the degenerated revolution. the origin and nature of the stalinist states. by workers power britain...

8/20/2019 The Degenerated Revolution. the Origin and Nature of the Stalinist States. by Workers Power Britain 1982

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The Degenerated Revolut ion

t he origin and nature of theStalinist states

by Workers Power Brit ain andthe Ir ish Workers Group

published by the

League for t he Fif th Internat ional


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Preface

Fifty years ago Stalinism was in crisis following the death of its world leader. Yet, the system he brutally forged lived onin the USSR and East Europe until 1989-91. Then, a combi-nation of deep systemic crisis and democratic mass protestsshattered the degenerate workers’ states one after anotherand, finally, the USSR itself.

The Degenerated Revolution was published 22 years ago,shortly after the brutal attempt by Polish Stalinists to main-tain themselves by crushing Solidarnosc, and shortly beforeMikhail Gorbachev tried to revive bureaucratic rule in theSoviet Union by introducing glasnost.

This book was written in the conviction that Stalinism’sdays as a ruli ng force were numbered. This was rooted inTrotsky’s revolutionary analysis of the degeneration of theRussian Revolution and the Left Opposition’s alternative pro-gramme which are presented in the opening chapters.

But its novel contribution lay in its explanation of thecreation of Stalinist states, in Eastern Europe and China,laterin Cuba and South-east Asia. The contradiction that capital-ism had been overthrown but by counter-revo lut i on arymethods which excluded the working class from power and,

therefore, prevented any progress towards socialism, had dis-oriented the Trotskyist movement since the 1940’s.Within i t,currents accommodated to one wing or another of Stalinism,seeing them as relatively progressive opponents of capitalism,rather than collective opponents of socialism.

The left’s reaction to the events of 1989-91 only served toconfirm the validi ty of the book’s critique of centr ism. TheUSFI’s programme of reform led it to back Gorbachev anddeny any danger of capitalist restoration. More grotesquely,the iSt believed the bureaucratic regimes themselves were adefence against capitalism and so sided with them againstmass working class mobilisations.

In contrast, the LRCI was able to develop the programmeof polit ical revolution amid the fast changing situation,

defending the socialist programme against bureaucrat andcapitalist alike.

Despite these strengths, however, there were flaws in thiswork, in part icular in the chapter dealing with the “post waroverturns” and the Marxist theory of the state. The bookargued that the capitalist states were “smashed” prior to thebureaucratic overthrows of capitalism after 1945. In fact, theStalinists were able to “take over”, or reconstruct, the bour-geois apparatus,and use it to destroy capitalism whilst main-taining the repression of the working class. In an appendix tothis re-publication we set out the corrections needed to the Degen erat ed Revolu tion on this issue published in 1998.

In addit ion, 1989-91 revealed weaknesses in our pro-

gramme of polit ical revolution itself. Although anti-bureau-cratic demands, including calls for democratic economicplanning were raised, as expected, they were rapidly replacedby support for restoration of capitalism as the best guaranteeof freedom and economic advance. We underestimated thedegree to which Stalinist dictatorship had alienated the massof workers from the idea of collective ownership and social lyplanned production. Worse, it had denied the working classany opportunity to develop its own organisations or leaders,and leadership was quickly provided by pro-Western forces.

The tran sition to capitalism, however, has massivelyincreased poverty and social inequality in the former degen-erate workers’ states. Already, a new generation of youngadults – with no l iving experience of Stalinist rule – resists.

This edit ion is dedicated to them, that they may learnfrom their parents’ and grandparents’ history so that they donot have to relive it.

London, 2003

2 The Degenerated Revolut ion

Contents

Int roduct ion 3

Th e t r an si t io n f r om cap it al ism t o co m mu ni sm 5

From soviet po w er to soviet Bonapart ism

– t he deg en er at ion o f t he Russi an Revolut io n 9

The survival and expansion o f Stal ini sm

af t er t he second w orld w ar 45

Bureaucrati c social revolut ions and the

M arxist t heory o f t he st at e 57

Tit o and M ao: disobedient St al inist s 62

Indo-China’s long revolution – a history

of w ar, compromise and bet rayal 72

Cast ro ’s “ Cuban road” - f rom popul ism

t o St al inism 82

The permanent revo lut ion abor t ed 89

St al inism and t he w orld w ork ing class 92

The programme of po l i t ical revolut ion 95

The defence of the USSR and of the

degenerat e w orkers’ st at es 100

Centri sm and Stal ini sm – t he

falsi f icat ion o f Trot sky’s analysis 103

Appendix: Marx ism. Stal in ism and the theory of the

state (reprinted from Trotskyist Internat ional 23,

January-June 1998 122

The DegeneratedRevolution:t he origin andnature of theStalinist statesby Workers Pow er and t he

Irish Work ers Grou p

First publi shed by the League for a Revolut ionary Communist

Internat ional in September 1982

Reprinted by the League for t he Fif th Internat ional January 2004


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Int roduct ion

Mill ions of working people now live under regimeswhose official title is “Socialist”. The world’s firstworkers’ state, the Soviet Union, is no longer the world’sonly workers’ state.

From Cuba to Kampuchea, the workers of a wholeseries of countries have witnessed the overthrow of cap-

italism.“Witnessed” is indeed the right word, for while the

property relations in these countries resemble those of the USSR, the manner of their establishment does not.In Russia in October 1917 the Bolsheviks led a genuineproletarian revolution which re su lted in the establish-ment of Soviet, i.e.workers’ council power. The workingclass, through its own organisations, and led by revolu-tionary communists, was the direct agent of the estab-lishment of the world’s first workers’ state. No otherworkers’ state has been established in this way.

The purpose of this book is to explain how and why

a series of post-capitalist societies came into being in away distinct from October 1917, and in a way unfore-seen by the foremost revolutionary thinkers of theMarxist tradition. Our starting point is the analysis of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution carried outby L. D. Trotsky in the 1930s. The section of this workdealing with the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia isbased on the theoretical insights that Trotsky made,par-ticularly in his book The Revolut ion Betrayed . His char-acterisation of the USSR as a “counter-revolutionaryworkers’ state” and, as such, one prone to chronic insta-bility,retains all of its validity today, as we seek to prove.

However, Trotsky predicted the imminent collapse of Stalin’s regime in 1940. Now, 42 years later, that mon-strous mockery of sociali sm is sti ll with us, even thoughits principal architect – J. V. Stalin – is long since dead.Does the clear incorrectness of Trotsky’s perspectiveinvalidate the fundamental elements of his analysis?

In analysing the survival and expansion of Stalinismafter the Second World War, we seek to show that it doesnot. Even though the route to the creation of workers’states may differ, ranging from guerrilla warfare inChina and Cuba, to administrative decree in Poland andthe German Democratic Republic, the essential aspects

of these states remain identical. Like the USSR,a work-ers’ state which has degenerated from genuine sovietpower to Stalinist dictatorship, all of the workers’ statesexclude the working class from real political power.

Nowhere – neither in the self-management councilsin Yugoslavia, nor the People’s Committees of Cuba dogenuine workers’ councils exercise state power.Capitalism has been overthrown. The economies of allof these countries are both nationalised and plannified.In everyone, however, the agency of this overturn waseither the Soviet bureaucracy itself (as in the Balticstates,before the war),or a national Stalinist party – that

is, a monolithic party, led by bureaucrats, not a revolu-tionary workers’ party based on democratic centralism.

The bureaucratic parties, while not extensions of theSoviet bureaucracy are, nevertheless, its replicas. Asprivileged bureaucratic castes their interests are basedon the contradictory reality of the existence of workers’states in which the working class have no political voiceand therefore no control over the economies.

Like the Soviet Union, these states are counter-revo-lutionary.However,where the USSR degenerated from ahealthy workers’ state, these other states have never beenhealthy. Brought into being by Stalinist part ies, they areall degenerate from birth. This work looks at the forma-tion of these states and the implications that this has forMarxist theory on questions such as the state and therole of the working class.

For this reason this work is also polemical. We rejectthe various theories of the USSR that have so faremerged from the so-called Trotskyist movement. Theplain truth is that the elements of the shattered Trotskyisttradition have never fully understood the real nature of the Stalinist regimes. While holding onto the title thatTrotsky gave to the first Stalinist regime, they haverobbed his analysis of its revolutionary content.

Leading spokesmen for “official” Trotskyism havedutifully denounced Stalinism in the abstract, only toprostrate themselves before it in practice (Pablo andYu go s l avi a, Mandel and Ch i na , the SWP(US) andCuba). Or else, elements have strayed from Trotsky’sanalysis to seek refuge in the world of ideal norms inwhich everything is either perfect or rotten, and nevershall there be a permutation (Tony Cliff ’s theory of theUSSR as State Capitalist is but one example of thisschool of thought).

