30.07.1998

One-sided analysis

Steve Riley of Manchester CPGB takes issue with Jack Conrad on the Soviet Union

It should be welcomed that theorists in the communist movement can still come up with original and insightful works. And it is this consideration which raised expectations in the CPGB around the ongoing work of comrade Jack Conrad developing his analysis of the USSR.

Conrad’s work is now bearing fruit, but just like the subject of his enquiry, it displays an inability to resolve its own internal contradictions, and points to a disturbing uncommunist future.

This work started life as an attempt to fill out an understanding of the bureaucratic socialist states, as a ruthless criticism of the mistakes of our movement in the light of the counterrevolutions of 1989-91. But far from being an analysis of the category of bureaucratic socialism, Conrad’s work became its thorough debunking and the rejection of all the progressive character of the Soviet Union from 1928 onwards.

Serious working class politicians do not uphold a fantasy of a workers’ paradise in the USSR, but neither do we discount the facts of the last 80 years of class struggle in a rush to wash our hands of inconvenient associations.

Whether or not the accounts of historians are correct in detail, the fact of the terror under Stalin is not in question. Neither is the failure of the Soviet bureaucracy to permit working class democratic control at the point of production. It still remains, however, to understand and explain the contradictory nature of the bureaucracy which can oppress the workers and peasants at home, yet fail to produce its opposite in class relations. The Soviet Union on the world stage intervened to suppress uprisings which ran counter to the interests of the bureaucracy, yet inspired the world’s communist and national liberation movements for over half a century. Overbearing suppression and world-scale psychosis are pitifully unconvincing explanations.

A particularly bitter fruit which comrade Conrad’s work has borne is not simply the theory of the ‘freak society’ but, by its forceful and one-sided concentration on the crimes of Stalin, the emotional assent of the majority of the comrades of the CPGB. Not least this has been permitted by the absence of any serious counter-argument, a charge which rings loudly in this author’s ears. In part comrades became inured to the thesis by the belief, and later hope, that comrade Conrad’s use of the most damning invective was hyperbolic. He is after all renowned for ‘bending the stick’ to make a point. The transposition of the thesis, however, from the on-going work of one comrade to the perceived wisdom of the majority has now been convincingly achieved.

It is clear now that the condemnation of the Soviet Union from 1928 onwards is intended, a conclusion which has alarming consequences. The defence of the Soviet Union against imperialism was wrong. The correct position for revolutionaries in the Soviet Union during World War II would have been for the defeat of the Soviet Union by Germany. Support for the national revolutions in Cuba and Vietnam was wrong. Defence of these states against imperialism now is wrong.

What kind of idealist nonsense has brought this about? Comrade Conrad’s drive to distance the CPGB from anything not identifiable as the ‘pure thing’ - advanced socialism arising out of the highest achievements of capitalism - has brought the CPGB to the point of opportunism. Like Tony Cliff in 1955, denouncing the great Satan may bring short-term popularity, but at the cost of a terrible historic wrong.