THE RETREAT
In the Soviet Union, despite Stalin’s bombastic claim that Russia has attained Socialism, economic realities have forced a retreat. Russian industry was incapable of providing the machinery and equipment necessary for making collectivised agriculture an economic proposition. 90% of the peasant farms were collectivised. But decree after decree had later to be promulgated, with the purpose of pacifying the peasants. Increasingly, concessions had to be made to the proprietary and individualistic tendencies in the village. Land of collective farms has been transferred to collectives in perpetuity. The collec-tive farmer has his own plot of land, that is his own little farm with its own livestock, the produce of which he sells in the market. Inequalities in the village, instead of decreasing, have been growing since 1934. And this is in-evitable so long as the level of agricultural technique re-mains low. For despite all Stalin’s efforts to introduce Socialism by law, economic forces will break through those laws. As Marx pointed out in 1875, “Law can never be higher than the economic structure and the cultural development of society conditioned by that structure.”
But far more important than the differentiation taking place within the collectives is the differentiation taking place as between the collectives. A minority of collectives, thanks to superiority of soil and location, the prices paid for their products, etc., have prospered at the expense of the remainder. These collectives have bought better equipment, increased their production still further, invest-ed in state loans on interest, and have raised the level of well-being of their members immeasurably above that of the mass of collective farmers and industrial workers.
In the cities, the differentiation of wages among workers has proceeded apace until it has assumed gigantic propor-tions. The Stakhanovist worker often earns twenty to thirty times, and the higher specialist even eighty to a hundred times as much as the unskilled worker. Differ-ences in income, based upon varying skill, intensity etc., one would expect in the Soviet Union which is still in the transitional stage between capitalism and socialism; but not the enormous disparities that exist. It is clear that the existing differences in income result not only from differences in individual productivity, but in fact much more from the appropriation by a minority of the products of the labour of the majority. A privileged section is living at the expense of the majority.
Who constitute this privileged section? The executive members and officials of the Soviets, officials of the party, trade unions and Communist Youth, the commanding staffs of the armed forces, the agents of the G.P.U. the directors and vice-directors of industrial enterprises; the whole administrative and technical personnel of industry down to the foremen, the presidents and party organisers of 250,000 collective farms and of the state farms and tractor stations, the leaders of the trade departments and co-operatives, numbering 5 to 6 million, constitute the most parasitic group in the privileged section of Soviet society. This is the bureaucracy, which is the ruling caste in the Soviet Union. This bureaucracy, together with an equal number composed of the members of the ‘well-off’ collec-tives, the Stakhanovists, and their relatives, constitute the privileged section of Soviet society. Together with their wives and families they would in all number over 20 mil-lion, i.e., 12 to 15% of the population. This is the social basis of the commanding upper circles of the bureaucracy which number probably as much as half a million.
The reaction has permeated every sphere of social life. The October revolution emancipated woman. But today abortion has been prohibited and divorces made difficult except for the bureaucracy. Youth has suffered, as every-one else, from the reaction. The 5 million Comsomols (the Communists organisation for youths from 14 to 23 years) have been forbidden to take any part in politics. The arts and sciences have been stunted by the bureaucratic straitjacket. For all writers must conform to every zig-zag in the party line for fear of reprisals. History has been altered and re-written over and over again to suit the requirements of the ruling faction, and of Stalin in particu-lar. The place of literary creations of beauty is taken by panegyrics to the all-powerful leader. Artists, stage directors, and even opera singers fall into disgrace over-night at a word or even a suggestion from above. Since 1935 there has been a marked tendency to revive and recreate the heroes of Czarist times. There has been an open fostering of nationalist ideology. For, having abandoned the revolutionary traditions of October, the bankrupt bureaucracy feels the need for nationalist fetishes by which to bind the masses.
The cult of the leader has developed to such an extent that it has reached fantastic proportions. Stalin has been ele-vated to the position of a virtual deity. The following is an extract from a speech made at the 17th Congress of Soviets, published in Pravda of February 1st, 1935, with a note of approval by Molotov, “Our love, our devotion, our strength, our heroism, our life—all these are thine, great Stalin Here take them, all this is thine, chief of the great father-land! Men of all time and of all nations shall call by thy name all that is beautiful, strong, wise and pretty …When my beloved will bear me my child, the first word I shall teach him will be—STALIN!” (See C.L.R. James World Revolution ). That a speech of such a level could have been made at a Congress of Soviets is itself a measure of the extent of degeneration that has taken place in the Soviet Union.
