1 The defeat of the revolutionary upsurge· in Europe, 1918-1923

The international revolution expected by the Russian proletariat and the Bolshevik leaders eventually broke out in 1918. Workers’ and soldiers’ coundls were set up in Germany and Austria. In Hungary, a Soviet Republic was proclaimed in March 1919; in Bavaria, in April 1919. The workers of North Italy, at boiling point since 1919, occupied all the factories in April 1920. Strong revolutionary currents appeared in other countries such as Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. In the Nether- lands a general strike was on the agenda. In Great Britain the workers established the ‘Triple Alliance’ of the three biggest unions in the country, which shook the government.

But this revolutionary wave ended in defeat. The principal reasons for this defeat were the following:

– Soviet Russia was torn by civil war. The former landowners and Czarist officers (aided by Russian and foreign capitalists) tried to overthrow the first workers’ and peasants’ republic by force. Because of this, the Soviet power could give only a reduced amount of material and military aid to the European revolutions which also faced the imperialist armies.

– International social democracy placed itself in the counter-revolutionary camp without hesitation, attempting by all the promises and lies imaginable (in Germany in February 1919 it promised the immediate socialisation of big industry – which, of course, did not happen) to turn the workers away from the struggle for power. It showed no hesitation at all in organising counter-revolutionary violence, in particular through the Freikorps called in by Noske to oppose the German revolution. These Freikorps were the nucleus of the future Nazi bands.

– The young Communist Parties, which had founded the Third International, lacked experience and maturity, and made many ‘leftist’ and rightist errors.

– The bourgeoisie, frightened by the spectre of revolution, granted important economic concessions to the workers (notably the eight hour day) as well as universal suffrage in a number of countries. These had the effect of halting the revolutionary upsurge in some of these countries.

The first setbacks for the revolution culminated in the bloody defeats in Hungary, where the Soviet Republic was crushed, and in Italy, where fascism came to power in 1922. Nevertheless, in Germany the Communist Party grew progressively, gained a broader and broader mass base, and in 1922-23 set out to win over the big trade unions and the factory councils.

The year 1923 saw an exceptional revolutionary crisis in Germany: occupation of the Ruhr by the French army; galloping inflation; a victorious general strike which overthrew the Cuno government; Communist majorities won in large trade unions; the constitution of Left Socialist/ Communist coalition governments in Saxony and Thuringia. But the Communist Party, badly advised by the Communist International, failed when it came to the systematic organisation of the armed insurrection at the most favourable moment. Big capital re-established the former situation, stabilised the mark, and brought a bourgeois coalition back into power. The post-war revolutionary crisis was over.

2 The rise of the Soviet bureaucracy

Soviet Russia had victoriously concluded the civil war in 1920-21. But it came out of it exhausted. Agricultural and industrial production had fallen catastrophically. Famine crippled large areas of the country. To remedy this situation, while waiting for a resurgence in the international revolution, Lenin and Trotsky decided upon an economic retreat. Nationalised ownership of big industry, the banks and the transport system was maintained. But a free market was re-established for the agricultural surpluses remaining after a part had been given to the state in the form of taxation. Private trade, crafts and small-scale industry were re-established.

The Bolsheviks saw this as a temporary retreat, and calculated the risks mainly on the economic level: the petty bourgeoisie would be able to acquire wealth and constantly reproduce private capitalist accumulation. But the social and political consequences of the isolation of the proletarian revolution in a backward country were more serious than these economic dangers. They can be summed up like this: the Russian proletariat progressively lost the direct exercise of political and economic power. A new privileged layer began to emerge which acquired a real monopoly of the exercise of power in all areas of society.

This process was not the result of a premeditated plot. It resulted from the interaction of a large number of factors. The proletariat was numerically weakened by the fall in industrial production and the exodus into the countryside. It was partially depoliticised under the weight of famine and hardship. Its most conscious elements were absorbed into the Soviet apparatus. Many of its best elements were killed in the civil war. This whole troubled period was not favourable to the formation of technically and culturally qualified cadres inside the working class. Hence the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois intelligentsia retained their monopoly of knowledge. A period of great poverty favours the acquisition and defence of material privileges.

