30.09.1999

Inversion of Marxism

Still defending Serbia

Comrade John Stone is an intelligent man, who has written good articles for this paper. All the more disappointing, therefore, that his latest contribution (Letters Weekly Worker September 23) is an incoherent ramble, characterised by all that is most bone-headed and philistine about a certain kind of Trotskyite ‘thinking’.

The comrade’s letter was prompted by my piece on East Timor (Weekly Worker September 16), in which I drew certain analogies between the conflict in the Balkans and the situation in Indonesia, between the KLA and Fretilin. At the heart of Stone’s riposte is the question of how Marxists should categorise the rump state comprising Serbia and Montenegro. He describes it as

“a former degenerated workers’ state that had been transformed into a new bourgeois state ... It is Europe’s only former multinational ‘socialist federation’ which does not accept its dissolution and has continuously had a government based on the old Stalinist party”.

What are we to make of this? It is good that the comrade recognises that Serbia is a bourgeois state. Good too that he is honest enough to place ‘socialist federation’ in quotes. But this concession to truth is a parenthetical aside. The comrade’s head may tell him one thing, but his heart yearns for the old certainties, whereby Yugoslavia/Serbia, as a “degenerated workers’ state” must be defended unconditionally by Marxists.

Not only is the comrade’s formulation inelegant, it is not even correct in terms of Trotskyite scholastics: he should know that the epithet ‘degenerated’ is reserved for the USSR; that the other former ‘socialist’ states of eastern Europe are categorised as ‘deformed’, on the basis that their political structures were marred by bureaucratic distortions from birth. Let us not quibble, however. We know what Stone is talking about and we assume he does too.

His position derives, of course, from Trotsky’s writings on the USSR, and at this point I hope readers will forgive me if I explore what, for many, will already be familiar territory. It is important to get matters straight, because comrade Stone’s variant of Yugoslav defencism is objectively much the same as that adopted during the Balkans conflict, not just by other Trotskyites, but by ‘official communists’ who would shudder at the thought that their position rests on the theories of the great apostate from ‘Marxism-Leninism’.

As we all know, even after 1933, when he called for the revolutionary overthrow of the Stalin regime, even after the foundation of the Fourth International, even after the German-Soviet non-aggression pact and the occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltic states by the Red Army, Trotsky still persisted in calling for the unconditional defence of the USSR. The twin pillars supporting his argument that the USSR still constituted a workers’ state were the great gains of October and of the Soviet working class: namely the existence of nationalised property and a planned economy. Thus, he wrote that “in spite of monstrous bureaucratic distortions, the class basis of the USSR remains proletarian” (LD Trotsky Stalin New York 1967, pp405-6), and that “In general and on the whole the new economic base is preserved in the USSR, though in a degenerated form” (‘The world situation and perspectives’ Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40 New York 1977, p156).

There is no doubting that Trotsky was a masterly Marxist dialectician, perhaps even a genius, but he was wrong about the USSR and his characterisation of the Soviet Union as a workers’ state now seems grotesque. Any objective observer must note the amalgam of contradictions and the internal incoherence on the subject. Let us begin with Trotsky’s repeated emphasis on property forms. Trotskyism has consistently made a fetish of property forms instead of giving adequate attention to the real social relations of production - their focus has concentrated on the relation between having rather than being, on things rather than human beings.

So far as nationalisation is concerned, it is immediately apparent that the notional social ownership of the means of production by ‘the people’ - a form of ‘socialist property’ to which Trotskyites attach such significance - was indeed purely formal. ‘Ownership’ is one thing, control another. Given the absence of even the most primitive forms of democracy, control over the means of production was exercised exclusively by the party and the bureaucratic apparatus.

That the social ownership of the means of production could be emancipatory in form but exploitative in content was a contradiction that Trotsky himself recognised. The Stalinist bureaucracy may have been, in his terms, only a morbid growth on the body of the working class, but “The Soviet bureaucracy has expropriated the proletariat politically in order by methods of its own, to defend the social conquests ... The means of production belong to the state. But the state, so to speak, ‘belongs’ to the bureaucracy. If these as yet wholly new relations should solidify, become the norm and be legalised, whether with or without resistance from the workers, they would, in the long run, lead to a complete liquidation of the social conquests of the proletarian revolution” (The revolution betrayed New York 1989, p249). This is precisely what had already happened, in the USSR, and was so from the beginning in the eastern bloc states, including Tito’s Yugoslavia.

