20.08.1998

Groping towards a theory

Jack Conrad reviews 'The fate of the Russian Revolution Vol 1', edited by Sean Matgamna (London 1998, pp603, £16.99)

From the beginning the Soviet Union in its unique and contradictory evolution has divided the workers’ movement. There were, of course, those who chose their own ruling class rather than side with the workers in revolutionary Russia. These labour traitors thereby proved themselves reactionaries of the worst sort. However, that was not the end of the matter.

Within the revolutionary camp itself different critical interpretations of the Soviet Union phenomenon have caused one schism or purge after another. Nowhere has such sect-like behaviour been more prevalent and damaging than within the Trotskyite tradition. In the last analysis the reason for this is the dichotomy that exists between the strange reality of the Soviet Union and Trotsky’s theory: ie, his belief that despite the systemic terrorism of Stalin’s monocracy it remained a degenerate workers’ state.

Without doubt, having come over to Bolshevism at the 11th hour, Leon Trotsky played an outstanding and invaluable role in the Russian Revolution. (Incidentally the rapprochement between Lenin and Trotsky was not due to the former undergoing a Trotskyite conversion to ‘permanent revolution’ with his ‘April thesis’ - that is an unfounded myth which ignores, indeed insults, the history of Bolshevism pre-1917.) The Soviet regime was in its heroic years associated throughout the world with two names - Lenin and Trotsky. True, when he was in power, and incidentally under Lenin’s protection, Trotsky showed distinct bureaucratic tendencies. In the early 1920s he proposed the militarisation of labour. Nevertheless from 1924 onwards he took the lead in fighting the bureaucratic degeneration of the isolated workers’ state.

Till his assassination Trotsky’s brave and unyielding opposition to the Stalin monocracy was from a defencist position. Siding with Stalin’s USSR was explained and excused under the rubric of “defending October” - as if there had been no counterrevolutionary break. The Soviet Union was not only non-capitalist, but, he insisted, a world historic gain. Although workers were deprived of all democratic rights in the 1930s, although they were reduced to the level of an oppressed and formless mass, Trotsky continued to regard the Soviet Union as some sort of workers’ state. In the absence of any working class political power Trotsky sustained this fiction by citing so-called ‘socialist property forms’. His criticism of bureaucratic socialism consequently focused on the sphere of distribution and consumption rather than that of production. He savaged inequality, but refused to see exploitation. In so doing Trotsky retreated from Marx’s method of dialectical investigation - its highest expression being Capital - to a neo-Ricardoism.

Trotsky’s untenable ideas on the Soviet Union came under sustained attack in the late 1930s from within the body of his close supporters. Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, Al Glotzer and other members of the Socialist Workers Party in the USA rightly stressed the centrality of proletarian political power for any genuinely socialist project. Trotsky’s notion of ‘socialist property forms’ was a nonsense. Effectively it equated nationalisation with socialism.

As Trotsky’s ‘Trotskyite’ critics pointed out, the key to understanding the class nature of the post-1928 Soviet Union was not property forms, but property relations: ie, the fact that with the first five-year plan the bureaucracy finally separated itself from any proletarian vestiges, launching a ‘second revolution’ from above and forced industrialisation. Living standards plummeted. Millions died. The Communist Party was decimated and transformed into an organ which existed to promote the cult of Stalin. Here, in the first five-year plan, was the qualitative counterrevolutionary break. A new social formation had been born out of the failure of the Russian Revolution and the impossibility of building socialism in one country.

Using its - ie, the state’s - monopoly of the means of production, the bureaucracy under Stalin ruthlessly pumped out surplus labour from the direct producers who exercised no positive control over the product, let alone society. The peasants were effectively re-ensurfed. The workers re-enslaved. Their trade unions were turned against them. They were denied the most elementary rights. They were atomised by a terroristic regime which ensured that they could not organise themselves into a collectivity. Any hint of political resistance meant imprisonment or death. In other words from 1928 the Soviet Union ceased being ours.

Shachtman, Draper, Glotzer, etc paid a heavy price for daring to question their mentor. With Trotsky’s blessing James Cannon hounded the “petty bourgeois deviation” out of the SWP. Trotskyism thus increasingly became a fixed sectarian dogma, not a scientific method open to unexpected challenges and new development. In step with ossification, in theory and practice, Trotskyism turned into its opposite. Trotskyism went from being a searing criticism of Soviet reality to an apologia. Following World War II Trotskyism was plunged into utter incoherence by the export of Soviet-style society to Eastern Europe. According to Trotsky’s epigones socialism was no longer conquered by the workers themselves. It came not from self-activity, but the Red Army (later other supposed agents of human liberation were discovered - Mao, Tito, Ben Bella, Castro, Saddam Hussein, Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill have all been worshipped by post-Trotsky Trotskyites).