As Trotsky says, “No army can be more democratic than the regime which nourishes it”. And “The army is a copy of society and suffers from all its diseases, usually at a higher temperature”. The Stalinist bureaucracy has introduced officers’ ranks resplendent with bourgeois titles in the Red Army, which had all been abolished by the October revo-lution. An officers’ hierarchy with special privileges has been created, which is now separated from the rank and file and is instead bound closer together with ruling bureau-cratic circles.
A POLITICAL COUNTER-REVOLUTION
The Soviets, the party, and the trade unions had been the instruments through which the proletariat exercised politi-cal power and guaranteed the stability of the proletarian dictatorship. But all these have become today the instruments not of the workers but of the bureaucracy. The Soviets had long since lost their democratic character as organisations in which the masses actively participated and intervened. But even these bureaucratised soviets have been liquidated under the New Constitution, introduced in 1937. Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets exist no longer, and the workers are dissolved in the general mass of the population. In the soviet constitution adopted after the revolution, the vote of a single worker received the same representation as those of five peasants, thus guaranteeing organisationally what was already guaranteed by the rela-tion of class forces, namely, the dictatorship of the proletariat. But in the New Constitution, which declares that Socialism has been achieved and classes abolished, the worker’s vote counts no more than that of a collectivised peasant. Thus the reactionary bureaucracy is relying upon the country in its struggle against the city. The New Constitution, far from being “the most democratic in the world”, as Stalin boasted, is a cruel farce. It suffices to point out that there can be no democratic significance in an election in which there is but one candidate to choose from, and he, too, nominated by the bureaucratic apparatus.
After the revolution, the trade unions became an instrument of the workers for guaranteeing workers’ democracy and protecting workers’ interests. Lenin had pointed out in the famous discussion on the trade union question in 1920, that the trade unions were a necessary weapon for the defence of the workers from their own workers’ state itself, which state, moreover, was a workers’ state with “bureaucratic deformations”. But the Stalinist bureau-cracy has taken away from the trade unions the right they enjoyed to intervene in questions of employment and dis-missals of workers, and of management of the factory in general. Unlimited and uncontrolled powers have been given to the factory directors imposed from above. There has ceased to exist any kind of workers’ control within the factory. Nor have the workers control over the trade union bureaucrats, who are appointed and removed from above. The party is the main instrument though which the pro-letariat exercises its political power in a workers’ state. But for this the party itself must have a free and rich inner life. But by repeated purges, the liquidation of all opposition, in short, by the destruction of every vestige of internal democracy, the bureaucracy converted the party into its docile instrument. Since 1929 the G.P.U. has played an ever-growing role in the internal life of the party. Not only expulsions, but imprisonment, exile, torture, death and punishment of relatives have become commonplace occurrences to stifle all opposition. Party Congresses, held more and more infrequently, are merely stage-managed affairs in which the policy already decided upon by the Politburo is carried unanimously with (too much!) acclamation. The Politburo is always right, with one exception, that is, it cannot be right as against Stalin, who is infallible. By strangling the Bolshevik Party, bureaucratising the trade unions and soviets, and now by even liquidating the latter the bureaucracy has completely expropriated the workers of political power. In short, it has carried through a political counter-revolution .
