Letters

Abortion rights

The abortion issue has again flared up, due to reports of one woman’s desperate late termination. This time, however, anti-abortionists are concentrating not on arguments as to ‘when life begins’ or Catholic dogma, but on the question of ‘rights’ - namely, the rights of the foetus.

Now, however much we’d like to shift the emphasis onto social provision or equality of access for working class women (all still worth mentioning), the antis insist on making it about the rights of the person and the autonomy of the conceived. Over the decades, the abortion debate has come down to the question of whose rights should be paramount. Does a right to exist of the being inside the womb trump the mother’s condition?

Various hypothetical instances have been used over the years to focus on the person and the question of personal viability and autonomy. One such ‘thought experiment’ was the supposition of a medical situation, where professional practitioners invent a technique whereby, in order to sustain a particular living patient, another adult must be hooked up to them by plastic tube for an indefinite period of time. It’s the only way that the patient can be saved! Do you feel that someone can plead that this is too much of an infringement of one’s life and personal autonomy? Or must someone accede to this essential connection of life-saving importance?

Of course, as socialists we may point out that we are all dependent on each other anyway and this involves exercising a duty of care regarding others. Is it not sheer indifference to let someone else die for our physical and mental convenience? Isn’t it base individualism? However, this service is not like saving an infant abandoned by their parents or caring for a severely (but still aware) disabled person. The imaginary sustainer is having to give up their own free life in being yoked to a patient: they are in fact subject to another. They may choose to consent to this condition willingly, especially if the patient is a relative or friend, but can we condemn someone who refuses to have their autonomy and/or mental health so encroached upon in this manner?

Likewise, if a foetus is not surviving outside the womb, the woman is already attached in this absolute way, subject to such a connection. As with the mother in the recent desperate case - who already had three children, one of whom had special needs - to counter such an absolute subjection to another, the personhood (sentient, intelligent and future-conscious) of the adult must override the right of the being in her womb to exist and the threat of physical and mental distress.

If socialists ignore the equal rights of persons, then they will not deserve the trust of those who have only recently achieved some equality.

Mike Belbin
London

With Stalinism

Jack Conrad manages to keep a foot in both camps: favouring the planned economy, whilst repudiating the actual introduction of that planned economy in the USSR after 1928-29 (‘First plan backgrounds’, June 15). Whilst favourably citing Stalinist hack Andrew Northall (Letters, June 8) against Trotsky and the Left Opposition, he actually then attacks both Stalin’s USSR and Northall from the right on the question of planning the economy.

Yevgeny Preobrazhensky and the Left Opposition were entirely correct on the New Economic Policy: it was a measured retreat from war communism, forced on the party in March 1921 by the crisis highlighted by the Kronstadt revolt that same month. As Jack admits, Trotsky had proposed such measures a year earlier (Lenin rejected them then).

Trotsky’s last struggle was against those who attacked Stalin - and with him the planned economy of the USSR - from the right, as elaborated in his In defence of Marxism. Their political descendants today are state capitalists, bureaucratic collectivists and third campists of all varieties who refused to defend the USSR against imperialism - particularly after Stalin invaded Finland in November 1939. These are Stalinophobes, who gravitate towards ‘democratic’ imperialism, as their main ideologue, Max Shachtman, did.

So we have no hesitation in forming a united front with Andrew Northall in defence of the planned economy of the USSR against Jack - unconditional, but critical defence here. There is a grain of truth in Northall’s stance against imperialism and, distorted though it is, it is not the far more direct capitulation seen in saying that capitalism was restored with the introduction of that five-year plan after 1929. So in that alone I support Northall, even though very critically.

Had the Communist Party followed the political approach of the Left Opposition, the great tragedy of forced collectivisation in the great famine of 1930-33, that took the lives of between 5.7 to 8.7 million, would have been avoided. And, contrary to the far-right Ukraine ‘Holodomor’ narrative, it raged not only in Ukraine, but in all the agricultural lands of the USSR, the northern Caucasus, Volga and Kazakhstan. This was the blueprint for Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1958-61, which caused history’s greatest famine ever - upwards of 30 million died in that mad, forced industrialisation/collectivisation drive.

