For decades, Trotskyists have denied that the degeneration of the USSR has anything to do with Bolshevik ideology. Most of us realise that the seed of Stalinism was in Bolshevism from the very beginning. Trotskyists prefer to blame the difficult conditions specific to ‘backward’ Russia. It was the ‘objective conditions’ of this uncivilised, peasant nation that was responsible for the failure of the revolutionary dream. They simultaneously believe that Bolshevism was indispensable for the successes of the revolution. All failures, however, must be blamed on the Russian people, for being too crude, uncultured, un-proletarian and uneducated, and on Western imperialism and counter-revolution. A former member of the SP told me, when he discussed this question with the full-timer of his region, that the full-timer snapped: ‘The reason why the revolution degenerated was because the Russian people were unworthy of him [Trotsky].’ Admittedly this is a somewhat crude way of putting it, and most Trotskyists would put it much more eloquently. However, this is what they believe, deep down – that a man like Trotsky was too cultured and too intelligent to rule over such a barbarous people. Instead, a ruthless philistine like Stalin was more suited to the task, the perfect representation of Russian backwardness. That is how Trotsky explained his defeat at Stalin’s hands. Stalin was simply a product of the unfavourable ‘objective conditions’, which guaranteed Trotsky’s defeat and sealed the fate of the revolution. If that sounds like self-serving tripe, that is because it is.
If Stalinism was the negation of Bolshevism, as Trotsky alleged, and Bolshevik ideology in no way contributed to the degeneration, then Trotskyism is useless as an ideology, since, in an unfavourable set of circumstances, it is doomed to give way to counter-revolution. If, on the other hand, Bolshevism is indispensable as an enabler of revolutionary transformation, then Bolshevism must also bear the responsibility for that revolution going sour. Bolshevism is at best useless, at worst, malicious. That is the paradox that Trotskyists must confront.
Leszek Kolakowski, in his essay ‘The Marxist Roots of Stalinism’, brilliantly explained the ‘dialectical’ relationship between the ‘objective conditions’ of Russian backwardness and the ideology of the Bolshevik revolutionaries, which brought about the monstrosity of Stalinism. In answer to those Marxists who argue that Marx would never have approved of the USSR, he notes the following:
There is nothing odd in the fact that political and social programs, utopias and prophecies lead to outcomes not only very different from but significantly in conflict with the intentions of their authors; empirical connections previously unnoticed or neglected may make it impossible to implement one part of the utopia without abandoning some other ingredient. This, again, is common sense, and trivial. Most of what we learn in life is about which values are compatible and which mutually exclusive, and most utopians are simply incapable of learning that there are incompatible values. More often than not, this incompatibility is empirical, not logical, and this is why their utopias are not necessarily self-contradictory in logical terms, only impracticable, because of the way the world is.
In the essay, Kolakowski looks at all the different aspects that went into creating Soviet totalitarianism, and ultimately, Stalinism – policies advocated enthusiastically by Lenin and Trotsky. One of these is ‘war communism’, which Trotskyists love to claim was simply a response to the ’emergency conditions’ of civil war. This is a blatant lie. A quote from Trotsky in Terrorism and Communism will suffice to prove otherwise:
Comrades, the internal civil war is coming to an end. On the western front, the situation remains undecided. It is possible that the Polish bourgeoisie will hurl a challenge at its fate … But even in this case – we do not seek it – the war will not demand of us that all-devouring concentration of forces which the simultaneous struggle on four fronts imposed upon us. The frightful pressure of the war is becoming weaker. Economic requirements and problems are more and more coming to the fore. History is bringing us, along the whole line, to our fundamental problem – the organization of labor on new social foundations. The organization of labor is in its essence the organization of the new society: every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labor. While every previous form of society was an organization of labor in the interests of a minority, which organized its State apparatus for the oppression of the overwhelming majority of the workers, we are making the first attempt in world-history to organize labor in the interests of the laboring majority itself. This, however, does not exclude the element of compulsion in all its forms, both the most gentle and the extremely severe. The element of State compulsion not only does not disappear from the historical arena, but on the contrary will still play, for a considerable period, an extremely prominent part.
