Trotskyism has so much wrong with it that a book would be needed to fully examine, analyse and refute its false claims. That will have to wait another day. For now, I will content myself with rebutting perhaps the central argument of Trotskyism. That is the claim Stalinism is not an essential product of Marxism. Rather, it is an aberration. Trotskyists hold that it was the product of the difficult objective conditions faced by the Russian revolutionaries after they seized power. Trotskyists have been at pains to deny that Stalinism had anything to do with Marxist ideology per se. Under no circumstances will they acknowledge that the actions of Lenin and Trotsky were directly responsible for Stalinism. Nor will they acknowledge that Stalinism was simply the logical conclusion of Bolshevik doctrine. Trotsky was always adamant that Stalinism was the product of Russian backwardness. It was Trotsky’s argument that the ‘objective conditions’ within Russia had been unfavourable towards socialism from the beginning. Therefore, Stalinism was inevitable unless the revolution spread to the more advanced countries of the West. Russia had to contend with a backward, agrarian economy and a largely peasant population. It also had to deal with the destruction caused by a world war, a civil war in which imperialist countries backed the reactionary White Army, and international isolation. As Trotsky explained in ‘Stalinism and Bolshevism’:
‘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, diverse 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 true name to do away with every trace of it.’
In this situation, a self-aggrandising bureaucracy was able to exploit the exhaustion and decimation of the working-class (which was referred to as ‘de-classed’). This bureaucracy substituted itself for the workers. In so doing, it adopted the doctrine of ‘Socialism In One Country’ as a concession to Russian peasant chauvinism, and backed away from support for international socialism. For a time, it even restored capitalism in the form of the NEP. These began as measures done out of expediency, but came to represent a definite trend of degeneration.
‘When the Bolsheviks made concessions to the peasant tendency, to private ownership, set up strict rules for membership of 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 in society. It can, by the direct attack by hostile forces, be thrown out of power. Given a more drawn out tempo of development, it can degenerate internally while holding on to 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 a crushing argument against Bolshevism.’
Trotsky then does something surprising. He concedes that Stalinism emerged from 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 explanation 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.’ (bold mine.)
Trotsky does something he commonly does in his writings. He appears to concede a point, before quickly drawing back and doubling down on what he was saying before. This often takes the form of ‘on the one hand but on the other hand’ statements like the one above. He concedes that Stalinism emerged from practices put into place by the Bolsheviks (including the time when he and Lenin were in charge of the party). However, he then insists that Stalinism was a ‘negation’ of Bolshevism rather than an ‘affirmation’. This is a distinction without a difference. Anyone can see that Stalinism was both of those things – an affirmation as well as a negation. Every ideology has elements of continuity and elements of difference. Stalinism is no different. In some regards, Stalinism was indeed a negation of Bolshevism. Stalin killed party members – Lenin never did. Stalin created a cult of personality around himself. Lenin never did. But there are also important examples of continuity. Under Lenin, a de facto alliance was established between the USSR and Germany, the two great post-war outcasts of Europe. There was military cooperation between the two powers in the form of the Rapallo Treaty, just to name one such agreement. The infamous pact signed between Hitler and Stalin in 1939 was in some ways the logical conclusion of this. Under Lenin and Trotsky, the USSR was already in the business of betraying its socialist allies to preserve its own power. An example is when Ataturk had the leaders of the Turkish Communist Party murdered whilst the USSR looked the other way and maintained friendly relations. Another is when Reza Shah of Persia did likewise to the Communists in his country. Lenin and Trotsky began the process of stamping out internal party democracy when they smashed the Workers’ Opposition in 1921. They also banned all rival parties, establishing a one-party state and a dictatorship of the central committee within the party. Stalin took this to its logical conclusion by establishing a dictatorship of one man at the head of the Central Committee – as Trotsky predicted in his ‘Our Political Tasks’ in 1903:
‘In the internal politics of the Party these methods lead, as we shall see below, to the Party organisation “substituting” itself for the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organisation, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee.’
