17.12.1998
Debating the USSR: New opportunity for advance
Sean Matgamna of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty addressed the CPGB’s Communist University ’98 on his understanding of the Soviet Union, and the possibilities for communists since its demise
The class struggle takes place on three fronts - economic, political, and ideological. I think that the ideological conditions everything else. Central to the class struggle on the level of ideas is the question of the Soviet Union.
The Russian Revolution proved that all the Marxist talk - the idea that the workers can take power and remake the world at a higher level, that the solidarity at the root of every labour movement can be generalised into a remade world, a remade humanity - that idea, which could easily be scoffed at, easily dismissed as fantasy or utopia, was proved in the Russian Revolution to be a reality. The Russian Revolution proves what was possible, and what, I would argue, is possible. And therefore one’s understanding of what happened to it is central.
The Stalinist rulers, the bureaucracy, who enslaved the people by extracting surplus product from them, presented for decades the lie that they were the continuation of the Russian Revolution. They thereby corrupted the ideas of socialism. One of the things that has happened in the 1990s is that the giant stock of lies of this ruling class that did not dare call itself such, the lie that they were socialists, that their system was socialism, and democracy and a continuation of the Russian Revolution - this enormous accumulation of lies has been taken over by the bourgeoisie, who were always willing to identify all the negative aspects of the Russian system with socialism.
The battle of ideas is the battle to understand what happened to our revolution. How do we understand it and what lessons can we draw? This is central to our ability to credibly present our perspective of socialism - our belief that Lenin and Leninism live. If they live, then they live on the basis of our being able to understand their experience.
What I want to do is discuss, firstly, what actually happened to the Russian Revolution, and, secondly, the various attempts to explain it. It is central to Marxism that socialism is necessarily the child of advanced capitalism. Socialism is only possible where capitalism has done its preliminary work of creating the possibility of an abundance. That was Marx’s point of view.
The Russian economy was nowhere near ready for socialism. Russia was an immensely backward country, a country that had abolished serfdom only in 1861, and where you still had a vast mass of peasants. But the technology of international capitalism was imported into the Russian empire: giant factories were created with tens of thousands of workers. Thus the working class was an immense power in Russia, able to push aside the timid bourgeoisie, and lead the peasants, who needed, in many respects, the sort of revolution that the French peasants had made at the end of the 18th century. The workers were able to take power because of objective social conditions, because of superb leadership, and because they were able to attain a sharp, clear level of class consciousness.
Russia not only ‘imported’ capitalism amidst agrarian backwardness. It imported Marxism, a variant of Marxism, that initially preached the idea that Russia was bound to go through a capitalist phase of development, and that that was progressive. Certain bourgeois people - the legal Marxists of the 1890s - used that Marxism to rationalise capitalism. Hence the struggle between the legal Marxists and those who were Marxists in the proletarian, revolutionary sense - a struggle for clarity in Marxism.
In Western Europe, the opportunists - Bernstein and so on - had begun to revise Marxism, to take away its revolutionary cutting edge, so the Russian Marxists could learn from that as well. And they developed a sharp, focused Marxism in conditions where the working class was immensely revolutionary.
But being able to make a revolution and take power is not the same thing as being able to build socialism. That was objectively impossible in Russia. Nobody who led the Russian Revolution, and the vast masses of workers who were educated by them, believed that they were going to make socialism. The solution to their dilemma - the fact that they could take power but not build socialism and therefore were doomed - was of course that the revolution would spread. The Russians thought they were the vanguard of a revolution that would spread to Germany, to France, to Britain, and possibly to America, in all of which countries objective conditions were ripe for socialism. The Russian Revolution was made by workers with tremendous audacity, with tremendous clarity, with tremendous international consciousness. Lenin in 1918 for example could publicly say without anybody being shocked that if they had to choose to take action that will lead to the defeat of our revolution, and if that is the way towards the German revolution, where the workers can actually bring socialism, then we will pay the price.
Revolution did erupt in Germany but was betrayed and defeated. A revolution took place in Italy, and that too was defeated. The result was that the Russian Revolution was isolated. Given this, degeneration was absolutely certain, and the Russians were not only isolated, but were facing an externally backed civil war. No less than 14 states were engaged in military and naval action against the Soviet state.
One of the things the bourgeoisie lie about is that the Stalinist totalitarian state emerged, as it were, from the egg of Bolshevism in 1917. That cannot be true. The reality is that when the Bolsheviks took power they were unable to survive unless they won the competition for the rural masses, for the peasants. They did that in a democratic struggle. They won the leadership of the great masses of the Russian people because they were able to provide conditions where the peasants could keep the land they had seized.
