and in the end fight together as one for the
permanent revolution - in Trotsky’s terms
abolishing tsarism, proletarian rule in Russia
supported by the peasants, and triggering the
socialist conflagration in Europe.
As conclusively shown by 1917, an illusory
perspective. Menshevik leaders stubbornly
insisted that proletarian rule - albeit supported
by the majority of peasant soviets - was
epochally premature. Nonetheless, when it
came not to the party, but the revolution itself
- its place in history, the strategic class
alliances needed, the international dimension,
etc - the similarities between Lenin and
Trotsky are striking.
Only a determined dogmatist could ignore
the parallels and essential agreements that
repeatedly occur in Trotsky’s Results and
prospects and Lenin’s Two tactics of social
democracy in the democratic revolution (1905).
Lenin called his strategy ‘uninterrupted
revolution’ - but clearly this was just another way
of saying ‘permanent revolution’. Either way,
the debt both men owed to the Marx-Engels
team is obvious.
In July 1917 Trotsky and his 4,000 comrades
in the Mezharonsti threw their lot in with the
Bolsheviks and Trotsky was elected onto its
central committee. He had found his true home
at last. With Lenin in hiding, Trotsky became the
main organiser of the October Revolution. He
chaired the Revolutionary Military Committee,
which planned and directed the seizure of the
Winter Palace and other vital government,
commercial, military and communication centres.
Shortly afterwards, in March 1918, Trotsky
was given responsibility for the Red Army. He
built it from the ramshackle foundations
provided by the workers’ militia headed by
Nikolai Podvoisky. Trotsky put an end to the
posturings and the humiliating defeats. He
created a million-strong continental force by
boldly recruiting former tsarist officers,
enlisting a peasant rank and file, re-instituting
strict military discipline and over that creating
an entirely novel system of commissars to
ensure political reliability and control. A
winning formula.
Though this body of armed men represented
a programmatic retreat from the workers’ militia
and conformed structurally in many ways to that
of a conventional standing army, the October
Revolution provided the ethos, inspiration and
directing personnel.
The Red Army’s eventual defeat of the white
and interventionist counterrevolutionary forces
in the 1918-20 civil war in no small part resulted
from Trotsky’s brilliance as a military thinker
and hands-on commander. He therefore both
helped to make and to save the revolution,
albeit already deformed (and not only when it
came to the army).
Simultaneously, Trotsky, along with Lenin,
played a key role in the formative debates of
the Communist International - thereby training
a generation of young revolutionaries. Here is
where Lenin and Trotsky’s main hope lay.
Comintern was to spread, rescue and complete
the Russian Revolution. And within a short
time span too.
First revolutions in Germany, Austria and
Hungary, followed by France, Poland and Italy,
then in terms of expectation, Britain, China,
Japan, India and Turkey and the formation of a
gigantic federation of Europe, the Soviet Union
and Asia. Then perhaps Egypt, Arabia, South
Africa, Brazil, Mexico … but finally North
America. The crowning achievement.
Lenin and Trotsky were to be disappointed.
Capitalism proved more durable than calculated.
Hence no spread, no rescue, no completion. The
Russian Revolution was left in asphyxiating
isolation. Nonetheless, the line of march mapped
out by Lenin and Trotsky in works such as Two
tactics and Results and prospects was perfectly
sound. Certainly given the circumstances of
1917 - dual power, peasant revolts and land
seizures, economic chaos, the continuation of
World War I, the ever growing danger of bloody
counterrevolution - Lenin was quite right to push
and push again for the Bolsheviks to save
Russia from collapse and the proletariat from
complete ruination by taking power … and thus
gamble on the left in Germany, Austria, etc, etc,
following suit.
Germany and Austria did follow suit. In a kind
of way. Each had their ‘February’ revolution.
Hohenzollern and Habsburg dynasties were
alike sent packing in November 1918. However,
social democracy - which retained a mass base
- connived, flattered, posed, scare-mongered,
pacified and smothered, so as to ensure that
capitalist stability was restored. As already
flagged, this coincided with sweeping reforms
which substantially benefited the working class.
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Eventually, though, there would be a very high
price to pay.
Democracy
Nothing written above should be taken as
staking a claim on Lenin and Trotsky upholding
a spotless Marxism post-1917. Both exhibited
inconsistencies and, it has to be said, definite
shortcomings, when it came to the centrality of
democracy for Marxism. Read, or re-read, Lenin’s
The proletarian revolution and the renegade
Kautsky (1918). Read, or re-read, Trotsky’s
Terrorism and communism (1920).