THE TERROR AND BONAPARTISM
In order to secure its own position, the bureaucracy has found it necessary to exterminate the entire Bolshevik Old Guard and so free itself from all the encumbering traditions that still bound it to the October revolution. For example, of the thirty-one members and alternates, of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party at the time of the revolution of October 1917, only Stalin, and Alexandra Kollontai are alive. A few died natural deaths, but the majority have been murdered. Ex--Mensheviks, hitherto unknown mediocrities, and even active counter-revolutionaries of the civil war period (like Maisky) have taken the places of the Bolshevik Old Guard of the revolution. The gigantic frame-ups of the Moscow Trials of 1936-37 with their charges unproved by any evidence, with the fantastic confessions of revolutionists (like Zinoviev and Kamenev) of decades of revolutionary service declaring that they had plotted to re-introduce capitalism in the Soviet Union (!), were staged, if inefficiently, at the command of Stalin, to serve more than one purpose. Stalin did not fear individuals like Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had by their abject recantations in the past repeatedly proved their subservience to him, but he feared the traditions and ideology of the revolution, which they symbolised. Secondly, by getting the accused to confess to fictitious connections with the exiled Trotsky, he was dealing a blow at the enemy he really feared, namely, the Left Opposition, driven deep underground, but representing none the less the only point around which the workers must rally in a revolt against the bureaucracy. Also, the trial, with the publicity it received throughout the country, was meant to terrorise completely not only all oppositionists, but all critics even, and this time not merely by expulsion, im-prisonment or exile, but by the firing squad. Finally, by the liquidation of the whole stratum of tried revolutionists who had led the Russian revolution side by side with Lenin, Stalin no doubt hoped to further his reconciliation with bourgeoisie of the “democratic” imperialisms with whom he was now feverishly striving to enter into a “Peace Alliance” against the Axis powers.
The terror has proceeded apace in the Soviet Union. In 1935 the death penalty was instituted for children from 12 years of age upwards. In May 1947 the death penalty in peace-time was abolished and 25 years imprisonment in labour camps substituted. Despite the fact that mass purges had taken place before, at the end of 1935 and in the first half of 1936, hundreds of thousands of party members were again expelled, the most active of them being thrown into prisons and concentration camps. The Army has not escaped the terror. In June 1937 Marshal Tukhachevsky and 7 Generals were tried in secret without witnesses or defence and executed within forty-eight hours. In 1938, 80 members of the Council of War constituted in 1934, 18 generals, and thousands of other officers and men were shot or imprisoned.
The above are only some of the more prominent instances that have seen the light of day. In the Moscow Trials, apparently only those who “confessed” were brought to trial. How many refused to “confess”, how many have been shot without trial, how many imprisoned and sent to concentration camps, no one knows. Needless to add, the hysteria of bureaucratic hatred has vented itself with the most ferocity on members belonging to, or suspected of belonging to, the Left Opposition.
The parasitic Soviet bureaucracy, consuming an entirely disproportionate share of the national income, incapable of utilising the active and willing co-operation of the masses, substituting its own bureaucratic mediocrity and inefficiency for mass initiative, and driven further and further along the road of guarding its own power and privileged position as against the masses, has come increasingly in contradic-tion with the necessities of development. It is consequent-ly compelled, on the one hand, to resort to ever more violent methods of repression against the masses whom it dreads, and on the other hand to find scapegoats among its own number on whom to fix the blame for its own inefficiency and mistakes. The ruling Stalinist faction performs this task for the bureaucracy.
In the interests of its own self-preservation the bureau-cracy has been compelled to raise the Stalinist faction even above itself, and, still further, openly to proclaim the Bonapartist principle of an infallible leader. “The increasingly insistent deification of Stalin, is, with all its elements of caricature, a necessary element of the regime. The bureau-cracy has need of an inviolable super arbiter, a first consul if not an emperor, and it raises upon it shoulders him who best responds to its claim for lordship … Each one of them at his post is thinking: L’etat—c’est moi . In Stalin each one easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy". (Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed , page 262.)
A DEGENERATE WORKERS’ STATE
The Soviet bureaucracy has completely expropriated the workers of political power; it consumes an enormous share of the national income; it permits no control whatsoever over its actions and its income; it has become the sole commanding and privileged stratum in Soviet society. But it would be a serious error to conclude that it has become a new ruling class. A ruling economic class is based on a particular system of property relations. The property relations established by the October revolu-tions still remains, namely, state ownership in the decisive spheres of the economy and the monopoly of foreign trade. “As a conscious political force the bureaucracy has be-trayed the revolution. But a victorious revolution is fortunately not only a programme and a banner, not only political institutions, but also a system of social relations. To betray it is not enough. You have to overthrow it. The October revolution has been betrayed by the ruling stratum, but not yet overthrown. It has a great power of resilience, coinciding with the established property relations, with the living force of the proletariat, the con-sciousness of its best elements, the impasse of world capital-ism, and the inevitability of world revolution”. (Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed , page 238.)
