28.05.2008
Trying Stalinism again?
Can there be a repeat of Soviet-style bureaucratic socialism? Mike Macnair responds to Tony Clark
Tony Clark’s reply (Letters, May 22) to comments in my article ‘Anything but Marxism’ (May 1) raises some important issues, and I think it would be helpful if comrade Clark is willing to give a fuller account of his views, which are a variant form of those widely held on the far left. In the meantime I would make four points in response to the arguments of his letter.
Comrade Clark’s argument about institutions is incoherent. His argument about ‘bureaucracy’ raises an important issue, but is misleading. His arguments about the causes of the fall of the Soviet and similar regimes reveal more clearly what is wrong with ‘trying Stalinism again’.
Institutions
First, I do not say, as comrade Clark makes me say, that the so-called ‘socialist countries’ “had no institutional safeguard against counterrevolution”. I say that from the date of the 1921 ban on factions, they had no institutional means by which the proletariat as a class could find political expression of its views and interests.
Marx and Engels claimed that only the movement of the proletariat as a class and the victory of this class over the capitalists and middle class - working class rule - can bring about a communist society; and (the other side of the same coin) that the working class can only emancipate itself by laying collective hands on the means of production: ie, by fighting for communism.
The underlying ground of this claim is that because the proletariat as a class is - unlike peasants and artisans - separated from individual ownership of the means of production, proletarians can only pursue their interests through free, voluntary cooperation in collective organisation, which foreshadows the nature of communist society (“the freely associated producers”).
It follows that the proletariat as a class can only maintain control of its own organisations (trade unions, parties, states) by freedom to organise collectively for particular goals within them. Hence, in 1921 the proletariat was politically expropriated by the Russian party and state apparatus. This apparatus maintained afterwards a merely ideological (in the negative sense of mystificatory or apologetic) link to the idea of working class rule.
Between 1920 and the ‘terror’ of the 1930s, the apparatus step by step expelled from itself and from society all those elements who, in one way or another, sought a step back towards the pre-1920 Bolshevism which politically represented the proletariat. The apparatus developed its ideological opposition to working class rule, first in the form of the idea of the sanctity of the smychka, the worker-peasant alliance, then, from the 1930s, in the fiction that classes had already been abolished in the USSR.
There can, of course, be no institutional guarantees against counterrevolution. But institutional forms can make counterrevolution more or less likely, and bureaucratic centralism made counterrevolution more likely. The sneer of comrade Clark - and, for that matter, those of the orthodox Trotskyists - towards institutional forms is in fact only directed against democratic institutional forms: they claim that purges (comrade Clark) or councils elected from workplaces (orthodox Trotskyists), combined with a bureaucratic centralist party (both), make counterrevolution less likely. But these are no less ‘institutional forms’ than freedom of parties and of factions, freedom of information, freedom of speech and so on.
Bureaucracy
Comrade Clark says that “the Trotskyists outlined a struggle to ‘overthrow’ the bureaucracy - an ultra-left position, since bureaucracies, generally speaking, cannot be ‘overthrown’”. This claim seems to me to involve a slippage in the meaning of the word ‘bureaucracy’.
The word ‘bureaucracy’ was originally coined in the 18th century by the French ‘physiocrat’ economist Vincent de Gournay,1 and was already in use by Marx in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of right. From its beginnings it has had two overlapping meanings. The first is ‘rule over society by state officials for their own benefit’. In this sense the word is analogous to ‘democracy’, ‘monarchy’ and so on. The second is the state officials as a group (usually with a derogatory sense that they are parasites on society). In this sense the word is analogous to ‘aristocracy’ as a word for the landlord class.
In the second sense of the word, comrade Clark is quite correct to say that “bureaucracies, generally speaking, cannot be ‘overthrown’”. The fact that there are bureaucrats arises in the first place because there are ‘bureaucratic’ jobs which objectively need to be done (accumulating information, drafting agendas, communicating decisions, and so on), and secondly from differential access to the skills associated with these jobs. What can be said is that bureaucracy can be made to wither away. This is in part by returning some jobs which are now bureaucratic to the people (as, for example, trial by jury rather than trial by judge). It is in part by the restriction of official salaries to the skilled worker’s wage, election and recallability, and rotation of officials.