Trotsky and the Left Opposition advocated collectivisation in proportion to when the tractors and combine harvesters, mills and all the other infrastructure became available and with pilot farms to demonstrate to the poor peasantry the benefits of this collectivisation. Nonetheless history records that, once these immediate and terrible events were over, collectivisation resulted in spectacular increases in life expectancy. Also literacy and per-capita gross domestic product grew spectacularly in the USSR after 1933 (and in China after 1962), demonstrating that the planned economy, despite its bureaucratic and undemocratic distortions, was far superior. It was partially production for human need and not for profit.

Jack’s article is an implicit endorsement of socialism in a single country, in that it regards the struggle in the Communist Party of the USSR as national events of manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre irrespective of world events. The two great world events in regard to the rise of the Stalin-led counterrevolutionary bureaucracy (after Hungary and Germany in 1918-19) were the defeat of the German revolution in October 1923 and the defeat of the Chinese revolution in April 1927. As for the right communist Nikolai Bukharin, he had lost faith in the world revolution before Stalin turned on him and Rykov in 1929.

But what are we to make of Preobrazhensky who capitulated after Trotsky refused to ally with Bukharin after 1928? Here we have a profound misunderstanding of the law of value. It was possible to partially suppress this law in production only - consumption had to be regulated by the bureaucracy (the “policeman of inequality”, in Trotsky’s famous phrase). But the law of value operates on a global scale and Preobrazhensky completely failed to understand this. Trotsky could not convince him of the ultimate impossibility of building socialism in a single country, while Europe, Japan and increasingly the USA dominated world markets and trade.

Stalinism, like social democracy/Labourism are counterrevolutionary currents, but they are part of the workers’ movement internationally. As Trotsky observed in his ‘Letter on India, 1939-40’, “The general historic role of the Stalinist bureaucracy and their Comintern is counterrevolutionary. But through their military and other interests they can be forced to support progressive movements … We must keep our eyes open to discern the progressive acts of the Stalinists, support them independently, foresee in time the danger, the betrayals, warn the masses and gain their confidence.”

We have formed united fronts with the New Communist Party and many others like them internationally on the war in Ukraine on the basis that the US/Nato is the main enemy, and we are for its defeat. Not everyone opposes the withdrawal of Russian troops as we do, but if Russia is not imperialist (neither is China) then we cannot be for dual defeatism in this war (as Jack is) or in a coming war against China. We are for the defeat of US/Nato global imperialism, the main enemy of the global working class and all the oppressed internationally. The secondary enemies - Putin, president Xi, etc - will be more easily dealt with whenever the global power is defeated and driven back. Remember Vietnam!

We have nothing but contempt for those US/Nato defenders around Chris Ford’s Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. And we are not for a ‘multipolar world’ of roughly equal imperialist power blocs. That remains the position of Socialist Fight and the Liaison Committee of the Fourth International, whom SF has rejoined (although we have not fused with Ian Donovan’s Consistent Democrats; there are two affiliates in Britain).

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

For the purges

I appreciate Jack Conrad is just trying to ‘stir the pot’ in the notes to his fantastical and nonsensical article about the establishment of socialism in the USSR, but I can assure him I do not engage in “uncritical adulation of Stalin” - or any other Soviet leader for that matter (‘First plan backgrounds’. June 15). They were all products of their time and circumstances, and all of them had significant credits and debits to their record. Stalin’s written and theoretical contribution to Marxism-Leninism was outstanding.

My own - balanced - view is that, yes, Stalin was a very significant Soviet leader, who carefully led and guided the Soviet Union from its extremely precarious and vulnerable state in the early 1920s, managed to coax and grow the industrial and agricultural economy under a form of socialist state control over the market over the next years to a certain critical mass, and was then able to launch a full programme of rapid socialist industrialisation and collectivisation, knowing full well the international situation was heading inexorably towards war, including against the Soviet Union. Without heavy industry and a heavy armaments sector, the USSR would surely have been crushed immediately by the imperialist powers.

Instead, it was the very strength and resilience of the Soviet economy and society - indeed of the Soviet people (products of that socialisation) - which played by far the major role in destroying four-fifths of Nazi Germany’s armed forces. That very strength and resilience produced a very rapid recovery despite the devastation of the war, and the USSR quickly became a world socialist superpower.

