On Stalinism (II)

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Let me just say parenthetically here that the precise interpretation
of, for example, the Spanish revolution is outside of my concerns. For
me, the line of the PCE led the revolution to defeat. But the conception
that one can decide one's political friends and enemies on the basis of
historical interpretation of past events outside of the bearing that
such interpretation may have on the present - we were right in 1937 and
you were wrong! - is a particularly pernicious item of sectarian baggage
that has found itself smuggled into the Marxist wardrobe: it is what I
call the 'red badge of courage' theory of political organisation, and,
since it is useless, I do not intend to open up a debate on such
questions either here or anywhere else unless it is indeed framed in the
context of what bearing this would have on what we do in the present.)

So, if, on the strength of the above, we can say that the only period in
which it is conceivable that the role of the Communist Parties can be
interpreted as a function of their place within the international
apparatus of the Soviet bureaucracy is that from the middle of the 1930s
to the middle of the 1940s, this is not necessarily to say that this
interpretation itself is a valid one without serious modifications. For
how true is it really that the parties of the Comintern were such
willing dupes of the Kremlin and nothing more? Perry Anderson once made
the point that reducing the history of the Communist Parties to the
influence of Moscow simply 'ignores the complex dialectic between the
national and international determinants of party policies', an approach
which, ironically, simply reproduces the traditional Cold War
scare-story interpretations of Communist history. [12]

The dominant politics of the European Communist Parties of the 1930s,
once the ultra-leftism of the 'third period' was passed, was informed by
the strategy of the Popular Front: a strategy which posed the
subordination of the socialist revolution to the necessity of an
alliance with the progressive bourgeoisie to eliminate impediments to
bourgeois democracy - concretely, in this conjuncture, fascism. As
Trotsky points out above, the similarity between this idea and that of
the old Menshevik two-stage theory of revolution is clear, for this
latter posed in the same way the necessity of a bourgeois-democratic
revolution as a necessary preconditional first stage for a future
socialist. In both theories the common feature was the projection of a
_national_ bourgeois democratic stage of the revolution. And it is this
conception of the march towards socialism taking a _national_ form that
is the decisive characteristic both of the line of the Communist Parties
in the 1930s and 40s and of pre-revolutionary Russian social-democracy.
In the latter case, the young Trotsky's position, which was also to be
the position that Lenin effectively came to after his 1917 return to
Russia, was that it was perfectly reasonable to pose socialist measures
as concrete and immediate goals _alongside_ 'democratic' ones; indeed,
that the logic of unfolding revolution would itself lead in this
direction, and that consciously attempting to limit the revolution to
bourgeois tasks alone would spell disaster. There was, in short, to be
no bourgeois-democratic 'stage'. But this view was not adopted - as is
commonly imagined - on the basis of a break with 'stagism' per se, but
on the view that to decide the social content of the coming revolution
it was not sufficient to look at Russia alone. For both Lenin and
Trotsky the 'stage' that had been reached was not the national stage of
the peculiar Russian admixture of social and political conditions but
the global stage of imperialism. The key for both Lenin and Trotsky was
that proletarian revolution was historically posed as both possible and
necessary because of the stage of the capitalist mode of production and
the capitalist mode of production had to be analysed fundamentally on a
world - not a national - scale. Needless to say, this conception has
little to do with the 'everything is possible' voluntarism that today
passes itself as 'Trotskyism': the iron laws of human social historical
development - pace Jurriaan's conceptions - formed the context in which
Lenin and Trotsky mapped out the contours of the unfolding revolution.
Their fundamental innovation was not an anti-stagist 'historicist'
voluntarism, but a concrete analysis of a concrete situation on a
_global_, rather than national, scale. [13]

But it was precisely a 'national-stagist' conception, with Menshevik
knobs on, that subsequently became the predominant line of the Communist
Parties in what is seen as the high period of 'Stalinism' as an
international phenomenon: what is taken as the 'Stalinist' two-stage
theory of revolution, or the 'Stalinist' conception of the popular
front, is in fact nothing other than precisely this conception applied
differentially to differing national political contexts.