Our analysis differs from “official” – that is to say,degenerate, Trotskyism – and from those who haverejected Trotsky ism altogether. We firmly believe that itis necessary to start with Trotsky’s basic analysis, but todevelop and extend it, not merely with regards to devel-opments after his death, but also with regard to theUSSR itself.

By developing his analysis and basing that develop-ment on the fundamental elements of his own method,we believe we have gone some way to explaining one of the most perplexing problems of this century – how hascapitalism been overthrown in a whole series of coun-tries without the independent action of the workingclass playing the decisive role, and what are the impl ica-

tions of this for revolutionary strategy?

The answers we have developed to this question haveenabled us to elaborate an understanding of Stalinism’srole within the world labour movement, and a strategyfor fighting against it.

These programmatic conclusions are summarised inthis work in the sections on Politi cal Revolution andDefence of the Workers’ States.

While this document deals with the origin andnature of the Stalinist states, it does not deal with theirdevelopment as degenerate workers’ states. Within the

left there is much controversy over the dynamics of theStalinist economies. Do they follow cyclical patterns?

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What is the nature of their crises?What is the relation-ship between the plan and the law of value in theseeconomies?What is the exact nature of the bureaucracy;what are its contradictions, layers etc? What is wrongwith “n ew cla s s” / “s ta te capitalist” t h eories of t h ebureaucracies?

These questions are vital ones to answer. Vitalbecause they lay the basis for developing concrete strate-gies for politi cal revolution based on realistic, not mere-ly general, perspectives.

We have not yet carried out the vast amount of workrequ i red before su ch qu e s ti ons can be properlyanswered. However, we recognise these gaps in ouranalysis and intend to carry on the work in order to fillthem.We are convinced that our analysis of the creationof these states gives us a firm foundation to conduct thiswork from.

A final word should be added about the origin of this work. Workers Power and the Irish Workers Groupboth emerged in the 1970s from organisations with ast ate capitalist analysis of the USSR (the Social ist

Workers Pa rt y (GB), and the Socialist WorkersMovement (Ireland)).As factions inside these organisa-tions, we had begun to challenge many of the theoreti-cal touchstones that these groups were based on.

After our expulsions we committed ourselves to athoroughgoing re-assessment of the “Russian question”.In the case of Workers Power, this re-assessment tookplace within the framework of a “holding” position of defining the USSR as state capitalist. It was only in 1980,during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan that wedecided such a holding position was wrong, and thatTrotsky’s analysis provided a correct alternative.

Correct, but not fully developed and certainly, asrepresented by the United Secretariat of the Fo urthInternational, the then Organising Committee for theReconstruction of the Fourth International, and theinternational Spartacist tendency, open to completeabuse. As organisations we committed ourselves to pro-ducing theses that could both develop Trotsky’s analysisand apply it to the post-war world, thereby serving as analternative to the bankrupt versions of Trotskyism onoffer.

These theses went through a series of conferencesand were finally adopted by a joint National Committee

of the two organisations in March 1982.After the adop-tion of these theses,an editorial team of Workers Powerm embers set about elaborating and developing theminto the present work.

We submit this book to the reader and request thathe or she bear the following objective in mind. WorkersPower and the Irish Workers Group believe that no rev-olutionary international exists. We believe that Trotsky’sFourth International has been destroyed by his followers’inability to explain the survival and expansion of bothStalinism and imperialism after the war.

The task for revolutionaries is to rebuild a TrotskyistInternational and the first step in doing this is by re-elaborating the revolutionary programme. What wemean by that is concretely demonstrated by this work.Stalinism, a cardinal question, responsible for endlesssplits and confusion amongst Trotskyists has to be fullyunderstood.

As the recent events in Poland have shown, anunderstanding of Stalinism is vital in developing andimplementing a revolutionary communist strategy. Are-elaboration of the Trotskyist position on Stalinism iswhat this work aims to be.We would justify the necessi-ty for such a re-elaboration in the words of Trotskywhen he was planning to “re-elaborate” The Communist Manifesto :

“Revolutionary thought has nothing in common with

idol worship. Programmes and prognoses are tested

and corrected in the light of experien ce which is the

supreme criterion of human reason ... However, as is

evidenced by historical experience itself, these correc-

tions and additions can be successfully made only by

proceeding in accord with the method lodged in the

foundation of theManifesto itself ”.

And so with our own analyses and programmes. Wehave developed Trotsky’s position by using his method.We invite wide-ranging debate on our conclusions. Forour part, we will seek to use them in the class struggle.Our theory is revolutionary theory. Above all it is aguide to action. It is theory as described by Marx :

“Clearly the weapon of criticism cannot replace the

criticism of weapons,and material force must be over-

thrown by material force. But theory also becomes a

material force once it has gripped the masses”.

Such theory can and must play its role in the strug-gle to rid the planet of all the Stalinist bureaucracieswho have debased socialism, slaughtered millions, andtoday extend their doomed life only by accumulatingendless contradictions, which they are incapable of

resolving,and which will inevitably devour them.

London, September 1982



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Against those who asserted the eternity of the statemachine and those who made the first act of therevolution its “abolition”,Marx and Engels argued thatthe proletariat could neither inaugurate a classless andstateless society at one blow nor use the existing statemachine,but that:

“Between capitalist and communist society lies the

period of revolutionary transformation of the one

into the other. Corresponding to this is also a poli ti -

cal transition period in which the state can be noth-

ing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the prole-

tariat . . . The proletarian revolution therefore inau-

gurates a new epoch in human history – the attempt

to consciously construct a society which can ‘inscribe

on its banners: From each according his abil ity, toeach according to his needs’”.2

The central task facing the proletariat in the transi-tion period is to transform property relations,social l ifeand political power so as to make possible the final con-solidation of a communist society. In this period notonly are the productive forces themselves to be mas-sively expanded, not only are the social relations of pro-duction to be revolutionised but the proletariat as aclass, and i ts proletarian state, will themselves witheraway. This was one of the earl iest insights of Marx andEngels,one from which they never wavered.

“ The working class, in the course of its development,will substitute for the old civil society an association

which wil l exclude classes and their antagonisms,and

there will be no more political power properly so

called, since“poli tical power is precisely the offi cial

expression of antagonism-in civil society”.3

And again:

“When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means

becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victori -

ous only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then

the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite

which determines it , private property.” 4

The dictatorship of the proletariat i s thus a tempo-rary though indispensable, agency in the final eradica-tion of capitalism and its social and economic laws. It isthe means to the full realisation of the Marxist pro-gramme – communism.

Poli t ics in t he t ransit ion period

The proletarian dictatorship has a double function. Itmust ensure the repression and destruction of the for-mer ruling class and the defence of the workers stateagainst internal and external counter-revolution. But i t

also inaugurates the construction of a planned econo-my which will allow the proletariat to progressively

eradicate the laws of motion of capitalist economy and,on the basis of material abundance, replace all its

repressive social norms and insti tutions. Marx andEngels were clear that the first prerequisite for theopening of the transit ion was the seizure of polit icalpower by the proletariat and the forcible retention of that power:

“But before such a change can be accomplished it is

necessary to establish the dictatorship of the prole-

tariat, whose prime condition is a proletarian army.

The working classes have to win the right to emanci-

pation in the battlefield.” 5

The purpose of the possession of state power – “theorganised power of one class for oppressing another” –

is to “sweep away by force, the old conditions of pro-duction” and thereby lay the basis for the abolition of its own supremacy as a class.The function of the prole-tarian dictatorship as the repressive agent against thebourgeoisie necessitates its dictatorial aspect. It is inLenin’s terms “unfettered by any law” in its dealingswith the bourgeoisie and their agents.

The attainment of communism via socialist con-struction imperatively demands the widest dem ocracyfor the toilers. To this end not only must the armedpower of the bourgeoisie be taken f rom its hands but thewhole military-bureaucratic machinery of the bour-

geois state must be smashed and replaced wi th a state of a new type representing the power of the proletariansthemselves.

