Re: Jim Higgins/Trotsky on USSR

[Dayne Goodwin <dayneg@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, Louis Proyect wrote:

> What Next? No.22 2002
> Trotskyist Bears and Working Class Stars
> Jim Higgins
        . . .
> . . . The theory of the Permanent
> Revolution is an astonishingly accurate preview of how the Russian
> Revolution actually took place. Less satisfactory were his later ideas
> on the "Russian question". . .
> . . . What we can say with some confidence is that the
> emphasis on the class nature of Russia and all the theories that failed
> to describe it or understand it illuminated nothing, and despite their
> alleged insight into the laws of motion of this new society none of them
> came within a mile of what actually happened. . .
>       . . .
> Paradoxically, one of the most practical and inspired ideas of Trotsky
> was the Transitional Programme that he worked up for the founding
> conference of the Fourth International. . .
-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -

        I was struck by a couple of paradoxes in the excerpt from Higgins'
article which Lou shared with us.  The few sentences above which are
excerpted from that excerpt were the stimulus -

        1) While Trotsky's _Transitional Program_ is little known outside
revolutionary socialist circles, his _The Revolution Betrayed: What Is The
Soviet Union And Where Is It Going?_ is one of his best known works,
widely known, respected, used and cited by activists and academics with a
variety of viewpoints.

        and, much more pertinent to Higgins' comments, 2) it strikes me as
extremely paradoxical that Higgins would say that Trotsky's analysis of
the USSR was completely unsatisfactory, especially that of Trotsky's later
years, and that none of Trotsky's insights on the nature and class
dynamics of the Soviet Union "came within a mile of what actually
happened" while simultaneously saluting the _Transitional Program_ for its
"practical and inspired ideas."

        Here is part of what Trotsky wrote in _The Transitional Program_,
in 1938 [certainly one of his 'later' writings since he was murdered by a
Stalinist agent in 1940] in the section on "The USSR and Problems of the
Transitional Epoch:"

        "The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. . . The political
prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming
ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers' state, will
overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to
capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the
way to socialism.
        " . . . The revolutionary elements within the bureaucracy, only a
small minority, reflect, passively it is true, the socialist interests of
the proletariat.  The fascist, counter-revolutionary elements, growing
uninterruptedly, express with ever greater consistency the interests of
world imperialism.  These candidates for the role of compradors consider,
not without reason, that the new ruling layer can insure their positions
of privilege only through rejection of nationalization, collectivization
and monopoly of foreign trade in the name of the assimilation of 'Western
civilization,' i.e. capitalism.  Between these two poles, there are
intermediate, diffused Menshevik-S.R.-liberal tendencies which gravitate
toward bourgeois democracy.
        " . . . The extermination of the generation of Old Bolsheviks and
of the revolutionary representatives of the middle and young generation
has acted to disrupt the political equilibrium still more in favor of the
right, bourgeois wing, of the bureaucracy, and of its allies throughout
the land.  From them, i.e. from the right, we can expect ever more
determined attempts in the next period to revise the socialist character
of the USSR and bring it closer in pattern to "Western civilization" in
its fascist form.
        " . . . Although it is impermissible to deny in advance the
possibility, in strictly defined instances, of a 'united front' with the
Thermidorian section of the bureaucracy against open attack by capitalist
counter-revolution, the chief political task in the USSR still remains the
overthrow of this same Thermidorian bureaucracy.  Each day added to its
domination helps rot the foundations of the socialist elements of economy
and increases the chances for capitalist restoration.  It is in precisely
this direction that the Comintern moves as the agent and accomplice of the
Stalinist clique in strangling the Spanish revolution and demoralizing the
international proletariat."

        Dayne Goodwin



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