In part the needless backtracking and
distortion contained in these fiercely polemical
pamphlets was due to a single-minded
determination to defend the Russian Revolution
- whose fate hung on no more than a thread in
late 1918 - from the disingenuous, hypocritical
and downright treacherous attacks launched by
Karl Kautsky, Philipp Scheidemann, Karl Renner,
Otto Bauer, Ramsay MacDonald and other
notables of European social democracy.
Retreats from basic democratic norms could
have, should have, been honestly explained
as being due to the isolation of the Russian
Revolution and decay of proletarian class
collectivity: ie, primarily the fault of the
social democrats themselves. But Lenin and
Trotsky tended to normalise - worse, even
celebrate - the abnormal situation in Russia.
Sadly, that went to the lengths of dismissing
the importance of majority rule in the name of
socialism. In effect Lenin handed Kautsky the
banner of democracy free of charge: “If we argue
in a liberal way,” writes an indignant Lenin, “we
must say: the majority decides, the minority
submits ... Nothing need be said about the class
character of the state in general, or of ‘pure
democracy’ in particular, because it is irrelevant;
for a majority is a majority and a minority is a
minority …. And that is exactly how Kautsky
argues.”28 Trotsky goes even further. He writes
about how it is correct to “repudiate democracy
in the name of the concentrated power of the
proletariat”.29
In particular, the dictatorship of the proletariat
thereby morphed in most leftwing circles,
blessed by the tremendous authority of Lenin
and Trotsky, into something so removed from
what Marx and Engels advocated as to lose any
real connection with it. Where Marx and Engels
wanted extreme democracy and majoritarian
working class rule, the Lenin-Trotsky-Zinoviev
Comintern justified minority rule, a one-party
state, the banning of opposition parties, the
denial of free speech and fair elections and
other elementary rights. The educators were
being more and more starved of education. The
revolution, including the proletariat, was
moving backwards.
Despite the not inconsiderable post-1917
retreats when it came to democracy, the writings
of Lenin and Trotsky - yes, including the faults
- taken as a whole, remain a Marxist treasure
trove, without which any contemporary working
class programme is hugely impoverished.
Quite frankly, anyone who wants to forget,
put aside, leave unmentioned or deny the role
and ideas of Lenin and Trotsky wants to
forget, put aside, leave unmentioned or deny
the importance of the October Revolution.
Akin to drugging the working class, strapping
it onto an operating table, drilling open the
skull and cutting away at those brain parts
that specialise in long-term memory. A criminal
attempt to lobotomise.
Stalin
What of Stalin? Theoretically he was far from
being the brightest star in the Russian firmament.
True, there is Marxism and the national
question (1913), written with Lenin’s direct help
and encouragement. Admittedly a bit plodding,
it has real worth, though. But there was little if
anything else of that kind. Stalin’s real talent lay
in tireless organisational work, willingness to
carry out the wishes of Lenin and later a canny
ability to manoeuvre and adapt.
Having served as the Soviet Republic’s
nationalities commissar, Stalin was promoted to
be the Communist Party’s general secretary in
1922. Remember, at the time, this new post,
suggested by Lenin himself, was viewed as
purely administrative. Nonetheless, the general
secretary quickly became the central figure in the
massively expanded state machine.
Substitution of the Communist Party’s fulltime apparatus for the disintegrating working
class collectivity and the militarisation of the
party and society itself ensured that democratic
norms were steadily eclipsed by bureaucratic
dictat. A phenomenon that was unavoidable
under conditions of civil war, isolation and
poverty. To argue otherwise is to abandon
Marxism for utopian socialism, anarchism, etc.
As for Stalin, the general secretary, he could
transfer, promote, demote or remove a vast array
of middle and lower-level functionaries, and
more or less as he saw fit. Stalin, precisely
because of his limitations as a Marxist, fell for
temptation and exploited his position for narrow
political advantage. Doubtless, at the time, Stalin
would have internalised his political trajectory
as being in the best interests of the global
working class.
Nevertheless, as we have said, during his last
attacks of debilitating ill health, between late
1922 and early 1924, Lenin, sought first to curb
Stalin’s growing power, and then, exasperated,
deci d ed t h at he h ad t o “cru s h S ta li n
politically”.30 However, a final stroke finished
Lenin off. Stalin survived in high office.
There is no need to rehearse the entire
subsequent course of events. Suffice to say,
with Lenin’s death - initially in alliance with
Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky, then
in alliance with Bukharin against Trotsky,
Zinoviev and Kamenev - Stalin rose to become
an unbridled monocrat. Stalin marshalled,
personified and almost intuitively articulated
the interests of what has variously been called
the Soviet bureaucracy, the Soviet new class,
the Soviet elite, the Soviet Thermidor. Of course,
this did not happen because of Stalin’s
attributes as a theoretician.