And perhaps most importantly of all, Lenin was staunchly anti-capitalist, like every other Bolshevik. The NEP was never seen as a permanent solution to Russia’s economic woes, but as a stop-gap until the time was ripe to transition to socialism. Stalin had always been sceptical of the NEP (despite his short-lived support for Bukharin’s pro-NEP faction), and it wasn’t too difficult for him to step forward as the champion of the workers and the soul of true Bolshevism against the kulaks and their supporters within the Communist Party. Forced collectivisation, with all its horrors is the logical conclusion of Bolshevik anti-capitalism. (Stephen Kotkin’s biography on Stalin is brilliant at explaining this.) The fact that the key thing Trotsky was willing to defend about Stalin’s regime was the nationalised planned economy (even if he recoiled at how it had been brought into being) should give us a clue as to the essential link between Stalinism (for all its perversions) and Leninist/Marxist ideology more generally.
It is simply cheek for Trotsky to draw his utterly false and sophistical distinction between Stalinism as an ‘affirmation’ of Bolshevism and Stalinism as a ‘negation’ of Bolshevism. It is both of those things. Just as Nazism is in some ways the affirmation of aspects of German nationalism, but in other ways is the negation of it (i.e. in its profound anti-liberalism, which was at odds with mainstream German nationalism pre-Nazism). Or how American liberalism is in some ways an affirmation of old-school, classical liberalism, but in other ways a negation of it. Every ideology is an affirmation of some beliefs and a negation of others. What Trotsky is saying is simply meaningless. The fact remains that Stalinism is the logical conclusion of Bolshevism (and indeed, Marxism), just as Nazism is in some ways the logical conclusion of German nationalism. This is not to say that Nazism was the inevitable conclusion of nationalism, or that Stalinism was the inevitable conclusion of Bolshevism or Marxism. That would be like saying that anarchism is the inevitable conclusion of liberalism because anarchism takes liberalism’s emphasis on individual freedom to an extreme. However, to pretend there is no essential connection between Marxism and Stalinism is simply hypocrisy. So then, to what extent can the horrors of Stalinism be blamed on Marxist ideology itself, rather than the difficult context the Bolsheviks had to deal with?
It is worth looking at what there is in Marxist ideology which might have predisposed the Bolsheviks to tyranny and dictatorship and allowed for the rise of someone like Stalin. It is no secret to anyone that Marxism has always had a difficult relationship with the notion of democracy. Marx never explained how democracy was to work in the future socialist society. He assumed that the revolutionary workers would find a suitable solution. As if that was not enough, Marx always defined the dictatorship of the proletariat as an entity which would be unconstrained by ‘bourgeois’ legality and would do whatever was necessary to crush counter-revolutionary opposition. This means that the liberal conception of a state governed by laws, with a separation of powers and with all citizens equal before the law, is anathema to Marxism. Instead, all power is vested in a centralised state, which is also supposed to be democratic and accountable to the working-class. Yet this clearly sets up a situation where abuses of power can take place.
Marx and Engels were clear that any future socialist society would be a centralised entity, and that the workers’ movement that would bring this society about would also have to be a centralised entity in which the discipline of the factory would be transferred to political life. Marx and Bakunin fell out over precisely this principle, and the Second International collapsed as a result. The German SPD, the special child of Marx and Engels, was infamous for being in the hands of a largely unaccountable bureaucracy with Bebel and Kautsky calling the shots. Robert Michels, the German sociologist, even used the SPD as a case study of how political organisations can fall prey to bureaucracy. Michels observed that if the SPD was like this now, how likely was it that if they seized power, the result would be the democratic, participatory society they claimed to be fighting for?
It so happens that Lenin was a strong admirer of the SPD and of its centralised structure, and actually wanted the Russian Marxists to model their own organisation on it. In his infamous 1902 work, What is to be Done?, Lenin marked out the SPD for special praise. When he later disavowed Kautsky and the other SPD leaders, it was for their betrayal of Marxism on the eve of WWI, not because their organisation was excessively centralised. When the Bolsheviks seized power, they were not the centralised body they would later become. In fact, as historians such as Alexander Rabinowitch have noted, the Bolsheviks were a chaotic patchwork of fiefdoms and committees which did not always obey party discipline. This actually helped the Bolsheviks in 1917, as Lenin was able to lean upon the rebellious rank-and-file of the party to push the recalcitrant leadership into agreeing to an insurrection. However, as the civil war wore on, Lenin had less and less patience for internal party debate. By 1921, Lenin proclaimed the ban on factions and stifled internal party debate. What had once been a vibrant and fractious organisation, full of passionate discussion and intense disputation, became an intellectually desiccated entity which was integrated with the state. Trotsky and his apologists like to maintain that the ban on factions was an emergency measure which was meant to be repealed. There is in fact little evidence in Lenin’s speeches that the ban had any sort of time limit. Trotskyists point to the context – the threat from counter-revolutionary imperialist powers, and the frightening experience of the Kronstadt uprising – as reasons why the Bolsheviks had to clamp down on inter-party democracy. Yet even if this is the case, it remains true that Lenin was ideologically predisposed to centralism anyway. All his talk about the importance of democracy and open discussion is counterbalanced by his obsession with discipline and centralism. For most of his career, he did not always get his way on this. However, once the Bolsheviks were in power, Lenin set about remoulding the party in his own image. As part of this process, Stalin was made General Secretary of the Party and the powers of this office were enhanced. Lenin knew that Stalin was a ruthless and unscrupulous individual, which is precisely why he was appointed – Lenin trusted him to get things done.
