|
. |
Leon
Trotsky's
Stalinism
and
Bolshevism
Transcribed for the Internet by Mike Griffin
for the Trotsky
Internet Archive,
a subset of the Marx/Engels
Internet Archive.
Minor corrections in accordance with the Merit
Pamphlet Ed. (1970) and Lenin's Collected Works (1961) by The Internationalist
Group.
Stalinism and Bolshevism
Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working
class and its vanguard but also lower the general ideological level of
the movement and throw political thinking back to stages long since passed
through. In these conditions the task of the vanguard is above all not
to let itself be carried along by the backward flow: it must swim against
the current. If an unfavourable relation of forces prevents it from holding
political positions it has won, it must at least retain its ideological
positions, because in them is expressed the dearly paid experience of the
past. Fools will consider this policy "sectarian." Actually it
is the only means of preparing for a new tremendous surge forward with
the coming historical tide.
The Reaction Against Marxism and Bolshevism
Great political defeats inevitably provoke a reconsideration of values,
generally occurring in two directions. On the one hand the true vanguard,
enriched by the experience of defeat, defends with tooth and nail the heritage
of revolutionary thought and on this basis attempts to educate new cadres
for the mass struggle to come. On the other hand the routinists, centrists
and dilettantes, frightened by defeat, do their best to destroy the authority
of revolutionary tradition and go backwards in their search for a "New
Word."
One could indicate a great many examples of ideological reaction, most
often taking the form of prostration. All the literature of the Second
and Third Internationals, as well as of their satellites of the London
Bureau, consists essentially of such examples. Not a suggestion of Marxist
analysis. Not a single serious attempt to explain the causes of defeat.
About the future, not one fresh word. Nothing but clichés, conformity,
lies and above all solicitude for their own bureaucratic self-preservation.
It is enough to smell 10 lines from some Hilferding or Otto Bauer to know
this rottenness. The theoreticians of the Comintern are not even worth
mentioning. The famous Dimitrov is as ignorant and commonplace as a shopkeeper
over a mug of beer. The minds of these people are too lazy to renounce
Marxism: they prostitute it. But it is not they that interest us now. Let
us turn to the "innovators."
The former Austrian communist, Willi Schlamm, has devoted a small book
to the Moscow trials, under the expressive title, The Dictatorship of
the Lie. Schlamm is a gifted journalist, chiefly interested in current
affairs. His criticism of the Moscow frame-up, and his exposure of the
psychological mechanism of the "voluntary confessions", are excellent.
However, he does not confine himself to this: he wants to create a new
theory of socialism that would insure us against defeats and frame-ups
in the future. But since Schlamm is by no means a theoretician and is apparently
not well acquainted with the history of the development of socialism, he
returns entirely to pre-Marxian socialism, and notably to its German, that
is to its most backward, sentimental and mawkish variety. Schlamm renounces
dialectics and the class struggle, not to mention the dictatorship of the
proletariat. The problem of transforming society is reduced for him to
the realisation of certain "eternal" moral truths with which
he would imbue mankind, even under capitalism. Willi Schlamm's attempts
to save socialism by the insertion of the moral gland is greeted with joy
and pride in Kerensky's review, Novaya Rossia ( an old provincial
Russian review now published in Paris): as the editors justifiably conclude,
Schlamm has arrived at the principles of true Russian socialism, which
a long time ago opposed the holy precepts of faith, hope and charity to
the austerity and harshness of the class struggle. The "novel"
doctrine of the Russian "Social Revolutionaries" represents,
in its "theoretical" premises, only a return to the pre-March
(1848!) Germany. However, it would be unfair to demand a more intimate
knowledge of the history of ideas from Kerensky than from Schlamm. Far
more important is the fact that Kerensky, who is in solidarity with Schlamm,
was, while head of the government, the instigator of persecutions against
the Bolsheviks as agents of the German general staff: organised, that is,
the same frame-ups against which Schlamm now mobilises his motheaten metaphysical
absolutes.