Marx and Engels in their observations on the ParisCommune, Lenin and Trotsky in their concrete assess-ment of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputiesin Russia, all isolated the distinct features of the stateform the proletariat must construct if it is to organiseitself to rule as a class. Most vitally, this state form mustbe based on: the abolition of the standing army and itsreplacement by a popular milit ia; and the recallability of all officials who shall be in receipt of no material privi-

leges bar those of skilled workers. Lenin described thefeatures of this semi-state thus:

“The workers after winning poli tical power, will

smash the old bureaucratic apparatus,shatter it to its

very foundations,and raze it to the ground; the work-

ing class will replace it by a new one, consisting of the

very same workers and other employees, aga ins t

whose transformation into bureaucrats the measures

will at once be taken which were specified in detail by

Marx and Engels: 1) Not only election, but also recall

at any time; 2) pay I not to exceed that of a workman;

3) immediate introduction of control and supervi-

sion by all, so that all may become “bureaucrats” for atime and that therefore, nobody may be able to

The t ransit ion from capitalismto communism


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become a “bureaucrat’ ”.6

The bui lding of a classless and stateless society can-not be victorious in one country or group of countries.So long as capitalism retains its essential grip on theworld’s productive forces and its arsenal of destruction,the successful revolution of the proletariat, can onlyprove ultimately victorious through the world-widedefeat of the bourgeoisie.The transit ional period there-fore must also be a period of the internationalisation of the proletarian revolution.

Econom ics in t he t ransit ion per iod

The immediate task of the proletarian state is to com-plete the polit ical destruction of the bourgeoisie, toex propria te the capitali sts and thus cen tralise themeans of production in the hands of the state repre-senting the toilers themselves. But the expropriation of the capitalist class does not of itself eradicate the oper-ation of the laws or norms of capitalist production anddistribut ion. The Marxist programme aims to replacethe capitalist system of production with production

planned consciously to meet human need. This, of necessity,wil l entail a period of transition within whichthe working class fights to eradicate the norms of capi-talist production, distr ibut ion and exchange.

Marx and Engels presumed that in the early stagesof the transit ion considerable remnants of capitalistsociety would remain in operation. “What we have todeal with here is a communist society, not as it hasdeveloped on its own foundations, but, on the contrary,

just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thusin every respect, economically,morally and intellectual-ly, sti ll stamped with the birth marks of the old society

from whose womb it emerged”.7

Marx presumed, for example, that in the initialstages of transition, remuneration for labour wouldtake place on the basis of a system whereby:

“The individual producer receives back from society

– after the deductions have been made exactly what

he gives to it. The same amount of labour which he

has given to society in one form he receives back in

another”. 8

But he pointed out that such a system would neces-sari ly involve the perpetuation of bourgeois right.

“But one man is superior to another physically or

mentally, and so supplies more labour in the same

time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to

serve as a measure, must be defined by i ts duration or

intensity,otherwise it ceases to be a standard of mea-

surement” ;9 “ it i s, therefore, a right of inequalit y, in i ts

content, like every right”.10

He goes on:

“But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of

communist society as it is when it has just emerged

after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society.

Right can never be higher than the economic struc-

ture of society and its cultural development condi-tioned thereby”.11

The economy in the transition period is charac-terised by the continuation of the class struggle, butunder di fferent circumstances. Class conflict within theboundaries of a workers’ state is not principally deter-mined by the opposition between wage labour and cap-ital in the workplace.

However the proletariat remains a definite socialclass. It is not abolished by the revolution but is ratherobliged to struggle against the remnants of capitalismwithin the workers’ state and against the continueddomination of capitalism on a world scale.

In this struggle the proletariat in a workers’ state isno longer simply a class of wage slaves, but rather toi l-ers consciously eradicating the material foundations of their slavery from the advantageous posit ion of beingorganised as a ruling class. By continuing the classstruggle, by raising the productivity of labour and elim-inating scarcity the proletariat does not merely negatethe bourgeoisie, it also progressively negates its ownexistence as a defini te social class. This goal is complet-ed by means of the transit ion, but the existence of atransit ion period implies the continuation of aspects of the “old society” – the proletariat, bourgeois methodsof distribution and remnants of the operation of thelaw of value.

The task of the proletarian state is to progressivelysubordinate the operation of the laws of capitalist soci-ety and economy to the principles of conscious plan-ning. It was E. Preobrazhensky,at the time a supporterof Tro t s ky ’s Left Oppo s i ti on , wh o, in The New Economics most sharply characterised the essence of thepolitical economy of the transit ion period as a struggleto subordinate the law of value to the laws of planning.

While the bo u r geois revo luti on is it sel f on ly anep i s ode in the devel opment and em a n ci p a ti on of bo ur geois mode of produ cti on , the task of cons tru ct-ing a socialist econ omy on ly:

“begins it s chronol ogy with the sei z u re of power by

the pro l et a ri a t .Nei t h er does that economy grow and

devel op autom a ti c a lly as the result of expropri ati on

of the capitalists, it has to be con s c i o u s ly constru ct-

ed by the prol eta rian state .” 12

The devel opm ent of a ny economic form means itso us ting of o t h er economic form s, the su bord i n a ti onof these forms to the new form , and their gradu al

“el i m i n a ti on”.

13

Statified property in the hands of even a healthyproletarian state does not have, in the immediate after-math of the proletarian revolution, an automaticallysocialist character.

The socialist, or otherwise, character of this postcapitalist property is determined by whether or not thedirection of those property relations is towards the tri-umph of conscious planning for the purpose of con-structing a society based on the principle of “from eachaccording to his abili ty, to each according to his needs”.We know of no better short description of the specific

characteristics of socialist property than that advancedby Trotsky himself:



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“The latter has as its premise the dying away of the

state as the guardian of property, the mitigation of

inequality and the gradual dissolution of the property

concept even in the morals and customs of society.”14

There can be no progressive mitigation of inequali -ty,no final triumph of the conscious planning principleover the law of value, no withering away of the stateexcept at the hands of the proletariat democraticallyorganised to exercise its own power.“The emancipationof the working class” remains “the task of the workersthemselves”.

Without direct control by the proletariat, the guar-antee against the emergence of a distinct stratum of bureaucrats ceases to exist and the vital force that canrevolutionise the productive forces in a rounded anddynamic way in order to meet human need – the cre-ative energy of the proletariat i tself – is excluded fromthe planning process.

But what happens in a state where capitalism hasbeen abolished but where the working class has lost ornever gained the power to exercise direct political

power? It is precisely this question that has faced theMarxist movement ever since the final triumph of Stalin in the USSR.

The tr ansit ion blo cked

Can the working class be said to be a ruling class whereits political power is not expressed by a revolutionaryvanguard linked to the mass of the class by organs of proletarian democracy?Can the dictatorship, the classrule of the workers exist where a bureaucratic dictator-ship over the working class has been established?

The history of the development of the capitalist

mode of production shows us many instances wherethe capitalist class either did not exercise, or lost theabil ity to exercise, direct poli tical power by and foritself. In France, the Napoleonic era, the Restorationperiod, and the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon allexcluded the bourgeoisie from direct access to politicalpower. But such is the nature of the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist class that this in no wayhampered the development of the capitalist economyand capitalist relations of production.

In deed Bonap artism is an inherent tendency of capitalism's po li tical li fe – one wh ich becomes domi-

nant in the imperialist epoch. The bo urgeoisie’s fear of the pro l et a ri at , the fact that i ts posi ti on as ruling cl asswas assured by economic laws over whi ch it had noconscious po li tical control made it possible for thebourgeoisie to to lerate, and even desire in certain cir-cu mst ances, a form of state that had a tendency toauton omy from direct con trol by the bo urgeoisie itsel f.This is no way altered the class ch aracter of that stateas long as it pres ided over and protected capitalistpropert y relati on s.

But, as we have seen, the Marxist movement hadalways seen the proletariat’s direct control over its own

state as an indispensable element without which thetransit ion to communism cannot be effected. Trotsky,

for example, in 1931 continued to express the view thatthe very designation of a state as a workers’ state – inthis case the USSR – signified that the bourgeoisiewould need an armed uprising in order to take powerwhile the workers could revive the party and regime“with the methods and on the road to reform”.

The history of the rise of the bourgeoisie evidencesa series of “polit ical revolutions” where the polit icallyexpropriated bourgeoisie struggled to overthrow theirpolitical expropriators (after having already sealed thehegemony of capitalist relations of production). Thiswas the case with the overthrow of the Bourbons in1830 and the Orleanists at the hands of the FrenchRevolution of 1848.

While the bourgeoisie resorted to revolutionaryaction and attempted to dress up its actions as a socialrevolution, these events did not signify the passing of social and economic power from one ruling class toanother.

Before the work of Trotsky in the 1930s, based onthe concrete experience of the political degeneration of

the Soviet Union, the Marxist tradition had made noattempt to study the potential situation of a workingclass that had succeeded in crushing capitalist powerand property but failed to prevent the emergence of adistinct bureaucracy strong enough to deprive the pro-letariat itself of political power.