Now, from here on in we get to the not very good part of the story. Kronstadt. Obviously it was a tragedy, but I think the Bolsheviks had a right to do what they did. On the other hand I do not see how we as responsible, honest people, who have to put ourselves in the place of our co-thinkers at that time, can just wash our hands of it. I wish that certain things had not happened the way they did. But they happened, and this did not change the nature of the system. The red terror was a horrible business - terror is a horrible business - but at the end of the day our class had power, our Party had power. We can learn from their mistakes.
The problem with this is that people tend to look for an ‘original sin’. Was it Kronstadt? I do not believe in original sin. The fact is that the Bolsheviks held on in the hope that the revolution would spread, but it did not. What happened in what became the Soviet Union in 1922? Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks developed the following idea which is central to the whole of modern communism: the idea that a Party, their Party, could act as a locum for the working class movement. Not a locum to make the revolution, but a locum to hang on, a watchman, able to keep control in the name of a working class. It seems to me to be the only thing they could have done. It was perfectly rational. The alternative was simply to surrender.
What the Bolsheviks had to do was construct an economy. Capitalism had not done its work in Russia. Economic conditions in 1917 were not conducive to socialism. That is the first departure from the elementary truths of Marxism: instead of taking over from advanced capitalism, they had to take on the role of developing a very backward economy. To do that they had to use capitalist measures. In the period of the civil war they had introduced war communism, which was basically primitive communism, where goods were confiscated from the peasants at the point of a gun most of the time. That was better than defeat, but it was no viable long-term economic system.
There were people who foolishly believed that they could go from this to full communism in the Marxist sense. But the Bolsheviks had to abandon this in March 1921 and introduced what Lenin called a controlled counterrevolution. They knew what they were doing. They actually took the measures that a bourgeois counterrevolution would have used: marketism and relatively free trade. A controlled counterrevolution, but a situation in which the workers still kept power. Trotsky had proposed such a system as early as February or March 1920. It was rejected. Then Trotsky proposed various fantastic ideas about labour armies that various people now use to show that Trotsky himself was the original totalitarian. Faced with enormous difficulties, the Bolsheviks adopted the NEP.
What did this mean in practice? It meant that a form of capitalism revived. It meant that the differentiation in the countryside revived. Peasants who were richer, who had better land, began to exploit labourers. It was in fact a fundamental germinating process of capitalism. Except that it took place in a society where the workers’ party was in power.
That could not happen without certain awful things affecting the political regime. First, the Bolsheviks took a decision which was probably in retrospect one of the greatest mistakes they ever committed. At the 10th Congress they temporarily, as they thought, banned factions in the Party. Why? Because they were undertaking a limited counterrevolution - a counterrevolution where the workers would keep power but use alien measures to develop the economy. The abolition of the rights of factions sadly became permanent, part of the system.
Things began to change, because first of all the fledgling state needed a bureaucracy. To a considerable extent, the state bureaucracy was inherited from the old tsarist system. The relationship between the Party and the state bureaucracy was one of antagonism. Central to the whole future of the system was whether or not the Party could keep its separation from the state bureaucracy and act as the defender of the proletariat against the bureaucracy.
One of the interesting things at the 10th Congress was that Lenin came out in favour of the right of free trade unions, on the basis that ‘We have a workers’ state, but one with bureaucratic deformations. The workers need to defend themselves against this state.’ Hence you had a tense balance between the bureaucracy that ran the state and the Party, including the Party leaders, and I suppose you might say including the Party bureaucrats.
The Party was the linchpin of the whole system, and that began to fall apart as well. In the early 20s, Stalin took control of the Party apparatus. The greatest betrayal, or rather the initial betrayal from which everything else flowed, was that Stalin and his allies began to break down the division between the Party and the state apparatus, eventually fusing the two. That was the beginning, the seed from which everything else flows - the destruction of the Party as a living proletarian entity.
At the same time, they introduced into the Party a system of appointments from above, whereby all the apparatus people, all the local secretaries, were appointed from the centre, and were therefore dependent on the centre, and not under pressure from the rank and file. By 1923, the first serious opposition emerged, arguing for the separation of Party and state, and for party democracy.
If we are Marxists, we criticise Marx. If we are loyal Trotskyists, and I think I am a Trotskyist, we criticise Trotsky. But I think you have to be careful what you are doing here. For example, the notion that the Stalinist line actually originated with Lenin. As far as I understand it, the way that the Party and the state bureaucracy were fused was done by Stalin. Not Stalin individually, but Stalin as representative of a whole layer.
