18.11.2004

Turning unfortunate necessities into virtues

Over 40 comrades attended the CPGB weekend school on the USSR and the rule of the working class. In four sessions over two days, Communist Party members and others, including comrades from Iran, Turkey and South Africa, attempted to analyse in Marxist terms the class nature of the USSR, why it developed as it did, and what made it collapse in tragedy and horror.

Communists stand for the maximum extension of democracy and human freedom. Yet in the minds of the majority of workers, as well as our enemies who use the USSR against us, communism is synonymous with the totalitarianism and inhumanity of Stalin’s Soviet Union. To rearm ourselves and the working class for the battles of the 21st century, we have to be able to account for the history of the Soviet Union and explain how and why it differs from our own vision of socialism.

Mark Fischer introduced the first debate, on the dictatorship of the proletariat. He outlined the etymology of the word ‘dictatorship’, and explained that for Marx and Engels the term simply meant the rule of the working class, with no connotations of tyranny or absence of democracy. The false understanding of the phrase - absolutism and rule not by the working class, but by an elite over the working class - was so strongly reinforced by the degeneration of the Russian Revolution that it now thoroughly confuses and disorientates the left sects, who often believe they are being loyal to Marxism by disowning or dispagaing democracy and democratic tasks.

But the rot set in early. Not with the Third International, but the Second International. Why did its representatives so often revert to pre-Marxist ideas that democracy is undesirable or at best unnecessary, and that revolution will come not from the struggle of the mass of the working class but from a benign dictatorship over the proletariat? Essentially because they failed to, or due to their own interests did not want to, grasp the democratism expounded by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. For example, the leading Russian Menshevik, Plekhanov, believed the highest principle was the success of the revolution. Ends justify any means.

With the 1917 Russian Revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat moved from theory to practice in a backward country, where the proletariat was vastly outnumbered by peasants. Bolshevik leaders, under the pressure of enormous difficulties, sometimes fell into the trap of agreeing with their enemies that democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat are necessarily opposites. Lenin came to regard the dictatorship of the proletariat as a distinct phase between capitalism and socialism, in which democratic norms are suspended. Trotsky took this logic to the conclusion of arguing that the party of necessity had to substitute itself for soviet democracy until such a time as the proletariat was able to raise itself to the level of a ruling class.

CPGB comrades made up the majority of the audience, but there was also a contingent from the International Bolshevik Tendency, who were keen for an argument. Unfortunately they seemed often unwilling to properly engage or unable to grapple with what happened to our class in the 20th centuries. Interleaved with the serious debate among CPGB members and others about the rule of law in a proletarian state, the possibility of peaceful revolution and other interesting questions, a succession of IBTers intervened - some reading out prepared statements - defending a bankrupt version of Trotskyism. Their arguments in the first debate boiled down to ‘You misrepresent Trotsky’, ‘What would you have done in 1919?’ and, on a slightly more serious level, the working class is justified in doing anything necessary to defend itself.

In a desperate situation, the Bolsheviks were justified in taking emergency measures to defend the revolution, agreed comrade Tina Becker. We can defend these actions, while criticising what we regard as errors, without generalising them into a theory. The mistake made by Trotsky and others was to argue that what happened was how socialism will always and should always be, thus making a virtue out of a necessity. Comrade Fischer added that the interests of the working class are also defended by a clear understanding of historical truth. Although retreats were necessary, the Bolsheviks were wrong to build them into a system and present it as the only path to socialism. In doing so they bequeathed problems to the workers’ movement for the rest of the century.

Comrade Mike Macnair introduced the session on the global significance of October. He outlined three aspects of the Bolsheviks’ understanding of their revolution and its world historic significance: the general shape of a revolution; the problems of revolution in a backward country and the theory of stages; and the revolution as part of the terminal crisis of capitalism. For each he went on to discuss the extent to which we can think the same way today. The lessons of October still hold true, comrade Macnair said, but he warned against falling into the trap of fetishising the soviet form - the particular form of the mass movement to overthrow capitalism can vary. In the debate comrade Hillel Ticktin referred to the two theories of how to take power that comrade Macnair had mentioned, through the general strike or through gaining a majority in parliament, and called them both inadequate. He made the point that no satisfactory theory of taking power has yet been put forward.

The second aspect of the Russian Revolution dealt with by comrade Macnair is the example of a backward country leaping over stages of development and taking a lead which hopefully advanced counties will follow. But it is obvious that revolution in a country like Russia had its own special problems: namely, technical backwardness and the existence of a strong peasant class. Capitalism prepares the ground for socialism in two ways: firstly by creating the technical preconditions to free people from the tyranny of labour, and secondly by liquidating the peasantry and petty proprietors. The individual property rights of peasants prevents cooperation and prevents political democracy. As Marx said, the natural representative of peasant proprietors is Bonapartism. Comrade Macnair questioned to what extent, therefore, a worker-peasant alliance was possible. He described the evolution of the Marxist attitude to the peasant question, and the grim course of the civil war in the USSR.

With the appearance of imperialism, capitalism had entered into its terminal phase, the Bolsheviks believed. Trotsky took this a stage further with his 1938 Transitional programme: since capitalism was in its “death agony”, the distinction between the struggle for immediate demands and the struggle for the socialist reorganisation of society had been superseded. Yet capitalism has survived for 66 more years, and the working class has been and still is able to make partial gains. Since the 1970s capitalism’s decay has once again become evident. But it is clear that in analysing how capitalism works, and how it goes into crisis, we cannot simply copy what was done in 1917 to 1920.