The psychological mechanism of the ideological reaction of Schlamm and
his like, is not at all complicated. For a while these people took part
in a political movement that swore by the class struggle and appealed,
in word if not in thought, to dialectical materialism. In both Austria
and Germany the affair ended in a catastrophe. Schlamm draws a wholesale
conclusion: this is the result of dialectics and the class struggle! And
since the choice of revelations is limited by historical experience and...
by personal knowledge, our reformer in his search for the Word falls on
a bundle of old rags which he valiantly opposes not only to Bolshevism
but to Marxism as well.
At first glance Schlamm's brand of ideological reaction seems too primitive
(from Marx... to Kerensky!) to pause over. But actually it is very instructive:
precisely in its primitiveness it represents the common denominator of
all other forms of reaction, particularly of those expressed by wholesale
denunciation of Bolshevism.
"Back to Marxism?"
Marxism found its highest historical expression in Bolshevism. Under
the banner of Bolshevism the first victory of the proletariat was achieved
and the first workers' state established. Nothing can erase these facts
from history. But since the October Revolution has led in the present stage
of the triumph of the bureaucracy, with its system of repression, plunder
and falsification - the "dictatorship of the lie", to use Schlamm's
happy expression -- many formalistic and superficial minds leap to a summary
conclusion: one cannot struggle against Stalinism without renouncing Bolshevism.
Schlamm, as we already know, goes farther: Bolshevism, which degenerated
into Stalinism, itself grew out of Marxism; consequently one cannot fight
Stalinism while remaining on the foundation of Marxism. There are others,
less consistent but more numerous, who say on the contrary: "We must
return Bolshevism to Marxism." How? To what Marxism? Before
Marxism became "bankrupt" in the form of Bolshevism it has already
broken down in the form of social democracy, Does the slogan "Back
to Marxism" then mean a leap over the periods of the Second and Third
Internationals... to the First International? But it too broke down in
its time. Thus in the last analysis it is a question of returning... to
the complete works of Marx and Engels. One can accomplish this heroic leap
without leaving one's study and even without taking off one's slippers.
But how are we going to go from our classics (Marx died in 1883, Engels
in 1895) to the tasks of our own time, omitting several decades of theoretical
and political struggles, among them Bolshevism and the October revolution?
None of those who propose to renounce Bolshevism as an historically "bankrupt"
tendency has indicated any other course. So the question is reduced to
the simple advice to study "Capital." We can hardly object. But
the Bolsheviks, too, studied "Capital" and not with their eyes
closed. This did not however prevent the degeneration of the Soviet state
and the staging of the Moscow trials. So what is to be done?
Is Bolshevism Responsible for Stalinism?
Is it true that Stalinism represents the legitimate product of Bolshevism,
as all reactionaries maintain, as Stalin himself avows, as the Mensheviks,
the anarchists, and certain left doctrinaires considering themselves Marxist,
believe? "We have always predicted this" they say. "Having
started with the prohibition of other socialist parties, the repression
of the anarchists, and the setting up of the Bolshevik dictatorship in
the Soviets, the October Revolution could only end in the dictatorship
of the bureaucracy. Stalin is the continuation and also the bankruptcy
of Leninism."
The flaw in this reasoning begins in the tacit identification of Bolshevism,
October Revolution and Soviet Union. The historical process of the struggle
of hostile forces is replaced by the evolution of Bolshevism in a vacuum.
Bolshevism, however, is only a political tendency, closely fused with the
working class but not identical with it. And aside from the working class
there exist in the Soviet Union a hundred million peasants, various nationalities,
and a heritage of oppression, misery and ignorance. The state built up
by the Bolsheviks reflects not only the thought and will of Bolshevism
but also the cultural level of the country, the social composition of the
population, the pressure of a barbaric past and no less barbaric world
imperialism. To represent the process of degeneration of the Soviet state
as the evolution of pure Bolshevism is to ignore social reality in the
name of only one of its elements, isolated by pure logic. One has only
to call this elementary mistake by its real name to do away with every
trace of it.
