On Stalinism (I)

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In some relatively recent discussions (starting with a discussion on
Hobsbawm, if I recall correctly) the terms 'Stalinism' and 'Stalinist'
cropped up a lot. These are terms in much currency on the Marxist left,
yet their very ubiquity is only matched by a lack of clarity as to what
they really mean. At one point, in fact, Domhnall made this very point,
and asked for a definition of the terms. As I'm not sure he got one, I
offer this - I'm afraid rather detailed - set of thoughts. Apologies in
advance for its undue length, and for the fact that it appears so long
after the original discussions.

 *********

The problem with coming up with a simple definition of Stalinism is that
- since the term has been used to talk about such diverse elements as
ideology, political practice, political parties and movements, forms of
state governance and so on - to avoid a definition that is hopelessly
unwieldy and ridiculously over-inclusive an a priori decision as to what
exactly the term is to be applied has to be made, a decision which
methodologically logically requires in turn some sort of definition.
This elemental tautology lies at the heart of the great bulk of
discussions on the nature of Stalinism. This lack of methodological
clarity is only compounded by the fact that the very term itself has
passed into the vernacular of politics as a term of abuse, applicable to
anyone one doesn't like, especially anyone with an 'authoritarian' bent:
thus not only was Gerry Healy a 'Stalinist' in his pomp, but so was Tony
Blair and in turn Margaret Thatcher too. Does the term have any value
then? I am going to argue that it does, but what I intend to do here is
try to return an analytical content to it, and to strip it of its
pejorative force. A subsidiary objective of mine will necessarily be to
argue strongly against Richard Fidler's suggestion that the question of
'Stalinism' - or, more accurately, the matters to which the label
'Stalinism' is, not always fortuitously, applied - is now an historical
rather than a contemporary one [1] - a view which has been very much
current within USFI circles over the last ten years or so. I shall
suggest that an account of how the concept of Stalinism has been dealt
with by ostensible non-Stalinists over the years raises questions
acutely relevant to the kind of political clarification that
revolutionaries need in the here and now and will need in the at least
foreseeable future.

The best place to begin all this is not to try to come up with a 'new'
definition of Stalinism, since that would be merely to repeat the
methodological tautology just referred to, but look at how the term
itself has been used in the past, to see what can be rescued from its
usage, and what has to be abandoned. For logical reasons, not the worst
place to start would be with the writings of Trotsky: and although I say
'logically' so, another subsidiary target of mine is going to be the
straightforwardly silly idea that there are two fundamental currents
within Marxism, Stalinism and Trotskyism, the one definable by what the
other is not. I hope to make it clear by the end that conceptions of
this type are very much a part of our problem and not of a possible
resolution.

Nevertheless, to begin with Trotsky. The only time in his writing that
you find anything approaching an attempt at a concrete and _scientific_
definition of Stalinism is in his book _The Revolution Betrayed_ [2], a
work which essentially deals with Stalinism as an historico-social
phenomenon, and in which the word 'Stalinism' only appears twice, both
references within three paragraphs of each other, right at the end of
the book. Trotsky's book (written in 1938) gives us the following
account of the socio-historical phenomenon - the Soviet bureaucracy -
that is its subject:

'No help came from the West. The power of the democratic Soviets proved
cramping, even unendurable, when the task of the day was to accommodate
those privileged groups whose existence was necessary for defence, for
industry, for technique, and science. In this decidedly not
"socialistic" operation, taking from ten and giving to one, there
crystallised out and developed a powerful caste of specialists in
distribution.

'[...]

'The present Soviet society cannot get along without a state, nor even -
within limits - without a bureaucracy. But the case of this is by no
means the pitiful remnants of the past, but the mighty forces and
tendencies of the present.

'[...]

'The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of
consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there
are enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want
to. When there are few goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in
line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a
policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the
Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and how has to
wait.

'[...]

