10.09.2008
Bureaucracy and terror
Mike Macnair reviews David Priestland's Stalinism and the politics of mobilisation: ideas, power and terror in inter-war Russia Oxford 2007, pp487, �58
David Priestland’s book is a contribution to the academic study of the history of the USSR, and in particular the origins of the 1930s terror. It is distinguished by the attempt to take seriously the political ideas of the Stalinists and their connection to, and partial divergence from, the ideas of the Bolsheviks after the revolution. It is this, as well as the wealth of documentation in the book - especially of political turns within the regime - that makes it worth reading.
I am reviewing the book in the context of a reply to Tony Clark’s article, ‘Defending Stalin’.1 The first article in this series criticised comrade Clark’s definition of ‘socialism’ and emphasised comrade Clark’s and other ‘official’ communists’ break with the fundamentals of the arguments of Marx and Engels. A third article, to follow, will address the question of ‘bureaucracy’, comrade Clark’s use of standard Stalinist arguments against Trotsky as a form of indirect defence of Stalin and his judgment of the role of the USSR on the world stage.
The review will, therefore, to some extent assume the arguments of the first article: that is, that Marx and Engels thought that the only road beyond capitalism was through the political power of the working class; that capitalism made communism possible because it undermined small-scale private ownership of means of production and family production and replaced it with wage labour; and that Stalinism constituted a break with these ideas.
Priestland analyses the evolution of the Stalinists’ political ideas within the framework of (a broadly Weberian) supposition that Marxism as such is utopian. Priestland does not fully argue out this view, but merely assumes it at the outset, but then in effect produces evidence for it in the shape of the calamitous history of the USSR in the 1920s and 30s (and, in the final chapter, of China under Mao).
Comrade Clark identifies with ‘Stalinism’ because he judges - correctly - that the ‘anti-Stalinism’ of Khrushchev and his co-thinkers was pro-capitalist, tended to undermine the USSR, and hence led to the fall of the USSR in 1991. But Priestland demonstrates from the documents that what became Khruschchevite ‘revisionism’ was already present within high-period Stalinism; and that Stalin personally and his immediate co-thinkers zig-zagged between this policy and a ‘leftist’ policy of ‘mobilising’ the masses to denounce the managers, kulaks, bureaucrats, etc (in the purges period characterised as “Trotskyite-Bukharinite wreckers”) who were allegedly sabotaging the economy.
On each occasion the ‘leftist’ policy was abandoned because it disrupted production. The victory of the ‘revisionists’ after Stalin’s death, and their ‘anti-Stalinism’, was merely the semi-public codification of a policy choice which had already been made - briefly in the rightwards legs of Stalin’s zigzags in the 1920s and 30s, and decisively with the end of the full-scale terror in 1938-39.
In other words, Priestland’s arguments address issues which are immediately relevant to comrade Clark’s arguments.
Priestland’s core arguments are, as we shall see, almost painfully ideological-apologetic. His underlying commitment to ‘liberalism’ (meaning the capitalist order, rather than either theorised political liberalism or neoliberalism) and his ‘cold war academic’ Weberian assumptions and silences deeply deform the story he tells. They make the 57-page introduction in particular a tortuous read. Nonetheless, the book is worth reading.
Academic history is now usually written under the empirical methodological disciplines established by German academics in the later 19th century - the fullest possible use of both primary sources and existing literature, accurate citation of sources, their assessment as witnesses using techniques borrowed from the law of evidence, and the attempt to explain events as economically as possible (‘Occam’s razor’). This sort of history is, like the physical sciences, a cumulative science: it leads to us knowing more about the past. This is still true even where - as in the case of Stalinism and the politics of mobilisation - the framework offered by the author to explain the events studied is deeply problematic.
In addition Priestland is probably correct to argue that the large majority of the Bolsheviks, including much of the left, from the 1920s were trapped within utopian ideological discourses, and that the nature of these discourses shaped the development of Soviet politics and helped lead to the terror.