Bolshevism, at any rate, never identified itself either with the October
Revolution or with the Soviet state that issued from it. Bolshevism considered
itself as one of the factors of history, the "conscious" factor
- a very important but not the decisive one. We never sinned in historical
subjectivism. We saw the decisive factor - on the existing basis of productive
forces - in the class struggle, not only on a national but on an international
scale.
When the Bolsheviks made concessions to the peasant tendency to private
ownership, set up strict rules for membership in the party, purged the
party of alien elements, prohibited other parties, introduced the NEP,
granted enterprises as concessions, or concluded diplomatic agreements
with imperialist governments, they were drawing partial conclusions from
the basic fact that had been theoretically clear to them from the beginning:
that the conquest of power, however important it may be in itself, by no
means transforms the party into a sovereign ruler of the historical process.
Having taken over the state, the party is able, certainly, to influence
the development of society with a power inaccessible to it before; but
in return it submits itself to a 10 times greater influence from all other
elements of society. It can, by the direct attack by hostile forces, be
thrown out of power. Given a more dragging tempo of development, it can
degenerate internally while maintaining itself in power. It is precisely
this dialectic of the historical process that is not understood by those
sectarian logicians who try to find in the decay of the Stalinist bureaucracy
an annihilating argument against Bolshevism.
In essence these gentlemen say: the revolutionary party that contains
in itself no guarantee against its own degeneration is bad. By such a criterion
Bolshevism is naturally condemned: it has no talisman. But the criterion
itself is wrong. Scientific thinking demands a concrete analysis: how and
why did the party degenerate? No one but the Bolsheviks themselves have
up to the present time given such an analysis. To do this they had no need
to break with Bolshevism. On the contrary, they found in its arsenal all
they needed for the clarification of its fate. They drew this conclusion:
certainly Stalinism "grew out "of Bolshevism, not logically,
however, but dialectically; not as a revolutionary affirmation but as a
Thermidorian negation. It is by no means the same.
The Fundamental Prognosis of Bolshevism
The Bolsheviks, however, did not have to wait for the Moscow trials
to explain the reasons for the disintegration of the governing party of
the USSR. Long ago they foresaw and spoke of the theoretical possibility
of this development. Let us remember the prognosis of the Bolsheviks, not
only on the eve of the October Revolution but years before. The specific
alignment of forces in the national and international field can enable
the proletariat to seize power first in a backward country such as Russia.
But the same alignment of forces proves beforehand that without a more
or less rapid victory of the proletariat in the advanced countries
the worker's government in Russia will not survive. Left to itself the
Soviet regime must either fall or degenerate. More exactly: it will first
degenerate and then fall. I myself have written about this more than once,
beginning in 1905. In my History of the Russian Revolution (cf,
"Appendix" to the last volume: "Socialism in One Country")
are collected all the statements on the question made by the Bolshevik
leaders from 1917 until 1923. They all lead to one conculsion: without
a revolution in the West, Bolshevism will be liquidated either by internal
counter-revolution or by external intervention, or by a combination of
both. Lenin stressed again and again that the bureaucratization of the
Soviet regime was not a technical or organizational question, but the potential
beginning of the degeneration of the workers' state.
At the eleventh party congress in March, 1922, Lenin spoke of the support
offered to Soviet Russia at the time of the NEP by certain bourgeois politicians,
particularly the liberal professor Ustrialov. "I am for the support
of the Soviet power in Russia" said Ustrialov, although he was a Cadet,
a bourgeois, a supporter of intervention -- "because it has taken
the road that will lead it back to an ordinary bourgeois state." Lenin
prefers the cynical voice of the enemy to "sugary communistic nonsense."
Soberly and harshly he warns the party of danger: "We must say frankly
that the things Ustrialov speaks about are possible. History knows all
sorts of metamorphoses. Relying on firmness of convictions, loyalty and
other splendid moral qualities is anything but a serious attitude in politics.
A few people may be endowed with splendid moral qualities, but historical
issues are decided by vast masses, which, if the few do not suit them,
may at times treat them none too politely." In a word, the party is
not the only factor of development and on a larger historical scale is
not the decisive one.
