22.05.2025

Centuries of Stalinism?

What is the nature of the transition from capitalism to communism? In the first of a series, Mike Macnair begins with the ideas of the 1950s Fourth International and how ‘official communists’ see things today

We have been discussing the question of the transition to communism in the Forging Communist Unity talks. The CPGB’s Draft programme presents this as involving the immediate overthrow of capitalist political rule, followed by a more or less prolonged process of socialisation of the means of production (starting immediately with land and infrastructure, banks and finance, and so on). To quote the Communist manifesto,

We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees,¹ all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state: ie, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

The issues are, of course, posed significantly differently in the 2020s than in 1848, and our Draft programme does pose them differently. But the shape of the revolution in our view remains political democracy first, then enabling a process of socialisation.²

Talking About Socialism comrades have urged the view that socialisation of the means of production needs to be pretty much immediate; whether because of the development of the forces of production (and in particular of workers’ skills) since the 19th century; or because the working class will naturally not stop short at taking the larger capitals (and to persuade the class to do so is to create a party dictatorship); or because political democracy is only possible if there is socialisation (as enabling democracy in the workplace). I admit that I may not have listed all the arguments here.

Underlying them, it seems to me that there is a concern among TAS comrades that the CPGB’s Draft programme might be proposing something like the gradualism in Britain’s road to socialism, the programme of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain; or - as bad, but different - ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (which involves intense exploitation of sections of the working class, as well as the dictatorship of the political police).

This is going to be a series of articles. In this one I look briefly at an analogous debate in the 1950s Trotskyist movement; and in a bit more depth at three articles related to the topic in the CPB’s Communist Review. Next week I will address Peter Kennedy’s arguments in his piece, ‘Differentiating socialism and communism’ on the TAS website, and go on to consider the ‘transition’ issue in terms more of general principle and analysis.

Trotskyists

There is a certain similarity of this fear with an episode in the history of the Trotskyist movement in 1951‑53. Michel Pablo (Michalis Raptis) in the document, ‘Where are we going?’, written in 1951 at the height of the Korean war, argued:

People who despair of the fate of humanity because Stalinism still endures and even achieves victories, tailor history to their own personal measure. They really desire that the entire process of the transformation of capitalist society into socialism would be accomplished within the span of their brief lives, so that they can be rewarded for their efforts on behalf of the revolution. As for us, we reaffirm what we wrote in the first article devoted to the Yugoslav affair: this transformation will probably take an entire historical period of several centuries and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and necessarily deviating from ‘pure’ forms and norms.³

French Trotskyist leader Marcel Bleibtreu characterised this statement as amounting to the claim that:

the transitional society (several centuries…) takes on a character of the sort that the Soviet-type bureaucracy (which is confused with all manifestations of bureaucratism that are inherent, wherever you have a low level of the development of the productive forces and a low level of culture) becomes a historically necessary evil: that is, a class.⁴

Pablo responded both with arguments from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme (that Marx’s discussion of the economics necessarily implied a period of transition) and by asserting that “We locate the downfall of Stalinism in the unfolding of the struggle already engaged between imperialism and the revolution in all its forms: the USSR, the ‘People’s Democracies’, Yugoslavia, China, the colonial revolutions now in progress and the international revolutionary movement. This struggle will not last for centuries but a much briefer period.”⁵

James P Cannon in May 1953 simplified Bleibtreu’s argument into the idea that Pablo forecast “centuries of Stalinism”.⁶

In reality, the underlying difference between Pablo and his opponents in the 1951-53 debate was not really about the form and duration of the transition from capitalism to communism. It was about the question of the origins and nature of Stalinism as such. For Pablo, Stalinism grew from the isolation of the Russian Revolution - and a tendency towards bureaucratic dictatorship would thus reappear in any new isolated revolution, so that the decisive issue was world revolution.

For Bleibtreu and Cannon,⁷ on the other hand, Stalinism grew from the specific backwardness of Russia. Thus Bleibtreu argued in the document quoted that the Chinese revolution showed that the Communist Party of China had broken with Stalinism: the first of many successful communist and left-nationalist leaders who were supposed to have done so.⁸ A perspective of a series of national revolutions was thus feasible.

This perspective was reflected in the fact that after splitting from the ‘Pabloites’ (in France in 1951, internationally in 1953) the ‘anti-Pabloite’ wing could not sustain an international even of organised symbolic coordination, but instead created a series of Comintern- or Cominform-style organisations centred on a single national party, with ‘Moscow’ in New York, Paris, London, Buenos Aires …

I was drawn to reference this episode by the similarity of the TAS comrades’ fear that the CPGB Draft programme’s account of the transition supports an ‘official communist’ approach, to Cannon’s “centuries of Stalinism” trope in 1953. But the point of substance is also relevant. The transition from capitalism to communism is necessarily on a world scale.