Lenin tried to fight this when he became aware of it. That Lenin was in favour of centralising the state is undoubtedly true, and that he was in favour of banning factions is undoubtedly true. But the very self-same Lenin, at the same congress where he was for banning factions temporarily, was in favour of the right of the workers to strike against their own state. He stood up for the right of the workers to revolt against their state. I do not want to deny Lenin’s mistakes. But you cannot equate Lenin with Stalin. There is a qualitative break.
By the middle of the 1920s, the state apparatus, with which the Party was fused, rose above society. It is a recorded fact that as early as 1925 or 1926 the central bureaucracy was using anti-semitic agitation inside the Party. After Lenin’s death, Stalin and Zinoviev introduced the so-called Lenin levy, recruiting around a quarter of a million, or slightly less, people into the Party, allegedly in honour of Lenin. The new recruits constituted an army of careerists who would work for the apparatus against the opposition. What you got was a division of the ruling Party into a hard core that represented the proletariat, and the majority of the Party, dominated by the apparatus, who in fact represented alien elements.
The proletarian core took some time to form. There was the Workers’ Opposition, which in some respects was rather syndicalist, but which in retrospect, one has to admit, had certain things to say about the system. There was the Trotskyist opposition of 1923. There was the Zinoviev opposition of 1925 to 1926. What was happening here? By the early 1920s there was no doubt at all that the whole Party, including the revolutionaries, was a bureaucracy. Not necessarily in the bad sense. I mean simply in the sense that they were a crust raised above society. They were raised above the proletariat, acting for the proletariat. But they were all, in various ways, bureaucrats.
The Trotskyists were the first people to grasp what was happening. They raised the demand for the restoration of Party democracy, and for higher wages for the workers. The Zinovievites, on the other hand, sponsored Stalin as secretary. Zinoviev ran the Petrograd soviet as an entirely bureaucratic system, but even Zinoviev became alarmed at what was happening. What he and Trotsky thought was happening was that there was a drift in the Soviet Union towards the restoration of the bourgeoisie.
Lenin was aware that things were going wrong and started a struggle. In 1922 he already felt like a man behind the steering wheel who had lost control of the car. He could move the steering wheel but the wheels did not respond. The state bureaucracy was out of control. Lenin argued for the removal of Stalin. But then Lenin became ill and died.
Thereafter, the Stalinist central state apparatus smashed the Bukharinites, smashed the NEP bourgeoisie, smashed the kulaks and then created something new in history. The bureaucracy made itself, as Trotsky later put it, sole master of the surplus product. They forcibly collectivised agriculture. They forcibly began to industrialise the economy at a breakneck speed. The Stalinists used immense concentrations of state power to redesign the social terrain. They used mass terror - and this was no accident. Terror for the next 20 years was an essential economic regulator.
You got the development of an entirely new social system - an immense concentration of political power and complete disregard for normal economic mechanisms. You got rule by diktat, the drawing into industry of large numbers of workers from the countryside, driven like slaves under police control. By the mid-1930s people were being jailed for being late for work. You could be exiled to Siberia just for not being sufficiently enthusiastic about Stalin.
You got slave labour - the highest figure I came across was 10 million, the lowest about six. Either way at any given time you had millions - people found guilty of some crime or other, or simply picked up and used as slaves. The Moscow subway system was built by slaves. This was a situation where the state was all-powerful, yet the system was full of contradictions.
The Stalinist bureaucracy nationalised everything. They did it directly, as a class, as a bureaucratic class action. They did it because they wanted to maximise the surplus under their control and make their class sole masters of the surplus product. Nationalisation implies planning, and it was, in theory, a planned economy. But how can you plan if you have no democracy? That is a fundamental contradiction. To plan, you have to know what is going in society, and you cannot have that without democracy.
I think one can describe this system, and extrapolate the laws that governed it. You cannot say, if you are serious, that this system did not function. For decades, for generations, it functioned. It had the means of production, it reproduced itself, it fed people; not very well, but it fed them; it existed.
What was the central mechanism of this state? Terror - the existence of a vast network of state personnel who operated by terror, who were themselves kept under control by terror. So you have this system. To say it was not a mode of production, I do not understand. To say that it was a peculiar mode of production - that I do understand. But it was a mode of production that failed to establish itself.
Nonetheless, the system expanded - it was capable of reproducing itself. So it was fundamentally a system characterised in its purest form by arbitrary political power, using unexampled terror. This was not an economically regulated system. It was a system regulated by unbridled state power. It had all sorts of contradictions and thus it fell apart. It dissolved in the face of the competition from tremendously advanced capitalism, and because it could not develop a modern technology, owing to the socially repressive system. It lost the monopoly of politics, and it simply could not control what happened afterwards.
