‘The USSR wasn’t real socialism’

The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky

Trotskyists are fond of saying that the USSR wasn’t ‘real socialism’. They have any number of excuses – economic and cultural backwardness, imperialist encirclement, counter-revolution, diplomatic isolation, etc. They are convinced that this was unique to the experience of Russia, and that other revolutions in the ‘advanced’ countries of the West will not have faced this problem. Moreover, they ignore the fact that the Communist experiment has been attempted in various countries with wildly different cultural and economic contexts (those damned ‘objective conditions’), and yet, the socialist paradise has never been established on this earth. After 100 years of attempts, surely we need to call time on this nonsense? (To which the typical Marxist response is, ‘We haven’t had enough time to judge communism’. Of course, they think that enough time has elapsed to judge capitalism.)

Besides, imagine if we used this excuse for other ideologies:

‘Real Nazism has never been tried. It degenerated. The Night of the Long Knives drew a river of blood between the true Nazism of Strasser and Röhm and the distortions of Hitler. Moreover, we failed to wipe out all the Jews, we faced economic crisis, imperialist encirclement and a world war. Twelve years is not enough time for us to judge Nazism as a failure. We need to keep doing Nazism, again and again, until we get somewhere.’

As it happens, Otto Strasser and his followers actually believed this.

Or a Christian:

‘Real Christianity has never been tried. The early Christian Church degenerated due to worldly corruption. The Catholic Church and others distorted Jesus’ true teachings. The persecution of the Arians and Jews, the Crusades and the Inquisition drew a river of blood between the true Christianity of Jesus and what we have today.’

(As it happens, Martin Luther actually believed most of this, as did generations of Protestants.)

Or a liberal:

‘Real liberalism has never been tried. The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States was not the fault of liberal democracy. It was an aberration from true liberalism. The vision of the Founding Fathers degenerated as a result of the difficult objective conditions – the existence of slavery and hostile Indian tribes, as well as globalisation. It is too soon to give up on liberalism – after all, it has only existed for a couple hundred years! America has only existed for about 250 years – we need to give the American bourgeoisie more time to work out the defects in their system. I say, let’s give critical support to the United States – in time, true liberalism will be restored.’

Or a neocon:

‘Eight years in Iraq is not enough time to judge the nation-building experiment a failure. The noble vision of George Bush and his advisors degenerated due to the difficult objective conditions of tribal and sectarian warfare, Islamist extremism, encirclement by Iran and Syria and the global financial crisis. We need to go back there and stick it out for a few more years, before deciding that the Iraq War has failed.’

Or an ISIS supporter:

‘Real Islam has never been tried. Islam degenerated after the death of the Prophet (pbuh) because of the wickedness of mankind and the difficult objective conditions. Only when all of the world has been conquered and made part of an eternal Caliphate will we have real Islam. A millennia and a half is not enough to judge Islam as a failure. We must keep fighting, we must keep killing, until we have won total victory.’

As you can see, it is utterly arbitrary to say that we cannot judge an ideology until a certain amount of time has elapsed. Any ideology can use this to protect itself from criticism and scrutiny. Nazism was a short-lived phenomenon, but we are still able to pass judgement on it as one of the greatest evils of human history. Likewise, even if Bolshevism had been snuffed out after just a few years, we could still rightfully judge it as a murderous disaster. The fact that it went on to last for 70 years simply gives us even more time with which to pass judgement on it. 100 years, though it isn’t much on the scale of recorded human history, is still a statistically significant amount of time (about 2%). Even a short-lived event in human history can have a massive impact. No one would question that WWII had an enormous impact on human history, even though it only lasted six and a half years. Imagine someone saying, ‘WWII only lasted six years – that is not enough time for us to judge world wars as incredibly bloody and destructive. Let’s try at least one more world war, just to make sure.’ Besides, Marxists themselves acknowledge this in practice when they celebrate the October Revolution of 1917 and the legacy it left behind. How many times do you hear a Marxist say ‘Let’s wait another 100 years before deciding whether October was a good thing or not.’ Unless you are a left-communist (who generally disparage the whole legacy of Bolshevism), then you are likely to celebrate October. Indeed, Trotskyist and Stalinist groups all over the world marked 100 years since October, and celebrated its achievements, even if Trotskyists caveated this by reminding us all of the ‘degeneration’ that set in just shortly afterwards.

Here is where the hypocrisy lies. Marxists think it is okay to pass judgement on communism after 100 years if that judgement is positive in nature. But it is ‘too soon’ to judge communism if that judgement is negative. They happily celebrate the October coup every year, and they see no reason why they should not heap praise upon the legacy of Lenin’s putsch and the ‘inspiration’ it provided to generations of leftists, but as soon as you seek to criticise the October revolution, suddenly, it is ‘too soon’ to pass judgement. We should have no fear of exposing this blatant double standard.