Nevertheless, the striking feature of the reception of such supposedly
'Stalinist' ideas outside of the Soviet Union is that they were hardly
foisted on the parties of the Comintern from outside; for it was not a
case, as Tom Nairn once noted about the popular reception of modern
nationalism, of force-feeding to anyone the idea of a national road to
socialism, of a consequent conception of social advance along
nationally-delimited stages: there was already an audience both
receptive to and eager for these ideas. To take the example of Spain:
even if it is held that the line of the Comintern and the PCE was
determined by the material interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, this
does little to explain how the PCE was able to build itself as a mass
party over the course of the civil war out of what was even by the
middle of the decade nothing more than an ineffective rump. Moscow gold
and Moscow guns simply does not account for why these ideas were so
attractive. [14]

Now, even of it is held, as it is by me, that the 'national-stagist'
line carried out, for example, by the PCE and Comintern in Spain was
indeed disastrous for the revolution, it needs to be pointed out that,
without an a priori commitment to the kind of conception of the
capitalist mode of production as a global phenomenon referred to above,
the idea that the struggle for socialism is a national one is not such a
strange one. The fundamental idea of revolutionary strategy is that the
precondition for social advance is the prior capture of state power. Yet
the states that we face are precisely national and not international. In
this sense the struggle for socialism does have a national aspect, in
that the proletariat must first deal with the national bourgeois state
with which it is confronted. [15] And, on the basis of _surface
appearances_, are we not faced with a national bourgeoisie, an national
capitalism, a national economy, and national classes? The idea that it
is possible spontaneously to come to the kind of judgement that Lenin
and Trotsky made regarding the _world_ stage of capitalist development
with regard to the Russian revolution without an a priori theoretical -
'scientific' - understanding of the global modus operandi of the
capitalist mode of production would be 'spontaneism' an a grand scale.

Some time ago I posted a note to the list on Lenin's _What is to be
Done?_ [16], a document to which I ascribed a fundamental importance in
the development of Marxism. I noted Lenin's comment:

'The basic error that all the Economists commit [...] [is] their
conviction that it is possible to develop the class political
consciousness of the workers from within, [...] from their economic
struggle [...].

'Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from
without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside
the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from
which it alone is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of
relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government,
the sphere of the interrelations between all classes.' [17]

And I made the following remarks:

'[...] "within" and "without", "inside" and "outside" are defined [...]
as a function of the distinction between the partial and the global.
Sectional struggles, trade union struggles for example, "organically"
only lead to sectional, partial consciousness: what the working class
needs, therefore, is a centralising, totalising instrument - effectively
a revolutionary party - to unify the experiences of its multifarious,
partial struggles. [...] This was Lenin's fundamental innovation, a
re-assertion of the political element of socialist strategy, founded on
the conception of the revolutionary party as a pro-active, subjective
political instrument.'

Of course, Lenin wrote _What is to be Done?_ before his break with what
we can call 'national-stagism'; yet his method here is of cardinal
importance for our purposes. The conception of the struggle for
socialism as essentially a national one is as much an example of partial
consciousness - 'trade-union consciousness' - as the view of the
supporters of 'economism' that the economic struggle within the
factories alone was sufficient. It is one of the ideas that organically
arise on the basis of the appearance of bourgeois society - and which
are, in this sense 'partially' correct - yet are insufficient in
themselves for the development of revolutionary socialist consciousness,
and which, moreover, are not organically amenable to self-correction:
meaning that full socialist consciousness needs a theoretical -
scientific - understanding of the global (understood now both literally
and metaphorically) relations making up bourgeois society. Such a
scientific understanding was for Lenin, predicated on organisation: the
theoretical understanding that was necessary was impossible to achieve
without a revolutionary party. Or to put it another way, what Lenin
meant by 'revolutionary party' was the type of organisation that would
bring this process about. It was, in turn, on this theoretical
innovation that the entire remaining course of Lenin's political
evolution was predicated.