As Lenin put it in State and revolution, “… we will reduce the role of the state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modestly paid ‘foremen and bookkeepers’ (of course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees). This is our proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with in accomplishing the proletarian revolution. Such a beginning, on the basis of large-scale production, will of itself lead to the gradual ‘withering away’ of all bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of an order, an order without quotation marks, an order bearing no similarity to wage slavery, an order in which the functions of control and accounting - becoming more and more simple - will be performed by each in turn, will then become a habit and will finally die out as the special functions of a special section of the population.”2
On the other hand, in the first sense of the word - the political rule of the bureaucracy - bureaucracies certainly can be overthrown. There is a very extensive bureaucracy (second sense) in Britain or the US, but this bureaucracy ‘rules’ only as the servant of the capitalist class. What happened in the late 1980s-early 1990s in the former Soviet dependencies of eastern Europe was that the bureaucracy attempted to transform itself into a capitalist class - but, by and large, it did not succeed: instead the political rule of the bureaucracy was overthrown by the capitalist class.
I do not share the view that the Soviet (etc) bureaucracy was a ‘bureaucratic collectivist’ or ‘state capitalist’ class. Rather, the bureaucratic political rule of the USSR and ‘eastern bloc’ was merely a very large-scale and prolonged instance of Bonapartism: the temporary and partial autonomy of the state apparatus due to unstable equilibrium between the classes. On the world scale, it balanced between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; on the national scale, between the proletariat and the petty proprietors (peasants, intelligentsia).
In this sense of ‘bureaucracy’, I judge along with comrade Clark that it was impossible for the proletariat to overthrow ‘the bureaucracy’. But I make this judgment not because it is impossible for ‘bureaucracies’ in the sense of bureaucratic political rule to be overthrown at all. Rather, I judge that the temporary victory of the proletariat in Russia in 1917-18 reflected the European relation of class forces; that the Russian relation of class forces in isolation would not even support transition from feudalism to capitalism; and, hence, that the defeats of 1918-21 in western Europe and isolation of the Russian Revolution supported the creation of a Bonapartism which froze in place a stage in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This, in turn, replicated itself after 1943 in countries with similar relations of class forces (China, etc).
Within this framework, the natural weight of the Soviet regime in the international workers’ movement worked (a) to maintain the national isolation of the workers’ movements in each individual country through the ideologies of ‘uneven development’ and ‘national roads’; (b) to support, by defending bureaucratic centralism, the social democratic and ‘pure trade unionist’ labour bureaucracy in the capitalist countries, which are the main support of the capitalist class in these countries; and (c) to promote class-collaborationism. The effect was to preserve the international equilibrium of class forces which supported the Bonapartist regime, until the bourgeoisie brought the Bonapartist regime down.
In all these respects international capital actively supported ‘official communism’. It did so through measures like the US 1940 Voorhis Act (which bans the affiliation of US workers’ parties to internationals) and the state regulation of political parties, trade unions, etc, more generally. And it did so through the usual academic and media drip, drip of congratulations to ‘realistic’ national-road, bureaucratic and class-collaborationist leftists and condemnation of ‘utopian’ class-independence, radical-democratic and proletarian-internationalist leftists (I do not mean by this latter category Trotskyists: Trotskyists were always merely a part of the small surviving fully Marxist left).
Ideological defeat
Comrade Clark says that “The defeat of socialism in the 1980s and 90s was an ideological defeat, the result of a prolonged ideological struggle waged by imperialism against socialism.” He explains this ‘ideological defeat’ by, on the one side, the long boom, the nuclear threat to the ‘socialist countries’, and the revisionist leadership in the USSR and its reliance on oil exports making the Soviet economy vulnerable.
On the other side, the carrot held out by the imperialists was “consumer capitalism”: but this, comrade Clark argues, is now leading to ecological disaster and to a “nightmare ... soon to be visited on those in the imperialist countries, where living standards will begin to plunge towards third world levels, as the consequences of peak oil becomes the dominant reality”. Although not explicitly, comrade Clark argues that this nightmare will make classical Stalinism, with an ecological twist, look like an attractive alternative.
The first part of these arguments, the characterisation of the defeat of the USSR, etc as an ideological defeat, is decidedly peculiar. The defeat comrade Clark describes is in substance an economic defeat. Put bluntly, the USSR-Comecon was not productive enough to afford both guns and butter; US imperialism, with its subordinate capitalist states, was. This economic defeat was expressed in the nuclear threat and the need for constant arms innovations, leading to arms expenditure dislocating the civil economy, and so on. The economic defeat was reflected in the triumph of ‘revisionism’, as the Soviet leadership recognised in private that their claims that the USSR surpassed capitalist productive capacity were proved in the hard light of military capability to be false, and turned to imitating capitalism. The attempt to use oil revenue to square the circle in the 1970s was merely a short-term expedient (and one which had been used, in relation to timber and other primary products, under Stalin).