In any case, it must be said that every ideology will, when implemented in practice, deviate from the ideals expressed in its teachings. This deviation becomes greater the longer the ideology has lasted. That is what happens when dogma comes into contact with reality. Even the United States, wedded as it always has been to classical liberalism and the doctrine of free markets, is far from a purely capitalist state. It has, if you will, ‘degenerated’ (at least, from the point of view of a hardcore classical liberal or even an anarcho-capitalist). The ‘degeneration’ can be traced all the way back to the Federalist-Democrat feud over whether to have a bigger or smaller central government, through to the victory of the Union in the civil war, to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, to the present. Here in Britain, the Anglican Church was founded as the state church and the monarch is meant to be the guardian of public morality, yet nowadays the Church has ‘degenerated’ into issuing liberal, inter-faith platitudes, and becomes less recognisably Christian with every passing generation and every emptying pew, whilst the Queen, who is head of the Church, does not go beyond pleasant bromides when speaking on matters of faith. When Mussolini’s fascists seized power in Italy, the ‘objective conditions’ caused Fascism to ‘degenerate’ and become a more pro-monarchist, pro-capitalist, pro-Church ideology than it had been formerly. (Mussolini had been a passionate republican, socialist and anti-Catholic.) When Mussolini made his compromises with Italy’s traditional institutions, some of his followers, who still saw Fascism as a branch of socialism, abandoned him in fury. For all of these reasons, we might say that America is not ‘true liberalism’, Anglicanism is not ‘real Christianity’ and Italian Fascism is not a ‘true’ representation of fascism, but this would be unbelievably arbitrary.

Even Trotsky concedes in In Defence of Marxism that every effort to implement socialism is likely to deviate from the ideal (although Trotsky uses the strange term ‘programmatic norm’, as if his ideal of socialism has ever been the ‘norm’ in any socialist state). Yet instead of giving up on socialism, Trotsky insisted that ‘more time’ was needed in order to give the degenerated workers’ state in the USSR a chance to revive and restore true socialism. One can understand having this attitude in 1939. Not in 2021. Every single effort to implement socialism has seen a deviation from the ideal, and deviated in the exact same way and for the exact same reasons. We might then crystallise these deviations into a hard-and-fast rule about the likely fate of every socialist experiment, and on that basis, give up on socialism entirely, instead of clinging to the false belief that once the ‘objective conditions’ are different, socialism will work. What Trotskyists call ‘objective conditions’, the rest of us call the real world. In the real world, there will be crises and unforeseen events, and any socialist experiment will, like every political experiment in human history, have to deal with them. Here are all the crises America had to deal with just decades after its founding:

-Several years of wrangling over what form of government to create, finally put into practice from 1789 onwards.

-Recessions and financial panics

-The War of 1812, which could have brought an end to the nascent republic

-Disputed elections

-Dispute over slavery and rights of central government vis-a-vis the states, leading to the American Civil War and over a million dead

-Wars on the frontier with Native Americans and Mexicans

-Imperialist encirclement by Britain, France and Spain (which could have brought about Confederate victory in the civil war and the end of the United States as we know it)

And yet today, America is the most powerful country in the world.

How about Israel? A tiny country in the Middle East surrounded by hostile enemies. A country which had to fight three wars within the space of 25 years, absorb millions of refugees and preserve a fragile, partisan political system, which has barely natural resources and was for decades dependent on German reparations and American aid. Yet today they are the Middle East’s most successful country and only liberal democracy, with a powerhouse economy.

What about France, the home of revolution? Let’s look at the action-packed several decades of the 18th and 19th centuries:

-The Revolution of 1789, which brings about civil war, revolutionary dictatorship, foreign imperialist encirclement and invasion, a coup by Napoleon Bonaparte which leads to the restoration of a monarchy and decades of war.

-1830: A revolution overthrows the restored monarchy.

-1848: Another revolution which overthrows France’s last king and restores a short-lived republic.

-1852: A coup brings Napoleon III to power and leads to the restoration of the Bonapartist monarchy

-1870: A German invasion destroys the Second Empire and leads to the creation of a Third Republic.

Then there was all the drama of the 20th century, including several years under German occupation in WWII. Yet today France can hardly be called a dysfunctional country, at least not compared to anywhere outside the West. Meanwhile, we are supposed to give the USSR a free pass because it had a difficult birth at the beginning, even though much of its misery was self-inflicted and the fault of Lenin and his demented, murderous utopianism rather than ‘objective conditions’. The fact that it spent decades as a superpower second only to the United States is supposed to be overlooked.

Let us face facts. If the early ideals that animated the USSR could not survive contact with reality, then that is the fault of Marxism and socialism. The price to be paid for purism and dogmatism is to be continuously disappointed. There will never be perfect or ideal conditions for any political project. I still remember an absurd analogy my branch secretary used to describe the failure of the USSR. ‘Imagine you are working on a scientific experiment in a laboratory, and someone comes in and smashes all your equipment. How can you say that the experiment has failed when it was not allowed to develop?’ This is of course an idiotic analogy. A scientific experiment can be consciously controlled so as to make allowance for all the variables that might distort the eventual result. A political project does not work the same way. Politics involves dealing with things that cannot be perfectly predicted or prepared for in advance. No socialist experiment will ever enjoy unlimited time and resources, for the wolves of war, counter-revolution and economic crisis will always be on the horizon, waiting to pounce. Sometimes it will be possible to anticipate these threats and deal with them, sometimes not. Even when it is possible to make preparations in advance, these preparations will often involve deviating from the revolutionary ideal, as the Bolsheviks found to their cost.

Marxists do not take any of these things seriously. Trotskyists will insist that if only the revolution had spread to the West, the Bolshevik regime would not have degenerated. This assumes that these other revolutions would have enjoyed perfect conditions in which to flourish, that they too would not have encountered civil wars and imperialist encirclement, that as long as the ‘correct leadership’ (i.e. Trotskyist leadership) was at the helm it would all have gone swimmingly. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.