'[The bureaucracy] arose in the beginning as the bourgeois organ of a
workers' state. In establishing and defending the advantages of a
minority, it of course draws off the cream for its own use. Nobody who
has wealth to distribute ever omits himself. Thus out of a social
necessity there has developed an organ which has far outgrown its
socially necessary function, and become an independent factor and
therewith the source of great danger for the whole social organism.' [3]

On the strength of this analysis, Trotsky could come up with the
following definition of 'Stalinism' as a socio-historical phenomenon:

'Caesarism, or its bourgeois form, Bonapartism, enters the scene in
those moments of history when the sharp struggle of two camps raises the
state power, so to speak, above the nation, and guarantees it, in
appearance, a complete independence of classes in reality, only the
freedom necessary for a defence of the privileged. The Stalin regime,
rising above a politically atomised society, resting upon a police and
officers' corps, and allowing of no control whatever, is obviously a
variation of Bonapartism - a Bonapartism of a new type not before seen
in history.

'Caesarism arose upon the basis of a slave society shaken by inward
strife. Bonapartism is one of the political weapons of the capitalist
regime in its critical period. Stalinism is a variety of the same
system, but upon the basis of a workers' state torn by the antagonism
between an organised and armed Soviet aristocracy and the unarmed
toiling masses.' [4]

This is Trotsky's _scientific_ definition of Stalinism as a social
phenomenon arising on the basis of a set of historically specific
material circumstances: in short, Stalinism as 'proletarian
bonarpartism', and it seems to me to be both eminently reasonable and on
reflection the only possible _scientific_ definition. Yet as soon as it
is posed a range of questions begin to suggest themselves.

In the first place, although Trotsky's account is absolutely not
pejorative in any sense, it does open up the question of what attitude
revolutionary socialists take to the phenomenon: there is extant in the
political tradition that likes to call itself 'Trotskyist' a view that
'Stalinism' understood in this sense - to be clear, how the regime
organised itself and what it did - was 'wrong', and that we, the bearers
of the whole unadulterated truth of Marxism, would have done things
better. But to say this is to pose the question: if Stalinism as a
social phenomenon arose within such clear material conditions, in what
way could we have done it better? If we say that Stalinism as a social
phenomenon emerged on the basis of the isolation of the revolution,
caught in the grip of a given structure of historical development, in
what sense can we say - without breaking out into precisely the kind of
vulgar voluntarism that Mark Jones so accurately and eloquently captured
in his description of the operation and practice of the Soviet
bureaucracy - that we could indeed have done it differently? And to what
degree can we say that in this set of circumstances, unfortuitous but
real enough - that Stalinism so understood was in fact inevitable?

It is necessary here to emphasise quite how new and unexpected the
problem of the _isolation_ of the world's first workers' state was: we
are sometimes, I think, inclined to take it for granted. But while for
pre-revolutionary Bolshevism it was entirely logical to expect the
revolution to break out in backward Russia itself, the idea, as Mark has
very clearly explained [5], that proletarian power could survive there
isolated from the wider European revolution - fundamental in the
development of the latter being Germany - was an idea that would have
been regarded as absurd. In this sense, that the Soviet Union did in
fact eventually collapse can come as no surprise; but that it would take
something over six decades for this to occur would have been regarded as
impossible.

What then was the regime to do? In the early to mid 1920s, faced with
the problem of the temporary (and it was in fact temporary) wane of the
European revolution, as the leading political force in a proletarian
state, a proletarian state within a whisker of being fatally debilitated
by the ravages of revolution, intervention and civil war, what should
the regime have done? Should it have simply bowed its head to the laws
of history and relinquished state power? To ask the question, I think,
is to answer it. Such a course would have been an unthinkable derogation
of revolutionary responsibility: the only possibility, unappetising as
it seemed, was to have tried to effect some kind of holding operation
while waiting for the historical tide to turn, indeed, doing all that
was possible to effect that turn itself. [6]