"One nation conquers another" continued Lenin at the same congress,
the last in which he participated... "this is simple and intelligible
to all. But what happens to the culture of these nations? Here things are
not so simple. If the conquering nation is more cultured than the vanquished
nation, the former imposes its culture on the latter, but if the opposite
is the case, the vanquished nation imposes its culture on the conqueror.
Has not something like this happened in the capital of the RSFSR? Have
the 4,700 Communists (almost a whole army division and all of them the
very best) come under the influence of an alien culture?" This was
said in 1922, and not for the first time. History is not made by a few
people, even "the best"; and not only that: these "best"
can degenerate in the spirit of an alien, that is, a bourgeois culture.
Not only can the Soviet state abandon the way of socialism, but the Bolshevik
party can, under unfavourable historic conditions, lose its Bolshevism.
From the clear understanding of this danger issued the Left Opposition,
definitely formed in 1923. Recording day by day the symptoms of degeneration,
it tried to oppose to the growing Thermidor the conscious will of the proletarian
vanguard. However, this subjective factor proved to be insufficient. The
"gigantic masses" which, according to Lenin, decide the outcome
of the struggle, become tired of internal privations and of waiting too
long for the world revolution. The mood of the masses declined. The bureaucracy
won the upper hand. It cowed the revolutionary vanguard, trampled upon
Marxism, prostituted the Bolshevik party. Stalinism conquered. In the form
of the Left Opposition, Bolshevism broke with the Soviet bureaucracy and
its Comintern. This was the real course of development.
To be sure, in a formal sense Stalinism did issue from Bolshevism. Even
today the Moscow bureaucracy continues to call itself the Bolshevik party.
It is simply using the old label of Bolshevism the better to fool the masses.
So much the more pitiful are those theoreticians who take the shell for
the kernel and the appearance for the reality. In the identification of
Bolshevism and Stalinism they render the best possible service to the Thermidorians
and precisely thereby play a clearly reactionary role.
In view of the elimination of all other parties from the political field
the antagonistic interests and tendencies of the various strata of the
population must, to a greater or less degree, find their expression in
the governing party. To the extent that the political center of gravity
has shifted form the proletarian vanguard to the bureaucracy, the party
has changed its social structure as well as in its ideology. Owing to the
impestuous course of development, it has suffered in the last 15 years
a far more radical degeneration than did the social democracy in half a
century. The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply
a bloody line but a whole river of blood. The annihilation of all the older
generation of Bolsheviks, an important part of the middle generation which
participated in the civil war, and that part of the youth that took up
most seriously the Bolshevik traditions, shows not only a political but
a thoroughly physical incompatibility between Bolshevism and Stalinism.
How can this be ignored?
Stalinism and "State Socialism"
The anarchists, for their part, try to see in Stalinism the organic
product, not only of Bolshevism and Marxism but of "State socialism"
in general. They are willing to replace Bakunin's patriarchal "federation
of free communes" by the modern federation of free Soviets. But, as
formerly, they are against centralised state power. In fact: one branch
of "state" Marxism, social democracy, after coming to power became
an open agent of capitalism. The other gave birth to a new privileged caste.
It is obvious that the source of the evil lies in the state. From a wide
historical viewpoint, there is a grain of truth in this reasoning. The
state as an apparatus of coercion is an undoubted source of political and
moral infection. This also applies, as experience has shown, to the workers'
state. Consequently it can be said that Stalinism is a product of a condition
of society in which society was still unable to tear itself out of the
strait-jacket of the state. But this situation, containing nothing for
the elevation of Bolshevism or Marxism, characterises only the general
level of mankind, and above all - the relation of forces between the proletariat
and bourgeoisie. Having agreed with the anarchists that the state, even
the workers' state, is the offspring of class barbarism and that real human
history will begin with the abolition of the state, we have still before
us in full force the question: what ways and methods will lead, ultimately,
to the abolition of the state? Recent experience proves that they are certainly
not the methods of anarchism.
The leaders of the Spanish Federation of Labour (CNT), the only important
anarchist organisation in the world, became, in the critical hour, bourgeois
ministers. They explained their open betrayal of the theory of anarchism
by the pressure of "exceptional circumstances". But did not the
leaders of German social democracy invoke, in their time, the same excuse?