There are two points that need to be registered here. The first is that
there is a qualitative difference between the type of organisation that
Lenin suggests - a type of organisation that has to be consciously
fought for - and that that normally obtains within the working class
movement. For the consequence of the modus operandi of the classic
social-democratic type organisations (of which, as has already been
noted on this list, the Communist Parties form a sub-group) is not to
engender the type of totalisation that Lenin envisages as essential for
the development of revolutionary socialist consciousness but precisely
to reinforce and institutionalise the sectoral divisions that
organically arise within bourgeois society, be they functional
('parliamentarism'), national, or vertical and horizontal sectoralism.
Indeed, the very structure of social democratic organisations mitigates
against totalisation: if the phenomenon of bureaucracy broadly
understood can be said to have a functional characteristic then it is
precisely this: that it arises from degrees of 'partial' consciousness
and acts as a block to their supercession. Moreover, such forms of
organisation, arising as they do on the basis of partial, sectoral,
consciousness, themselves are the organic and natural forms of political
organisation that bourgeois society prompts: without conscious political
struggle for the revolutionary party as a totalising instrument the
working class movement will spontaneously throw up bureaucratic and
conservatising social-democratic type political organisations. If the
contour of the struggle to build a revolutionary party can be summed up
in one sentence, then it is the struggle to break free from and overcome
the limitations of this partial and sectoral consciousness that the
working class movement develops organically within bourgeois society and
which finds its reflection in the type of political organisations that
it spontaneously produces. It is against this necessity that particular
attempts to build revolutionary parties can be judged in terms of
(relative) success or failure, against the degree to which they have
been successful in overcoming the limitations of partial conceptions of
the struggle for socialism.

The second point flows logically from the first. If at root what we have
denominated 'Stalinist' ideologies and political practices in reality
fall within this general problem of organisation and politics, then we
are precisely not dealing with a conjunctural problem: the kinds of
difficulties posed by consideration of the practice of the 'Stalinist'
Communist Parties are in fact nothing to do with the phenomenon of
'Stalinism' per se but are a reflection of perennial problems facing the
socialist revolution. In this sense undue attention on 'Stalinism' as a
- or the - problem precisely obfuscates what is really necessary: it
fails to be able to explain the very phenomenon under consideration as
much as it fails to draw out the necessary practical lessons.

It is now possible to make some summary conclusions of my argument.

1. The term 'Stalinism' retains a validity as a scientific label for the
phenomenon of proletarian bonarpartism, in which a relatively privileged
administrative corps develops in a state within which the bourgeoisie
has been expropriated politically and socially but which has become to a
greater or lesser degree isolated. To some extent there is a natural
tendency in this direction in the socialist revolution, in that, since
the locus of bourgeois rule lies in the state, which in its bourgeois
form can only be national, unless we expect in a utopian fashion
'simultaneous revolution' (which is not and never has been synonymous
with 'permanent revolution') socialist revolutions will inevitably be
isolated for greater or lesser periods. And we can say that as a general
rule both the tendency in this direction and the likelihood that the
revolution will fail, i.e. that bourgeois rule will be reimposed, are
proportional to both the duration and the degree of the isolation.
Socialism in one country in all its varieties remains the utopian
fantasy it always has been.

2. That understood in this sense 'Stalinism', by virtue of its being a
scientific concept, loses all pejorative value.

3. That the term 'Stalinism' to refer to political parties, members of
political parties, particular political practices, particular ideas or
ideological trends, outside of a very particular historical conjuncture
- that of 1935/6 to 1945/6 - loses any explanatory power whatsoever and
leads only to obfuscation; and that within this concrete conjuncture,
the term 'Stalinism' can only be applied with very important
reservations. [18]

4. That these reservations mean that even within this conjuncture the
term 'Stalinism' to describe the practice of the Communist Parties tends
to under-estimate the indigenous organic tendencies within the workers'
movement to develop a partial understanding of the road to socialism, to
look toward national solutions, and to develop bureaucratic structures.