But then why did the economic defeat happen? In the first place, the USSR started out massively behind the USA. Nationalisations and planification allowed some catching up - as was also true, indeed, more successfully, of Wilhemine Germany and Meiji Japan, though these started at a vastly higher productive and cultural level than the former tsarist empire. But this is precisely a test of destruction of ‘socialism in a single country’: it did not deliver overtaking the capitalist world, contrary to Lenin’s tentative suggestion in 1923 - “why cannot we begin by first achieving the prerequisites for that definite level of culture in a revolutionary way, and then, with the aid of the workers’ and peasants’ government and Soviet system, proceed to overtake the other nations?”3
Secondly, the political ideologies of the bureaucratic Bonapartist regime undermined the economy. ‘Socialism in one country’ and ‘national roads’ prevented the planned integration of the Comecon economies with that of the USSR itself, resulting in duplication of very similar heavy-industry complexes in every country. The information monopoly of the bureaucracy, guaranteed by top-down appointments and the ban on factions, turned into a disinformation monopoly, as factory and state and collective farm managers ‘spun’ their results to make themselves look better. This is a familiar feature of Blairism, borrowed from the ex-‘official communists’ and fellow-travellers in the Blairite ranks; it is less catastrophic under New Labour because there is a world outside the world of managerial ‘targets’. In the ‘Soviet-style regimes’ there was none. The class collaborationism of people’s frontism promoted the ‘revisionist’ illusions in supposedly neutral ‘technocrats’ and, in the 1970s, sucked at least the eastern European regimes into the third world debt trap.
Green austerity
Will capitalist ecological crisis and the new oil price shock, leading to the end of ‘consumer capitalism’, make classical Stalinism look attractive? In the first place, it is certainly true that a nightmare for working people is coming, though how quickly is debatable. Secondly, for many working class people in the former USSR the Brezhnevite ‘period of stagnation’ looked attractive from the depths of the results of neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ in the 1990s-2000s. There is a similar feature of Ostalgie in parts of the former GDR.
This is not, however, the same thing as mass nostalgia for the Stalin period, when labour discipline was routinely enforced by the use of slave-labour death camps, paranoia at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy produced meaningless purges, and petty disputes about the allocation of flats, etc could lead to false denunciations to the KGB, torture and death. Nor is there any significant evidence of mass nostalgia for the ‘great leap forward’ or ‘cultural revolution’ in China.
Comrade Clark says that in the new crisis “living standards will begin to plunge towards third world levels”. Is there significant evidence of mass support for classical Stalinism in the ‘third world’? The answer needs to be a little nuanced. In places where there is a mass peasantry not yet integrated in market relations, Maoism can win mass support: witness Nepal, and the Naxalites in parts of India. But in third world countries with a powerful urban proletariat, classical Stalinism, and even ‘official’ communism (‘revisionism’ in comrade Clark’s eyes) has never succeeded in winning majority support.
It has failed to do so - in spite of appalling working and living conditions - in the first place precisely because of the objective interest of the working class in political democracy. Thus the Cuban revolutionaries, for example, explicitly distanced themselves from the political forms of classical Stalinism.
It has failed to do so, secondly, because ‘national roads’, the ‘anti-imperialist front’ and popular-frontist class-collaborationism have hitched the communists to the wagons of a series of bourgeois-nationalist movements which have continued the subordination of the proletariat and in due course, when the time was right, turned on the communists and crushed them.
It has failed to do so, thirdly, because the class-collaborationism of the labour bureaucracy is not unique to the imperialist countries, but can be found also in every colony and semi-colony to have a significant trade union movement: and the overthrowing of the political dominance of this bureaucracy, which requires a struggle for radical democracy, is necessary if the working class is to take political power.
In the context of the rest of his argument, comrade Clark’s critique of “consumer capitalism” and assertion of the need for an “ecologically sustainable socialist society” is merely a politics of nostalgia for bureaucratically managed austerity (as much as Green politics is). Which bits of ‘consumerism’ are we to ask workers to give up? Cheap food available without long queues? Opportunities for information and communication through transport, telephones, the web, etc? The (very, very limited) emancipation of women from domestic labour through labour-saving devices?
Stalinism can win majority support in peasant-majority areas and countries because it is, at the end of the day, a Bonapartism socially based on the atomised petty proprietors seeking “rain and sunshine from above” from an all-powerful state.4 Hence the natural overlap with the equally petty-proprietor politics of Green austerity.
The way out of capitalism will not be provided by either of these politics of nostalgia. The way forward is about the working class taking over the running of society, and making its own decisions about all sorts of questions. Comrade Clark’s attempt to reply to my article precisely reveals why, as I said in it, ‘trying Stalinism again’ is no use.
Notes
1. 1712-59 - fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_de_Gournay
2. VI Lenin State and revolution Beijing 1970, pp58-59.
3. ‘Our revolution’ CW Vol 33, pp476-80: www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/16.htm
4. K Marx The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte chapter 7.