But in truth neither of the two courses outlined above was followed:
rather than effecting a clear 'holding operation' what was done was done
as if it would have been the normal way forward in _ideal_
circumstances. When the Bolsheviks first banned inner-party opposition
and opposition parties they did so on the explicit and generally
understood grounds that these were temporary and exceptional measures
that had been forced on them by the deleterious internal and external
position in which they found themselves: under the police state that
came later such methods of operation were theorised as the _optimal_
method of Marxism. Stripped of its voluntaristic excesses, for example,
the drive towards industrialisation begun in the late 1920s would have
anyway been necessary, but this in turn became theorised within the
context of building 'socialism in one country' as its goal. In short,
what should have been temporary and exceptional measures designed to buy
the revolution time and a breathing space became in effect commonly
understood normal practices, in turn their own orthodoxy; and as what
was previously regarded as temporary and exceptional became orthodox, a
political ideology was developed that justified this change, and through
which the bureaucracy itself sought, by means of the vocabulary and
syntax of Marxism, to legitimise itself.

And here we reach a point which is fundamental to our purposes: for if
we accept the definition of Stalinism above as a social phenomenon, we
also have to take stock of the set of ideological concepts developed by
the regime that too are commonly defined as 'Stalinist'. Chief among
them is of course that of the possibility, indeed the desirability, of
building socialism in one country. This idea is held to be so
quintessentially Stalinist that it is necessary to point out that the
idea of a 'national' road to socialism in one form or another has also
been a ubiquitous one within social-democratic reformist socialism, the
fundamental difference being that in the latter case the move to
socialism is predicated on using parliamentary power to direct the
bourgeois state in this direction, whereas the ex post facto Soviet
model was developed after the political rule of the Russian bourgeoisie
had already been broken. Nevertheless, in their common conception that a
socialist order could be constructed within the borders of a single
state, independently from or even against other states, there can be
found a remarkable similarity (even if it is the case that the greater
part of European social-democracy has rather shifted from 'socialism in
one country' to 'nicer capitalism in one country'). 'Socialism in one
country' Soviet-style was in fact nothing more in reality than a
social-democratic reformist idea given a new, 'Marxist' gloss. In this
respect, given the natural nationalist reflex expressed by these ideas,
it is no more surprising that the Soviet version of 'socialism in one
country' should have led to the patriotic excesses of 1941-45 than the
fact that the social-democratic vision of the superiority of one's own
national working class should have broken out into social-chauvinism in
August 1914.

But according to Trotsky's analysis, 'socialism in one country' was not
alone the quintessence of Soviet ideology, for, as he noted, again in
_Revolution Betrayed_,

'Together with the theory of socialism in one country, there was put
into circulation by the bureaucracy a theory that in Bolshevism the
Central Committee is everything and the party nothing. This second
theory was in any case realised with more success than the first.' [7]

Of course this observation will strike a chord with anyone with any
experience of activity in a would-be Trotskyist or sub-Trotskyist group:
'democratic centralism' without the democracy, top-down discipline and
decision-making, no rights of forming internal platforms, imposed slates
in elections, no public discussion of party policy: it matters little
whether you call such practices 'Stalinist' or 'Zinovievist', their
presence is clearly near ubiquitous across all currents within the
Marxist movement. But anyone who has passed any time in a modern (or not
so modern) social-democratic organisation will see, maybe in a less
concentrated way, similar processes at work: the view that the
leadership of a party is everything and the membership nothing is not
such an exclusively 'Stalinist' idea, and neither is the cult of the
personality. It seems as if there is some sort of automatic reflex
driving towards this form of bureaucratic organisation within workers'
parties in general, and to demarcate such tendencies as exclusively
'Stalinist' seems to me to be unwarranted, even if 'Stalinist' practices
classically occurred within a distinct overall ideological framework.