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and Sean Matgamna are to be congratulated for the production of volume one of “lost texts of critical Marxism”. Let there be many more. These writings of Shachtman and his comrades have been unavailable for too long. They certainly make interesting and inspiring reading. Shachtman’s theory - that the Soviet Union was nether capitalist nor socialist, but bureaucratic collectivist - points in the right direction. It is, needless to say, vastly superior to Trotsky’s ‘socialist property forms’ or the notion imposed on the British SWP by Tony Cliff that the Soviet Union was state capitalist. Both these theories owe more to Procrustes than Marx. They either mercilessly stretch Soviet reality or chop off its feet and head in order to fit it into a preconceived abstract schema. The Marxist theory of money, the law of value, the inseparability of socialism from democracy, the role of consciousness are all hopelessly mangled in the process.

The fate of the Russian Revolution will infuriate doctrinaire Trotskyites. Shachtman is their prince of darkness. The fallen angel whose name is for them irredeemably associated with class treachery. Shachtman’s ‘lesser of two evils’ drift into the camp of democratic imperialism - criminally he supported the US- sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 - is brandished in order to dismiss everything he said and wrote against Trotsky. As Matgamna tellingly argues, the same technique could equally be applied to Plekhanov or Kautsky. But that would be pure philistinism and a significant intellectual loss. Truth must be our goal. Labelling thinkers all right or all wrong gets us nowhere. People are complex ... and sometimes even mortal enemies are capable of revealing vital aspects of the truth. We close our minds at our own peril. Everything must be questioned. Nothing taken for granted.

Both Shachtman and Matgamna (in his introductory essay) go to great lengths to save Trotsky, the revolutionary, from Trotsky, the theorist of ‘socialist property forms’, and latter-day Trotskyites. In a couple of his late articles - eg, ‘The Comintern and the GPU’ - and the unfinished biography Stalin the claim is that Trotsky’s thought implicitly undermined or went beyond his old theory. If he had lived, he would, it is suggested, have broken from his “provisional” and “tentative” formulations and boldly declared the Soviet Union a society ruled by a class of bureaucratic exploiters that was antithetical to socialism and the working class. Maybe. Maybe not.

Speculation obviously has a legitimate place in Marxist discourse. Many things in history could have been different. Even very different. Nevertheless saving Trotsky from Trotsky smacks of iconisation. It reveals a certain lack of courage, an unwillingness to take criticism the whole way. Trotsky never joined the bourgeoisie. He was no Plekhanov. But if the Soviet Union was a class society which exploited the workers as slaves, then those who have arrived at such a conclusion should be fearless in their criticism of Trotsky - a man who not only possessed all the necessary socio-economic facts about the Soviet Union, but had the proven ability to creatively develop Marxism as a science.

Bureaucratic collectivism is evidently a ‘theory’ which contains insights of value - it does have the great virtue of leaving behind the wooden normative method of analysis. On the one side, that if the Soviet Union could be shown not to be capitalist, then it had to be socialistic; and on the other side, that if it could be shown to be non-socialism, it had to be capitalist or state capitalism. Life is much richer than the linear sketch drawn by Marx for Western Europe in his Critique of political economy: ie, primitive communism - slavery - feudalism - capitalism - communism. There have been and can be many other possibilities, including unviable freak societies like the Soviet Union.

Bureaucratic collectivism therefore calls for, demands, a concrete analysis of the Soviet Union phenomenon. Unfortunately neither Shachtman nor any of his successors developed a fully rounded, or general theory, of the USSR. Shachtman, in his defence, never claimed to have arrived at such a necessary level of theorisation. His bureaucratic collectivism is therefore not really a theory - it cannot locate the Soviet Union’s actual laws of motion and the essential contradictions which led it to stagnation and ignominious final collapse.

From my talks with prominent AWL comrades - Tom Rigby, for example, at Communist University ’98 - there appears to be a danger of bureaucratic collectivism being turned into its opposite by present-day adherents. Instead of getting to grips with the Soviet Union in all its complexity through painstaking research and the logical development of new categories, the limited and often intuitive insights of Shachtman and co are cited as gospel because they conform with what is imagined as ‘Marxist’ orthodoxy. Using this fundamentalist approach, comrade Rigby knows that the Soviet bureaucracy had to be a fully fledged ruling class.

Hopefully The fate of the Russian Revolution will not be used to establish another rigid dogma. On the contrary this book deserves to be used in the service of real theoretical development.

Jack Conrad