Stalin’s master-servant relationship with the
hardening but ever more free-floating partystate apparatus sets the scene for and surely
helps to explain the ‘theory’ of socialism in one
country. A nationalistic bastardisation of
Marxism, the idea was presented by Stalin in
late 1924 - in the second edition of Foundations
of Leninism.
In April 1924, in the first edition of this
meticulously crafted pamphlet, Stalin simply
reiterated what till then was a standard Marxist
formulation: “For the final victory of socialism,
for the organisation of socialist production, the
efforts of a single country, and particularly of a
peasant country like Russia, are inadequate - for
this the efforts of the proletarians of several
leading countries are necessary.”31 Soviet power
in Russia was seen as an auxiliary in the fight
for world revolution. Not an end in its own right.
To supersede commodity production, hence
money and wage labour, and introduce labour
tokens and equal wages for equal hours - leave
aside the communist principle of ‘To each
according to their need’ - required “hastening the
victory” of proletarian rule, at least over Europe.
And that with the confident expectation that the
completion of the world revolution by the
proletariat in North America was within sight.
The second edition of Foundations of
Leninism “corrected” this careless “Trotskyist”
aberration. Just months after the first edition,
Stalin was saying what amounted to the exact
opposite. His original formulation apparently no
longer fitted with the facts. Russia “can and
must build a socialist society.” Now the
“complete victory of socialism” was equated
with “finally” consolidating socialism and “fully”
guaranteeing Russia “against intervention and
consequently against restoration”.32
Presumably, Stalin, with a finger firmly on the
pulse, felt that the increasingly bureaucratised
upper layers of the Communist Party were
yearning for a new sense of mission. What in
effect he proposed was keeping the word
‘socialism’, but giving it an altogether more
prosaic, far less ambitious content. The
organisation of socialist production was to be
associated not with the global transition from
capitalism to communism. Rather nationalised
property and enhancing the Soviet Union’s
state power in the international arena.
Of course, Stalin hedged it around with all sorts
of internationalist huff and puff, but socialism in
one country symbolically broke the Soviet Union
from the world revolution. Herein lies its
criminal significance. Instead of the Soviet Union
being subordinated to the world revolution, the
world revolution - and concretely that meant
Comintern and in some countries mass
communist parties - was to be subordinated to
the Soviet Union. Previously that would have
been dismissed as dangerous anti-Marxist
nationalism. But in the conditions of the mid1920s it was welcomed as a heroic reconfirmation
of purpose.
Socialism in one country became official
Soviet policy in 1926. Nikolai Bukharin had
already suggested the idea and given it a certain
intellectual gloss with some clever articles and
pamphlets. Like Stalin he cynically exploited the
newly invented Lenin cult. Armed with a couple
of disembodied, and admittedly carelessly
worded, passages, Bukharin turned Lenin into
an advocate of socialism in one country.
Needless to say, this had nothing to do with the
authentic Lenin. His quoted writings were in fact
designed to counter those Bolsheviks who were
afraid of what they thought was a madcap
adventure: ie, what became the October
Revolution. Lenin was convinced that the
working class could achieve and for a time
maintain its rule in Russia. Nothing more. Lenin
knew, and repeatedly said, that spreading the
revolution to Europe was vital. Quote-mangling
arguments to the contrary that one still hears
today are quite frankly either plain dishonest or
plain stupid.
Anyway, Bukharin steered himself into an
uneasy alliance with Stalin. He seems to have
seriously believed that Russia could move
forward at the snail’s pace of the peasant
economy, eventually industrialise and from there
haul itself up into generalised prosperity. That
despite relative isolation from the rest of the
world economy.
This Stalin-Bukharin theory of socialism in
one country had nothing to do with whether or
not the working class could come to power
without simultaneous uprisings in the advanced
capitalist countries. There could be a socialist
revolution, a socialist regime and thus socialist
development in a single backward country. A
revolution led by socialists whose aim is to
spread the revolution worldwide. October 1917
and Lenin’s government of commissars provides
indisputable proof.
However, what the theory of socialism in one
country sought to do - doubtless spurred on by
disappointment and frustration over the failure
of the German revolution and inability of Russia
to break the imperialist economic boycott - was
to discard the internationalist imperative and
orientate the bureaucracy towards an autarkic
national socialist agenda.
Exports and imports were not excluded.
The Soviet Union managed to buy and sell
internationally. And it did so on a relatively
substantial scale too. However, the goal was
to achieve economic independence or selfsufficiency. Fear of imperialist blackmail and
capitalist penetration were undoubted factors.