Trotsky was the first Marxist to develop an analogybetween the bourgeois “poli tical revolution” and thetasks of the proletariat should it itself be polit icallyexpropriated without capitalist property relations hav-ing been restored in a social counter-revolution.

In Trotsky’s view the loss of direct political power by

the proletariat and its vanguard does not lead immedi-ately or automatically to the re-establishment of thecapitalist mode of production. The experience of theUSSR shows this to be the case. But should the prole-tariat and its conscious organised vanguard lose politi-cal power then the transition to socialism will beblocked because the only force with a material interestin that transit ion, and the abili ty to effect it, will havebeen prevented from doing so.

The result will be that “the state” wil l continue inprecisely the form Marxists seek to abolish – set aboveand against the toilers. Far from a tendency to ever

greater equali ty, inequali ties will continue and solidify.The capitalist norms of distribut ion and exchange thatMarxists seek to destroy and replace with consciousplanning at the hands of the mass of toilers wil l contin-ue and even strengthen. Family li fe, sexual oppression,the deadening cultural void of human relations undercapitalism will not be transformed, but wil l live on inthe post-capitalist society.

Such societies – although no longer dominated anddetermined by the laws of the capitalist system of pro-duction – can only advance to communism after thepro l et a r iat has sei zed po l i ti cal power aga i n . Th eoppre s s ive mach i n ery in the hands of the ru l i n gbureaucracies in the so-called sociali st states, the jeal-



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ously guarded material privi leges of the bureaucratsmean that the proletariat cannot seize that powerthrough reform. It will of necessity be forced on theroad of political revolution.

Thus the monstrous bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolut ion and the duplication of its essen-tial features ab initi o in a whole series of revolut ions,does not introduce a que sti on unfore s een by thefounders of communism. It does not require a quali ta-tive alteration of the Marxist programme but the devel-opment of the anti-bureaucratic content present fromits creation.

A vital element of the Marxist programme for con-structing communism – the expropriation of the capi-talist class and the centralisation of production on thebasis of a plan – has been implemented in the USSRand the other degenerate workers’ states.

For this reason we recognise these states to be a his-toric gain for the working class – states based on post-capitalist property form s . But wi t h o ut pro l et a ri a npolitical power the potential of that property form to

revolut ionise the producti ve forces and lay the basis fora communist society cannot be realised. The politicalpower of the bureaucracy and the state forms whichdefend i t remain therefore an obstacle to the realisationof the historic interests of the working class.

Footnotes

1. Karl M arx, “Cri tique of the Gotha Programme", Marx and Engels Selected

Works, (Moscow, 1970), 3 vol., vol.3, p.26.

2. ibid., p.19.

3. Karl Marx,Marx and EngelsCollected W orks, (London,1976), voI.6,pp.211-2.

4. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, (London, 1975), voI.4,p.36.

5.Marx, “Rede auf der Feier zum seibenten Jahrestag der I nternationalen

Arbeiter assoziation am 25. September 1871”, cited in K. Marx, F. Engels, V.I.

Lenin: On Scientific Comm unism , (Moscow, 1976),p.244.

6. V.I.Lenin, Collected Works, (Moscow,1964), vol.25,p.481 (our emphasis.)

7. Marx, “Cri tique of the Gotha Programme” op.cit ., p.17.

8. ibid.,p.17.

9. ibid.,p.18.10.lbid.,p.18.11.lbid.,p.19.

12. E.Preobrazhensky, The N ew Economics, (Oxford, 1965),p.79.

13.ibid.,p.77.

14. L. Trotsky, “The Fourth I nternational and the Soviet Union”,Writings 1935-

36 , (NewYork, 1977),p.354.

15. L. Trotsky,“ Problems of the Development of the USSR",Writings 1930-31

(New York) ,p.225.


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In October 1917 state power in Russia was seized byforces intent on using that state power to effect thetransition from capitalism to communism.Never beforein world history had conscious revolutionary commu-nists taken state power. The October revolution inaugu-rated the first attempt to implement and develop theprogramme of revolutionary communism in the after-math of a proletarian seizure of power.

State power in Russia lay in the hands of the workersand soldiers organised in workers’ councils – the Soviets– and a workers’ militia. The politically conscious van-guard of the workers was organised in the Bolshevikparty – 250,000 strong at the time of the October revo-lution. That party commanded a majority at the Second

All-Russian Congress of Soviets that assumed powerafter the overthrow of the old Provisional Government.In the first Council of People’s Commissars – itself responsible to the Soviet Congress – the Bolsheviks hada majority of posts but shared governmental power witha section of the populist Social Revolutionary party –the Left SRs – who supported the creation of Sovietpower.

Enormous material obstacles confronted the SovietGovernment’s attempt to begin creating the socialistorder. The Tsarist regime had developed industr ial cap-italism in Russia in con junction with the major imperi-

alist powers and to a large extent economically subordi-nate to them. As a result Russia experienced extremeunevenness in the development of h er productiveforces. Developed capitalist industry fostered by imperi-alism coexisted with under-development and pre-capi-talist relations, particularly in agricultural production.On the eve of the first imperialist war the nationalincome per capita in Tsarist Russia was 8 to 10 times lessthan in the United States.1

Four-fi fths of the population earned their miserablelivelihoods from agriculture. Although Tsarist Russiawas a net exporter of grain, her wheat yield was on alevel with that of India and well below that of theEuropean states. Consequently the vast majority of thepopulation eked out a pitiful living in conditions of extreme material and cultural backwardness.

Imperialist capital did however develop pockets of heavy industry amidst the rural squalor of Tsa ristRussia. Over half the capital invested in the Donetz coalfield in 1914 was foreign, as was over 80 per cent of thecapital in iron mining, metallurgy and the oil industry.2

It was in these industries that the Russian proletariatwas formed and grew to political maturity. The Russianworking class was small but highly concentrated. In1914 between two and three million were employed as

factory workers, three-quarters of a mill ion in the minesand one mill ion on the railways.3

But the concentration of that proletariat in giantplants – enterprises employing over 1,000 workers

employed 17.8 per cent of the American proletariat,but41.4 per cent in Russia – gave it enormous social wei gh tand political strength.4

Taken in isolation the material backwardness of rev-olutionary Russia was striking.Tsarist Russia had reliedon western capitalism for both capital and key manu-factured goods – chemicals in particular. Hence theunquestioned unanimity in the ranks of the Bolshevikparty that the construction of the material base for aclassless, stateless society could not be achieved in onecountry alone, let alone in one as backward as Russia.

The key planks of the Bolshevik Party’s programme

for transition attempted to relate the programme devel-oped by Marx and Engels to the particular circum-stances of Russia and the part to be played by its revolu-tion in the world proletarian revolution.

All the Bolshevik leaders saw their revolution as butan initial act in the world revolution. They saw the fateof their revolution as being tied indissolubly to that of the world proletarian revolution. This was stated clearlyand unambiguously by Bukharin and Preobrazhenskyin their commentary on the programme of the RussianCommunist Party (Bolsheviks):

“The Communist movement can be victorious only as

a world revolution. If the state of affairs arose in whichone country was ruled by the working class, while in

other countries the working class not from fear but

from conviction, remained submissive to capital, in

the end the great robber states would crush the work-

ers’ state of the first country.”5

At the heart of the Bolshevik programme for transi-tion, therefore, was the struggle to internationalise therevolution. The Russian revolution was but one gain inthe struggle for international revolution. The commu-nist programme is a programme for the eventual aboli-tion of classes and the state. Having smashed the armed

power and executive bureaucracy of the old regime,Bolshevism was committed to the struggle to replace theold type of administrative and coercive apparatus withone that mobilised and actively engaged the toilersthemselves.

In Russia this meant taking sovereign power into thehands of the working class organised in soviets. But italso meant the struggle to ensure that working class rulewas not simply formal. A struggle had to be waged toenable the workers themselves to gain the experienceand culture (in the first place) to be able to directly holdthe administrative apparatus to account. This was a nec-

essary staging post to being able to directly manage theeconomy and dissolve the administrative apparatus as a

From soviet power to sovietbonapartism


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form separate from the working class.

In this struggle cultural obstacles as well as materialones confronted the Bolsheviks,not least the problem of illiteracy. The pre-revolutionary census of 1897 foundthat only 21.1 per cent of the population of the Russianempire (excluding Finland) were able to read and write.6

As a result the programme for transition in Russiarequired an increase not only in the social and politicalweight of the industrial proletarians but also a con-scious struggle to raise the cultural level of the masses of Russian society to one commensurate with the tasksconfronting them.

