While Perry Anderson starts [in New Left Review Volume 1, No 139] from a position warmly sympathetic to Trotsky’s attempt to theorise the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the social nature of the USSR, he nevertheless comes to conclusions radically different from Trotsky’s in relation to Stalinism’s international role. They are also conclusions radically different from those of the Fourth International and the overwhelming majority of organisations claiming to stand in the Trotskyist tradition.

We should be clear at the outset that Anderson’s method and spirit are exactly in accord with Trotsky’s own. There is no point in defending the indefensible, just because the ‘Old Man said it. ‘The most dangerous thing in politics is to fall captive to one’s own formula that yesterday was appropriate, but is bereft of all content today’. Marxism is the method of successive approximations, and besides, Trotsky did not live to see the last 40-odd years of Stalinist development, much of which would surely have taken him by surprise.

The essence of Perry Anderson’s position can be summed up as follows: hostile both to capitalism and to proletarian liberty, the Stalinist bureaucracy has, despite itself, often played a progressive role. While Trotsky’s theory of Stalinism in the Soviet Union was in essence correct, and in any case has not in its fundamentals been surpassed: ‘…he erred in qualifying the external role of the Soviet bureaucracy as simply and unilaterally ‘counter-revolutionary’-whereas in fact it was to prove profoundly contradictory in its actions and effects abroad, just as much as it was at home. Secondly, he was mistaken in thinking that Stalinism represented merely an exceptional or “aberrant” refraction of the general laws of transition from capitalism to socialism, that would be confined to Russia itself. The structures of bureaucratic power and mobilisation pioneered under Stalin proved to be more general and dynamic a phenomenon on the international plane than Trotsky ever imagined…Stalinism, in other words, proved to be not just an apparatus, but a movement-one capable not only of keeping power in a backward environment dominated by scarcity (USSR); but of actually winning power in environments that were more backward and destitute (China, Vietnam)-of expropriating the bourgeoisie and starting the slow work of socialist construction, even against the will of Stalin himself…Stalinism as a broad phenomenon…did not merely represent a degeneration from a prior state of relative class grace: it could also be a spontaneous generation produced by revolutionary class forces in very backward societies, without any tradition of either bourgeois or proletarian democracy.

The first thing to note is that Perry Anderson provides neither a precise definition of Stalinism, nor does he outline in what sense Trotsky considered the role of Stalinism to be internationally counter revolutionary. Both are crucial to any attempt at disproving Trotsky’s theory. Trotsky considered the essence of Stalinism to be the subordination of the interests of the world working class (international revolution) to the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. His accusation against Stalinism internationally was not that its every action was counter-revolutionary, but that it had gone over to the ‘bourgeois order’; that the central role of the Stalinised Comintern was to defend the position of the bureaucracy, which relied for its position on the lack of advance, the incompleteness, of the world revolutionary process: in other words, that the Stalinist bureaucracy and the parties which it controlled, had made an accommodation with the continued domination of the world economy and world politics by imperialism, and was acting as a profound barrier to the overthrow of the world imperialist system. In making a balance sheet of Stalinism you have to judge this question: has Stalinism overall acted as a barrier to the overthrow of imperialism? By attempting to give a ‘yes/no’ answer, Perry Anderson credits Stalinism with achievements of a quite extraordinarily revolutionary character, as we shall see.

The central error which Perry Anderson makes in his critique of Trotsky is to transfer the role of the Stalinist bureaucracy inside the Soviet Union onto a world scale. Quite rightly, he says that inside the Soviet Union the bureaucracy is hostile to private capitalist property and also to proletarian liberty. He then argues that ‘(Trotsky’s) error was, ironically. only to have thought that this contradiction could be confined to the USSR itself; whereas Socialism in One Country proved to be a contradiction in terms”

Anderson’s argument here is quite wrong. Internationally, the Soviet bureaucracy has shown itself time and time again prepared to reconcile itself to the continued existence of private capitalist property, if not to proletarian liberty. Trotsky’s whole argument was precisely that, in order to maintain its own rule, the bureaucracy could not tolerate any attempt to restore capitalism in the USSR, but that internationally it would reconcile itself to the continued existence of imperialism. It would do so because the spread of revolution internationally threatened not just imperialism, but also its own rule. The Stalinist bureaucracy was a product of the confinement of the revolution to a relatively backward country, and the continued pressure of imperialism. Revolutionary upsurges threatened to destabilise the grip of the bureaucracy on its own working class. That the Stalinist bureaucracy did indeed collaborate with imperialism to strangle revolution in Trotsky’s lifetime is hardly a matter of dispute.