Certainly, after the war, the suspiciousness, paranoia, conspiracy theories, faction-fighting, purges, executions, partly stemming from Stalin’s aging personality, grew to extreme proportions, and it was only Stalin’s death which brought that to an end.

I am strongly supportive of Khrushchev’s actions in restoring full socialist legality and re-establishing the leading role of the Communist Party, which had been largely sidelined in favour of the military and security apparatus. I do think some of his economic and political reforms were a bit barmy and some actions on the international stage genuinely dangerous and frightening, but he deserves full credit for implementing deStalinisation in the 1950s and 60s.

Regarding the so-called Great Purge (1937-38), I’m afraid there are such things as hard, concrete facts and evidence. Historians such as Oleg Khlevniuk and J Arch Getty have now been able to scrutinise voluminous files of documents slowly released after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, including politburo minutes and papers, and a wealth of material from the security organs and from republican, provincial and local archives. Whilst there is no doubt as to their anti-Soviet and anti-Stalin credentials, they are capable of establishing the facts as to what happened and why.

The Soviet leadership in the late 1930s was certain war was coming and was genuinely extremely concerned about a potential ‘fifth column’ of enemies of Soviet power within the country. Among others, former kulaks and criminals who had been internally exiled as part of the mass collectivisation were now completing their sentences and expected to return to their former homes and communities, and were becoming the main source of criminal and anti-Soviet activities.

Operational order 00447 of the Soviet security apparatus (NKVD) “concerning the operation for repressing former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements” was issued towards the end of July 1937. The order defined “the contingents to be subject to repression” (“repression” mainly meant sentenced to be imprisoned for fixed terms, but some were shot). In reality it included all those who had struggled against Soviet power or who had been victims of previous repressions.

These included: kulaks, who had either been released or fled from exile; former members of disbanded parties (Socialist Revolutionaries, Georgian Mensheviks, Mussavats, Dashnaks, etc); former White Guards; surviving tsarist officials; those arrested for terrorist and spying offences; and oppositional factionalists, who had previously been expelled from the Communist Party.

All these groups either presented a clear and present danger to Soviet power or had the real potential to create it. I recognise repressing those with the ‘potential’ to threaten Soviet power will offend some modern-day liberals, but these are frequently the same ‘liberals’ and ‘democrats’ who would have hated the very existence of Soviet power and would have supported any effort to overthrow it. We know what happened to the communards after the Paris Commune was overthrown by reactionary forces.

Limitu (limits) were established in advance for the numbers to be repressed in each area - either to be imprisoned or shot. It is ‘hilarious’ that classic anti-Soviet historians (like Robert Conquest, Arch Getty and Khlevniuk) and modern-day Trotskyists insist on translating this word as meaning ‘quotas’ or minimum target numbers to be arrested and/or shot. As if the NKVD were scouring the streets looking for people to make up the numbers. No, the word means the precise opposite - maximum numbers. A simple example of how historians and modern anti-communists can completely turn facts and the truth into their opposite.

Were innocent people caught up and some killed in the Great Purge? Yes. Did these constitute unacceptable crimes? Yes. Local NKVD units were strongly encouraged to use their local initiatives. It was only when it became clear at a national level that repressions were starting to exceed the limitu or ‘control figures’ that the Great Purge started to be reined in during 1938. Significant numbers from then and into the 1940s were released from prison, rehabilitated and given back their rights. That, of course, implies innocent people were arrested and some were wrongly executed - and those responsible were then subsequently punished. The replacement of Nikolai Yezhov as head of the NKVD in 1938 has to be seen in this context.

In many ways, the Great Purge in sociological terms led to a major renewal of the leadership of the party and state at all levels - older, less educated, autocratic, more ‘suspect’ leaders were replaced by a younger, better educated, newer generation, who were brought up and moulded in the collective values of Soviet socialist power and untarnished with the bitter factional and personal disputes pre- and post- the 1917 Revolution.

And, of course, the ‘fifth column’, which Nazi Germany and Japan managed to cultivate in every single country prior to invasion, either did not exist in the USSR (despite there being large quantities of raw material for such an anti-Soviet basis) or it was indeed largely eliminated in this period.

We have to take a hard, sober, balanced, rounded and critical assessment of the facts and of history. Uncritical adulation of any individual cannot be part of that.

Andrew Northall
Kettering