Cleaver

In this context, it is useful, for seeing what real ‘official communism’ argues about the matter, that the latest issue of the CPB’s Communist Review (May-June 2025) carries three articles in different ways about the transition.

In page order, Carlos Martinez, author of the 2023 book The east is still red - Chinese socialism in the 21st century, reviews Torkil Lauesen’s 2024 The long transition towards socialism and the end of capitalism. Sion Cleaver writes on the CPB’s programme Britain’s road to socialism as “A Marxist approach to modern conditions”. And Ruth Pitman has a ‘political education column’, “on the significance of the Critique of the Gotha programme”. I will discuss these in a different order, starting with Cleaver before moving on to Martinez and then Pitman.

Sion Cleaver’s article purports to be a defence of the BRS, but in fact abstracts from it to the point that it says very little about its specifics. It states mainly propositions that most Trotskyists (let alone other forms of non-‘official’ communists) would agree with.

He begins with the point that communism is the “actual movement [Bewegung] which transforms [aufhebt] the present state of affairs. The conditions for this result from the situation that now exists” (from the German ideology drafts).⁹ This is agreed by all Marxists, though there is a widespread tendency to back-read the English usage of ‘movement’ in the sense of the ‘labour movement’ onto Bewegung, which means a process of change. The differences among leftwingers are about what the situation that now exists is (or, more exactly, what current dynamics are).

He returns to this issue at the end of the article, claiming that BRS is Hegelian-dialectical (relying on Hegel’s Phenomenology of spirit). It would be useful for him - and, incidentally, enable a serious critique of what is wrong with the BRS - for him to read Marx’s 1843‑44 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of right.¹⁰ BRS is, in fact, Hegelian as opposed to Marxist: its strategy relies on the state bureaucracy and the labour bureaucracy as potential representatives of the general interest - rather than, as Marx pointed out, defenders of their particular bureaucratic turf interests.

Cleaver’s second point is that Britain today is not Russia in 1917 or China in 1949 - which, again, is perfectly true. That “the working class must use all available means - including parliament, local government, and industrial action” (citing Lenin’s Leftwing communism) would again be agreed by everyone, including the Socialist Workers Party and the Spartacists and their offshoots; it is only the left communists who would eschew electoral work as a matter of choice.

He goes on to quote Gramsci on “war of position versus war of manoeuvre”. He is probably unaware that this conception of making a difference between Russia and the west was actually originated by Trotsky (and, in fact, led Trotsky to a radical misunderstanding of the dynamics of World War II). Trotskyists, he says, “often argue that any engagement with parliamentary democracy is a capitulation to reformism. However, their position assumes that conditions for immediate revolutionary insurrection already exist - a claim not supported by material analysis.”

Again, this is a complete fantasy in relation to the claims of the Trotskyists. They by and large argue precisely that, since conditions for insurrection do not presently exist, what needs to be created is a militarised ‘party’ for the future when they do exist, coupled with a broad-front left Keynesian party for the present. In reality, the politics of the dominant tendencies among the Trotskyist left is precisely that of the BRS, and their organisational separation from the Morning Star-CPB is due to sectarianism on both sides: for example, why can the CPB not absorb Socialist Action?¹¹

Cleaver thus actually fails to defend the actual politics of the BRS, defending instead a sort of generic ‘Leninist’ orthodoxy.

The basic obvious problem with the BRS is that its starting point is the struggle for a “left government”, to be a coalition of left-led Labour with the CPB and other “left parties”, on the basis of a Keynesian and nationalist policy for ‘rebalancing’ away from finance capital. The nearest approach to this policy that has ever been achieved is the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party in 2015-19. Though the BRS has been re-edited since 2019, no balance-sheet is made of why the Corbyn project failed.

In fact, this is a larger issue: the BRS offers no balance sheet of why the leadership of the USSR itself collapsed the regime in the late 1980s, and no significant section of the working class was willing to defend it; it appears merely as a “defeat” by the USA. OK, what might we do better to prevent a similar defeat? The BRS offers at most support for the Chinese regime (implying the use of internal passports to hold down wages, and so on).

Relatedly, the BRS’s analysis of the evolution of British capitalism is built round the idea of national economies, characterised nonetheless by ‘Stamokap’ (‘state monopoly capitalism’). This was a theory constructed by Soviet economists to explain cold war-period capitalism, and has very little purchase on the world since the turn under the Carter administration to neoliberalism. What about the radical de-industrialisation of Britain since Thatcher’s administration?

The BRS in essence clings to an image of Britain dating to the cold war period, in order to cling to the delusion - which remains completely central to it - of ‘socialism in one country’ and ‘national roads to socialism’.