Neither should we imagine that this process passed unnoticed by the Russian revolutionary Marxists. From 1920 the Workers Opposition within the Soviet Communist Party sounded the alarm, although the solutions it proposed were largely inadequate. From 1921 Lenin was obsessed by the bureaucratic danger, calling the Russian state a bureaucratically deformed workers state and powerlessly recording the hold of the growing bureaucracy on the apparatus of the party itself. In 1923 the Trotskyist Left Opposition was established, making the struggle against the bureaucracy one of the key points of its programme.

It would, however, be incorrect to believe that the rise of the Soviet bureaucracy was inevitable. Although it had profound roots in the social and economic reality of Russia at the beginning of the 1920s, this does not mean that there was no real chance of opposing it successfully. The programme of the Trotskyist Left Opposition was aimed entirely at creating the favourable conditions needed to put the situation to rights:

(a) by accelerating the industrialisation of Russia, thus increasing the specific weight of the proletariat in society;

(b) by increasing wages and fighting unemployment, with a view to increasing the confidence of the working masses in themselves;

(c) by immediately increasing democracy in the soviets and in the party, with a view to raising the level of political activity and class consciousness of the proletariat;

(d) by accentuating the class differences within the peasantry: providing credit and agricultural machinery to help the poor peasants, while burdening the rich peasants with increased taxes;

(e) by continuing to look towards the world revolution, and by rectifying the tactical and strategic errors of the Comintern.

If the Bolshevik leaders and cadres as a whole had understood the necessity and possibility of achieving such a programme, the revitalisation of the soviets and the exercise of power by the proletariat would have been possible from the mid-1920s. But the majority of the cadres of the party were themselves caught up in the process of bureaucratisation. The majority of the leaders understood too late the mortal threat contained in the rise of the bureaucracy. The failure of the ‘subjective factor’ (of the revolutionary party), together with the necessary objective conditions, explains the victory of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR.

3 The nature of the bureaucracy: the nature of the USSR

The bureaucracy is not a new ruling class. It plays no indispensable role in the process of production. It is a privileged layer which has usurped the exercise of administrative functions in the Soviet state and economy, and which uses this monopoly of power to grant itself big advantages as consumers (high wage differentials, fringe benefits, advantages in kind, special shops, etc.). It does not own the means of production. There is no way in which it can guarantee the maintenance of advantages, nor transmit them to its children: all this is linked to the exercise of specific functions.

It is a privileged social layer of the proletariat, whose power rests on the conquests of the October socialist revolution: nationalisation of the means of production; a planned economy; state monopoly of foreign trade. It is conservative in the same way as is every workers bureaucracy: it puts the preservation of what has been gained above the extension of the revolutionary conquests.

It is afraid of international revolution, which threatens to revive the political activity of the Soviet proletariat and thus undermine its own power. It wants to maintain the international status quo. But as a social layer it remains opposed to the re-establishment of capitalism in the USSR, which would destroy the very foundations of its privileges (not that this prevents the bureaucracy from spawning sub-groups and tendencies which try to transform themselves into new capitalists).

The USSR is not a socialist society – that is, a classless society. It remains just as it was immediately after the October 1917 revolution, a society in transition between capitalism and socialism. Capitalism could be restored there, but only through a social counter-revolution. The direct power of the workers could be restored, but only through a political revolution which would break the bureaucrats’ monopoly over the exercise of power.

The Soviet economy cannot be given the tag of ‘capitalist’ because it is a system of ‘domination of the producer by the bureaucrats’. Capitalism is a specific system of class domination, characterised by the private ownership of the means of production, competition, generalised commodity production, the transformation of labour power into a commodity, the necessity to sell all produced commodities before the surplus value contained in them can be realised, the inevitability of periodic crises of generalised overproduction. None of these fundamental characteristics can be found in the Soviet economy. 

But if the Soviet economy is not capitalist, neither is it socialist in the traditional sense of the term employed by Marx, Engels and Lenin himself. A socialist economy is defined as the regime of associated producers, who themselves regulate their productive and social life by establishing a hierarchy of needs to be satisfied depending on the resources at their disposal and the amount of work they are prepared to dedicate to the productive effort. The Soviet Union is a long way from such a situation. A socialist economy is defined by the disappearance of commodity production. In contradiction to the current official doctrine of the USSR, Marx and Engels clearly state that this withering away is in no way part of the ‘second phase’ of classless society, commonly known as the ‘communist phase’, but is a characteristic of the first phase, commonly known as ‘socialist’.