Nonetheless, as an operative programme this
almost certainly substantially lowered the Soviet
Union’s real growth rates throughout the era of
the five-year plans. We take not headline figures,
but real growth rates, which means factoring in
quality - always a chimera in the USSR - and
therefore the stubborn and growing percentage
of waste. Some 20% to 30% of Soviet output was
typically damaged or completely useless.
Nor should relative input and output ratios be
ignored. Purely as a statement of fact, Sovietmade steel, cement, cloth, rail track, tanks,
tractors, cars, radios, etc were as units of
production two, three, four times more costly in
terms of labour time than the prevailing average
in the world market. The same went for eastern
Europe. Faced with the blasting winds of western
competition after the 1989-91 collapse, a huge
swathe of the plant, machinery and industrial
infrastructure, built at enormous human cost
under bureaucratic socialism, proved to be
hopelessly outmoded and had to be scrapped.
Why socialism in a single
country is a reactionary
utopia
Capital is a system of abstract and generalised
wage labour, global commodity production and
global commodity trading; a system of world
money, a system which promotes no ageless
holy doctrines, respects no patriotic, racial or
ethnic prejudices, which overcomes all barriers
in its endless pursuit of profit. Accumulation is
its alpha and omega.
Capitalism is also a system of states. Here we
distinguish between capital and capitalism.
Capital and state form a contradictory unity. The
state, of course, being inherited in Europe from
late feudalism. Anyway - and this is the main
point - the state harbours, yet also curbs, capital.
Without the state, capital is defenceless against
internal and external competitors, foes and
enemies. Capital as capital has no armies proper.
No navies or airforces. No ability therefore to
enforce the rule of law. But the state taxes, lops
off a slice of capital’s hard earned profits, and,
especially with the growth of democracy and the
power of organised labour, cannot permit the
unlimited exploitation of workers within its
borders. All resisted and bitterly resented by
individual capitalists and yet absolutely vital for
the survival of collective capital.
Nevertheless, as a result, far from capitalism
being topographically flat, with capital flowing
downwards, spreading evenly throughout the
planet, capitalism was from its beginnings and
remains highly variegated, combining as it does
both class exploitation and national oppression.
Capitalism produces and reproduces a
pyramidal structure going from the hegemonic
state at the apex, through key allies and wouldbe rivals, to medium powers and finally
dependent, peripheral and marginal countries at
the base. Needless to say, though seeming to
defy Isaac Newton’s universal law of gravity,
surplus value flows upwards. At the bottom
that means the production and reproduction
of backwardness.
Marxism has always stressed that the global
system of capitalism creates the material basis that
makes communism possible. Communism being
a system which ensures the full development of
all, because it ensures the full development of
each. Given the topographical unevenness of
capitalism, the real starting point for communism
must be in the upper part of the capitalist pyramid.
Alone such top countries contain within them the
abundant wealth needed for communism. Third
world communism is the dead-end communism
of poverty. Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, etc.
However, the abundant wealth in the upper part
of the capitalist pyramid is not only internally
generated. It results from highly complex
international economic relations, ranging from
benign mutual exchange to naked imperialist
exploitation.
Even a socialism in one advanced country actually advocated, remember, albeit in a
bureaucratic-reformist manner, by Galloway,
Scargill and Griffiths, and their imitators such as
Solidarity’s Tommy Sheridan, the Scottish
Socialist Party’s Alan McCombes and the SWP’s
John Rees - could easily see a potentially
catastrophic loss of wealth. Sanctions, military
threats and provocations, counterrevolutionary
movements, overseen and paid for by the
hegemonic power and its allies, produce a siege
economy. Hence a bureaucratic socialism of
scarcity, as long established import-export
patterns are disrupted or cut off and people and
production are diverted into ensuring and
bolstering defence capacity. Such a socialism
cannot rest on a semi-state, operate a system of
labour tokens and break down the hierarchical
division of labour. Instead there is social
inequality, rationing and therefore the strong
state (or, as Trotsky evocatively said, the
policeman to oversee the queue).
Of course, in the late 19th century Russia
has to be counted amongst the seven great
world powers. Geographical size, importation of
advanced capitalist technique, direction by a
semi-Asiatic state apparatus, expansion to the
east and south, bountiful natural resources, a
huge population, integration into the European
dynastic system and ability to raise large and,
in comparative terms, well equipped armies
ensured that. Putting things into their proper
perspective, however, Russia has been
described as a colonising semi-colony (Trotsky).
British and French interests exerted particular
leverage.