Let us imagine for one moment that the Sovict Union was genuinely ‘hostile to capitalist property and proletarian liberty on an international scale. It would mean that the Stalinist bureaucracy was engaged in a world-wide fight to establish bureaucratic workers’ states. Any modus vivendi with world capitalism would be totally excluded. The Soviet bureaucracy would fight to bring the Communist Parties to power everywhere (while simultaneously crushing independent working class action). Undeniably a world-wide orientation of this kind would be progressive. It would engender struggles which the Stalinist parties would be quite unable to control. New bureaucratic states thus established would surely prove impossible to dominate from Moscow and would rapidly undermine the stability of the Moscow bureaucracy.

This scenario is of course very far from being the case. But it highlights why to defend its own rule and its own interests the bureaucracy has to reconcile itself to the continued existence of ‘individual, private capital’, of world imperialism.

What, then, is Anderson’s evidence against the argument that Stalinism has played a fundamentally counterrevolutionary international role? It is, first, the post-war social overturns in Eastern Europe; second, the role of the Soviet Union in defeating fascism and in the post-war decolonisation of the ‘third world’; and, third, the revolutions carried out (in China, Vietnam, etc.) by parties which had their origins in the Stalinised Comintern. Each of these arguments is tendentious and one-sided.

Anderson’s lack of a definition of Stalinism shows in his unproblematic inclusion of the Chinese and Vietnamese parties in the ambit of the Stalinist ‘movement’. To do so is to say, in effect, that Stalinism is the totality of parties and movements which came out of the Comintern. This is hardly satisfactory. Doubtless, all the parties mentioned by Anderson were marked by Stalinist methods and conceptions. But they all, to a greater or lesser extent, broke with Moscow, generally over the crucial question of whether or not to take power. In other words, they refused to subordinate the interests of their own working class to that of the Kremlin bureaucraсу.

The origins of the division between parties which cravenly accepted the dictats of the Kremlin and those which refused lie in the uneven process of the Stalinisation of the Comintern. For geographical and social reasons it proved much easier to bring to heel the French and Italian parties, for example, than the Chinese. The alternative to defining Stalinism as subordination to the diplomatic interests of the Kremlin, and through that to the international bourgeois order, is to define Stalinism as a totality of movements which have common theoretical approaches, policies and internal structures. But this is hardly adequate to define the ‘laws of motion’ of such parties. If it is a common ‘approach’ which constitutes Stalinism, then why do some parties take power against the direct orders of Stalin and others subordinate themselves to their own bourgeoisie? This is a mystery, unless Stalinism is defined as subordination to the diplomatic interests of the bureaucracy of a workers’ state.

The origins of the division between parties which cravenly accepted the dictats of the Kremlin and those which refused lie in the uneven process ofthe Stalinisation of the Comintern. For geographical and social reasons it proved much easier to bring to heel the French and Italian parties, for example, than the Chinese. The alternative to defining Stalinism as subordination to the diplomatic interests of the Kremlin, and through that to the international bourgeois order, is to define Stalinism as a totality of movements which have common theoretical approaches, policies and internal structures. But this is hardly adequate to define the ‘laws of motion’ of such parties. If it is a common ‘approach’ which constitutes Stalinism, then why do some parties take power against the direct orders of Stalin and others subordinate themselves to their own bourgeoisie? This is a mystery, unless Stalinism is defined as subordination to the diplomatic interests of the bureaucracy of a workers’ state.

It might be objected that there is today more than one bureaucratic workers’ state and that, by derivation, Stalinism could be defined as subordination to the interest of for example the Chinese bureaucracy. This seems to me a reasonable argument, but one which does not affect the substance of the matter. In any case, Anderson himself throughout his article conflates ‘Stalinism’ with the ruling bureaucracy in the USSR. Why then are parties which broke from that bureaucracy in a decisive way part of the Stalinist movement?

In discussing the post-war social overturns in Eastern Europe, Perry Anderson confuses the question of the military bureaucratic interests of the Soviet bureaucracy with its alleged ‘hostility to private capitalism’ internationally. The creation of the buffer states was carried out not because Stalin was innately hostile to capitalism in Eastern Europe, but for the military defence of the USSR. There is some evidence, but again this is not decisive, that Moscow first of all conceived of the buffer states as being subordinate to the USSR, but not necessarily workers’ states. In the event, the bureaucracy proved incompatible with local capitalism. But there is nothing in the creation of the ‘People’s Democracies’ which demonstrates any world revolutionary role for Stalinism.