Trotsky clearly argues that the use of slave labour, far from being a response to ‘objective conditions’ specific to the Bolshevik experience, is necessary for socialism in all times and all places. As Kolakowski explains:
The second stage (which overlapped with the first) is known by the misleading name of ‘war communism’. The name suggests that the policies of this period were conceived of as temporary and exceptional measures to cope with the monstrous difficulties imposed by civil war and intervention. In fact, it is clear from the relevant writings of the leaders – in particular Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin – that they all envisaged this economic policy (the abolition of free trade, coercive requisitioning of ‘surplus’ – i.e. whatever the local leadership considered to be surplus – from the peasants, universal rationing, forced labour) as a permanent achievement of the new society, and that it was eventually abandoned not because the war conditions which had made it necessary no longer existed, but as a result of the economic disaster it had caused. Both Trotsky and Bukharin were emphatic in their assurances that forced labour was an organic part of the new society.
In the essay, Kolakowski argues that even if the Soviet leaders themselves did not believe in Bolshevik ideology, it was still necessary to have a state ideology so as to legitimise their rule. That neither the bureaucracy nor those that they ruled over genuinely believed in it is beside the point. Even if we take seriously the Trotskyist argument that Stalin was not a true Marxist, paying lip-service to Marxist slogans was still vital for the legitimation of the Soviet state, both at home and abroad.
Interestingly, Trotskyists are not the first people, by any means, to point out that the peculiar features of Russian history and culture explain the development of Soviet totalitarianism. Contemporary historians like Richard Pipes have made similar claims. Kolakowski concedes this, with caveats:
But this historical background does not explain the peculiar function of Marxist ideology in the Soviet order. Even if we go so far as to admit (with Amalrik) that the whole meaning of Marxism in Russia ultimately consisted in injecting a shaky ideological empire with flesh and blood that would allow it to survive for a time before definitively falling apart, the question of how Marxism fitted into this task remains unanswered. How could the Marxist philosophy of history, with its ostensible hopes, aims, and values, supply the totalitarian, imperialist, and chauvinist state with an ideological weapon?
Kolakowski goes on to explain why Marxism proved eminently compatible with Stalinism. Marx’s basic argument is that capitalism has destroyed the social unity of the pre-capitalist world, creating a division of labour that atomises human beings, and a structure of ‘bourgeois’ concepts and institutions – law, state, representative democracy, human rights etc – which legitimises this atomisation. A socialist society is one in which the division between the individual on the one hand and society on the other has been annihilated, and brought into a perfect unity. Kolakowski explains:
Once the bourgeois order is replaced by a system of communal property, this machinery no longer has any purpose. Individual interests converge with universal ones, and there is no more need to shore up society’s unable equilibrium with regulations that define the limits of individual freedom. And it is not only the ‘rational’ instruments of liberal society that are then done away with: inherited tribal and national ties will also disappear.
Kolakowski argues that Marx did not provide a technique by which to achieve this ambitious goal, but Kolakowski believes that Stalinism is one of many legitimate interpretations, by means of which the Marxist goal might be fulfilled. The Marxist theory of class consciousness, for example, naturally gives a privileged position to the Leninist party, which claims that only it knows the real interests of the workers (and is entitled to suppress any ideas among the workers that are the product of ‘bourgeois’ corruption). Since the party is the sole possessor of truth, ruthless dictatorship is justifiable at all times and in all places. (In the case of Stalinism, this naturally culminated in the belief that the party leader, Stalin, was the sole possessor of truth). The Marxist injunction to expropriate private property can be identified as one means of bringing about social unity, but naturally there will be social conflict even after this, requiring the party-state to wield its mighty hammer of suppression as often as necessary to crush ‘remnants of capitalism’ among the people. Marx argued that the administration of people would give way to the administration of things, but how, Kolakowski asks, can things be administered without administering people? Moreover, a socialist society would abolish hired labour, but, says Kolakowski, ‘what if communist enthusiasm alone proves an insufficient incentive for people to work? Clearly, this means that they are imprisoned in bourgeois consciousness, which it is the task of the state to destroy. Consequently, the way to eliminate hired labour is to replace it by coercion.’