The Russian revolution was not,however, simply thework of the industrial proletariat.The proletarian insur-rection took place alongside the seizure of land and thebreakup of the old estates by the peasantry. It combinedelements of a land war against the remnants of feudal-ism with a working class seizure of power.

As a result Russia’s arable land was divided into 25million peasant farms. Not only did the size of theseunits present an obstacle to re-building agricultural

production on a scale and with a technological level suf-ficient to ensure a qualitative transformation of agricul-tural production. It also served to strengthen petty -commodity production and primitive capitalist rela-tions in the countryside.

The programme of transition therefore, had to winthose peasants who had gained least f rom the revolutionon the land the poor and middle peasants-to an alliancewith the proletarian state against the rural capitalistsand for cooperative large scale agricultural production,utilising developed technology. The Soviet Governmentreferred to transition proceeding “gradually with theconsent and confirmation of the majority of peasantsfollowing the teachings of their practical experience andof the workers.” 7

These then were the broad outlines of the Bolshevikprogramme for effecting a transition to socialism in theaftermath of the Russian revolution. The initial periodafter the revolution saw an enormous extension of thesovereignty of the masses and,as a result, the break up of the authority and jurisdiction of the apparatus the olds ta te mach ine.The October revolution immed ia telydecreed that authority in the factories should reside withthe workers’ committees therefore legitimising “workers’control” over the capitalists. In December 1917 full

power in the army was transferred to soldiers’ commit-tees with the right to elect and dismiss officers.

The initial perspective for transition was thereforeone of prioritising measures to break the power of theremnants of the old state apparatus, the employers andindustrial managers and the officer caste, by subjectingthem directly to the sovereignty of the Soviets and fac-tory and soldiers’ committees. In February 1918 the oldcourts were abolished and a decree promulgated toensure the election of judges.

The July 1918 constitution of the young Sovietrepublic systematised the achievements of Soviet power.Sovereign power formally resided with the All-Russian

Congress of Soviet s , whose constitution ensured thepredominance of the proletariat’s voice within it. Ruraland urban bourgeois were not granted the right to vote.

The franchise was weigh ted so as to give one seat inthe Congress for every 25,000 urban voters and 125,000provincial voters. In the provincial Soviets the vote wasweighted to one seat for 2000 city voters and one for10,000 rural voters. The Bolshevik programme aimed atcombining democracy for the proletariat with proletari-at’s dictatorship over the old exploiting classes andhegemony over the peasantry.

The for mat ion of t he Red Army

The tempo and nature of the transition was of necessitydetermined by both the material problems confrontingthe fledgling Soviet regime and the military /politicalstruggle waged by its internal and external enemies.German imperialism resumed its advance against SovietRussia until the regime signed the March 1918 BrestLitovsk treaty, ceding the majori ty of the Ukraine toGermany. Later in 1918, and during 1919, the armies of

14 capitalist states waged a war to overthrow the work-ers’ republic. The Social Revolutionaries and a majorityof the Menshevik leaders sided with the White Armiesof Yudenich, Denikin and Kolchak in the civil war thatensued. In White-dominated areas, with the backing of the SRs, the Soviets were dissolved and the power of thei nstitutions of the Ts arist state – the Dumas andZemstvos – was reinstated.

In the face of counter-revo luti ona ry attack theBolsheviks were compelled to make specific tacticalretreats in order to ensure the survival of the workers’d i ct a tors h i p. The Red Terror exerc i s ed by the

Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) was an indispens-able weapon of the proletarian dictatorship. In order toeffectively defend the revolution a standing army was re-created,but now to defend the gains of the working classand therefore in an important sense an army of a “newtype”.

The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army was createdon 23 February 1918 and grew to be 5 mil lion strong by1920.30,000 of the old Tsarist officers were enrolled intothat army so that the workers’ state could take advantageof their military expertise.8 While political supervisionof these officers by the workers’ state continued, the

form that it now took was the appointment of politicalcommissars to oversee their work.

In the middle of 1918 the right to elect officers in t heRed Army was abolished. Such actions were necessaryand justified because the military threat against theyoung workers’ state precluded the peaceful and gradualevolution of a group of capable commanders by way of the elective method. The needs of war in defence of theworkers’ state demanded military expertise immediate-ly. Appointment of officers and the Commissar systemalone could achieve this.

The refusal of the Mensheviks and SRs to recognise

the authority of the Soviet regime led to their expulsionfrom the Soviets in July 1918.They continued to legally



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opera te out s i de the Sovi et s . A left shift by theMensheviks in October 1918 led to their readmission tothe Soviets in November of that year. After an armedattempt to destroy the Bolshevik-led regime, the LeftSRs were expelled from the Soviets in July. In the facto-ries the move towards workers’ management was haltedand reversed in favour of the single authority of thedirector appointed by the workers' state. By the start of 1921 some 2,183 out of 2,483 enterprises were managedin this fashion. All of these measures marked a decisive

shift towards the centralisation of political power in thehands of the party that organised the conscious layer of the Russian proletariat. These layers were rightly com-mitted to holding state power for the working class asthe prerequisite for the transition to socialism. The pro-letarian dictatorship in Russia took on the form of thedictatorship of the proletariat’s political part y.

Anarchists denounced the dictatorship of the partywithout explaining how else counter-revolution couldhave been defeated.

On the other hand, by the early 1920s leading mem-ber of the Communist Party Gregori Zinoviev was lay-ing down theoretical foundations for Stalinism. He ide-alised the dictatorship of the party, and made it synony-mous with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Neither position in any way serves the proletariat inthe long term. Revolutionaries recognise that exception-al circumstances demand exceptional measures. Thedictatorship of the party was such a measure, entirely

justified and utilised correctly by Lenin, as a temporaryand emergency method of defending the proletariat’sgains against a vicious counter-revolution.

The Civil War had a devastating effect on the indus-tr ial base of the Soviet Republic and therefore on the sizeand morale of the working class. In the proletariancitadel of Petrograd, for example, industrial productionin early 1921 stood at only one-eighth of its 1913 level.9

In 1920 and 1921 the giant Putilov works, the sym-bolic heart of the Petrograd working class was workingat only 3 per cent capacity.10 As a result the industrialworkforce of Petrograd dropped from a registered230,000 in January 1918 to only 79,500 in September1920.11

Those workers most committed to the transition tosocialism were drawn into the Red Army and the state

apparatus, those least conscious were either forced backinto the villages or forced to survive in appalling anddemoralising material circumstances in the beleagueredand economically stagnant cities. By January 1921 therewere only 3,462 members of the Russian CommunistParty employed in Petrograd’s factories – comprisingonly 3.2 per cent of the city’s industrial workers.12 Nowonder then that the factory committees and Sovietswi t h ered as ef fecti ve , repre s en t a ti ve and dy n a m i cinstruments of the proletarian dictatorship.

In order to deploy and mobilise scarce resources forthe batt le front of the class struggle, the workers’ statemade decisive revisions in the schedule for expropriat-ing private property. On 28 June 1918 every important

category of industry was nationalised. From the springof 1918 “food detachments” from the towns were sentinto the countryside to forcibly requisition grain fromthe peasants. The system of War Communism wasdeployed to ensure the survival of a regime that, at theheight of the Civil War, controlled less than one-quarterof the terr itory of the old Russian Empire. It meant thevirtual abolition of money as a means of exchange andthe market as a means of distribution.

It also necessitated temporary measures to militarisethe workforce so as to deploy them in the interests of theRed War effort. In November 1919 a decree was issuedwhich placed the employees of state enterprises undermilitary discipline.13

The eventual victory of the Red Army in the CivilWar therefore had a contradictory character.On the onehand it marked a victory for forces still committed tothe transition to communism.

On the other it was achieved at the expense of retarding both the material and political prerequisites of that transition. This retardation was compounded by

the defeat of the post-war revolutionary movement of the European working class. The savage betrayal of theGerman revolution by the social democratic leaders – abetrayal paid for with the blood of Rosa Luxemburg andKarl Liebknecht – and the defeat of the HungarianSoviet Republic left the victorious workers’ republic iso-lated in backward and ravaged Russia.

War Communism and international isolation gavebirth to several alien and unscientific views of the transi-tion, and false estimates of the relations between presentpolitical forms and those required of the workers’ state atits existing stage in the transition. Some, like Strumilin,who attempted to draw up a plan of production in amoneyless system,and Bukharin, who hailed the collapseof money and the de facto barter economy as advancedforms of the transition to communism, hopelessly over-estimated the potential of the regime to effect measures tocreate an advanced transitional society.