Priestland’s theory
The central question Priestland poses to Marx and Marxists, on the basis of which he judges Marxism to be utopian ideology, is this:
“How could a modern industrial system, based on a system of wage incentives and coordination by a technocratic elite, be reconciled with the desire to transform work into creative self-expression and to free workers from all subordination?” (p25)
This statement is a highly ideological-apologetic formulation of a real contradiction in 19th and 20th (and perhaps 21st) century socialist politics, and it will be necessary to return to it after summarising the rest of Priestland’s argument and narrative.
The same page offers a different ‘contradiction’ in Marx’s thought: that “Marx provided different accounts of the forces that drive history forward, and in particular the relationship between economic forces and the consciousness of the working class.”
This second point is in substance merely abusive. A tension between structural causal dynamics and individual and group agency is inherent in any historical, economic or sociological account of human society, and, for that matter, any proposal for political action. Marx makes exactly this point in one of his most famous quotations: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”2 The tension is also up-front in Priestland’s own book (pp3-4, 49-54 and elsewhere).
In any such project it is therefore possible to extract quotations which emphasise the agency side of the question and present them as “romantic” or “voluntarist”, and extract quotations which emphasise structural causal dynamics and characterise them as “scientistic”; and this is what Priestland proceeds to do. This then sets up a second (non-dialectical) contradiction within Marxism between “scientism” and “voluntarism”. As a result, Priestland is able to diagnose four ‘Marxisms’: elitist and scientistic; elitist and voluntarist; non-elitist and scientistic; populist and voluntarist (pp32-34).
In Bolshevism in power, says Priestland, these four versions of Marxism mutate into five general positions. “Voluntarism” becomes “revivalism” (pp39-44). In this view proletarian class-consciousness was a vital force in history and politics, on which the party had to draw by mobilising workers’ energy and enthusiasm. Political ideas were primary; enemies were identified as ‘bourgeois’ or ‘petty bourgeois’; ‘purging’ or ‘cleansing’ party and state institutions was important. But there were two variants of “revivalism”. Populist revivalism sought to rely on working class spontaneity - without conceding actual decision-making to the workers - and to ‘proletarianise’ the bureaucracy by recruiting workers to it. Elitist revivalism sought merely to mobilise workers under a military command and control regime; this trend became “uncomfortable with the language of class and class struggle, and in the 1930s they sometimes claimed that class differences had been overcome ...” (p44).
“Scientism” becomes “technicism” (pp44-47). This trend - particularly associated with Bukharin in the 1920s - favoured the use of material incentives and gradual development, and “tended to favour ... the technical intelligentsia” (p45). Only a few ultra-gradualists who favoured more extensive use of market mechanisms and law could be described as non-elitist technicists (pp46-47), technicists generally being elitists.
The fifth position Priestland characterises as “neo-traditionalist” (pp47-49). This idea has been applied in some of the academic literature to Stalinism in general, but Priestland reduces it to a trend within Bolshevism in power. In this view society was divided into hereditary status groups with distinct tasks, in effect pre-capitalist ‘estates’ - industrial workers, collectivised peasants, Soviet intelligentsia and ‘loyal’ nationalities on the good side; on the enemy side former bourgeois, petty bourgeois and kulaks (large farmers) and unreliable national minorities. Priestland recognises that neo-traditionalism could not be characterised as Marxist, and hence could not really be openly spoken, but suggests that aspects of this discourse were present throughout and that the class language used by “revivalists” could shade into it.
Priestland’s narrative
Chapters 1-5 of the book attempt to ‘cash out’ this theoretical analysis of contradictions within Bolshevism in the form of fairly detailed historical narrative. I will summarise this in extreme outline, inevitably oversimplifying.