Naturally, civil war is not peaceful and ordinary but an "exceptional
circumstance". Every serious revolutionary organisation, however,
prepares precisely for "exceptional circumstances". The experience
of Spain has shown once again that the state can be "denied"
in booklets published in "normal circumstances" by permission
of the bourgeois state, but the conditions of revolution leave no room
for "denial" of the state; they demand, on the contrary, the
conquest of the state. We have not the slightest intention of blaming the
anarchists for not having liquidated the state by a mere stroke of a pen.
A revolutionary party , even having seized power (of which the anarchist
leaders were incapable in spite of the heroism of the anarchist workers),
is still by no means the sovereign ruler of society. But we do severely
blame the anarchist theory, which seemed to be wholly suitable for times
of peace, but which had to be dropped rapidly as soon as the "exceptional
circumstances" of the... revolution had begun. In the old days there
were certain generals - and probably are now - who considered that the
most harmful thing for an army was war. In the same class are those revolutionaries
who complain that their doctrine is destroyed by revolution.
Marxists are wholly in agreement with the anarchists in regard to the final
goal: the liquidation of the state. Marxists are "state-ist"
only to the extent that one cannot achieve the liquidation of the state
simply by ignoring it. The experience of Stalinism does not refute the
teaching of Marxism but confirms it by inversion. The revolutionary doctrine
which teaches the proletariat to orient itself correctly in situations
and to profit actively by them, contains of course no automatic guarantee
of victory. But victory is possible only through the application of this
doctrine. Moreover, the victory must not be thought of as a single event.
It must be considered in the perspective of an historic epoch. The workers'
state - on a lower economic basis and surrounded by imperialism - was transformed
into the gendarmerie of Stalinism. But genuine Bolshevism launched a life
and death struggle against that gendarmerie. To maintain itself Stalinism
is now forced to conduct a direct civil war against Bolshevism under
the name of 'Trotskyism', not only in the USSR but also in Spain. The old
Bolshevik party is dead but Bolshevism is raising its head everywhere.
To deduce Stalinism from Bolshevism or from Marxism is the same as to deduce,
in a larger sense, counter-revolution from revolution. Liberal-conservative
and later reformist thinking has always been characterized by this cliche.
Due to the class structure of society, revolutions have always produced
counter-revolutions. Does this not indicate, asks the logician, that there
is some inner flaw in the revolutionary method? However, neither the liberals
nor the reformists have succeeded, as yet, in inventing a more 'economical'
method. But if it is not easy to rationalise the living historic process,
it is not at all difficult to give a rational interpretation of the alternation
of its waves, and thus by pure logic to deduce Stalinism from "state
socialism", fascism from Marxism, reaction from revolution, in a word,
the antithesis from the thesis. In this domain as in many others anarchist
thought is the prisoner of liberal rationalism. Real revolutionary thinking
is not possible without dialectics.
The Political "Sins" of Bolshevism as the
Source of Stalinism
The arguments of the rationalists assume at times, at least in their
outer form, a more concrete character. They do not deduce Stalinism from
Bolshevism as a whole but from its political sins. the Bolsheviks - according
to Gorter, Pannekoek, certain German "Spartakists" and others
- replaced the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of
the party; Stalin replaced the dictatorship of the party with the dictatorship
of the bureaucracy, the Bolsheviks destroyed all parties but their own;
Stalin strangled the Bolshevik party in the interests of a Bonapartist
clique. The Bolsheviks made compromises with the bourgeoisie; Stalin became
its ally and support. The Bolsheviks preached the necessity of participation
in the old trade unions and in the bourgeois parliament; Stalin made friends
with the trade union bureaucracy and bourgeois democracy. One can make
such comparisons at will. For all their apparent effectiveness they are
entirely empty.
The proletariat can take power only through its vanguard. In itself the
necessity for state power arises from the insufficient cultural level of
the masses and their heterogeneity. In the revolutionary vanguard, organised
in a party, is crystallised the aspiration of the masses to obtain their
freedom. Without the confidence of the class in the vanguard, without support
of the vanguard by the class, there can be no talk of the conquest of power.