So far as planning is concerned, the same contradictions are apparent. If we define planning - which as Marxists we surely must - as the conscious and direct regulation of society by the associated producers themselves, it is self-evident that without democracy there simply can be no planning at all. What was called planning in the USSR and eastern bloc countries was in fact the direction of production and distribution by the bureaucratic administrative-command apparatus. Again, Trotsky himself was ambivalent on the matter. The first chapter of The revolution betrayed can be read (and is disingenuously quoted by Stalinists like Harpal Brar) as a paean of praise to the “gigantic achievements in industry” and “enormously promising beginnings in agriculture” that took place under Stalin (ibid p8). But later in the same book, Trotsky emphasises that “the political lever in the form of a real participation in leadership of the interested masses themselves, a thing which is unthinkable without soviet democracy”, is an essential precondition for real planning (ibid p66).

Trotsky specifically uses the category of ‘administrative planning’ to differentiate the activity of the Stalin bureaucracy from the real thing. Time and again, for instance in his article ‘Does the Soviet government still follow the principles adopted 20 years ago?’ (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1937-8 New York 1976, p217), Trotsky insists that democracy is the one and only conceivable mechanism for running a socialist society. From this viewpoint, it can readily be seen that planning in these terms never existed in Stalin’s USSR or the other eastern bloc countries. The vital ingredient - direct, democratic participation by the working class - was absent.

In the light of the above, we can say that the twin pillars of Trotsky’s defence of the USSR as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ were made of sand, but there are many reasons why we can and should forgive him for his mistakes.

Those ‘official communists’ like the CPB’s Robert Griffiths who now plagiarise an unaclnowledged Trotsky and his theory of the ‘degenerate workers’ state’ for their own purposes pass over in silence Trotsky’s insistence that the social ownership of the means of production and the existence of planning in the USSR could never be in and of themselves sufficient for socialism. He considered them a necessary, but not a sufficient, precondition. For Trotsky, however great the gains of October, they existed within the framework of a transitional state formation characterised by the absence of democracy and by the rule of a bureaucratic elite. Only the overthrow of this elite and the recapture of power by the proletariat in a revolution could introduce the conditions that would make socialism possible.

The point is made clear in his discussion of the occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltic states. Emphasising once again the centrality of property forms, Trotsky says that “Our general appraisal of the Kremlin and the Comintern does not, however, alter the particular fact that the statification of property in the occupied territories is in itself a progressive measure.” But he goes on to say that “In order that nationalised property in the occupied areas, as well as in the USSR, become a basis for genuinely progressive - that is to say socialist - development, it is necessary to overthrow the Moscow bureaucracy” (In defence of Marxism New York 1973, p19). Furthermore, he later makes the point that “the USSR minus the social structure founded by the October Revolution would be a fascist regime” (my emphasis ibid p53). Here lies the basic contradiction in Trotskyite and neo-Trotskyite thinking vis à vis the USSR. We do not need to describe the USSR under high Stalinism as fascist in order to accept the essential correctness of Trotsky’s reasoning. The October Revolution ushered in a “social structure” based on elected and recallable soviets and workers’ and peasants’ democracy. By the mid-1930s that “social structure” had been completely eliminated. Only an outer husk of names remained. Whatever the exact date of the counterrevolution, it is surely undeniable that without democracy and the rule of the working class, no state - even if it has abolished private ownership of the means of production and introduced ‘planning’ - can legitimately lay claim to be proletarian or socialist.

In this light, the attempt by comrade Stone and many others on the Trotskyite and ‘official communist’ left to defend Serbia on the basis that it is any kind of workers’ state is fatally flawed: any reliance on arguments adduced by Trotsky concerning ‘degenerate’ or ‘deformed’ workers’ states is demonstrably unsustainable, except on the basis of his evident mistakes.

The only recourse left to them, as comrade Stone’s letter also illustrates, is a Pavlovian anti-imperialism, whereby any regime, no matter how despicable, must be defended simply on the basis that it is under attack by the forces of imperialism. As the comrade writes in his letter, “Marxists defended Kosovar rights to secede from capitalist Serbia, but when Nato launched its attack we needed to defend the whole oppressed country against the planet’s bosses.” It is interesting to hear the comrade claim that “Marxists defended Kosovar rights to secede from capitalist Serbia”. To be sure, some of us Marxists did, but many, including comrade Stone - unless my memory deceives me - did not, or at least his position on the question was marked by equivocation. Was it not comrade Stone who wrote:

“We believe that the Kosovars have the right of self-determination, but in the context of imperialist attack against a non-imperialist country revolutionaries have to subordinate this principle to that of defending an oppressed nation (Yugoslavia) against the world’s bosses” (Weekly Worker July 22)?