The division of Europe was agreed with US and British imperialism at Yalta. The East European transition went hand in hand with the Stalinist betrayal of the revolution in Greece and the potentially pre-revolutionary situations in Italy and France. Stalin respected his agreement with Roosevelt and Churchill. Fernando Claudin² and many other authors have documented in detail the line of the Stalinist parties in Western Europe for the restoration of bourgeois democracy after the Second World War.

Trotsky, in his writings on the Soviet-German invasion of Poland foresaw that in certain situations the Soviet bureaucracy might be forced to invade and even occupy neighbouring states for reasons of self-defence. He predicted that in such situations bureaucratic rule would prove to be incompatible with the continued existence of capitalism: a ‘military-bureaucratic’ transition would ensue.

The creation of the buffer states was part and parcel of a deal with imperialism which helped to create the new (imperialist) world order after the war. Only if it could be shown that it was part of a tendency towards expansion and the creation of new bureaucratic states could it be termed part of a ‘revolutionary’ side of Stalinism

Anderson’s argument about the role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazism is perplexing. He himself admits that the defeat of Hitler was no part of Stalin’s strategy until the Soviet Union was invaded. The bureaucratic-terrorist methods with which Stalin waged the war put its success in jeopardy many times. In any event, how is it possible for a revolutionary Marxist to attribute the defeat of Hitler as a positive virtue of Stalinism, without mentioning the mechanisms by which fascism came to power and the Second World War was unleased?

The rise of fascism and the war were the price paid by the international working class for its failure to take power between the wars: in other words, for the defeat in Germany, the destruction of the Spanish Revolution and the betrayals of the French Popular Front. In each of these sorry tales the role of Stalinism was crucial. In Germany the ‘third period” insanity of the Communist Party sabotaged any chance of successful resistance to the Nazis. In Spain, the Soviet Union intervened directly to crush the revolution and subordinate it to bourgeois objectives-murdering some of the best leaders of the Spanish proletariat in the process. Stalin and Stalinism bear a heavy responsibility for the victory of Nazism and for the very fact.

Of course the Soviet bureaucracy, when the Hitler-Stalin pact proved worthless could not accept the destruction of its rule by fascism. In predicting defeat for the Soviet Union in the war Trotsky undoubtedly underestimated the commitment of the Soviet masses to collectivised property relations, and their ability to win out despite the bureaucratic mismanagement of the war. But the (eventually) successful defence of Soviet territory is not evidence for any revolutionary qualities of Stalinism.

Anderson’s argument that Stalinism has constituted a ‘dynamic’ and ‘generalised’ form of transition to socialism in the third world is full of dangers. If we leave aside the argument that the Vietnamese and Chinese parties were Stalinist, Anderson’s position seems to contain another logic-namely that in the semi-colonial countries bureaucratic forms of mobilisation are necessary or inevitable, both in the overthrow of imperialism and the building of socialism. What other logic is there in the terms ‘generalised’ and ‘dynamic’?

Presumably this is because of the lower level of culture and material wealth in these countries. This would be an extraordinary logic to accept, if only because it puts in question Trot- sky’s account of the bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union itself, which Anderson supports. For if bureaucratic forms of mobilisation are ‘general’ and ‘dynamic’, then wasn’t Stalinism a necessary evil inside the Soviet Union itself? This of course is the standard apology for Stalin’s crimes-that Stalin adopted brutal but necessary methods, that workers’ democracy was impractical in such a ‘backward’ country, and that in any case you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Everything from the insanity of the forced collectivisation to the labour camps can be justified by such arguments.

Trotsky’s case against the bureaucratic management of the Soviet economy was precisely that while there was something very ‘dynamic’ about collectivised property relations, the domination of the bureaucracy was a fetter on this dynamism and held back the development of the productive forces. This is exactly the same argument as is put forward by the world Trotskyist movement today- that bureaucratic management, bureaucratic forms of ‘mobilisation’ in both the East European countries and the less developed countries such as China, serve as an obstacle to maximising the potential inherent in national planning and collectivised property relations. If Perry Anderson thinks that workers’ democracy is inappropriate in the less developed countries, then he is undermining the very case he makes out on the Soviet Union itself.