Nevertheless, even if we can identify these ideas - 'socialism in one
country' and the top-down fetishisation of the 'leadership' and the
'leader' - as core to the self-justificatory ideology of the Soviet
bureaucracy (despite the fact that a good case can be made for not
regarding these concepts as exclusively or even particularly
'Stalinist'), we also have to address the fact that when people use the
term 'Stalinism' they often use it to talk about not only Stalinism as a
phenomenon internal to the Soviet Union but also as a system of
international politics: in short, the term 'Stalinism' has been
routinely used to talk about what has been perceived as the Soviet
bureaucracy's international apparatus - the Communist International and
the parties originating from it. How have the Communist Parties and the
Soviet bureaucracy been yoked together in a way that allows the same
political characterisation to be applied equally to them both? The
argument runs like this. At the same time as the process of degeneration
began in the Soviet Union - exactly when appears to be a matter of taste
but the consensus will have it at somewhere around the early to mid
1920s - there occurred, at the behest of the bureaucracy, a similar
degeneration in the Comintern and its constituent parties outside of the
Soviet Union. As the structures of the Soviet state and the apparatus of
the CPSU were manipulated and bent to the will of the bureaucracy so it
could further its own interests at the expense of those of the working
class both in the Soviet Union and elsewhere (so the story goes) the
parties of the Comintern were transformed - through bureaucratic
pressure - into instruments not of the working class and socialist
revolution but of the separate and distinct conservative interests of
the Soviet bureaucracy. This subordination of the interests of the
working class to the interests of the bureaucracy is the defining
feature of many commonplace explanations of what Stalinism really is,
and historical experiences such as the way that the 'Stalinised' CPGB
failed to prepare for 'revolutionary struggle' in 1926, the defeat of
the Second Chinese Revolution of 1927, the triumph if Hitler, the French
Popular Front, the role of the Spanish Communist party in the process of
revolution and counter-revolution of 1936-39 are, so to speak, trotted
out as evidence of, on the one hand, the growing divergence between the
interests of the bureaucracy and the cause of socialist revolution, and,
on the other, the way in which the parties of the Comintern were
increasingly used as instruments of the former to the detriment of the
latter.

This is effectively the classical definition of Stalinism that has
passed into the 'Trotskyist' lexicon: Stalinism as a concatenation of
parties, movement and apparatuses, with the social phenomenon of
bureaucracy at its base, linked together in the common project of
securing to position of the bureaucracy at the expense of the interests
of the working class and oppressed globally.

Now, there are a range of objections that one can make against this use
of the word 'Stalinism' - some obvious, some less so.

The most obvious is that - if this interpretation has any truth to it
(and in my view it has a kernel, but only a kernel) - then it can only
function as an accurate description of the operation of the Communist
Parties outside of the Soviet Union within the confines of a very
specific political conjuncture. If, for example, one can make the
judgement that the western European Communist Parties functioned as
effective servants of Moscow in, for example, 1939 - and, with some very
important reservations which I shall address shortly I think there is a
sense in which one can - it is certainly not the case that one could say
the same thing after around 1945-6. For whatever errors the western
European Communist Parties made after the Second World war, and they may
well have been legion, what one can most certainly not say is that these
errors arose from a willing defence of the interests of the Kremlin
bureaucracy over those of socialist revolution. And what one can say
with regard to the western European Communist Parties in this respect
can be said a fortiori with regard to the Communist Parties of
Yugoslavia, China and Vietnam: for whatever else one could say about,
for example, Tito, that the making of the Yugoslav revolution of 1941-6
was carried out at the behest of the Soviet bureaucracy is not one of
them, for it was carried out 100 per cent absolutely and willingly
against it. Indeed, it was precisely over the theoretical confusion
posed by these developments - parties supposedly 'Stalinist', and
therefore 'counter-revolutionary to the core' [8] - leading popular
revolutions against capitalism - that the post-war Fourth International
tore itself apart over 1951-3.