The Incas in Peru had a system that some people have called primitive socialism. They had a system highly dependent on the state and highly centralised - immensely centralised, considering the level of technology. They were in some respects like ancient Egypt at its very early stages. Suddenly the Spaniards came and wiped out their system. There are many such false starts in history. The Stalinist system was one of them.
This system was a fundamental contradiction in terms. The proletariat was supposed to be the ruling class in this system. The proletariat cannot for example, like the peasantry, divide up the land. The proletariat cannot take a little bit of the factory. The proletariat can only rule collectively, and therefore it follows absolutely that the proletariat can only rule and plan democratically.
Instead, the Soviet Union had a system that was a rigid, autocratic, totalitarian power, power that no government probably ever had. Hitler never had such power. Stalin had power that had never been known, even in the very ancient world, because modern technology for the first time made such power possible.
I would argue that the Soviet Union was a system with a class society. People like Hillel Ticktin argue that it was not, but I do not understand this. The problem with Ticktin, who is very knowledgeable on the facts, is that he functions somewhere between academia and sectarian politics. And, if I can understand him, what he is actually doing is a precise modification of theories, and he is doing it in a sectarian fashion, an attention-grabbing fashion. But the problem with all of this is that it destroys a large part of the ABC of Marxism.
That the USSR was not a fully articulated, viable class society I think is certainly true. But there was some correspondence, in a very crude, inadequate, wasteful way, between what was planned, and what happened. This seems to me beyond serious dispute.
The bureaucracy extracted surplus product. There can be no doubt about that. The bureaucracy was a ruling class, a ruling class with peculiarities. It was not the same as most ruling classes, but the idea that it was somehow not a class system is ridiculous. I cannot think of anything that corresponds more to the worst features of capitalist class society than the Stalinist system.
Perhaps what is being argued about here is precise, technical definitions - which is fine: that is the business of science. But if you go on then to say that the Soviet system was not really a mode of production, or that because the Soviet ruling class was peculiar it was not a real ruling class, then what the hell are you saying? For example, some people say that the ruling class did not pass on property. This is not the case. It did pass on property - not formal ownership of property as such, but the privileges that gave access to it: educational possibilities, membership of the elite. It would obviously have been better from their point of view to have had money in the bank that they could have used to control the means of production, like capitalists. But they had heirs. There was no question of them not being able to pass anything on.
This was a system that controlled the surplus product. Did they control all of it? Well, no. Black marketeering had an increasingly powerful role to play after the ending of the high terror period. But the Soviet ruling class controlled a very large part of the surplus product. They used it for their own purposes. They decided what to do. They decided what to reinvest. They decided what to have in the bureaucrats’ private shops.
What I conclude from this is that you have to introduce into the concept of class the vast experience over a long period of time from a large part of the world. You have to modify: you have to accept the possibility that there is a bit more in the actual definitions of class than people who did not live to see the Soviet Union might have predicted. That is Marxism. The alternative is to deny that the USSR had a ruling class, to deny that it was a mode of production, which leads you into bizarre nonsense. You are saying that a large part of the world did not have a ruling class although it had extracted its surplus product for god knows how long. You are actually destroying some of the fundamentals of Marxism.
The bureaucracy seized power not in a capitalist counterrevolution, which is what Trotsky and Lenin expected. They seized power within the forms of the collectivised economy - and then presented this as socialism. More than that, they seized power within the forms of Marxism. Marxism is a very porous thing. What the Stalinists did was use Marxism as their ideology, as their anti-capitalist ideology, but applied it in an anti-proletarian, undemocratic way. They lopped off the democratic elements in Marxism, kept what was anti-capitalist, and substituted their own idea of a bureaucratic state. Thus for decades and decades the would-be revolutionary workers throughout the world who hated capitalism, who had a fellow feeling with the Stalinists as anti-capitalists, accepted as their positive alternative to capitalism a lot of grotesque ideas, for example about dictatorship.
What you have here is something analogous to what Marx and Engels described in the Communist manifesto as reactionary socialism. The reactionary socialists were bitterly hostile to industrialisation. On the other hand they had no positive alternative programme, except to go back to an imaginary golden age in the past. To these people Marx counterposed proletarian, positive, democratic development on the basis of what capitalism had achieved.
To a large extent, the central lie that has dominated communism for most of this century is the lie that it is enough to be anti-capitalist. Yes, we are anti-capitalist: that is the beginning of wisdom. Marxism begins with the critique of capitalism. Right now, the reason why it is possible for us to think of ourselves as rational, reasonable beings, despite the tremendous collapse of what many of us considered to be communism, is because we can make a rational critique of capitalism. But anti-capitalism is not enough. It depends what you put in its place.