Chapter 1 argues that Lenin in his politics before 1917 attempted to synthesise “populism” and “scientism”, but that the line of State and revolution was voluntarist and “populist-revivalist”, though an element of “elitism” in the form of the role of the vanguard party was also present in Lenin’s ideas. This policy was proved utopian by the chaos of winter 1917-18. In April 1918 the leadership, led by Lenin and Trotsky, abandoned the line of State and revolution in favour of an elitist position, which veered between technicism (talk of ‘state capitalism’) and “elitist revivalism” (subbotniks or unpaid overtime; Trotsky’s efforts on militarisation and military morale). In this context ‘bureaucracy’ was used by leadership speakers and writers to mean ‘red tape’ and inefficiency rather than the anti-democratic aspect of bureaucracy.
The contradiction between the new line and Bolshevik (and wider Russian working class) traditions resulted in the emergence of a series of oppositions - the Left Communists, the Workers’ Opposition and the Democratic Centralists, and the Military Opposition. These groups generally pursued a populist-revivalist line. Since they could not return to liberalism, their opposition to bureaucracy, meaning the elitist authority relations, had to blame alien classes, especially the technical specialists (spetsy) and suggest more promotion of workers into official positions as a remedy. This sort of approach could slide over into neo-traditionalism: workers seen as virtuous because their parents were workers. Though Stalin did not formally go into opposition, beyond an informal relationship with the Military Opposition, his political ideas were closer to those of the oppositions.
In 1920-21 the economy was still falling apart in spite of effective victory in the civil war. The first response of the leadership was to extend the use of coercion, Trotsky being the most vigorous advocate (labour militarisation). Faced with a majority against this approach, Lenin backed off from supporting Trotsky. In 1921 there was an actual political crisis (peasant revolts, strikes, Kronstadt) and Lenin and the party leadership abandoned ‘war communism’ and turned to market mechanisms and the New Economic Policy. This represented a major shift towards technicism. Along with it went attacks by leadership figures on the Proletkult proletarian culture movement and extended defence of the spetsy. Bukharin’s Historical materialism advocated a ‘social equilibrium’ theory, which could be used to support gradualism in economic policy.
After the initial successes of NEP, party discontent and opposition (and worker discontent) began to develop. The result was the creation of an alliance between elitist revivalists (Trotsky, Piatakov and others) and populist revivalists, mainly former Democratic Centralists. This appeared first in the Moscow (Left) Opposition. Then Zinoviev and Kamenev went into opposition on a much more workerist and populist-revivalist platform (the Leningrad Opposition), and these ideas dominated the United Opposition of 1926-27. The first publication of Engels’ Dialectics of nature in 1925 spurred the growth of ideas of a policy of ‘dialectical leaps forward’ in the economy, most strongly argued by Strumilin and Piatakov.
Stalin and his group, though still in alliance with Bukharin against the oppositions, were already moving away from Bukharin’s gradualism and towards the politics of the Leningrad/United Oppositions from 1925, while using the critique of ‘Trotskyism’ to distinguish themselves from the opposition. They were able to base themselves on regional ‘party bosses’, who were worried about NEP technicism reducing their political role, but too concerned about the threat from below to go over to the opposition.
In 1926-27 the defeat in China, the breaking off of diplomatic relations by Britain after the ‘Zinoviev letter’ and the French refusal to negotiate on commercial credits and expulsion of Rakovsky produced a war scare. At the same time a new and acute ‘scissors crisis’ (peasants refusing to sell grain because the price was too low) appeared in the economy. After disposing of the opposition with expulsions and a purge, the Stalin faction abruptly broke with Bukharin’s gradualist line in early 1928 and adopted a more extreme version of the “revivalist” politics of the opposition. The result was the policy of forced collectivisation and crash industrialisation. This had an “elitist” aspect - the workers were to be ‘mobilised’ by the ‘cadres’ without really getting the right to make decisions, and there were truly massive cuts in real wages and speed-up. In this context, the large majority of the opposition “capitulated” (Trotsky’s expression): ie, joined forces with the Stalinists.