The fact is, even before Kronstadt, the Bolsheviks had been gradually centralising power. They had subverted the trade unions. They had subordinated the workers’ committees and soviets to the parties. They had perverted the judicial system. They rigged elections. Indeed, the most repressive actions taken by the Bolshevik regime in its early years occurred right after the end of the civil war with the Whites. It was in the immediate aftermath of the conflict that the Bolsheviks banned the Mensheviks as a political party, exiled Martov and eliminated what was left of press freedom. It is hard to see how this can be blamed on the ‘difficult objective conditions’ of civil war and imperialist intervention, especially since all the foreign troops had been withdrawn at this point (or were in the process of being withdrawn). The difficult context probably accelerated the Bolsheviks’ actions, but they would most likely have taken them anyway. The end of the war saw fiercer repression, not less.
The sensible conclusion for any individual to draw is that Stalinism was only in part a product of the difficult context the Bolsheviks had to face, and in part was a product of certain problematic aspects of Marxist ideology. To use a Marxist phrase, there is a dialectical relationship between the ‘objective conditions’ and the ‘subjective factor’ of Bolshevik ideology that led to Stalinism. It is simply not good enough for Marxists to protest that the ‘objective conditions’ were unfavourable. As Trotsky himself says in ‘Stalinism and Bolshevism’ (though in the context of making criticisms of the anarchists): ‘Every serious revolutionary organisation, however, prepares precisely for “exceptional circumstances.”‘ The Bolsheviks knew that in seizing power, they would be attempting to govern a large, largely peasant country, full of people who were hostile to Marxism. They certainly knew that there would be imperialist intervention. Why wouldn’t the great nations of the capitalist world seek to destroy a state which proclaimed its desire to overthrow capitalism? (As it happens, the ‘imperialist intervention’ is exaggerated in Trotskyist accounts for propaganda purposes, – the foreign contingents present in Russia at the time were relatively small and ineffectual.) This was inevitable.
Perhaps the most preposterous claim of all is that Stalinism could have been avoided if the revolution had spread to the more advanced countries of Europe (i.e. Germany). This is wishful thinking. This rests upon the misguided and utterly counterfactual assumption that the German working-class would have faced next to no obstacles in their bid to create a Marxist regime right in the heart of Europe. This project would be even more vulnerable to counter-revolutionary encirclement than the Bolsheviks, with an even more reactionary peasantry than that populating Russia, with a doggedly reactionary officer corps running the armed forces. As if that was not enough, the German economy had been just as damaged as the Russian economy by WWI, if not more so. How on earth were the German workers to fight a brutal civil war and a bunch of imperialist powers at the same time as reviving a shattered economy and feeding a starving and disease-ridden population? One of the great myths of Trotskyism is that a successful German revolution was some sort of panacea that could have secured Marxism victory on the continent. A successful German revolution would have been more difficult to pull off than a Russian one (which, let’s face it, succeeded in large part because of chance). In any case, revolutions are by their nature disruptive. Think of the chaos that succeeded the Russian Revolution, and magnify that by ten times for a more industrial country with a more interconnected economy. Russia had a resilient countryside that could endure periods of economic difficulty. It is hard to imagine the German countryside being as resilient. The myth of the ‘missed opportunity’ of a German revolution looms large in Trotskyist thinking and it has no historical basis whatsoever.
Here is the thing. If the ‘objective conditions’ have to be perfect for Marxist socialism to succeed, then Marxist socialism is a forlorn hope. Essentially, Trotskyists are arguing that socialism can only triumph if the workers seize power with no opposition – with no civil war, no economic disruption, no imperialist intervention – and in a country with a strong, developed, advanced economy ready-made. Pie-in-the sky poppycock.