Inheriting the culture, space and material
conditions of tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union
could quickly consolidate itself into a Eurasian
military power (an extensive, albeit generally
inferior, arms industry was built up under
Stalin and his successors). But despite seeing a
proletarian-led revolution and being noncapitalist, the Soviet Union could never
transcend the subordinate position of being a
supplier of raw materials (grain, timber, oil, gas,
metals, etc) to the world market.
The Soviet Union was never going to catch
up with, let alone overtake, the capitalist
metropoles by its own efforts alone. Absorbing
eastern Europe after World War II and spawning
allies such as Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba
proved to be a hefty burden for the Soviet Union
to carry. Almost certainly the Soviet Union
experienced a net loss.
Arguably, by adopting a policy of integration
into the world economy, as advocated by Lenin
in the early 1920s, the Soviet Union - whatever
its particular socio-political form - would have
benefited from the global division of labour and
thus avoided the economic irrationalities, selfinflicted tortures and absurd pretensions.
Stalin maintained that the USSR had abolished
class contradictions in the mid-1930s. Socialism
had been victoriously achieved. After him
Khrushchev bombastically claimed that the
USSR was due to overtake the US in terms of
GDP by 1970 and would achieve a national
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communism by 1980. Within its state borders
abundance and distribution according to need
would reign.
Absurd claims and delusions aside, socialism
- real socialism, that is - must necessarily involve
perfecting, making more efficient and more
productive, the world division of labour.
Location of natural resources, infrastructure,
ease of transport, environmental impact,
established expertise and the need for
development in what are now backward areas all will be taken into account by a World Union
of Socialist States. In step, nation-states give
way to mere cultural zones and, in time, the
administration of things, as material and cultural
development is ratcheted upwards to the highest
level and abundance becomes a norm that is
taken for granted everywhere.
There was more to socialism in one country
than autarchy and the inability to transcend
backwardness. There was internal class politics
too. Till 1924 it was universally agreed - amongst
Marxists - that the working class could not hold
power in isolation for an indefinite period of time.
Months, of course; a year, no doubt; a dozen
years, maybe; decades, surely not. Without
spreading the revolutionary flame the proletarian
regime would, sooner rather than later, be
violently extinguished - that or it flickers out and
turns into its opposite.
Soviets were already becoming hollowed out
in 1918. In tandem, workers’ control shifted to
one-man management, land for the peasants to
seizing their grain, elections to appointment,
democracy in the Communist Party to military
forms of command and control.
In purely national terms, if the German,
Austrian, Hungarian, etc revolutions had
succeeded, there is every reason to believe with technical, industrial and other such
transfers - that working class power in Russia
would have reversed its debilitating process of
decomposition instead seen the full flowering
of democracy.
Departures from the communist programme
came not because of pre-planned design.
Retreats were forced on the top political
leadership by objective circumstances.
Economic collapse and the need to win the civil
war not least amongst them. But taking such
a course finds justification for Marxists only
to the degree that Russia continued to act as
an inspiration, a bastion for spreading the
world revolution.
Socialism and its opposite
At this point in the argument let us revisit what
Marxists have meant by ‘socialism’. In general
Marx and Engels did not employ the term
positively. Yes, there is ‘scientific socialism’. But
mostly socialism is used derogatively and referred
to opponents and their associated programmes:
eg, feudal, church, utopian, bourgeois, military,
state, bureaucratic, etc socialisms. Ideologies
which were pointedly counterposed to modern,
proletarian or German communism.
Within the Second International ‘socialism’
shifted meaning. It assumed positive
connotations. In common Marxist parlance
‘socialism’ directly referred to, or broadly equated
with, the rule of the working class and the phase
between capitalism and full communism and the
global realisation of general freedom.
Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme
(1875) provided the classic reference point. Here
Marx famously distinguished between a lower
and an upper phase or stage of communism. The
lower phase is communism, but not as it has
“developed on its own foundations”. Rather it
is communism “just as it emerges from capitalist
society, which in every respect, economically,
morally and intellectually, is still stamped with
the birth-marks of the old society from whose
womb it emerges”.33
The lower phase of communism begins with
the revolutionary rupture from capitalism. If you
name that phase ‘socialism’, as I do, then that
has the distinct advantage of historical
continuity and making sense of the writings of
the Second International - Kautsky, Lenin and
Trotsky being amongst its noted thinkers.