5. And, finally, that these organic tendencies are not particularly
'Stalinist', are not phenomena that have been confined to historical
conjunctures, but represent perennial problems for the workers'
movement, consciousness of their causes, reality and dangers
representing the only effective method of combating them and overcoming
them.

And the consequence of all this? If it is accepted that what is dubbed
the politics of 'Stalinism' is not in fact a phenomenon engendered by
the bureaucratic regime in the Soviet Union, but a particular variation
of perennial tendencies within the workers' movement, then two
conclusions can be reached. The first is that, by their perennial
nature, these problems are still with us. This is evidently so: the most
cursory glance at any of the revolutionary organisations coming from a
non-Stalinist tradition shows that they have inherited, to a greater or
lesser degree, political traits and habits that have been routinely
denominated as 'Stalinist'. We have recently had long (and important, in
my view) discussions on the phenomenon of 'Zinovievism': by this, as I
understand it, we are talking about a set of political practices and
organisational methods which to some degree, in their monolithism,
approximate to what is understood in this respect by 'Stalinism'. But it
is not the case that these practices, problematic though they be, arise
from an uncritical reception of extant models of political organisation:
that the methods of the - forgive the question-begging terms - partially
('Zinovievist') or fully ('Stalinist') degenerated Communist
International were simply copied. That models existed, that texts were
available to serve as holy writ: these are undoubtedly important factors
in the process of development of flawed ideological models. But it is
not the foundation of the problem. The tendency towards what we can
loosely call 'bureaucratism' appears to be an organic tendency within
working class organisations, and an a priori awareness of this danger a
necessary condition for its amelioration. The legitimacy bestowed on
such practices by precedent, be it practical or textual, is purely
secondary. It is thus clear that 'Zinovievism' and 'Stalinism' in this
sense have outdated not only both Zinoviev and Stalin but the political
apparatuses with which their names have been associated.

'Zinovievism' - the tendency towards bureaucratic and monolithic
organisational practices - is one aspect of this question. There are two
more. The first is what we can call 'nationally-conceived' socialism:
the taking at face value the surface appearance of the functioning of
capitalism, leading to an effective acceptance of the concept of
'capitalism in one country', leading in turn, without too much of a
logical leap, to the possibility of 'socialism in one country'. Again,
as I have tried to emphasise, this is an idea that is not borrowed from
an external source but a product of an organic tendency of working class
organisation in bourgeois society. Now of course every self-proclaimed
Trotskyist group will jump to dissociate themselves from these concepts;
but the truth is that their opposition to nationally conceived socialist
progress is largely formal. An example: the old Militant group in
Britain, under the tutelage of Messrs. Grant and Woods, as orthodox
Trotskyist as you could want for in its self-presentation, used to
advance as a key strategic slogan the nationalisation of the top 250
monopolies, or such like (I believe that it went down to 200 at some
point in the early 1980s, I suppose as a result of the inexorable
tendency towards the concentration and centralisation of capital). Now
never mind all the other questions begged by such a formulation (who is
going to do it and how): the idea that one can pose a 'socialist
transformation' in one country (Britain in this case) by a workers'
government nationalising (another question-begger) the 'commanding
heights of the economy' is foolish to the point of absurdity. What would
happen then? To what degree would what would happen in other countries
affect this development? The Militant was largely silent on this matter:
but this is the fundamental question, important beyond all others. Most
'Trotskyist' groups have formulations, more or less sophisticated, along
these lines. Indeed, push most honest revolutionaries and they would
come out with something very similar: a reflection of the paucity of
understanding of these questions extant on the revolutionary left. The
idea that 'socialism is international' has become a cliché, an empty
phrase robbed of content, an icon, to follow Lenin, only fit for hanging
on the wall and praying at. How many left groups in Europe seriously
address the question of Europe in a concrete way (and by 'concrete' I
don't mean empty slogans along the lines of 'a workers' Europe not a
bosses' Europe')? On this issue there is an effective silence. But this
is the strategic question that left in Europe must face: even the
Mensheviks understood it clearly. It is something else we have lost
because we have not understood where 'nationally-conceived socialism'
comes from.