Thus the analysis of Stalinism as an 'international movement' breaks
down as a workable explanation of the functioning of the role of the
Communist Parties immediately after the end of the Second World War.
(The Comintern, of course, was dissolved in 1943.) One reason why this
in fact might have been so is hinted at by Trotsky in his 1928
discussion of the Comintern's Draft Programme:

'If it is at all possible to realise socialism in one country, then one
can believe in that theory not only after but also before the conquest
of power. If socialism can be realised within the national boundaries of
backward Russia, then there is all the more reason to believe that it
can be realised in advanced Germany. Tomorrow the leaders of the
Communist Party of Germany will undertake to propound this theory. The
draft program empowers them to do so. The day after tomorrow the French
party will have its turn. It will be the beginning of the disintegration
of the Comintern along the lines of social-patriotism. The communist
party of any capitalist country, which will have become imbued with the
idea that its particular country possesses the "necessary and
sufficient" prerequisites for the independent construction of a
"complete socialist society," will not differ in any substantial manner
from the revolutionary social democracy which also did not begin with a
Noske but which stumbled decisively on August 4, 1914, over this very
same question.' [9]

But if we can say that the definition of 'Stalinism' as the
international apparatus of the Soviet bureaucracy and the
characterisation of the Communist parties as 'Stalinist' on this basis
breaks down definitively after the Second World War, when could the
beginning of this process be dated: when could we say, in other words,
that the Communist Parties stopped being ostensibly revolutionary
parties and became - as the theory would have it - dupes of the Kremlin?

The answer - even if the general interpretation is accepted - is:
surprisingly late. To return to Trotsky's interpretation: it is
customary to date the phenomenon of the Communist Parties acting as the
international apparatus of the Soviet bureaucracy against the interests
of the socialist revolution to as far back as the mid-1920s, and to
wheel out examples as the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, the
Second Chinese Revolution or the successful rise of German fascism as
proof of the argument, painting a picture of every defeat in this period
as the product of a conscious policy of betrayal at the behest of the
Kremlin - a kind of left mirror-image of the 'evil-empire'. But when, in
April 1939, Trotsky met with C L R James, their recorded conversation -
which merits reproduction at some length - makes it very clear that
Trotsky at least had little truck with this kind of enormous
conspiracy-theory view of the Comintern:

'JAMES: You would not agree with Victor Serge that the bureaucracy
sabotaged the Chinese revolution; in other words, that its attitude to
the Chinese revolution was the same as its attitude toward the Spanish?

'TROTSKY: Not at all. Why should they sabotage it? I was on a committee
(with Chicherin, Voroshilov, and some others) on the Chinese revolution.
They were even opposed to my attitude, which was considered pessimistic.
They were anxious for its success.

'JAMES: For the success of the bourgeois democratic revolution. Wasn't
their opposition to the proletarian revolution the opposition of a
bureaucracy which was quite prepared to support a bourgeois democratic
revolution, but from the fact of its being a bureaucracy could not
support a proletarian revolution?

'TROTSKY: Formalism. We had the greatest revolutionary party in the
world in 1917. In 1936 it strangles the revolution in Spain. How did it
develop from 1917 to 1936? That is the question. According to your
argument, the degeneration would have started in October 1917. In my
view it started in the first years of the New Economic Policy. But even
in 1927 the whole party was eagerly awaiting the issue of the Chinese
revolution. What happened was that the bureaucracy acquired certain
bureaucratic habits of thinking. It proposed to restrain the peasants
today so as not to frighten the generals. It thought it would push the
bourgeoisie to the left. It saw the Kuomintang as a body of
officeholders and thought it could put Communists into the offices and
so change the direction of events. [...] The party was excited over the
Chinese revolution. Only during 1923 had it reached a higher pitch of
intensity.

'No, you want to begin with the degeneration complete. Stalin and
Company genuinely believed that the Chinese revolution was a bourgeois
democratic revolution and sought to establish the dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry.

'JAMES: You mean that Stalin, Bukharin, Tomsky, Rykov, and the rest did
not understand the course of the Russian Revolution?