Kautsky’s The class struggle (1892) explains
that the socialist “cooperative commonwealth”
begins when the working class becomes the
“ruling class” and is therefore a social form that
leads to full communism.34 That is certainly how
Lenin wrote in State and revolution (1917). The
“first phase of communist society,” he remarks,
is “usually called socialism”.35 Trotsky too can
be quoted using the same terminology: “In a
communist society the state and money will
disappear. We shall be able to speak of the
triumph of socialism only at the historical
moment when the state turns into a semi-state,
and money begins to lose its magic power.”36
Of course, in the early 1920s Lenin, Trotsky and
other Marxists in Russia and elsewhere were
trying to get a handle on the new and entirely
novel situation. That involved frantically, though
with a very heavy heart, inventing a whole array
of new phrases which acknowledged, or
attempted to capture, the totally unexpected and
rapidly changing situation.
The working class party has come to power
in a peasant, economically backward and warruined country. Having gained plots of land
through the revolution, the peasant majority is
growing ever more discontented with grain
requisitions, conscription of menfolk and
inability of the regime to supply cheap, goodquality and plentiful consumer goods. While the
pockets of big industry have been nationalised,
they are starved of western credits and updated
equipment. Some factories grind to a halt.
Industrial workers decline in numbers and
meanwhile the most militant sections enrol in the
Red Army or are promoted in the Communist
Party apparatus. Many die in the civil war.
Finally, the topmost leaders of the Communist
Party have begun to substitute for a
disintegrating working class collectivity and
there follows a forced retreat to market relations
in the spheres of agriculture and internal trade.
In the early 1920s, Lenin variously spoke
of a special kind of “state capitalism” under
proletarian rule, a workers’ and peasants’
state which is suffering from “bureaucratic
deformation”, etc. Socialism, if we mean by that
the first stage of communism, was less a
description of the Soviet Union and more an
aspiration. After all, socialism had been thought
of as decisively taking off or superseding
capitalism at its most advanced level of
development. A united bloc of Germany, AustriaHungary, France, Britain, Holland, Belgium and
Scandinavia taken together, yes. But hardly an
isolated Russia.
Also, as noted above, revolution in Russia
was never conceived by Marxists as a thing in
itself. Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg
had all written of the coming overthrow of
tsarism as being a bourgeois democratic
revolution, but, showing the nature of the epoch
of capitalist decline, this ‘bourgeois democratic
revolution’ would be led by the proletariat in
alliance with the peasantry, which, most clearly
in Lenin’s writings, strives to consolidate itself
in the form of a proletarian-led popular
government. The most effective and enduring
means of spreading the world revolution.
During the short period that joined the
degeneration of the Third International in the
mid-1920s with the aborted birth of the Fourth
International in the late 30s, Trotsky decided that
it was necessary to categorically differentiate
between what he called the dictatorship of the
proletariat and socialism. He described the
Soviet Union as a “degenerate workers’ state”,
not because the working class was unable to
rule and the Communist Party apparatus had
temporarily substituted (in the expectation of
rescue from Europe). Rather because of the
“nationalised property forms” that resulted from
the October Revolution and the first five-year
plan - in 1928 the Stalinite bureaucracy moved
to collectivise agriculture and began a hamfisted, oppressive and hugely inefficient
industrialisation drive. Trotsky was quite clear
in his own mind that the Stalinite bureaucracy
was not ruling on behalf of the working class,
but against the working class. He thought in
terms of a strung out, unique but inherently
unstable form of dual power.
Without a “political revolution” in defence of
“nationalised property forms”, and socialist
revolutions in the west, Trotsky was convinced
that the Soviet Union could not survive a widely
expected World War II. Both a repetition of early
1920s Lenin and, more to the point, a refusal to
recognise the counterrevolution within the
revolution that culminated with 1928 and the first
five-year plan.
The further deterioration in Trotsky’s
thought - his latching onto a hopelessly
anachronistic formula, his refusal to admit defeat
in the Soviet Union - are once again perfectly
understandable. Stalin’s system had no historic
precedent, was changing through a series of
wild zigzags. Furthermore, information was
becoming increasingly scarce, filtered and
unreliable. This was exacerbated by Trotsky’s
own personal situation. Forced into internal exile
in Alma Ata, a year later, he was expelled from
the Soviet Union altogether.
With many of his comrades capitulating to
Stalin, hounded by enemies of every sort,
under constant physical threat, driven from
this country to the next, mixing with and
trusting only a diminishing circle of secondrate and increasingly fractious followers,
leading not millions, but scattered, isolated
and persecuted sects, Trotsky was no longer an
educator who had a forward-moving mass to
educate him. Circumstances which made rounded
theorisation and the development of Marxist
categories particularly difficult, if not impossible.37
Trotsky did admit the possibility of a new social
formation coming into existence. But he refused
to squarely face up to its reality. For example,
though he admitted that surplus product was
being forcibly extracted from the producers, he
could not take this any further in terms of
developing a rounded analysis of the Soviet
Union as an exploitative social formation.