In this sense the proletarian revolution and dictatorship are the work
of the whole class, but only under the leadership of the vanguard. The
Soviets are the only organised form of the tie between the vanguard and
the class. A revolutionary content can be given this form only by the party.
This is proved by the positive experience of the October Revolution and
by the negative experience of other countries (Germany, Austria, finally,
Spain). No one has either shown in practice or tried to explain articulately
on paper how the proletariat can seize power without the political leadership
of a party that knows what it wants. The fact that this party subordinates
the Soviets politically to its leaders has, in itself, abolished the Soviet
system no more than the domination of the conservative majority has abolished
the British parliamentary system.
As far as the prohibition of other Soviet parties is concerned,
it did not flow from any "theory" of Bolshevism but was a measure
of defence of the dictatorship in a backward and devastated country, surrounded
by enemies on all sides. For the Bolsheviks it was clear from the beginning
that this measure, later completed by the prohibition of factions inside
the governing party itself, signalized a tremendous danger. However, the
root of the danger lay not in the doctrine or the tactics but in the material
weakness of the dictatorship, in the difficulties of its internal and international
situation. If the revolution had triumphed, even if only in Germany, the
need of prohibiting the other Soviet parties would immediately have fallen
away. It is absolutely indisputable that the domination of a single party
served as the juridical point of departure for the Stalinist totalitarian
regime. But the reason for this development lies neither in Bolshevism
nor in the prohibition of other parties as a temporary war measure, but
in the number of defeats of the proletariat in Europe and Asia.
The same applies to the struggle with anarchism. In the heroic epoch of
the revolution the Bolsheviks went hand in hand with genuinely revolutionary
anarchists. Many of them were drawn into the ranks of the party. The author
of these lines discussed with Lenin more then once the possibility of allotting
the anarchists certain territories where, with the consent of the local
population, they would carry out their stateless experiment. But civil
war, blockade and hunger left no room for such plans. The Kronstadt insurrection?
But the revolutionary government could naturally not "present"
to the insurrectionary sailors the fortress which protected the capital
only because the reactionary peasant-soldier rebellion was joined by a
few doubtful anarchists. A concrete historical analysis of the events leaves
not the slightest room for legends, built up on ignorance and sentimentality,
concerning Kronstadt, Makhno and other episodes of the revolution.
There remains only the fact that the Bolsheviks from the beginning applied
not only conviction but also compulsion, often to a most brutal degree.
It is also indisputable that later the bureaucracy which grew out of the
revolution monopolised the system of compulsions for its own use. Every
stage of development, even such catastrophic stages as revolution and counter-revolution,
flows from the preceding stage, is rooted in it and carries over some of
its features. Liberals, including the Webbs, have always maintained that
the Bolshevik dictatorship represented only a new edition of Czarism. They
close their eyes to such "details" as the abolition of the monarchy
and the nobility, the handing over of the land to the peasants, the expropriation
of capital, the introduction of the planned economy, atheist education,
etc. In the same way liberal-anarchist thought closes its eyes to the fact
that the Bolshevik revolution, with all its repressions, meant an upheaval
of social relations in the interests of the masses, whereas Stalin's Thermidorian
upheaval accompanies the transformation of Soviet society in the interest
of a privileged minority. It is clear that in the identification of Stalinism
with Bolshevism there is not a trace of socialist criteria.
Questions of Theory
One of the most outstanding features of Bolshevism has been its severe,
exacting, even quarrelsome attitude toward questions of doctrine. The 26
volumes of Lenin's works will remain forever an example of the highest
theoretical conscientiousness. Without this fundamental quality Bolshevism
would never have fulfilled its historic role. In this regard Stalinism,
coarse, ignorant and thoroughly empiric, lies at the opposite pole.