Several comrades agreed with comrade Macnair about the Transitional programme. Weekly Worker editor Peter Manson said it was based on a false premise, and comrade Ticktin described it as useless. Understandably IBT comrades defended the transitional programme, on the basis that it is necessary to pose now the question of power. They attacked the programme of the CPGB as reformist. Comrade John Bridge said this is an anarchist position, since it fails to distinguish between the revolutionary struggle for reforms and reformism. As comrade Macnair said in his summing up, the IBT does not explain what exactly it means by the “question of power” when they accuse the CPGB of having a reformist programme which ‘fails to pose’ it.

This session provoked two more fruitful debates which no doubt could be continued in later CPGB forums and in the Weekly Worker, on soviets and on the peasants. Comrade Ticktin agreed that the proletarian revolution need not necessarily come through soviets: they are not synonymous with the class as a class. Comrade Bridge added that the task of the party is to bring consciousness to spontaneous developments such as soviets and trade unions.

On the peasant question there was more disagreement, and this debate continued into the second day of the school. Comrade Bridge declared himself unconvinced by comrade Macnair’s conclusions. There have been peasant ideologies of communism, and in feudal times there were examples of peasants doing more than acting together against their own local lord. He said the question for us is, can the working class establish a hegemony over the peasantry, either before or after the revolution? The problem in Russia was not that the Bolsheviks took the grain to feed the cities, but that the cities were not producing anything they could give the peasants in exchange. Given a successful European revolution, a large section of the peasantry could have been won to accept the leadership of the working class.

Moving on from the Russian Revolution to the Soviet Union as it existed for over 70 years, session three of the school, introduced by comrade Jack Conrad, looked at why Soviet bureaucratic socialism was unviable. The comrade expressed surprise at how few Marxist writers have made a serious attempt to analyse the political economy of the USSR and work out why it collapsed, and described his own efforts to understand it using the methodology of Marx’s Capital. Unlike Tony Cliff he does not think the Soviet economy produced commodities, because the products of industry had use-value (of a sort), but no exchange-value. Money in the Marxist sense did not exist either. He said the Soviet product had target-value, since what existed in the USSR was not ‘planning’, but target-setting.

For a viable socialist plan honesty and democracy are needed. He described how the undemocratic nature of the system, where the producers had no involvement and the managers no incentive to tell the truth, led to chaos, shortage and a full-scale attack on workers’ rights and conditions. He explained why the system could only grow while it had new labour and natural resources to exploit: it was unable to continuously modernise existing factories and plant. He said the Soviet Union could be called a deformed or a degenerate workers’ state in the 1920s, but by the 1930s there was no vestige of workers’ control left.

Alan Davies of the IBT claimed that all the facts comrade Bridge gave about the Soviet Union are fully compatible with Trotsky’s theory of the USSR as a deformed workers’ state. He criticised the CPGB for revising its views about the Soviet Union since 1991. He accused the CPGB of altering its programme first and then adjusting its theory to fit the new programme, when we no longer defended the USSR. This claim was brushed aside by CPGB comrades, who stated that quite the opposite had occurred: our rejection of ‘defending’ the USSR state was arrived at after a painstaking study of the nature of the Soviet Union in the light of 1991 - something most of the Trotskyist groups do not even contemplate undertaking.

Comrade Ticktin declared himself amazed than anyone could still hold to a view of defending the USSR state. He described the Soviet Union in the 1960s, when he lived there, as a crude, brutal society. It is possible to demonstrate both theoretically and practically that there was nothing to defend in the USSR state, and any group that does defend it damns itself and shames the left. We should repudiate the regime, not defend it, he added.

Several CPGB comrades said that what should be defended is not a state, but the gains of the working class in and against any system. In Britain, for example, we defend the gains of the working class in the form of a health service and so on, without, of course, defending British capitalism, under which those gains have been won. So it was with the oppressive Soviet regime. The IBT attacked the CPGB for welcoming the fall of the Soviet Union, but in his reply to the debate comrade Conrad said the events of 1991 were inevitable: the system was born in crisis and decay and could not be saved, so that it was meaningless to say we either regret or welcome its fall.

The collapse of the Soviet state, why it happened when it did and the nature of the regime which came after it was the theme of the final session of the school, ‘Putin’s Russia and the decline of capitalism’, introduced by comrade Ticktin. He said the elite in the last days of the Soviet Union knew the system was doomed and attempted to reintroduce capitalism in a controlled way, which would allow them to retain and extend their privileges. They have succeeded in the sense that many of the same people who were part of the old ruling elite make up the new one, but they have failed to restore a capitalist system, despite the introduction of finance capital. Putin is in effect attempting to return to a version of the old system, but this is possible only because the working class is too atomised and demoralised to fight back (despite the collection of “useless” Trotskyist groups which have moved into Russia).

He concluded by saying our task should be to build a serious Marxist party in the west, crucially in Europe, which would act as a vital inspiration to the east, while at the same time making it clear to workers both here and there that our socialism has nothing in common with the Stalinised USSR, which we do not defend in any way.