The other aspect of this problem is what I have called 'impossibilist
voluntarism'. The Trotskyist left is badly infected with this. For if
you have developed a set of concepts and ideologies so out of kilter
with the essence (not the appearance) of bourgeois rule then your
political line is bound to come across as impossibilist. I have spent so
long listening to would-be revolutionaries coming out with formulations
like 'we start not from what is possible but from what is necessary'
that when I hear it nowadays I want to weep. The idea of Marxism as
'practical politics' - or as Trotsky once put it, of the dialectic as
'really clear thinking' - seems too to have gone. It is, on the strength
of this, little wonder that the disparagers have such an easy time of it
belittling Marxism as an exercise in religious faith, when what is
necessary to sustain this kind of politics really does require a
suspension of rationality.

These are, as I say, perennial problems. We faced them before
'Stalinism' existed and we face them the same now that it has gone. What
has been called 'Stalinism' was little more than one local expression -
or better, a series of local expressions - of them. We really do forget
this at our peril.

Tragedy or farce, anyone?


NOTES

[1] 'As a corollary to my earlier post on this topic, it follows that
with the demise of the Stalinist regimes, the question of Stalinism per
se becomes historical, not contemporary [...].' 'Re: Did Stalinism end
in the 1950s?',
<http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w49/msg00283.htm>.

[2] An unfortunate translation: the book's English subtitle - _What is
the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?_ - is much more faithful to the
book's original title. See Perry Anderson's _New Left Review_ article
'Trotsky's Interpretation of Stalinism', (May-June 1983, 49-58),
reprinted in Tariq Ali (ed.) _The Stalinist Legacy_ (Harmondsworth,
1984), 121.

[3] Trotsky, _The Revolution Betrayed_ (New York, 1972), 59, 111-13.

[4] Ibid., 277-8.

[5] See his superb post 'RE: Did Stalinism end in the 1950s? (corrected
for typos, very sorry for double posting)' at
<http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w49/msg00297.htm>.

[6] Parenthetically, here I would say that although Trotsky remained a
convinced internationalist - understood in the sense that he understood
that the resolution of these questions lay in the arena of the
international revolution and not within the physical borders of the
Soviet Union, I sense that he doesn't completely break free from a kind
of 'subjective voluntarism' himself: there is an idea in Trotsky that a
'better policy' within the Soviet Union could have ameliorated the in
effect historically doomed, all else being equal, situation in which the
state found itself. This is only a nuance in Trotsky, but if one looks
at, for example, Mandel's writings on Soviet development, the way in
which he treats the Soviet social structure as a qualitatively superior
method of organising human affairs, with the implication that in this
form it had the possibility of a lease of life almost in perpetuity,
this kind of conception is taken one logical step beyond. Without
wishing to denigrate Mandel's legacy, which I hold to be a truly heroic
one, it is necessary to admit a certain and curious reflection of
'Stalinist' conceptions apparent in his thought on this question.

[7] _Revolution Betrayed_, 97.

[8] Interestingly, the attribution of the idea of 'Stalinism' as
unmediatedly 'counter-revolutionary' to Trotsky although common is
false. It turns out to be in fact an invention of Joseph Hansen: '[...]
The power to make such changes [i. e. the post-war social overturns in
eastern Europe] did not require us to revise the concept of Stalinism
developed by Trotsky. Stalinism still remained counter-revolutionary to
the core.' 'What the New York Discussion has Revealed' [23 February,
1953], _International Committee Documents 1951-1954_, vol. 1 (New York,
n.d.), 32. See also ibid., 38: 'The main lesson to be learned from our
brief analysis of Stalinism is that it is counter-revolutionary in
essence.'

[9] Trotsky, 'The Draft Programme of the Communist International: A
Criticism of Fundamentals', in _The Third International After Lenin_
(New York, 1970), 72.