Martinez

Carlos Martinez’s review of Torkil Lauesen focuses on the idea of a “long transition towards socialism” (Lauesen’s own title) beginning and continuing under capitalist world dominance, with 1848 as its starting point. In this framework, the collapse of the USSR can be merely an example of ‘win some, lose some’: “The retreats suffered by our movement should be considered as part of an inevitable ebb and flow of a complex trajectory that could take hundreds of years, but which nonetheless has an inexorable historical materialist tide.”

Lauesen is right, and Martinez is right, that the process of transition from capitalism to socialism has already begun, and that we need to understand considerable aspects of modern capitalism as responses to the rise of the proletariat as a class, and in particular responses to the Russian Revolution and its consequences. However, this does not license a refusal to give a clear account of what led to the collapse of the USSR.

Martinez tells us that Lauesen is a Maoist by background and has probably had “no easy task coming to terms with Deng Xiaoping theory. And yet, Lauesen’s methodology adheres to Mao Zedong’s observation that ‘the only yardstick of truth is the revolutionary practice of millions of people’.”¹² Assuming Mao is correctly translated here (the context of the quotation in Mao’s On new democracy shows plain inconsistencies), the methodology is nonsense. It would imply acceptance of Lysenkoism and other such crap of the sort attempted in China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ in 1958-62. The majority is not always correct.

The argument is that China remains socialist (in spite of the very extensive development of capitalism within the integument of political rule by the Communist Party of China) and is on the road to actually overcoming the dominance of the USA, because of its increased productive dynamism. There is, he argues, no danger of China emerging as an imperialist power, because of CPC political control.

The plausibility of this claim is to my mind very limited. US political actors through the 19th century and into the 20th argued that the USA’s constitutional order would mean that it would be egalitarian, not imperial, in its relations with overseas countries.¹³ The problem is that politically independent capitalism as such forces heavy engagement in overseas trade and overseas investments. This, in turn, forces both lending to purchaser countries (which produces an unequal relationship) and endeavours to push input materials suppliers towards specialisation, and navalism to protect the shipping and the investments. Capitalism, otherwise than as a colonised country, is forced towards imperialism - and the same is true of the Chinese use of capitalist methods as a means of development.

Martinez goes on to identify Lauesen as arguing that:

Marxists in the west must urgently adopt an internationalist perspective and help construct a global united front composed of the socialist countries, the national liberation movements, the anti-imperialist forces of the global south, and the progressive forces in the advanced capitalist countries …

Lauesen urges his readers to make a permanent break with social chauvinism; to make a permanent break with the arrogant western Marxism which rejects the leadership and the lessons of actually existing socialism …

The trouble is that, though Carlos Martinez is probably not old enough to have written similar arguments before 1989, with the USSR and its satellites in the role of “the socialist countries” and “actually existing socialism”, such articles were certainly written in the Morning Star and Communist Review and similar periodicals, down to a late stage before the 1989-91 collapse.¹⁴ The political regime of the ban of factions and police control of dissent - as much present today in China as it was in the 1950s-1989 USSR - produces the result that it is impossible to be sure about which parts of the confident assertions of Chinese success are really true, and which parts are merely ‘official optimism’.

Pitman

Ruth Pitman’s column on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme starts with the standard narrative that the Eisenachers were “nominally the more revolutionary” and the Lassalleans “more reformist”.¹⁵ She adds, for some reason, the simply false claim that the Eisenach party was larger; and understates the private circulation of Marx’s and Engels’ critiques and the amount of difference between the draft they commented on and the programme adopted.¹⁶

The first lesson she draws is on unity: that “we should never water down our long-term aim of socialist revolution as the price of formal unity, but should focus on unity in action, while maintaining our Marxist-Leninist principles” (original emphasis). This formula is that of the united front, but without the early Comintern’s demand for insisting on freedom of criticism.

Her second point is headlined: “On the role of non-proletarian strata - working for a popular front against imperialism”. This begins with a quote from Marx’s opposition to the Gotha Lassallean formula that, relative to the working class, all other classes are only “one reactionary mass”. This is followed by a quote from Lenin from ‘The discussion on self-determination summed up’ (1916) on the importance of “revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices”. Her lesson is rather broader than Lenin’s (or the early Comintern’s, in its resolutions and discussions on the national and colonial question):

The lesson for us today is to recognise and respect the potential of non-proletarian strata in the struggle against imperialism at home and abroad [emphasis added] … This is relevant in the cases of resistance and national liberation movements and even bourgeois governments of nations attempting to escape the economic dominance of the imperialist countries.

Here, the ‘official’ communist parties have repeatedly fallen into political traps by imagining strategic alliances with either the ‘democratic bourgeoisie’ (liberals) or the ‘national bourgeoisie’ (nationalists of various stripes). The invariable result is to be knifed, producing demoralisation of the mass movement, except for the cases where the communists already controlled the armed forces (eastern Europe, north Vietnam, north Korea, China, etc).