Similarly utopian, and ultimately therefore reac-tionary, views were in evidence in the struggle of theWorkers’ Opposition against the party majority in 1920and 1921. This grouping around Shlyapnikov, Luovinovand Kollontai urged that the party should relinquish itshold over the battered economy and place it in thehands of a Congress of Producers. The reality of the

morale, size and organisation of the Russian workingclass at this time made such proposals utopian in theo-ry and potentially disruptive of the political power of the advanced layers of communists organised in theparty.

At the same time however there was a definite ten-dency towards bureaucratism within the proletariat’sparty and in the relation between that party and thestate apparatu s. At the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 theSecretarial triumvirate of Krestinsky, Preobrazhenskyand Serebriakov who urged a relatively tolerant andopen regime within the party were ousted and replaced

by Molotov. The party also agreed to a temporary banon the right to form factions within the party.While the



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party at the same time set out to purge indisciplined andcareerist elements – 24 per cent of the party wasexpelled during 1921-4 – these measures served tostrengthen the potential for the exercise of bureaucraticpower in the party itself.

By the end of the Civil War the possibility of contin-uing the transition to socialism depended on the van-guard and its ability to comprehend the scale of defor-mation and retreat in the workers’ state, so as to be ableto advance. In essence it depended on the commitmentof the Bolsheviks to continue a relentless struggle, withthe aid of the new Third International, for the interna-tional revolution of the working class. Meanwhile insideRussia itself the defence of the revolution and itsadvance now required a conscious struggle to recreatethe working class as a material and political force.

The Kronstadt rebellion of February 1921 and aseries of peasant revolts spreading from Tambov toWestern Siberia highlighted the problems facing the vic-tor ious workers' state . A fuel and food crisis inPetrograd precipitated a strike wave amongst the city’sworkers in February. The demoralised and i mpover-ished workers were receptive to Social Revolutionaryand Menshevik agitators and only emergency food sup-plies and a declaration of martial law in the regionsecured a return to work. This revealed that forces whohad supported the Reds against White counterrevolu-tion were themselves profoundly dissatisfied with thepolitical and economic regime of War Communism.That dissatisfaction amongst the peasant sailors of Kronstadt for example served to increase the potentialfor counter-revolutionary elements, masquerading asthe all ies of the toil ing masses, to mobilise mass discon-tent against the revolutionary regime.

The young workers’ state and the NewEconomic Pol icy

It is evidence of Lenin’s supremely concrete understand-ing of the problems confronting the proletarian regimethat, in the face of this upsurge, the Party took specificmeasures both to strengthen its own monopoly of polit-ical power and to affect a retreat from the policies of War Com mu n i s m . The Kron s t adt rebell i on wascru shed.The alternative would have been to tolerate theopening of a new phase of civil war and the joining of a

reactionary peasant war against the regime. But at thesame time,with the inauguration of the New EconomicPolicy (NEP), ma jor concessions were made to the pri-vate peasantry by the workers’ sta te.War Communism’ssystem of requisitions was replaced by a system of tax-ing the peasantry on the basis of a fixed proportion of each peasant farm’s net produce. The after-tax surplusof the peasants could be traded by the peasant on thefree market.

In that it legalised the operation of the law of value,NEP represented a retreat by the regime. In that itserved to revive agricultural production and won abreathing space for the internationally isolated regime itwas a retreat that granted the regime the potential to

make future advances along the road of transition.

Under NEP there existed two fundamental and con-flicting elements in the economy of the Soviet Union. Inagriculture and other petty commodity production thelaw of value was absolutely dominant.Yet in the statifiedeconomy – mainly heavy industry and transport – thelaw of value could be offset by state direction of invest-ment and was, therefore, susceptible to the planningprinciple. In this period the major threat to the workers’state and to its ability to extend its control over theeconomy through extending conscious economic plan-ning was the spontaneous development of primitivecapitalist accumulation in the countryside and thepotential alliance between it and imperialist capital.

For that reason the state monopoly of foreign tradewas an indispensable weapon without which directimperialist penetration into the economy of the firstworkers’ state could not have been prevented. In thestruggle against this threat the young workers’ state hadaccumulated three principle weapons with which todefend itself: the revolutionary expropriation of theindustr ial sector of the economy; the application andex tensi on of the planning pri nciple; and the statem on opoly of foreign t rade. These three measures, takentogether, anti-capitalist by their very nature, form thecharacteristic defining property relations of a workers’state.

NEP was a retreat and was recognised as such byLenin. It made him acutely aware of the need to ensurethat it did not pave the way for a rout. In the last twoyears of his active political life Lenin attempted to con-cretise and refocus the Bolshevik programme for transi-tion.First, it was necessary to construct the mechanismsof economic planning and extend their authority over

the Soviet economy. Enormous problems of experienceand culture faced the young regime in its attempts toweld together an apparatus of economic planning in thematerial circumstances of post revolutionary Russia.

In Febru a ry 1920 a Com m i s s i on for theElectrification of Russia (GOELRO) was establishedwith the brief to coordinate an all-Russian plan for elec-tricity production. While the party programme calledfor “one general State Plan” the mechanism for creatingsuch a plan had to be constructed gradually and on thebasis of the first ever experience of the attempt to createplanning mechanisms in the interests of subordinating

and, eventually, extinguishing the operation of the lawof value.

A Su preme Econ omic Council (Ves enkha) wasestablished as early as December 1917.By the end of theCivil War it possessed the authority and experience todraw up plans for particular industries with the assis-tance of the state planning commission (GOSPLAN)which was established in 1921. It produced a Five-yearplan for the metal industry in 1922-23 and in 1923attempted to produce a general plan that would amalga-mate Vesenkha’s plans for individual branches of indus-try. But in this period the planning mechanisms simply

provided trusts with forecast “control figures” as dictat-ed by their interpretation of market conditions within



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NEP. The strengthening and coordination of thesemechanisms to a level capable of serious subordinatingthe law of value remained a prerequisite of effectivetransitional advance.

But the struggle against the law of value was notsimply a struggle between industry and agriculture. Of necessity it involved a conscious struggle to wean thema jority of the peasantry away from petty commodityproduction and from the economic and political domi-nance of the richer capitalist peasant farmers (theKulaks). In Lenin’s last writings he advanced the pro-gramme of cooperation as the means of effecting analliance (smychka) between the workers’ state and thepoor and middle peasants on the road to building asocialist system of agricultural production:

“By adopting NEP we made a concession to the peas-

ant as a trader, to the principle of private trade; it is

precisely for this reason (contrary to what some peo-

ple think) that the cooperative movement is of such

immense importance.” 15

Lenin realised that the small and middle peasants

had gained insufficient land from the revolution toguarantee them a secure livelihood and to make possi-ble the application of the labour-saving technologiesuti l i s a ble on ly in larger agri c u l tu ral units. Hen cethrough the provision of equipment to the poorer peas-ants organised in cooperatives the workers’ state couldboth raise the technological level of Soviet agricultureand cement solid political ties with the mass of the peas-antry against the layer of rich labour hiring Kulaks.

In On Co-operati on Lenin therefore advocated a pol-icy of the ruthless priori tisation of the provision of credits and machinery to those peasants organised incooperatives as a means of recommencing the transitionto socialism in the Soviet countryside.16

Any other policy would unleash the potential withinNEP to strengthen the tendency to social differentiationwithin the peasantry and towards an increase in thesocial and economic weight of the anti-socialist Kulaks.

Lenin’s last writings also focus on the problem of developing the ability of the working masses to replacethe old form of administrative apparatus and to subjectthe existing state apparatus to the authority of the work-ers’ state.