Nevertheless, Trotsky remained a top-rank
Marxist educator. He was capable of many
profound insights. Trotsky saw the lack of
quality, the irrationalities, the political
expropriation of the working class, the national
socialism in the Soviet Union. Indeed it is no
exaggeration to say that all worthwhile Marxist
theories of the Soviet Union, no matter how partial
or flawed, are derived from Trotsky in one way or
another. In that sense all contemporary Marxists
are pupils of Trotsky.38
With the first five-year plan the Soviet Union
can no longer be described as a workers’ state
of any sort. Deformed, degenerate or anything
else. There was a counterrevolution within the
revolution. Outward forms stayed the same, but
the potential for reform, even the potential for a
political revolution as a realistic strategy,
drained away.
Unintentionally, through one improvisation
following another, Stalin and the bureaucracy
launched the Soviet Union as a highly unstable,
ectopic and ultimately doomed social formation.
The counterrevolution within the revolution
necessitated first the anathematisation, then the
attempt to physically exterminate anyone who
continued to uphold the programme, tradition
and memory of Lenin and the October
Revolution. Above all, in the 1930s that meant
Trotsky - and that is exactly why he should be
resolutely defended against Galloway, Griffiths
and Scargill and other shamefaced Stalinites.
Stalin insisted that, with the five-year plans,
the Soviet Union was constructing socialism. By
that, however, he and his successors no longer
meant working class rule, leaving behind
advanced capitalism and the global transition to
communist social relations. The fact of the
matter is that proletarian power had become its
dialectical opposite. Stalin’s first five-year plan
saw the re-enslaving of the proletariat and the reenserfing of the peasantry, carried out under the
slogans and banners of the October Revolution.
Surplus product was extracted by a party-state
bureaucracy and used for its own ends.
Yet, trapped between a declining capitalism and
a delayed socialism, the exploiting bureaucratic
social stratum, its leaders included, lacked
historical purpose, could never consolidate itself
into a class. A not unassociated phenomenon. The
bureaucracy and its representatives could not
even admit its own existence.
Coyle cannot get his head round any of this.
The poor man thinks it is unMarxist to write of
the Soviet bureaucracy leaving behind, lifting
off from, its class base. He tries to make fun of
what he cannot understand. And once again he
displays his own ignorance. Firstly, of empirical
Soviet realities; secondly, of Marxist theories of
the Soviet Union; and thirdly of the extensive
writings of Marx and Engels on the Asiatic mode
of production and the autonomy of the state in
many pre-capitalist societies.39
States must have a “definite class character”,
according to Coyle, and that is that. 40
Presumably he thinks in the black and white
terms of capitalists and proletarians - with the
implication that the proletariat ruled throughout
the 1928-91 period. Laughable. And if reality does
not conform to that wooden formula, which
palpably it does not, then it is reality that must
be rejected. That is certainly unMarxist.
Precisely because the Soviet bureaucracy was
not able to form itself into a ruling class, even
along lines comparable to an Asiatic despotism,
collapse was inevitable. There was no ability to
think collectively, no ability to control labour
productivity or organise extended reproduction.
As the system stagnated and then regressed,
the bureaucracy - or at least the decisive sections
of it - moved to collapse the whole thing in the
attempt to put political privileges onto secure
capitalist foundations. It has to be said, though,
that the marketisation drive under Boris Yeltsin
was a complete disaster. Living standards and
production levels plummeted. A social disaster,
and no successful transition to capitalism.
Is the ex-Soviet Union capitalist? Coyle thinks
the answer is obvious. Capitalism rules in Russia.
Marxism, however, experiences no problem in
answering, ‘Yes and no’. The situation in Russia
is highly complex. In general that is eminently
predictable in an epoch of transition between
capitalism and communism. So, yes, there are
capitalists and capital in Russia. But, as we
know, most capitalists prefer to channel wealth
out of Russia and into the relative safety of the
west. Equally to the point, there is no
generalised wage labour in Russia. But there
is continued disintegration.
In that sense Russia today holds up a mirror
for the rest of the world. A warning. Either
malfunctioning forms, decline, crazy wars,
economic crisis and endemic corruption or the
left does what it must do and finally gets its
act together and organises the working class
into a party that can take power. The choice
is ours l
Notes
1. Weekly Worker October 30 2008.
2. www.socialist-labour-party.org.uk/
upto_date_news_and_comment_can_b.htm.
3. Quoted in www.socialequality.org.uk/iw/242/7a242.shtml.
4. See my supplement, ‘Dripping from head to foot with blood
and dirt’ (Weekly Worker October 23 2008).