Her third point is to draw on Marx on the distinction between full communism and “an intermediate, transitional process which he calls the ‘lower stage of communism’ and which is today generally known as socialism”. The job which she makes this distinction do is to call for vigorous campaigning in support of “the countries which are (or were) building socialist societies under the leadership of communist parties, such as the former Soviet Union and countries of eastern Europe, China and Cuba.” She complains:

… everything about these countries is constantly misrepresented in an extremely negative light, while any difficulties or mistakes made are highlighted and elevated as general principles of ‘communist’ society …

… Meanwhile, the Trotskyists add to the bourgeois propaganda … by describing such societies as ‘state capitalism’ or ‘deformed workers’ states’.

I note merely that Lauesen (favourably reviewed by Martinez) characterises the USSR under Khrushchev and Brezhnev as ‘state capitalist’. The more fundamental point is the one I have made above, both on the BRS and on Martinez: what explanation can you give, comrades, of the failure of the USSR and the eastern European states?

It should be apparent, I think, that there are fundamental differences between these approaches and that of the CPGB. While we recognise a transition period, this starts with the working class taking political power through the creation of extreme democracy (or democratic republicanism).

Our approach

Unlike the BRS, with its ambiguous formulae about making the state bureaucracy ‘accountable to’ elected representatives (and leaving untouched the labour bureaucracy), we campaign consistently for radical democracy in the workers’ movement as well as in the state.

We are clear and explicit that there can be no socialism - not just no communism - in a single country. We would not imagine that ‘Lexit’ is politically progressive (still maintained in the BRS) or enter into a coalition government with nationalists, as Syriza in Greece did.

We reject out of hand illusions in the Soviet-style regimes. While we recognise that China is complicated, it is clear enough that there is a powerful dynamic towards capitalism and imperialism in that country’s development - and the political regime is not one which is subordinated to the working class as a class, with the result that a 1989-style outcome is quite possible.

And, while we argue that the Communist Party should not propose the instant expropriation of the petty proprietors (small businesses and family farms), which would amount to repeating the errors of forced collectivisation, we do not advocate the formation of people’s fronts with “non-proletarian strata”, which is a road to communist defeat.

1. . Emphasis added. “Nach und nach” is in the German; “by degrees” is S Moore and F Engels (1888); “with the utmost possible rapidity” is in Helen Macfarlane’s 1850 translation; “bit by bit”, which is the most literal translation, is in Hal Draper’s ‘new English version’ - H Draper Adventures of the Communist Manifesto [1994] Chicago 2020, pp160-61.↩︎

2. . I have also written on this in my review of Bruno Leipold, in ‘Very essence of Marxism’ Weekly Worker March 6 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1528/very-essence-of-marxism).↩︎

3. . www.marxists.org/archive/pablo/1951/01/where.html (June 1951).↩︎

4. . ‘Where is comrade Pablo going’ in F Feldman (ed) Towards a history of the Fourth International, part 3: International Committee documents 1951-1954 New York 1974, p13.↩︎

5. . ‘On the duration and the nature of the period of transition from capitalism to socialism’ (June 1951): www.marxists.org/archive/pablo/1951/06/stalinism.htm.↩︎

6. . ‘Internationalism and the SWP’: bolshevik.org/history/pabloism/InterandSWP.html.↩︎

7. . And also Mandel: ‘The question of Stalinism: ten theses’ (January 1951): www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1951/04/10theses.htm.↩︎

8. . I owe this point to Daniel Gaido’s useful review of Livio Maitan’s 2020 Memoirs of a critical communist (www.historicalmaterialism.org/towards-a-history-of-the-trotskyist-tendencies-after-trotsky), though I checked the quotation in Bleibtreu.↩︎

9. . I have adopted, in preference to the translation used by Cleaver, that in T Carver and D Blank Marx and Engels’s ‘German Ideology’ manuscripts Basingstoke 2014, pp93-95 - checked against the German text of G Hubmann and U Pagel (eds) Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Deutsche ideologie zur Kritik der Philosophie Berlin 2018, p18.↩︎

10. . www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/index.htm.↩︎

11. . That is, British Socialist Action: www.socialistaction.net (a formerly Trotskyist group that is now fully committed to ‘official’ communist politics).↩︎

12. . The Mao quote is from www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_26.htm.↩︎

13. . Some useful quotations at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_imperialism.↩︎

14. . Lauesen, who is old enough, was an armed-struggle Maoist in the 1970s and probably already then considered the USSR state-capitalist and Soviet-imperialist (in essence, still his judgment of the USSR after Nikita Khrushchev, p233).↩︎

15. . I have written more on this: see ‘The snowball effect’ Weekly Worker March 20 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1530/the-snowball-effect).↩︎

16. . For Lars T Lih, see platypus1917.org/2023/06/02/a-review-of-karl-marxs-critique-of-the-gotha-program.↩︎