“Two main tasks confront us, which constitute the

epoch: to reorganise our machinery of state, which isutterly useless, and which we took over in its entirety

from the preceding epoch;during the past five years of

struggle we did not, and could not, drastically reor-

ganise it. Our second task is educational work among

the peasants.” 17

Repeatedly in the period after the Civil War Leninemphasised the bureaucratically deformed nature of theSoviet workers’ state and struggled to reform that stateapparatus:

“Our state apparatus is so deplorable, not to say

wretched, that we must first think very carefully how

to combat its defects, bearing in mind that thesedefects are rooted in the past, which, although it has

been overthrown, has not been overcome, has not yet

reached the stage of a culture that has receded into the

distant past.” 18. . .“The most harmful thing here would

be haste. The most harmful thing would be to rely on

the assumption that we know at least something, or

that we have any considerable number of elements

necessary for the building of a really new state appara-

tus, one really worthy to be called socialist, Soviet

etc:” 19

But this perspective of renovating the Soviet work-ers' state and recommencing the transition to socialismin alliance with the poor and middle peasants remainedpart of a programme for internationalising the workers’revolution. The isolation of that revolution necessarilyserved to retard the development of the material pre-requisites of socialist construction

“The general feature of our present life is the fo ll ow-

ing: we have destroyed capitalist industry and have

done our best to raze to the ground the medieval insti -

tutions and landed proprietorship, and thus created a

small and very small peasantry, which is following the

lead of the proletariat because it believes in the results

of its revolutionary work. It is not easy for us, howev-

er, to keep going unti l the socialist revolution is victo-

rious in more developed countries merely with the aid

of this confidence, because economic necessity,espe-

cially under NEP, keeps the productivity of labour of

the small and very small peasants at an extremely low

level. Moreover, the international situation, too, threw

Russia back and, by and large, reduced the labour pro-

ductivity of the people to a level considerably below

pre-war.” 20

What then were the roots of the bureaucratisation of the workers’ state that Lenin perceived and fought

against in the early 1920s?The functional roots of thebureaucracy lay in the exhaustion and weariness of theinternationally isolated Soviet society in the aftermathof the civil war, together wi th the material backwardnessof the country inherited from Tsarism. In this context aseries of “pre-socialist” and “non-socialist” tasks facedthe young Soviet regime. Trotsky correctly outlined thisprocess:

“No help came from the West. The power of the

democratic Soviets proved cramping, even unen-

durabl e,when the task of the day was to accommodate

those privileged groups whose existence was necessary

for defence, for industry, for technique and science. Inthis decidedly not ‘socialist’ operation, taking from ten

and giving to one, there crystallised out and developed

a powerful caste of specialists in distribution...”21

While the armed forces and executive bureaucracyof the old ruling class were smashed, the proletarianstate was forced to work with significant remnants of the old Tsarist state machine in order to administer theworld’s first workers’ state. Lenin described this process-and its impact in the following way:

“We took over the old machinery of state and that was

our misfortune. Very often this machinery operates

against us. In 1917, after we captured power, the gov-ernment officials sabotaged us.This fr ightened us very



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much and we pleaded: ‘Please come back’. They all

came back, but that was our misfortune.”22

As we have seen, the Russian proletariat itself wasdecimated by the experience of the civil war that itfought to defend the workers’ state. Its most consciousel em ent was drawn into ad m i n i s tering the statemachine, its advanced layers suffered death and priva-tion to secure the victory of the Red Army. Of necessitythe advance of the proletarian dictatorship in the direc-tion of planning and equality depended on the smallconscious vanguard section of the Russian working classorganised in the Communist Party. Political degenera-tion in their ranks, a slackening of their direct commit-ment to socialist advance – nationally and internation-ally – would serve to undermine the proletariat’s onlyguarantee of advance towards socialism.

Enormous objective material factors therefore con-tributed to the process of bureaucratisation. These werestrengthened by the operation of NEP within which thestate apparatus was called upon to play the role of arbi-tration between the interests of the peasantry and theindustrial working class. This process of bureaucratisa-

tion not only led to the continuation of the old form of administrative apparatus and to a considerable continu-ity of personnel between the old and new apparatus.

It also played an important role in shaping the char-acter and leadership of the Bolshevik party itself. By1923 less than 10 per cent of the party had pre-revolu-tionary records and two-thirds of the members and half of the candidates were involved in non-manual jobs. InLenin’s last years alarming signs of bureaucratic degen-eration were apparent in the party’s highest bodies.

In the face of these objective and subjective tenden-cies the key problem facing the workers’ state waswhether the vanguard could regenerate itself and theworking class as a whole, in a struggle against bureau-cratism, national isolation and complacency.Lenin’s lastwritings show him to have been increasingly aware of bureaucratism in the party apparatus and that this wasserving to render the party powerless in the face of theweight of the old state apparatus.

In turn this presented an obstacle to building a newstate appa ra tus responsive to the vanguard itself andcommitted to the transition to socialism. In fact bureau-cra ti sm in the state was positively strengthening the “oldw ays” of Great Russian ch a uvi n is m , ru deness and

bureaucratism within the party itself.

In his last battles Lenin concentrated on the regimein the party and the relation between the party and stateapparatus as the key problems without the solution towhich the transition to socialism would be retarded.Until his death he remained the most astute of all theparty’s leaders as to the realities of Soviet Russia and tothe type, nature and tasks of the workers’ state. His lasttestimony itself – Letter to Congress – contains animplicit criticism of the entire old guard of the party forits failure to grasp the urgency of, and the necessaryconcrete steps towards, regeneration.

Lenin’s eyes were opened to the degree of bureau-

c ra tic degen era ti on within the party by rel a ti on sbetween Dzherzhinsky, Stalin and Ordzhonikidze andleading representatives of the Georgian Communistparty. The latter were resisting plans to replace the loosefederal structure of the young Soviet republic with amore centralised structure under the name of the Unionof Soviet Socialist Republics. During the controversyOrdzhonikiadzhe struck Kabanidze, a supporter of theGeorgian party leader Mdivani. While not in completesolidarity with the political stand of the Georgians,Lenin

weighed in against the central leadership.

Lenin conceded that perhaps the unionisation planhad been premature:

“There is no doubt that that measure should have

been delayed somewhat until we could say that we

vouched for our apparatus as our own. But now, we

must, in all conscience, admit the contrary; the appa-

ratus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is

a bourgeois and tsarist hotch-potch and there has

been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of

the past five years without the help of other countries

and because we have been ‘busy’ most of the time with

military engagements and the fight against famine.

It is quite natural that in such circumstances the

‘freedom to secede from the union’ by which we justi-

fy ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to

defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that

really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in

substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical

Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the

i nfi n itesimal percen t a ge of Soviet and sovi eti s ed

workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-

Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.” 23

Lenin urged exem p l a ry punishment forOrdzhonikidze and that: “The political responsibilityfor all this truly Great-Russian nationalist campaignmust, of course, be laid on Stalin and Dzherzhinsky.” 24

At the same time Lenin urged on the party the strength-ening of the accountability of the state machine throughraising the political weight of the Workers and Peasants’Inspection (RABKRIN).

Mindful of the developing bureaucratic regime inthe party and Stalin’s evident unsuitedness to the post of Secretary that he had quietly assumed in 1922, Leninurged the removal of Stalin from his post:

“Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tol-erable in our midst and in dealings amongst us

Com mu n i s t s , becomes intol era ble in a Sec ret ary

General.That is why I suggest that the comrades think

about a way of removing Stalin from that post and

appointing another man in his stead who in all other

respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only

one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant,

more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the

comrades, less capricious, etc.” 25

As Lenin’s letters to Trotsky published first in The Stalin School of Falsificati on show, Lenin urged a blocwith Trotsky against Stalin on these issues.26

But the tendency towards bureaucratic arbitrary rule



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within the party continued thro u gh out 1923. There isevidence of the formation of s ec retly organised opposi-tion groups within the party which called for a struggleagainst the new bureaucratism.

The most significant – the Workers Truth group –was led by Miasnikov who had been expelled from thep a rt y in 1921.27 In re s ponse the party leaders h i presponded to the working class discontent that this evi-denced with an attempt to strengthen police dictator-ship within the party itself.A special commission head-ed by Dzherzhinsky “demanded from communists thei m m ed i a te denu n c i a ti on , ei t h er to the Con tro lCommission or to the GPU,of illegal groups within theparty.”28

This crisis coincided with mounting imbalancewithin the NEP economy to the advantage of the privatetrader and farmer and to the disadvantage of the prole-tarian state. By 1922-23, 75 per cent of retail trade wasin private hands. By 1923 industr ial production stood atonly 35 per cent of the pre-war level while the marketedagricultural surplus had reached 60 per cent of pre-wartotals.29

This strengthened a tendency towards a “scissors cri-sis” – rising industrial prices and relatively decliningagricultural prices – which threatened to result in a dropin peasant markets if state industry could not providesufficient manufactured goods at cheap enough pricesto encourage the peasants to sell their surpluses. At the12th Party Congress in 1923 Trotsky showed that indus-trial prices were at 140 per cent of their 1913 level whileagricultural prices stood at only 80 per cent. Only astrengthening of the planned industr ial base of theUSSR could have provided the material prerequisites of coopera ti on – for example tractors , m anuf actu red

implements and have served thus to isolate the prosper-ous Kulak layer of the peasantry which commanded thebulk of the surplus. Continued retardation of industrycould only serve to strengthen the Kulak and the grip of the law of value within the Soviet state.