But it also had a “populist” aspect, which took the form of attacks on kulaks, bureaucrats and spetsy, starting with the show-trial of Shakty engineers in March 1928. Priestland carefully documents the rhetorical shifts in the line of the Stalinist leadership towards ‘democracy’, ‘socialist emulation’ and so on. Proletkult was revived. Another element was a connection being made between scepticism about the plan targets, sabotage and real or supposed international conspiracies against the Soviet state - expressed in the ‘Industrial Party’ and ‘Menshevik Union Bureau’ trials of 1930-31.
In fact, the turn proved to be disastrous. Forced collectivisation resulted in famine. There were extreme bottlenecks in industrial production. The industrial output figures were falsified, not only directly, but because incomplete buildings and factories were counted as ‘output’. Workers used the egalitarian rhetoric to attack managers and to create ‘work collectives’ which ‘undermined wage incentives’ by levelling differentials. Increased plan targets for production led to severe falls in quality. The ‘Right Opposition’ around Bukharin, though out of power, had not yet been purged and their criticisms had increasing resonance.
The result was that the Stalin group turned, from around 1931, to a much more “technicist” orientation. Plan targets were relaxed and the targeting of kulaks, bureaucrats and spetsy dramatically tailed off. Though the main body of the land remained ‘collectivised’, peasants were allowed private plots. In this context, there was a shift towards ‘legality’, and Stalinists began to talk about the state surviving in socialism; there was also a substantial renewal of Russian nationalist rhetoric; and the use of the language of class began to shift away from ‘Marxism’ towards neo-traditionalism.
Nonetheless, Stalin had not fundamentally broken with “revivalism”. Though the new “technicist” orientation allowed real economic growth and industrialisation through the completion of projects unfinished in 1928-31, this growth slowed in the mid-30s, just as the capitalist economies were beginning to recover. Stalin’s response was to move increasingly back towards “revivalism”. From 1935 this shift became more marked.
The language of ‘class struggle’, however, did not reappear: Priestland suggests that this was due to the leadership fearing a repeat of the partial loss of control of 1928-31. This meant that the emphasis on coercion, purges, show-trials and international conspiracies had to be all the stronger, leading to the mass-scale terror of 1937, primarily directed against spetsy and old party activists identified as ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘saboteurs’. But “revivalism” was just as economically irrational as it had been in 1928-31 (and similarly led to a fall in productive output). By 1938, it was clear that this ‘left’ turn, too, was failing, and the leadership brought it to an end.
Priestland’s conclusion summarises his findings, and compares them with the very similar dynamic in China under Mao: “technicism” in the 1950s, followed by the “revivalist” Great Leap Forward in 1958, followed by a return to “technicism”, followed by the “populist revivalism” of the Cultural Revolution (1966-67). “Populist revivalism”, he concludes, led to the adoption of irrational policies.
Ideological
The core strength of Priestland’s book is simple. It takes seriously Stalin’s ideas, those of his immediate co-thinkers and their relationship to the ideas current in the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union more generally. As a result, it breaks free from seeing what Stalin said and wrote as mere lies covering for his personal character as an individual monster, or covering for the interests of ‘the Soviet bureaucracy’ as an undifferentiated exploiting group.
It thus helps explain why the Soviet regime adopted positively irrational policies, which actually reduced production and military preparedness, in 1928-31 and 1935-38, and were - as comrade Clark correctly says - opposed to the interests of the bureaucracy as such (contrary to comrade Clark’s view, they were opposed to everyone else’s interests, too). It helps us to understand why the majority of the oppositions of the 1920s “capitulated” in 1928-31; why the same pattern played out in China under Mao; and why leftists could and even today still do choose to be Stalinists (meaning real Stalinists like comrade Clark, not just ‘official communists’).
At the same time, as I said at the outset, Priestland’s broadly Weberian theory is ideological-apologetic. There is an obvious aspect to this: namely, that the international place of Russia, the Russian Revolution and the Soviet regime is nearly wholly out of the picture (except for the war scare of 1926-27).