In developing the anti-Marxist theory of the supposed possibility of completing the construction of socialism in one country, Stalin expressed in a pragmatic manner the petty-bourgeois conservatism of the Soviet bureaucracy: a mixture of old officials of the bourgeois state, jumped-up elements of the Soviet state apparatus, demoralised and cynical communists, young technicians eager to ‘make a career’ without regard to the class interests of the proletariat as a whole.

In opposing to this theory the basic thesis of Marxism (‘classless society can only be achieved on the international level, including at the very least some of the principal industrialised countries of the world’ – ‘the socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena’), Trotsky and the Left Opposition hardly defended a ‘defeatist’, ‘wait and see’ position regarding the fate of the Russian revolution. Long before Stalin they tried to encourage the more rapid industrialisation of the country. They were, and remain, supporters of the defence of the USSR against imperialism, of the defence of what remains of the conquests of the October revolution against any attempt to restore capitalism in the USSR. But they understood that the fate of the USSR would finally be settled by the result of the class struggle at an international level. Today, as previously, this conclusion remains correct.

4 What is Stalinism?

When he pronounced his famous indictment of the crimes of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev explained these crimes by the ‘personality cult’ which had reigned during Stalin’s dictatorship. This subjective, even psychological, explanation of a political regime which completely changed the lives of tens of millions of human beings is incompatible with Marxism. The phenomenon of Stalinism cannot be reduced to the psychological or political peculiarities of one man. We are dealing with a social phenomenon whose social roots must be laid bare.

In the USSR, Stalinism is the expression of the bureaucratic degeneration of the first workers state, where a privileged social layer usurped the exercise of political and economic power. The brutal forms (police terror; the massive purges of the ’30s and ’40s; the assassination of almost all the old cadres of the CPSU; the Moscow trials, etc.) as well as more ‘subtle’ forms of this bureaucratic power can vary. But after Stalin, as under him, the fundamental characteristics of the bureaucratic degeneration still remain.

Power is not exercised by the soviets, freely elected by all the workers. The factories are not managed by the workers. Neither the working class nor the members of the Communist Party enjoy the democratic freedoms necessary to be able to decide freely on the major questions of economic and cultural, domestic and international policy.

In the capitalist world, Stalinism signifies the subordination, by the parties which follow the Kremlin, of the interests of the socialist revolution in their own countries to the interests of Soviet diplomacy. Instead of serving as an instrument for the analysis of the evolution of the contra- dictions of capitalism, the relation of forces between the classes, the objective reality of the transition period between capitalism and socialism, so as to aid the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat, Marxist theory is debased to the level of an instrument to justify each ‘tactical turn’ of the Kremlin and the Stalinist parties.

Stalinism tries to justify these manoeuvres as necessary for the defence of the USSR, the ‘chief bastion of the world revolution’ before the Second World War, and the ‘centre of the world socialist camp’ since then. The workers must essentially defend the USSR against imperialism’s attempts to re-establish the rule of capital there.

But the Stalinist tactical manoeuvres which have contributed to the defeat of so many revolutions in the world; which eased the coming to power of Hitler in Germany in 1933; which condemned the Spanish revolution of 1936 to defeat; which obliged the French and Italian communist masses to reconstruct the bourgeois state and the capitalist economy in 1944-46; which led to the bloody crushing of the revolutionary movement in Iraq, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile and many other countries since then; these manoeuvres hardly correspond to the interests of the Soviet Union as a state. They correspond to the narrow interests of the defence of the privileges of the Soviet bureaucracy – contrary, in all these cases, to the true interests of the USSR.

5 The crisis of Stalinism

The decline of the international revolution after 1923 and the backward state of the Soviet economy: those were the two main pillars of bureaucratic power in the USSR. But both have been gradually undermined since the end of the 1940s.

Twenty years of defeats for the revolution have been followed by a new rise in the world revolution, at first confined to equally under-developed countries (Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam, Cuba), extending into the West since May 1968. After years of effort aimed at ‘socialist accumulation’, the USSR has ceased to be an under-developed country. Today it is the second industrial power in the world, with a technical and cultural level as high as that of many advanced capitalist countries. The Soviet proletariat, along with that of the USA, is numerically the strongest in the world.