'TROTSKY: They did not. They took part and events overwhelmed them.
Their position on China was the same they had in March 1917 until Lenin
came. In different writings of theirs you will see passages that show
that they never understood. A different form of existence, their
bureaucratic habits affected their thinking and they reverted to their
previous position. They even enshrined it in the program of the
Comintern: proletarian revolution for Germany, dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry for semicolonial countries, etc. [...] I
condemned it in my critique of the Draft Program.

'JAMES: What about Bukharin's statement in 1925 that if war came
revolutionists should support the bourgeois-Soviet bloc?

'TROTSKY: After Lenin's testament Bukharin wanted to show that he was a
real dialectician. He studied Hegel and or every occasion tried to show
that he was a realist. Hence "Enrich yourselves," "Socialism as a
snail's pace," etc. And not only Bukharin, but I and all of us at
various times wrote absurd things. I will grant you that.

'JAMES: And Germany 1930-33?

'TROTSKY: I cannot agree that the policy of the International was only a
materialisation of the commands of Moscow. It is necessary to see the
policy as a whole, from the internal and the international points of
view, from all sides. The foreign policy of Moscow, and the orientation
of the Social Democracy to Geneva could play a role. But there was also
the necessity of a turn owing to the disastrous effect of the previous
policy on the party inside Russia. After all the bureaucracy is deal mg
with 160 million people who have been through three revolutions. What
they are saying and thinking is collected and classified. Stalin wanted
to show that he was no Menshevik. Hence this violent turn to the left.
We must see it as a whole, in all its aspects. [...]

'In Germany they hoped now for a miracle to break the backbone of the
Social Democracy; their politics had failed utterly to detach the masses
from it. Hence this new attempt to get rid of it.... Stalin hoped that
the German Communist Party would win a victory and to think that he had
a "plan" to allow fascism to come into power is absurd. It is a
deification of Stalin.

'JAMES: He made them cease their opposition to the Red Referendum; he
made Remmele say "After Hitler, our turn"; he made them stop fighting
the fascists in the streets.

'TROTSKY: "After Hitler, our turn," was a boast, a confession of
bankruptcy. You pay too much attention to it.

'SCHUESSLER: They stopped fighting in the streets because their
detachments were small CP detachments. Good comrades were constantly
being shot, and inasmuch as workers as a whole were not taking part,
they called it off. It was a part of their zigzags.

'TROTSKY: There you are! They did all sorts of things. They even offered
the united front sometimes.

'JAMES: Duranty said in 1931 that they did not want the revolution in
Spain.

'TROTSKY: Do not take what Duranty says at face value. Litvinov wanted
to say that they were not responsible for what was happening in Spain.
He could not say that himself so he said it through Duranty. Perhaps
even they did not want to be bothered about Spain, being in difficulties
at home.... But I would say that Stalin sincerely wished the triumph of
the German Communist Party in Germany 1930-33....' [10]

On the strength of this it is clear that, at least for Trotsky, there is
little evidence to support the view that in any meaningful sense Stalin,
the Comintern and the Communist Parties actually willed, for example,
the defeat of the Chinese Revolution or the triumph of Hitler. But
Trotsky comments that 'in 1936 [the Comintern] strangles the revolution
in Spain', and in the Transitional Programme (written in 1938) he refers
to the 'cynically counter-revolutionary role' of the Comintern. [11] By
the second half of the 1930s, it seems, for Trotsky the degeneration of
the Comintern is complete. But even if this argument is accepted (and I
am going to argue that there is a big reservation we have to make in
order to accept it) it leads to the conclusion that the 'parties of the
Comintern as dupes of the Kremlin' interpretation, if it is to hold any
water at all, can only do so from the middle of the 1930s to the middle
of the 1940s: a mere ten years. Outside of this period, as a
characterisation of the role and policy of the Communist Parties
explanandum and explanans simply do not fit.

~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.