Boris Kagarlitsky in Empire of the periphery (2008) makes the fundamental point that, in terms of world systems theory, Russia before the revolution was a peripheral country, not a core country. In Leninist terms, it was a semi-colony which was also sub-imperialist: ie, the Russian core was dominated by western capital, while the colonised areas of the east and south were dominated by Russian capital. The country’s economy had been shaped since the 17th century to fit western - mainly Dutch and British, and from the late 19th century French - interests in raw materials and capital exports. These interests had driven the ‘second serfdom’, the maintenance of the autocracy, and sub-imperialist geographical expansion. Russia’s problem was not isolation from the world capitalist system, but integration in it as a subordinate country.
Immediately, the revolution of 1917 was produced in the context of World War I. The Bolshevik leaders - and not only the Bolsheviks, but also the Left SRs - thought that what they were doing was starting the European proletarian revolution, not creating a nationally isolated ‘socialist’ or ‘workers’ regime. The debates which Priestland discusses were - down to the late 1920s and perhaps even down to 1933 - almost entirely framed in that context.
A critical consequence of that context was that the European capitalist states undoubtedly saw the Russian Revolution and Soviet Russia as an enemy throughout the period, did wish for its overthrow and took concrete actions towards this end. Michael Kettle’s incomplete three-volume Russia and the Allies 1917-1920, with all its defects, makes it clear from British documents that plots and industrial sabotage sponsored by British intelligence were quite real throughout the civil war period, as well as the Allied direct military intervention in the civil war. In the German military intervention of early 1918, Ludendorff sacrificed the chance of victory on the western front in order to ‘put the Bolsheviks in their place’. After the civil war we do not have the same documentation, but there were clearly what would now be called financial sanctions against the Soviet regime.
The crash of 1929 and the ensuing slump, much deeper in the US than in Britain, led US manufacturers of producer goods to be briefly willing to break with this system of quasi-sanctions and sell industrial plant to the USSR on credit terms in spite of the risk. Even so, to raise the hard currency to pay for the equipment the regime had to halve real wages and continue exporting grain while people were starving; and it was only when there was a retreat from the political line of 1928-31 that the new plant could begin to be put effectively into operation and the USSR could experience rapid growth, until the new Stalinist convulsion of 1935-38.
Priestland’s alternative is ‘liberalism’. But the period his book studies in the USSR is one in which ‘liberalism’ was unequivocally in retreat. Horthy’s coup in Hungary (1920) and the fascist takeover in Italy (1922) were followed by more overthrows of constitutional regimes: Bulgaria in 1923, Poland, Portugal and Lithuania in 1926, Yugoslavia in 1929, Germany in 1933, Austria, Latvia and Estonia in 1934, Greece in 1936, Spain in the civil war of 1936-39, and Romania in 1938. German military operations in 1939-40, coupled with local capitalist defeatism, accounted for Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, leaving Sweden, Finland and Switzerland as the only countries in continental Europe with constitutional regimes which survived the period.
With this background, Priestland’s arguments make the Bolsheviks’ - and even the Stalinists’ - ideas look much more crazy than they actually were. They make ‘liberalism’ - ie, western capitalism - look much more attractive than it actually was before World War II set free the conditions for renewed capitalist development in the 1950s.
Comrade Clark (June 19) says that “Mike forgets that most of the austerity imposed on the Soviet Union was by imperialism.” I do not forget it in the least. I argue precisely that any national revolution will immediately be faced with war from the imperialist centres - whether this war takes the form of active hostilities, as in 1918-21 and 1941-45, or of continuous war threats coupled with financial sanctions, blockade and efforts at subversion, as in 1921-39 and 1947-91. The USSR was in an unusually strong position to resist these operations, compared to most countries. Nonetheless, it was not able to defeat the USA, but fell. My argument is therefore precisely that - as Kagarlitsky argues - capitalism is a world system which can only be overthrown at the global level, not by attempting to secede from it.