The growt h of bureaucrat ism

But 1923 also saw mounting signs of the ossification of the party leadership in terms of its ability to aid anddevelop the international revolution of the proletariat.Un der the directi on of Zi n ovi ev the Com mu n i s t

International seriously miscalculated tactics for a revo-lutionary offensive in Germany in the autumn of 1923.The bureaucratically deformed workers’ state remainedisolated.

It is in the face of these manifest degenerativeprocesses that Tro t s ky and the cad re of the Lef tOpposition launched their struggle against the partyleadership in order to reactivate the struggle for social-ism. True, Trotsky failed to activate the proposed blocwith Lenin at the 12th Party Congress in Apri l 1923. Heleft Bukharin to fight alone against the bureaucratism of the party’s leading Troika of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and

Stalin – an unholy alliance united by enmity towardsTrotsky.

In 1924 he was complicit in the decision of the sameparty leadership to conceal the existence of Lenin’s callfor the removal of Stalin. To this extent he clearly didnot share the sense of urgency felt by Lenin as to thethreat to socialist advance in the USSR. But the coinci-dence of Miasnikov’s grouping and Dzerhzhinsky’spolice tactics stung Trotsky into a war against bureau-cratism during the latter part of 1923. In October hewrote to the Central Committee denouncing partyadministration in general – particularly the demise of

the elective principle – and Dzherzhinsky’s proposals inparticular.

Trotsky had no doubt that bureaucratism had a pro-found material roots:

“It is unworthy of a Marxist to consider that bureau-

cratism is only the aggregate of the bad habits of office

holders.

Bureaucratism is a social phenomenon in that it is a

definite system of administrati on of men and things.

Its profound causes lie in the heterogeneity of society,

the difference between the daily and the fundamental

interests of various groups of the population.”

30

But Trotsky insisted this bureaucratism posed fun-damental problems to the advance of the revolution:

“...bureaucratism in the state and party apparatus is

the expression of the most vexatious tendencies inher-

ent in our situation, of the defects and deviations in

our work which, under certain social conditions,

might sap the basis of the revolution.And, in this case

as in many others, quantity will at a certain stage be

transformed into quality.” 31

For Trotsky only the struggle for democracy in theparty could mobilise the vanguard against bureau-

cratism. The alternative was alien ati on and demoralisa-tion amongst the ranks of worker communists.

“Not feeling that they are participating actively in the

general work of the party and not getting a timely

answer to their questions to the party,numerous com-

munists start looking for a su bstitute for independent

party activity in the form of groupings and factions of

all sorts. It is in this sense precisely that we speak of the

s ym ptom a tic import a n ce of gro u p i n gs like the

Workers’ Group.” 32

As a result “ The task of the present is to shift the cen-tre of party activity towards the masses of the party”

because “There is not and cannot be any other means of triumphing over the corporatism, the caste spirit of thefunctionaries, than by the realisation of democracy.” 33, 34

The offensive of Trotsky was complemented, inOctober, by the declaration of 46 Old Bolsheviks includ-ing Antonov Ovseenko, Serebriakov, Preobrazhenskyand Pyatakov. Taken as a whole the two positions repre-sented a platform of extending democracy in the partyas the immediate form of extending workers’ democra-cy in the USSR and of developing industrial planning asthe means of strengthening the smychka with the poor-er peasants against the Kulaks. To this extent it repre-

sented an important development and refocusing of theprogramme of Bolshevism. It contained the key ele-



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ments, in embryo, of the future programme of the LeftOpposition.

The 1923 debate also showed that despite the party’sleadership, the careeri sts who had entered its ranks andthe exhaustion of significant sections of its cadre, thereremained a solid core within the party committed to thetransition to socialism. Despite the campaign against“Trotskyism” that was launched by the ruling Troika theplatform of proletarian democracy received widespreadsupport in the party. It received strong support inMoscow, the Urals and Kharkov.35

As late as 1929 the Stalinist historian Yaroslavsky wasadmitting that the opposition won half the votes in cer-tain areas of Moscow.36 The leadership was forced toconcede the demand of the 46 for a special CentralCommittee meeting on the subject and a decl aration infavour of democratising the party’s life in return for aCentral Committee resolution condemning the activi-ties of Trotsky and the 46. It would clearly be wrongtherefore to conclude that the party at this time couldsimply be described as the property of its central andincreasingly bureaucratic leadership.

The death of Lenin in 1924, fo llowing on from thefirst setback for the forces of the Left Opposition (theCentral Committee confrontation), served to intensifythe tendency towards revisionism and bureaucratismwithin the party leadership. Against the struggle forregeneration waged by Trotsky and the Left there werethree major groupings all representing specific pro-grammatic revisions and degenerations.

In 1924 and 1925 a definite Rightist tenden cyincreased in confidence and weight within the partyapparatus. Represented primarily by Bukharin, Tomskyand Rykov, this tendency reflected the pressure of thericher layers of the peasantry on the party /state appara-tus. Its programme involved continued and extendedconcessions to the richer peasants in the name of build-ing a specifically Russian peasant-based form of social-ism. As its principle spokesman, Bukharin, put it:

“We have come to the conclusion that we can build

socialism even on this wretched technological level...

that we shall move at a snail’s pace,but that we shall be

building socialism and that we shall build it.” 37

During 1925, at both the 14th Party Conference andCongress Bukharin elaborated a specific new content to

Lenin’s call for “an understanding with the peasantry.” Itwas to mean concessions to the peasantry in order toencourage their economy, it was to mean tailoring thepace of industrial development to these concessions.The policies of Bukharin were enshrined in the decisionof the April 1925 Central Committee meeting to sanc-tion the right to hire labour and extend the rights of land leasing and thus strengthen the operation of thelaw of value in the USSR. In April 1925 Bukharin deliv-ered his famous speech to a mass party meeting inMoscow calling on the Russian peasants to “enrichyou rs elves.”

The Ri ght had another social base within thebureauc ratised apparatus of the workers’ sta te . An

important section of the Soviet Trade Union leaders –particularly Tomsky – craved an unprincipled alliancewith the reformist leaders of the Yellow Amsterdam-based International Trade Union Federation. For thempotential alliances with the reformist trade union lead-ers-particularly in Britain-represented a potential roadof protection and stability for the Soviet state in its exist-ing bureaucratised form.

In essence the Right was therefore a tendency com-mitted to strengthening capitalist forces within theUSSR and sec u ring pe ace with world capitalismthrough the medium of the reformist labour bureaucra-cies. The Right’s programme was a narrow nationalistone that sought to preserve the status quo – the bureau-cratically deformed workers’ state. Objectively,however,the Right were in fact a tendency for capitalist restora-tion. This was the logical end point of their programmeof concessions to rich private peasants. In the mid-1920s their reactionary views accorded with the doc-trine of “Socialism in One Country”,a creed they sharedwith Stalin.But the Right’s policy of relative freedom forSoviet Trade Union officialdom and compromise with

the rich peasant farmers meant that they were not of necessity wedded to the forms of bureaucratic rule lateradvanced by the group around Stalin.

In concert with this group against the CommunistLeft, but in material conflict with the Right’s pro-gramme, stood a bureaucratic left centre group aroundZinoviev and Kamenev. Their social base was the indus-tr ial ci ty of Len i n grad and the Com mu n i s tIntern a ti on a l . For the Ri gh ti sts the failed GermanRevolution of 1923 underlined the fact that the prole-tariat of Western Europe could not be relied on to solvethe problems of isolated and backward Russia. For

Zinoviev however, it meant that a serious blow had beenstruck at the ability of the Soviet state to resist the devel-oping bourgeois forces within its own boundaries.Zinoviev expressed this in the following terms:

“An alliance of a proletarian Germany with Soviet

Russia would create a new phase of NEPism... would

nip in the bud the tendency of a new bourgeoisie to

assume a controlling position in the economic life of

our republican union.” 38

The 5th Congress of the Comintern,meeting in Juneand July 1924, reflected a profound disorientation in thestrategy and tactics of the Communist International.

Zinoviev responded to the German defeat and theappearance of capitalist stabilisation with a call tobureaucratically “Bolshevise” the Communist Partiesand a turn to left rhetoric – effectively turning theComintern against the decisions taken at its fourthCongress on the United Front tactic and the Workers’Government slogan.39

It was at this Congress that the characterisation of Social Dem oc racy as a wing of fascism was first aired –by none other than Zinoviev himself. In its aftermathZinoviev probably ordered the abortive uprising inEstonia in December 1924.40

Victor Serge descri bed Zinoviev’s bureaucratic leftistresponse:


8/20/2019 The Degenerated Revolution. the Origin and Nature of the Stali

the degenerated revolution. the origin and nature of the stalinist states. by workers power britain...

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