5. Weekly Worker November 20 2008.
6. CPB Assessing the collapse of the Soviet Union London
1998, pp7-10.
7. Communist Review No32, summer 2000.
8. R Conquest The harvest of sorrows London 2002, p329.
9. Communist Review No32, summer 2000.
10. http://rationalrevolution.net/special/library/tottlefraud.pdf.
11. Quotes from Coyle’s Weekly Worker article, November 20
2008.
12. Communist Review No32.
13. Weekly Worker November 20 2008.
14. JA Getty and RT Manning Stalinist terror Cambridge
1993, p4.
15. See JA Getty The origins of the great purges Cambridge
1985.
16. So the rightwing totalitarian paradigm normalised
capitalism and refused to recognise that the Stalin regime
emerged from a defeated workers’ revolution. As Hillel Ticktin
points out, this shows a deep-seated hostility towards the
masses and their regrettable entry into politics. The intellectual
inspiration of the rightwing totalitarian school were the
critiques of democracy produced by Heidegger and Nietzsche.
Whereas Trotsky wrote in terms of the popular classes being
expropriated politically under Stalin, they “saw the masses as
the problem” (H Ticktin, ‘Soviet studies and the collapse of the
USSR: in defence of Marxism’ in M Cox [ed] Rethinking the
Soviet collapse London 1998, p79).
On that thoroughly elitist basis the Soviet Union is lumped
together with Nazi Germany. After all, the German National
Socialist Workers Party had two million members when it came
to power in 1933, reaching 8.5 million at its peak. Through that
huge, semi-militarised base, the Nazi leadership likewise
oversaw successive mass mobilisations of the population till
its own final collapse. The madness of crowds fallen under the
demagogic leadership of declassed intellectuals led to
dictatorship, benighted intolerance, the demonisation of
vulnerable minorities and the orgy of mass killings. Or so the
argument went.
The rightwing totalitarian paradigm categorically separates
the Nazi incubus from capitalism. Which is, of course, why it
was assiduously promoted, generously financed and
institutionally embedded. Totalitarianism became the west’s
official opposite. Theoretically tenuous, it hardly needs saying.
But, given the dreadful realities of Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union, plus the ideological needs of the cold war, a political
masterstroke. And far more believable amongst the mass of the
population than ‘official communist’ propaganda about the
wonderfully democratic constitutions, all round happiness and
imminent material abundance in the Soviet Union and the
“socialist third of the world”.
17. See V Shlapentokh, ‘Soviet society and American
Sovietologists: a study in failure?’ in M Cox (ed) Rethinking
the Soviet collapse London 1998.
18. See H Ticktin ‘Soviet studies and the collapse of the USSR:
in defence of Marxism’ ibid.
19. Morning Star October 3 2005.
20. www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/jan2006/griffiths.php.
21. ‘Dripping from head to foot with blood and dirt’ Weekly
Worker October 23 2008.
22. L Trotsky The transitional program for socialist
revolution New York, p140.
23. Weekly Worker January 29 2004.
24. SWP Pre-conference Bulletin No3
December 2008.
25. Aristotle The politics London 1992, p59.
26. See www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1891erfurt.html.
27. For a very useful discussion of Lenin, his aims and methods
see Lars T Lih Lenin rediscovered Chicago 2008.
28. VI Lenin CW Vol 28, Moscow 1977, pp250-51.
29. L Trotsky Terrorism and communism London 1975, p53.
30. Quoted in M Lewin Lenin’s last struggle London 1975,
p103.
31. Quoted in RB Day Leon Trotsky and the politics of
economic isolation, Cambridge 1973, p100.
32. JV Stalin SW Vol 6, Moscow, 1953, pp110-11.
33. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, p85.
34. K Kautsky The class struggle New York, p110.
35. VI Lenin CW Vol 25, Moscow 1977, p472.
36. L Trotsky The revolution betrayed New York 1980, p65.
37. See H Ticktin, ‘Leon Trotsky’s political economic analysis
of the USSR, 1929-40’ in M Cox (ed) The ideas of Leon Trotsky
London 1995, pp65-85.
38. I include Max Shachtman’s bureaucratic collectivism and
Tony Cliff’s idea that the Soviet Union was the highest stage of
capitalism. Even though such ‘theories’ hardly deserve the
title, they did have a certain value as critiques. However,
neither they nor the Maoist, anarchist and similar
pronouncements did much, if anything, to provide an
understanding of the laws that operated in the Soviet Union.
39. See H Draper Karl Marx’s theory of revolution Vol 1, New
York 1977.
40. Weekly Worker November 20 2008.