We are living in a world where the collapse of the Stalinist system has seemingly devastated communism. I think this is a good thing - because the poisonous, fraudulent, Stalinist pretence of communism for a very long time occupied the place of real communism, made it impossible, for example, for the tiny forces of Trotskyism to compete, while the Stalinist liars had the resources of an immense state, an immense empire. The fact that all that has collapsed has had some immediately devastating effects on the consciousness of lots of people. On the other hand, it clears the ground.
Undoubtedly living standards in Russia have fallen since 1991. But what is our point of view? We do not judge things by, for example, whether living standards are better, although the workers are held in a vice that makes it impossible for them to be politically active. We judge things from the point of view of the possibilities of the working class being the subject of history. Of becoming its own subject.
The reality is that the Stalinist system cut particularly against the workers. In a place like Poland, which was the least totalitarian (in 1953 they restored the peasant plots, and in 1956 they made a deal with the Catholic Church), Stalinism still cut savagely against the working class. The same is true of all the other Stalinist states. They made it impossible for the people to become conscious, to become aware. In Czechoslovakia, where before World War II they had a mass Communist Party, where in 1968 there was some recrudescence of what seemed to me to be a genuine communism, the Russian Stalinists crushed it, destroyed it fundamentally.
From our point of view, the decisive thing is the possibility of our class acting, organising, learning. It is a great tragedy that a lot of primitive people in the labour movement in this country were for revolution, for Stalin, because the Stalinists were collectivists. In the east a lot of people have simply looked at the west, looked at capitalism, looked at marketism, because it was prosperous and the opposite of their own system. In a real sense, Arthur Scargill, who I think is a political monster, and Lech Walesa, who started out as an underground militant, are horrible mirror images of each other, each one looking across the divide. In the Middle Ages peasants used to worship the devil because god was the god of their oppressors.
From our point of view the fundamental thing is our class having the possibility of becoming the subject of history, not to judge everything simply by something like a welfare state. I think much is exaggerated about how good the Russian welfare state really was. Sweden was the real success story. Our point of view is, however, that above all we want the working class to overthrow capitalism. We want it to be free to learn.
Therefore, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was fundamentally a good thing, because it opens up new possibilities. It is a new beginning - that is the point. We are at an early stage of that beginning and a great deal depends on us - on our clarity, on our courage at looking at our own history, and on our ability to do that without losing heart, or without making peace with inequality and with the capitalist system.
Of course if you look around, you see such things as the rise of the workers in Indonesia, in South Korea, and what you see is that capitalism, even in its seemingly most successful phases, raises its own gravedigger. But the point is, a great deal depends on how we come to terms with the past of the communist movement, which in this century has been a chapter of horrors in many respects.
The task facing us is the rebuilding of revolutionary socialism. Now, there is a tremendous tradition of revolutionary socialism. There is a tradition of resistance to Stalinism - the tradition of critical Trotskyism, a far more rational tradition than is to be found among most of the so-called orthodox Trotskyists, many of whom frankly are not of this world. We have produced a collection of texts from this other tradition which I would urge you to read.
At the end of the day, to those who lie that the Stalinist system was real socialism, and that socialism, therefore, deserves to be buried in the cesspit of history, we can point to the real Russian Revolution. We can point to what our people did. We can point to what our people are capable of doing.
If we can bring the ideas of unfalsified communism, Bolshevism, to the labour movement, it will revive, because capitalism forces the labour movement to revive. Capitalism is not just the parent of ultimate socialism. It is also the parent of labour movements because workers resist. If we, the tiny forces now calling ourselves communist, can bring to the revived labour movement a refreshed, clear, honest and self-critical account of socialism in this century, then we will be far better able to win the battle of ideas. At the end of the day we are not religious people. We are people who see socialism in Marxist terms: that is, we see socialism in terms of what has evolved in history.
We are faced with laying new foundations. I repeat, despite the seeming devastation caused by the collapse, we are probably in a better position to rebuild a genuine Leninist party - Trotskyist as well, but Leninist, if you insist. We are probably in a better position to rebuild an unfalsified communist movement than anyone has been since the rise of the Stalinist state. In order to clarify our ideas, we must not be frightened to look unpleasant things in the face.
At the end of the day, the proletariat exists in capitalism. It fights back - it is forced to fight back. At the end of the day, the justification for our politics is capitalism: what capitalism is, what it does. And at the end of the day, we will rebuild a mass communist movement that will learn the lessons of the miserable 20th century.
And we will overthrow capitalism. We will bury capitalism.