The Opposition declared more than 10 years ago in its program: "Since
Lenin's death a whole set of new theories has been created, whose only
purpose is to justify the backsliding of the Stalinists from the path of
the international proletarian revolution." Only a few days ago an
American writer, Liston M. Oak, who has participated in the Spanish revolution,
wrote: "The Stalinists are in fact are today the foremost revisionists
of Marx and Lenin -- Bernstein did not dare to go half as far as Stalin
in revising Marx." This is absolutely true. One must add only that
Bernstein actually felt certain theoretical needs: he tried conscientiously
to establish a correspondence between the reformist practices of social
democracy and its programme. The Stalinist bureaucracy, however, not only
has nothing in common with Marxism but is in general foreign to any doctrine
or system whatsoever. Its "ideology" is thoroughly permeated
with police subjectivism, its practice is the empiricism of crude violence.
In keeping with its essential interests the caste of usurpers is hostile
to any theory: it can give an account of its social role neither to itself
nor to anyone else. Stalin revises Marx and Lenin not with the theoreticians
pen but with the heel of the GPU.
Questions of Morals
Complaints of the "immorality" of Bolshevism come particularly
from those boastful nonentities whose cheap masks were torn away by Bolshevism.
In petit bourgeois, intellectual, democratic, "socialist", literary,
parliamentary and other circles, conventional values prevail, or a conventional
language to cover their lack of values. This large and motley society for
mutual protection - "live and let live" - cannot bear the touch
of the Marxist lancet on its sensitive skin. The theoreticians, writers
and moralists, hesitating between different camps, thought and continue
to think that the Bolsheviks maliciously exaggerate differences, are incapable
of "loyal" collaboration and by their "intrigues" disrupt
the unity of the workers' movement. Moreover, the sensitive and squeamish
centrist has always thought that the Bolsheviks were "calumniating"
him -- simply because they carried through to the end for him his half-developed
thoughts: he himself was never able to. But the fact remains that only
that precious quality, an uncompromising attitude toward all quibbling
and evasion, can educate a revolutionary party which will not be taken
unawares by "exceptional circumstances."
The moral qualities of every party flow, in the last analysis, from the
historical interests that it represents. the moral qualities of Bolshevism,
self-renunciation, disinterestedness, audacity and contempt for every kind
of tinsel and falsehood -- the highest qualities of human nature! -- flow
from revolutionary intransigence in the service of the oppressed. The Stalinist
bureaucracy imitates also in this domain the words and gestures of Bolshevism.
But when "intransigence" and "flexibility" are applied
by a police apparatus in the service of a privileged minority they become
a source of demoralisation and gangsterism. One can feel only contempt
for these gentlemen who identify the revolutionary heroism of the Bolsheviks
with the bureaucratic cynicism of the Thermidorians.
Even now, in spite of the dramatic events in the recent period, the average
philistine prefers to believe that the struggle between Bolshevism ("Trotskyism")
and Stalinism concerns a clash of personal ambitions, or, at best, a conflict
between two "shades" of Bolshevism. The crudest expression of
this opinion is given by Norman Thomas, leader of the American Socialist
Party: "There is little reason to believe," he writes (Socialist
Review, September 1937, pg. 6), "that if Trotsky had won (!) instead
of Stalin, there would be an end of intrigue, plots, and a reign of fear
in Russia." And this man considers himself... a Marxist. One would
have the same right to say: "There is little reason to believe that
if instead of Pius XI, the Holy See were occupied by Norman I, the Catholic
Church would have been transformed into a bulwark of socialism." Thomas
fails to understand that it is not a question of a match between Stalin
and Trotsky, but of an antagonism between the bureaucracy and the proletariat.
To be sure, the governing stratum of the USSR is forced even now to adapt
itself to the still not wholly liquidated heritage of revolution, while
preparing at the same time through direct civil war (bloody "purge"
-- mass annihilation of the discontented) a change of the social regime.
But in Spain the Stalinist clique is already acting openly as a bulwark
of the bourgeois order against socialism. The struggle against the Bonapartist
bureaucracy is turning before our eyes into class struggle: two worlds,
two programs, two moralities. If Thomas thinks that the victory of the
socialist proletariat over the infamous caste of oppressors would not politically
and morally regenerate the Soviet regime, he proves only that for all his
reservations, shufflings and pious sighs he is far nearer to the Stalinist
bureaucracy than to the workers.