The aim of the bureaucracy is to defend its own power and privileged position. But, precisely in order to do this, it is compelled, albeit bureaucratically and inefficiently, to defend statified property as the source of its power and its income. Thus the bureaucracy plays a dual role. The progressive aspect of its work merits the support of the international proletariat, which should not, however, be blind to its reactionary general role. Thus the rule of the bureau-cracy reflects in a distorted form the dictatorship of the proletariat. These considerations enable us to define the bureaucracy not as a ruling class but as a ruling caste, and the Soviet Union as a degenerate workers’ state .
The absolute pre-requisite of the regeneration of the workers’ state is the overthrow of the corrupt and parasitic bureaucracy. But this can only be done by violence, that is to say, by a revolution. But what is called for is not a social but a political revolution. The proletariat would have to institute soviet democracy in place of the bureau-cratic aristocracy. For the Soviet Union this means, among other things, a revival of freedom of Soviet parties beginning with the new Bolshevik party, a revival of the trade unions, a radical revision of economic planning in the interests of the masses, the abolition of ranks and decora-tions, the freedom of criticism, the release of science and art from their shackles, and last but not least, a mooring once again of Soviet foreign policy to the anchor of revolu-tionary internationalism.
It may pertinently be asked, why has the political revolu-tion not yet occurred, or at least why have there been no visible signs of its approach? Trotsky answers this question: “The vast majority of the Soviet workers are even now hostile to the bureaucracy. The peasant masses hate them with their healthy plebeian hatred. If in contrast to the peasants the workers have almost never come out on the road of open struggle, thus condemning the protesting villages to confusion and impotence, this is not only because of the repression. The workers fear lest, in throw-ing out the bureaucracy, they will open the way for a capitalist restoration … The workers are realists. Without deceiving themselves with regard to the ruling caste—at least with regard to its lower tiers which stand near to them—they see in it the watchman for the time being of certain part of their own conquests. They will inevitably drive out the dishonest, impudent and unreliable watch-man as soon as they see another possibility. For this it is necessary that in the West or in the East another revolu-tionary dawn arise”. (Revolution Betrayed , page 269.)
“The first victory of a revolution in Europe would pass like an electric shock through the Soviet masses, straighten them up, raise their spirit of independence, awaken the traditions of 1905 and 1917, undermine the position of the Bonapartist bureaucracy, and acquire for the Fourth International no less significance than the October revolu-tion possessed for the Third. Only in that way can the first workers’ state be saved for the socialist future”. (Ibid , page 274.)
The Stalinist bureaucracy knows full well that the inter-national revolution reviving revolutionary traditions and bringing to life and strength forces now dormant in the Soviet Union, would spell its own doom. In turning its back on international revolution the Stalinist bureaucracy was only acting in self-preservation. In no circumstances can it adopt a revolutionary policy in regard to any coun-try, even a country with which it is at war. This is well illustrated by the fact that during the war it did not stand for proletarian revolution in Germany, but only for the overthrow of Hitler. In an “Order of the Day” dated February 23, 1942, Stalin declared: “History teaches us that Hitlers come and go, but that the German people, the German state remains”. It was no part of the plans of the Stalinist bureaucracy to overthrow the German capita-list state. On the contrary its plans were to crush the masses if they attempted a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system in Germany. This is made quite clear in the statement of Ilya Ehrenberg, Stalin’s chief war-time publicist, made to the Christian Science Monitor and published in the 7th August 1944 issue of that journal. Asked what the Russians would do in the event of a revolt in Germany which would “overthrow Hitler and welcome the advancing Red Army with appropriate banners”, he replied: “These would be the first people we would shoot”! The occasion for such an eventuality did not develop in Germany. But in the countries of Eastern Europe, one after another, the advancing Red Armies crushed the re-volutionary upsurges of the masses. The Stalinist bureaucracy, which hates and dreads the international revolution, has no alternative in the face of revolutionary risings of the masses but to tread the path of counter-revolution.