Intellectual property
As I said earlier, the core of Priestland’s argument that Marxism is a utopian ideology is this: “How could a modern industrial system, based on a system of wage incentives and coordination by a technocratic elite, be reconciled with the desire to transform work into creative self-expression and to free workers from all subordination?”
Now this question is at one level obviously ideological-apologetic. It implicitly characterises the City and Wall Street wide-boys who have given us the ‘credit crunch’, and - god help us! - British or US industrial management as a ‘technocratic elite’. The characterisation of the capitalist market order as a “system of wage incentives” is similarly ideological-apologetic. It is true that the capitalist order as a whole is a system of (capitalist) incentives, which includes “wage incentives”, both in the sense of the stick of fear of unemployment as motivating performance at work and the carrot of improved access to consumer goods if wages can be increased. But to focus in on wage incentives alone is to imply that the only thing that can go wrong with an economy is the loss of ‘labour discipline’.
Behind this ideological scheme, however, is a real problem. It is undoubtedly true that Marx argued and Marxists argue that workers can take over running the society, and that the eventual socialism or communism will be a society without the ‘division of labour’ in the sense of life-long specialisation on particular jobs - and in particular the ‘division between mental and manual labour’: ie, the role of managers and ‘technocrats’. It should be said that Priestland’s “free the workers from all subordination” (emphasis added) was certainly not Marx’s position. This can be seen from - for example - Marx’s marginal notes on Bakunin’s Statism and anarchy (1874). What was in question was, rather, to free the workers from permanent subordination: ie, that nobody should be permanently manager/coordinator/bureaucrat in charge of other people. Implicit in Priestland’s question is the claim that this is impossible.
Actually, looking at any of the ‘advanced capitalist countries’ (aka the imperialist centres), Priestland’s implicit argument is a lot less plausible. Looking at these countries, we see high levels of general education, and a great deal of technical information of one sort or another codified in books, available on the web and so on; and quite a lot of skilled tasks deskilled or partially deskilled by being incorporated in machines. Under these conditions the demands of general education increase, and the demands of specific skills training decrease. If people do not “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner”, it is certainly true that many change jobs radically after a few years, retrain, take adult education, etc. Andy Warhol’s “in the future, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes” is imaginable, if not yet an immediate prospect.
This is where we are going. It is not, however, where we are coming from; and it is certainly not where Russia was at the date of the revolution. Just for example, the urban literacy rate in Russia in 1914 has been estimated at around 45%.3
Marx’s idea is that communism becomes possible because capitalism tends to socialise the means of production (a central point of the first article in this series).
Information and skills are part of the means of production. Going back to the stone age, knowing how to knap flint gives you variety of tools once you can find a flint. Conversely, if someone gave me a capstan lathe, it would be - to me - a heap of junk, not a means of production, until I learned how to work it. Capitalism tends to socialise information and skills - through general education, through publishing, through replacement of skills by machines and so on. But to the extent that information and skills are not socialised they are private property.
Large property in information takes the form of technical monopolies which receive technical rents (usually patents and other intellectual property rights; but there are also unpatented ‘trade secrets’ in many machines, which require ‘reverse engineering’ by skilled engineers to allow duplication of the machine). The tsarist empire specialised in exporting raw materials, mainly grain, in the hope of gaining access to Dutch and British, and later French, intellectual property in various forms (Kagarlitsky). The USSR had to break its back exporting in 1928-31 in order to gain access to US intellectual property in the form of machines.
Under capitalism, small private property in skills or information can in some cases be used to run a small business (like plumbers, dentists or practising lawyers). Similarly, a family farm (or peasant holding) does not just consist of land. It also involves movable capital (animals, etc) and a very wide range of skills. Adam Smith made the point that the farmer or farmworker needs more skills than the urban specialist artisan.4
In other cases, the collective monopoly of the skill held by a group of people allows them in wage bargaining to insist on some sort of premium over the wage. This premium can be in money; or it can be in better working conditions (white-collar workers), in partial freedom from managerial control or in managerial control over others.