In these conditions, the basis for the passivity of the masses in countries dominated by the Soviet bureaucracy has begun to disappear. The beginnings of oppositional activities have been accompanied by splits within the bureaucracy itself, which has been undergoing a process of growing differentiation since the Stalin-Tito rupture in 1948. The interaction between these two factors favours a sudden eruption of political action by the masses, who have taken up the tasks of the political revolution, as in October-November 1956 in Hungary, or during the ‘Prague spring’ of 1968 in Czechoslovakia.

Until now these mass movements have been suppressed by the military intervention of the Soviet bureaucracy. But as the same process ripens in the USSR, no exterior force will be able to halt the tide of political revolution in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Soviet democracy will be re-established. All danger of the restoration of capitalism will disappear forever. Political power will be exercised by the workers and poor peasants. The struggle for the socialist revolution in the rest of the world will be greatly advanced. 

6 Economic reforms

After Stalin’s death, and above all during the ’60s and ’70s, a vast movement of reform in methods of planning and management has taken place in the USSR and ‘People’s Democracies’. The most urgent reforms took place in agriculture, where the production of foodstuffs per head of the population was lower at the time of Stalin’s death than it had been in 1928, and was even lower than during the Czarist epoch in the case of livestock. Successive measures aimed to promote an increase of income for the peasants, the rationalisation of the use of agricultural machines (which were sold to the kolkhozes), the establishment of enormous state farms on the ‘virgin lands’ of Kazakhstan, and the massive growth of investment in agriculture.

The reforms in industry were both slower and more hesitant. The objective necessity for these reforms flows from the crisis of growth of the Soviet economy, from a fall in the annual growth rate of industrial production. It corresponds to the exhaustion of the reserves in productive resources which had allowed extensive industrialisation to function more or less adequately – that is, with no efforts being made to economise to the maximum on labour, raw materials and land. The exhaustion of reserves brings with it the obligation to calculate more exactly, to make more rational choices between various investment projects. The growth in the economy itself, the multiplication of enterprises and their resources, risked increasing wastage endlessly unless more rational methods of planning and management were introduced.

The pressure of the working masses, weary of decades of sacrifice and tension, and wishing to improve and diversify their level of consumption, as well as the need to bring the decisions – at the level of light industry – into line with the consumers’ desires, both pointed in the same direction. Yet another element encouraged the drive for reform: a growing technological backwardness in relation to the third technological revolution of the capitalist economy, a backwardness flowing from the system of material incentives for the bureaucracy, which discourages technological experimentation and innovation. The form of these incentives was henceforth modified.

By linking the managers’ bonuses to the ‘profits’ (the difference between the cost price and the selling price), which are said to ‘synthesise’ the global performance of the enterprise, rather than to gross production expressed in physical terms, the bureaucratic leaders hoped to discourage wastage of raw materials and labour and to encourage a more rational use of machinery. The results were modest but positive in light industry. But they hardly made any difference to the hybrid nature of the system, since the selling prices continued to be fixed by the authorities of the central plan.

The scope of all these reforms is limited because they do not resolve the fundamental problem. No ‘economic mechanism’ outside of democratic and public control by the mass of producers and consumers can achieve a maximum return for a minimum effort. Each reform tends to substitute a new form of bureaucratic abuse and wastage for the old form. No global rationalisation of planning is possible under the rule of the bureaucracy and its material privileges, which are seen as the principal motor for the realisation of the plan. The reforms have not restored capitalism, nor have they reintroduced profit as a guide for investment decisions. But they have increased the internal contradictions of the system. On the one hand they have accentuated the thrust of one faction of the bureaucracy in favour of a greater autonomy for the factory managers, threatening key gains of the working class such as the guaranteed right to work; and on the other hand they have increased the resistance of the workers to the tendencies to chip away at their gains and the planned economy. 

7 Maoism

The victory of the third Chinese revolution in 1949 was the most important gain for the world revolution since the victory of the October socialist revolution. It broke the capitalist encirclement of the USSR, greatly stimulated the process of permanent revolution in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and tangibly altered the balance of forces on a world scale to the disadvantage of imperialism. This could come about because, in practice, the Maoist leadership of the Chinese CP had broken with the Stalinist line of the ‘bloc of four classes’ and revolution by stages, had led a vast peasant uprising, and had destroyed the bourgeois army and the bourgeois state, in spite of its proclamations in favour of a coalition with Chiang Kai-shek.