It is difficult to think of a more sterile, useless and fundamentally unprincipled approach to the problem of supporting the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination: support the right ‘in principle’, but the moment their oppressor falls out with the imperialists, forget it: subordinate everything to the paltry maxim that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Leaving aside Serbia for a moment, applying the same approach means that so long as a single US or British missile lands on Iraq, for example, then the rights of the Kurds to life, let alone mere self-determination, must be ‘subordinated’ to the principle of supporting Saddam Hussein’s noble struggle against “the planet’s bosses”.

Fortunately for comrade Stone, however, he is excused in his own mind from siding with Jakarta against the same bosses, because “Indonesia peacefully accepted the intervention of UN troops in an occupied territory which has just voted for independence”. The implication is clear: if imperialism had not succeeded in “peacefully” persuading the Indonesian regime to comply, if the UN or Nato had decided to bomb Habibie into submission, revolutionaries would have been obliged to ‘defend Indonesia’. Surely the fact that East Timor was “an occupied territory which has just voted for independence” (a reasonable approximation to the situation in Kosova) would have to be ‘subordinated’ to defending “an oppressed nation … against the world’s bosses”. Or would it, comrade Stone?

To return to comrade Stone’s letter, he begins by taking issue with me for supposedly “characterising both the progressive Fretilin and the reactionary KLA as national liberation movements who should be supported”. I did indeed refer to Fretilin as “ in some respects the equivalent of the KLA”. As every reader must know, in the course of many articles earlier this year the CPGB gave its support to Kosovar independence and to the struggle of the KLA. We did so without any illusions in the petty bourgeois nationalist orientation of the KLA’s politics and its request for assistance from Nato forces (comrade Stone insisted on seeing only those aspects and therefore considered the KLA to be simply “reactionary”).

In his eagerness to support his assertion that the KLA was “a direct tool of imperialism”, comrade Stone resorts to statements that are - how can one put it? - counter-factual. For example, he writes that “the KLA was in the forefront of the social counterrevolution and wanted Kosova to secede in order to transform it into a western, free-market, semi-colonial enclave”. This is just fantasy. If, as the comrade states elsewhere in his letter, the Kosovars wanted “to secede from capitalist Serbia” (my emphasis), then how can such an aspiration be described as “counterrevolutionary”? The old nostalgia is showing through once more.

The dichotomy which comrade Stone attempts to create between Fretilin on the one hand - “a legitimate anti-imperialist guerrilla movement” - and the KLA on the other - “armed and financed by the west ... it was the main imperialist local puppet” - is clumsy and false. If the west had a puppet - or at least a useful and compliant client in the region - then that position was filled for quite some time by Stone’s beloved Slobodan Milosevic. Under whose aegis, and with whose aid, does the comrade imagine that Milosevic turned rump Yugoslavia into a “bourgeois” and “capitalist” state?

Go back only a year or so and you find that the KLA’s ideological hero and model was the Stalinist, Enver Hoxha; Fretilin also has a leftwing past. But both groups are now characterised by right-moving, petty bourgeois nationalism. If the comrade has any doubt about this in respect to Fretilin, he should read reports of that organisation’s attempts to reach a cosy compromise with Jakarta and of its agitation for an imperialist-led intervention force. East Timor under Fretilin will surely be an Australian neo-colony.

The comrade’s fundamental problem is that he turns everything upside down. Rather than beginning with life - with all its dialectical complexity and contradiction - and then proceeding to formulate appropriate categories, he begins by dusting off a few ‘time-honoured’ categories from his impoverished and distorted lexicon of Trotskyism and then tries to impose them on reality. The inevitable result is not just a perversion, but an inversion of Marxism.

It is this approach which blinds him to some obvious Marxist insights into the situation in both Serbia and East Timor. Under present conditions, in which the working class across much of the world is atomised and passive, and where not a single major country has a workers’ party worthy of the name, it is inevitable that the spontaneous consciousness of oppressed peoples like the Kosovars and the East Timorese will lead them into the illusion of believing that their liberation from tyranny (be it Serb or Indonesian) can be delivered by Nato or the United Nations. It is the duty of communists and revolutionary socialists (of whom the comrade is one) to support the freedom struggles of all such oppressed peoples, regardless of their illusions.

Michael Malkin