[10] From Trotsky, _Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39_ (New York, 1974),
261-5 (unbracketed ellipses in original text). 'Schuessler' is Otto
Schuessler, a German who had been Trotsky's secretary in Turkey. The
theme of the discussion was James' book _World Revolution_. The text of
this discussion along with others can also be found in the collection of
James' work _At the Rendezvous of Victory_ (London, 1984) (this excerpt
61-4).

[11] _The Transitional Programme for Socialist Revolution_ (New York,
1977), 113.

[12] 'It is [...] necessary not to bend the stick too far in the other
direction, that of the characteristic Cold War histories, which tend to
present each national communist party as if it were just a puppet whose
limbs were manipulated mechanically by strings pulled in Moscow. That
was never the case.' Perry Anderson, 'Communist Party History', in
Raphael Samuel (ed.), _People's History and Socialist Theory_ (London,
1981), 145-146.

[13] I go into these issues in more detail elsewhere:
<http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w30/msg00151.htm>.

[14] The following figures give some idea of the scale of the growth of
the Spanish Communist Party during the civil war: just before the
elections of February 1936 the PCE had 30,000 militants, in January 1937
200,000 and in March 1937 250,000 in the 22 provinces controlled by the
Republicans. In Catalunya in this period the PSUC passed from 5,000 to
45,000 members; and in Euskadi from 3,000 to 22,000. Joan Estruch,
_Historia Oculta del PCE_ (Madrid, 2000), 132.

[15] It is precisely this point that Roman Rosdolsky deals with in his
short but seminal article 'The Workers and the Fatherland: A Note on a
Passage in the Communist Manifesto', _International_  4.2 (Winter 1977).
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Rosdolsky's
contribution to Marxism, especially in relation to the national
question. I have this article on disc, and would be happy to forward it
on to anyone who wants it.

[16] <http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002/msg05443.htm>.

[17] 'What is to be Done?', _Collected Works_, vol. 5, 421-22.

[18] In fact, perhaps the only period in which a case could really be
made for the Communist Parties acting as the dupes of the Kremlin
without significant domestic mediation is that between the
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939 and the German invasion of the
Soviet Union of June 1941. Nevertheless, embarrassing though this period
was to be for subsequent hagiographers, it is necessary not to
over-estimate the degree of twist and turns in policy on the part of at
least one of the two parties most affected - the French and the British.
In the latter case, although Britain's entry into the war post-dated the
signing of the pact, and the party struggled at first to clarify its
line, dallying for a brief period with support for the war effort, its
eventual turn against the war did not in fact entail a break from the
method of the popular front. The party's line was for a people's peace
and a people's government, and its principal campaign from the mid part
of 1940 for a 'people's convention' (eventually held in January 1941) in
which the perspective of a patriotic parliamentary opposition loomed
large. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of
1941, with another short delay to rectify the line, the party could
comfortably now support the war effort, but again through the rhetoric
of the people's front. What stands out in the party's practice right
through this period is not so much a slavish obedience to Moscow but
rather a fundamental continuity of popular frontist politics with a
concomitant uneasy shifting from pacifism, to chauvinism, to pacifism
and back again. It is perhaps only in France that the dictates of the
Kremlin over-ruled all other considerations in this period: although the
party's deputies initially voted for war credits, the PCF subsequently
adopted the position, also held by Moscow, that France was an aggressor
nation and Germany the aggrieved peaceful party. The party was,
consequently, completely debilitated and isolated (no small matter under
conditions of fascist occupation). As France was overrun, the party's
enduring commitment to the line of the popular front led it to advocate
the construction of a 'people's government' out of the struggle against
Vichy; yet at the same time the party was to denounce de Gaulle as 'a
tool of the City of London', and tentative approaches to rebegin legal
publication of _L'Humanité_ were made to the Vichy regime. After the
German invasion of the Soviet Union, the party was able to shift its
position to an assessment of de Gaulle as representative of the
patriotic bourgeoisie: with this position, the party could enter the
Resistance. Normal service, in this sense, could be resumed.

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