However, this victorious revolution was bureaucratically deformed from the outset. The independent action of the proletariat was strictly limited, if not prevented, by the Maoist leadership. The workers state which was established was in no way based on democratically elected workers’ and peasants’ soviets. Forms of managerial and bureaucratic privileges, imitations of those in force in Stalinist Russia, were widespread. This provoked a growing discontent among the masses, and especially among the workers and youth, which Mao tried to channel by launching the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ in 1964-5.

This combined genuine forms of anti-bureaucratic consciousness and mobilisation in the urban masses with an attempt by Mao to purge the CP apparatus and eject his opponents from the bureaucracy. When the mass mobilisations and the increasingly critical ideological evolution of the ‘Red Guards’ almost escaped from their control, the Maoist faction put an end to the ‘Cultural Revolution’. It re-established the unity of the bureaucracy to a large extent, bringing back into leadership positions most of the bureaucrats thrown out at the height of the ‘revolution’.

The Sino-Soviet conflict was provoked by the attempt of the Soviet bureaucracy to impose a monolithic control over the leadership of the Chinese CP and its move to withdraw economic and military aid to the People’s Republic of China as a reprisal for Mao’s refusal to give way to these ukases. This conflict steadily moved from being an inter-bureaucratic, organisational and ideological battle within the international Stalinist movement into one at state level. The narrow nationalism of the bureaucracy, Soviet as well as Chinese, dealt a severe blow to the interests of the world workers and anti-imperialist movement as imperialism was able to gain new room for manoeuvre by exploiting the Sino-Soviet conflict.

On the ideological level Maoism represents a current which is part of the workers movement, with aspects which are a variety of the Stalinist deformation of Marxism-Leninism. While Stalinism is at the same time the product and expression of a political counter-revolution within a victorious proletarian revolution, Maoism is the expression both of the victory of a socialist revolution and of the bureaucratically deformed nature of this revolution from its very beginning. It therefore combines characteristics of a more flexible and eclectic approach to the relations between the apparatus and the masses with the characteristic trait of smothering any independent action or organisation on the part of the masses, especially on the part of the urban proletarian masses.

In particular, it is characterised by an incomprehension of the social nature of the workers’ bureaucracy, and of the origins of the possible bureaucratic degeneration of socialist revolutions and workers states – since it is itself the ideological expression of one fraction of the bureaucracy. In identifying in an irresponsible and non-scientific manner ‘bureaucracy’ with the ‘state bourgeoisie’ in the USSR, and in defining the USSR as ‘social-imperialist’, it justifies in advance all the turns in Chinese foreign policy and those of the Maoist groups. It even goes so far as to put American imperialism, the USSR, bourgeois parties and Communist Parties on the same footing, not to mention its designation of the USSR and the CPs as the ‘principal enemy of the people’,and its offers of an alliance with imperialist powers and bourgeois parties against the Soviet Union and the CPs. These ‘tactics’ are based on the theory according to which most of the capitalist countries are not faced today with the task of socialist revolution but with that of struggling for national independence from the two ‘super-powers’.

The arbitrary character of all these theories, which are in fact just belated justifications for Peking’s diplomatic manoeuvres, has its roots in a voluntarist and idealist deformation of Marxism. Under the pretext of fighting ‘economism’ as the ‘most dangerous’ revision of Marxism, the ‘orthodox’ Maoists cease to consider social classes as objective realities determined by the production relations in a given society. Social classes are identified with ideological options. The proletariat is no longer the total mass of wage-earners, but those who ‘follow Mao Tse-tung thought’.

In this way, petty-bourgeois or bourgeois ideological currents within the working class are identified with ‘the bourgeoisie’ or ‘its representatives’, and the ideological struggle within the workers movement is identified with the ‘class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie’. From this flows the rejection of workers democracy, the justification for using violence and repression within the workers movement, the rejection of the whole Marxist-Leninist tradition of struggling for a united front of all workers organisations against the common class enemy. The dictatorship of the proletariat is identified with ‘Mao Tse-tung thought’ and exercised by the ‘Mao Tse-tung party’.

Thus we come full circle. After declaring war on the power of the bureaucracy in the USSR, the Maoists end up defending a regime of bureaucratic command which is very similar to that existing in the USSR, even if it is topped off with a bit of fancy icing in the form of ‘participation’ of the masses in decision making. Maoism does not accept the Leninist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, based on the exercise of power by freely and democratically elected workers’ and peasants’ councils, any more than Stalin, Khrushchev or Brezhnev.