If we take away the capitalist market when there has not already been extensive capitalist socialisation of intellectual property (and other small production), we take away with it the dynamic which tends to socialise intellectual property rights, etc. The possessors of small property then confront the rest of the society as monopolists. Unless they are coerced, they will refuse to work until they get what they want, whether it is money, working conditions or being in charge.
Russian ideologies
This is part of what happened to the Russian Revolution. The Russian revolutionaries thought in October 1917 that they were starting the European revolution. When the German workers had not come to their aid by February-March 1918, they were in a situation like cartoon characters who have walked off a cliff and suddenly notice that nothing is holding them up: the economy was collapsing because the possessors of specialist information - whether they were civil servants and army officers, technicians, managers or peasant farmers - were withholding their services from the general economy. To meet this problem the Bolsheviks used coercion (Cheka, hostage-taking and so on). But they also had to provide a carrot: and this carrot was concessions to the spetsy, which meant the end of workers’ control and a return to the subordination of the working class to the managers.
They had also sucked most of the members of the Bolshevik Party into the new state apparatus. Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks in power (2007) provides the most detailed discussion of the consequences in their Petrograd stronghold. More generally, as of October 1917 the Bolshevik party had around 250,000 members, mostly workers. As of 1921 it had a slightly larger membership, but now two-thirds composed of state officials.5 The ‘cadres’ had become a new section of the intelligentsia, petty private proprietors of information and skills.
If the revolutionary movements elsewhere in Europe had succeeded in 1918-21, all of this would have amounted to no more than short-term emergency measures, which is certainly how the Bolshevik leaders thought of it at the time.6 But what actually happened was Bolshevik victory in the civil war, and defeat of revolutionary movements in the west. Under these conditions the Bolsheviks gradually slid from seeing what they were doing as emergency measures to seeing it as socialist construction within the limits of the workers’ state - and then to the idea of socialist construction in a separate country.
Around the time that the Stalinist core abandoned the ‘Marxist’ language of class struggle in 1931-35, socialist construction in a separate country mutated into socialism in one country and with it the claim that the state would survive in socialism, the denial of the existence of classes and class conflict in the USSR and so on.
In a separate country and especially a backward or ‘peripheral’ one, Priestland’s objection to Marxism is true: without the prior socialisation of petty property by capital, the project of communism is utopian (as, in fact, Marx said ...). The result is inherent and irresolvable contradictions between the industrial workers, the intelligentsia (in the two forms of the managers and techs on the one side and the ‘cadres’ on the other) and the peasants. Under such conditions ‘Marxist’ politics is driven to take the utopian forms Priestland describes - elitist-revivalist, technicist, populist-revivalist. What became Stalinism in the broad sense of official Soviet and later Maoist, etc ideology, is driven by this logic. Exactly the same thing happened, albeit in less extreme forms, in Cuba.7
But then - as I said at the outset - comrade Clark adopts only one side of Stalinism, the politics of 1928-31, of the terror and of the Chinese Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. He rejects the other side - the ‘technicist’ arm of the zig-zags as being ‘revisionism’. Priestland’s book shows clearly that this side was already present under Stalin and that Stalin contributed to it; as well as the fact that each of these efforts failed.
Notes
1. Weekly Worker June 19.
2. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
3. R Wortman Scenarios of power Princeton 1995, p14.
4. A Smith Wealth of nations (1776) book I, chapter 10, part 2: www.adamsmith.org/smith/won-b1-c10-pt-2.htm
5. E Acton Rethinking the Russian revolution New York 1990, pp193-94, 207.
6. T Lih, ‘The mystery of the ABC’ Slavic Review spring 1997.
7. WM Leogrande and JM Thomas, ‘Cuba’s quest for economic independence’ Journal of Latin American Studies May 2002, pp325-363 provides a convenient narrative.