This whole question is vital for the future of the revolutionary movement in the semi-colonial countries – are bureaucratic forms the general mode of transition in these countries? Or are they the product of the lack of a conscious fight against bureaucratism, that is to say the absence of a revolutionary Marxist leadership? Trotsky himself regarded scarcity as the social basis for bureaucratism and thought it inevitable that bureaucratic methods and tendencies would be a constant pressure in less developed countries. That is what the analogy of the ‘policeman and the queue is all about. But he did not regard it as inevitable, or ‘general’, that a bureaucratic social caste would arise in colonial countries in a post revolutionary situation. He thought that by the conscious fight of a revolutionary leadership this could be avoided.

The example of Cuba, at least in part, shows that the growth of a privileged bureaucracy can be avoided. Obviously this is a crucial question for the future of a country like Nicaragua. Is bureaucracy inevitable? Is it the general rule? Will the coming social revolution in the Indian sub-continent create the kind of bureaucracy which exists in China? Will it be led by Stalinist parties?

And what of the role of the Soviet Union in the post-war decolonisation? Of course, the existence of the Soviet workers state has been an immense factor in the world relationship of social forces, which has aided the colonial revolution, despite the betrayals and perfidy of the bureaucracy. But this is not a virtue of Stalinism. Moreover, the role of the Stalinist parties in the Third World has been one of the main obstacles to the achievement of socialism, and remains so today. Time and again, the ‘two-stage’ theory of revolution-first a democratic revolution together with your own bourgeoisie and then the socialist revolution- has led the Stalinist parties and their followers into a trap. Anderson talks of those parties like the Chinese which broke with Moscow. But what about those that didn’t, the real Stalinist parties?

The subordination of the Middle East CPs to the Arab bourgeoisies is well known. In Iraq and Egypt the respective subordination of the CPs to Ba’athism and Nasserism led them to destruction. In Latin America the popular frontist record of the CPs is appalling; in Chile, the CP was the right wing of the Popular Unity alliance. On the Indian sub-continent all the various CPs, and especially the pro-Moscow CP, subordinate themselves to the local bourgeoisie. And in Indonesia, the subordination of the PKI to the diplomatic interests of Peking, expressed in their support for Sukharno, led to the worst defeat of the world workers’ movement since 1933 in Germany.

Finally, we come to the overall role of the Soviet Union in relation to successful revolutions. It is true, and no account of world politics can ignore it, that the Soviet Union has acted as a shield to defend the Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions. In order to defend its own military position, the Soviet Union has been forced to extend its own sphere of operations, to seek out military, strategic and diplomatic allies. In most instances this takes the form of allying itself with local capitalist forces in the Third World; hence the current alliance with Syria’s Assad, and even an attempted alliance with Sadat in Egypt. These alliances are at the expense ofthe local working class and even the local CPs.

In Vietnam and Cuba the Soviet Union attempted to use the opportunities for diplomatic and military advances provided by revolutions carried out by others. But Perry Anderson will be hard put to show that the Soviet Union has consistently supported revolutions in Cuba, Vietnam or China. In Cuba the revolution was made against the line of the local CP, which even entered the government of the tyrant Batista. In Vietnam the Soviet Union was a prime mover in the 1954 Geneva accords which deprived the Viet Minh of many of the gains of Dien Bien Phu. Stalin was against the seizure of power by the Chinese CP.

Far from being ‘persistently anti-capitalist’ outside its own borders, the Soviet bureaucracy has always acted according to its own bureaucratic interests. This applies especially to the colonial revolution. The latest evidence of this is the complete and utter prostrate inaction of the USSR over the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, where the bureaucracy hardly bothered to go through the normal diplomatic protests let alone render material aid to the PLO. It did however support its capitalist ally Assad.

Certainly, the colonial revolution has benefited from the existence of the workers’ state in the USSR. But it has not benefited from Stalinism. The emergence of world Stalinism was not inevitable. It arose from something very specific, something propelled by immense social forces, but in the end something avoidable-the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party, the Russian Revolution and the Communist International. The price humanity pays for this process is immense, in every part of the world. It has held back the struggle for socialism over a 50-year period.

By refusing to acknowledge that the world role of Stalinism is counter-revolutionary, Anderson underestimates the practical tasks facing revolutionary Marxists in every sector of the world revolution. For neither in the advanced capitalist countries, the semi-colonial countries nor indeed in the workers’ states themselves can we put our trust in parties linked to the Moscow bureaucracy. The task of building authentic revolutionary Marxist parties faces the working class everywhere. To accept that Stalinism has and does play a ‘contradictory’ role on a world scale all too easily leads to an abstention from the task of building parties which base themselves on the tradition of the first Communists to fight Stalinism- Trotsky and the Left Opposition.