Like other exposers of Bolshevik "immorality," Thomas has
simply not grown to the level of revolutionary morality.
The Traditions of Bolshevism and the Fourth International
The "lefts" who tried to skip Bolshevism in their "return"
to Marxism generally confined themselves to isolated panaceas: boycott
of parliament, creation of "genuine" Soviets. All this could
still seem extremely profound in the first heat of the post-war days. But
now, in the light of most recent experience, such "infantile diseases"
have no longer even the interest of a curiosity. The Dutchmen Gorter and
Pannekoek, the German "Spartakists," the Italian Bordigists,
showed their independence from Bolshevism only by artificially inflating
one of its features and opposing it to the rest. But nothing has remained
either in practice or in theory of these "left" tendencies: an
indirect but important proof that Bolshevism is the only possible
form of Marxism for this epoch.
The Bolshevik party has shown in action a combination of the highest revolutionary
audacity and political realism. It established for the first time the only
relation between vanguard and class that can assure victory. It has proved
by experience that the alliance between the proletariat and the oppressed
masses of the rural and urban petit bourgeoisie is possible only through
the political overthrow of the traditional petit bourgeois parties. The
Bolshevik party has shown the entire world how to carry out armed insurrection
and the seizure of power. Those who propose the abstraction of Soviets
from the party dictatorship should understand that only thanks to the Bolshevik
leadership were the Soviets able to lift themselves out of the mud of reformism
and attain the state form of the proletariat. The Bolshevik party achieved
in the civil war the correct combination of military art and Marxist politics.
Even if the Stalinist bureaucracy should succeed in destroying the economic
foundations of the new society, the experience of planned economy under
the leadership of the Bolshevik party will have entered history for all
time as one of the greatest teachings of mankind. This can be ignored only
by bruised and offended sectarians who have turned their backs on the process
of history.
But this is not all. The Bolshevik party was able to carry on its magnificent
"practical" work only because it illuminated all its steps with
theory. Bolshevism did not create this theory: it was furnished by Marxism.
But Marxism is the theory of movement, not of stagnation. Only events on
a tremendous historical scale could enrich the theory itself. Bolshevism
brought an invaluable contribution to Marxism in its analysis of the imperialist
epoch as an epoch of wars and revolutions; of bourgeois democracy in the
era of decaying capitalism; of the correlation between the general strike
and the insurrection; of the role of party, Soviets and trade unions in
the period of proletarian revolution; in its theory of the Soviet state,
of the economy of transition, of fascism and Bonapartism in the epoch of
capitalist decline; finally in its analysis of the degeneration of the
Bolshevik party itself and of the Soviet state. Let any other tendency
be named that has added anything essential to the conclusions and generalisations
of Bolshevism. Theoretically and politically Vandervelde, De Brouckére,
Hilferding, Otto Bauer, Léon Blum, Zyromski, not to mention Major
Attlee and Norman Thomas, live on the dilapitated leftovers of the past.
The degeneration of the Comintern is most crudely expressed by the fact
that it has dropped to the theoretical level of the Second International.
All the varieties of intermediary groups (Independent Labour Party of Great
Britain, POUM and their like) adapt every week new haphazard fragments
of Marx and Lenin to their current needs. They can teach the workers nothing.
Only the founders of the Fourth International, who have made their own
the whole tradition of Marx and Lenin, take a serious attitude towards
theory. Philistines may jeer that 20 years after the October victory the
revolutionaries are again thrown back to modest propagandist preparation.
The big capitalists are, in this question as in many others, far more penetrating
than the petit bourgeois who imagine themselves "socialists"
or "communists." It is no accident that the subject of the Fourth
International does not leave the columns of the world press. The burning
historical need for revolutionary leadership promises to the Fourth International
an exceptionally rapid tempo of growth. The greatest guarantee of its further
success lies in the fact that it has not arisen away from the great historical
road, but is an organic outgrowth of Bolshevism.
28 August 1937
internationalistgroup@msn.com
Return
to THE INTERNATIONALIST GROUP Home Page
|