Then of course there is Engels’ talk about how the genuine freedom of a socialist society will mean maximum control over one’s natural environment and the conscious regulation of social processes. ‘On this definition, the more society is technologically advanced, the freer it is; and the more social life is submitted to a unified directing force, the freer it is.’ (Engels does not appear to have viewed free elections or ‘any other bourgeois contrivances of the sort’ to be more important in defining freedom). And it was Engels, after all, who insisted that the sciences could not be left to themselves, but needed to be regulated by Marxist philosophers (justifying Lysenkoism and other absurdities). The International Marxist Tendency today still holds to this moronic view, expressed by Alan Woods and Ted Grant in Reason and Revolt.
The point is that Marx really did consistently believe that human society would not be ‘liberated’ without achieving unity. And there is no known technique apart from despotism whereby the unity of society can be achieved: no way of suppressing the tension between civil and political society except by the suppression of civil society; no means of eliminating the conflicts between the individual and the ‘whole’ except by the destruction of the individual; no way toward a ‘higher’, ‘positive’ freedom – as opposed to ‘negative’, ‘bourgeois’ freedom – except through the suppression of the latter. And if the whole of human history is to be conceived in class terms…then it does follow that the new society must start by a violent break in cultural continuity from the old one.
Of course, Marx’s vision of a society in which there was total unity is impractical. Conflict can never be completely banished from a society, merely repressed – as happened in actual Marxist regimes. The search by leftists for utopia always culminates in totalitarianism, bloodshed and disappointment.
In the IMT, we would always talk of how dialectics gave us ‘foresight’ when others were always taken by surprise by events. Yet there is no sense that Lenin and Trotsky anticipated the disasters of Stalinism when they carried out their crazy coup. Meanwhile, other people predicted precisely this, without the benefit of Marxist dialectics:
It would be utterly false to say that ‘no one could have predicted’ such an outcome of Marxist humanist socialism. Anarchist writers actually did predict it, long before the socialist revolution: they thought that a society based on Marx’s ideological principles would produce slavery and despotism. Here, at least, mankind cannot complain that it was deceived by History and surprised by the unpredictable connections of things.
Kolakowski has a very special passage for those who remain unconvinced that ideology can explain the twisted nature of Stalinism:
The question discussed here is one of ‘genetic vs environmental’ factors in social development. Even in genetic inquiry, when the properties under investigation are not precisely definable, or when they are mental rather than physical (like ‘intelligence’, for example), it is very difficult to distinguish the respective roles of these factors; how much more difficult, then, to distinguish between the ‘genetic’ and the ‘environmental’ in our social inheritance – between an inherited ideology and the contingent conditions in which people try to implement it. it is common sense that both factors are at work in any particular case, and that we have no way of calculating their relative importance and expressing it in quantitative terms. To say that ‘genes’ (the inherited ideology) are entirely responsible for how the child turns out is just as silly as saying that the ‘environment’ (contingent historical events) can entirely account for it. (In the case of Stalinism, these two unacceptably extreme positions are expressed respectively as the view that Stalinism was in fact ‘no more than’ Marxism realised and as the view that it was ‘no more than’ a continuation of the czarist empire.) But although we cannot perform a calculation and assign each set of factors its ‘fair share’ of responsibility, we can still reasonably ask whether or not the mature form was anticipated by the ‘genetic’ conditions’.
The continuity I have tried to trace back from Stalinism to Marxism appears in still sharper outline when we look at the transition from Leninism to Stalinism. The non-Bolshevik factions (the Mensheviks, not to mention the liberals) were aware of the general direction Bolshevism was taking, and predicted its outcome fairly accurately, just after 1917; moreover, the despotic character of the new system was soon attacked within the party itself (by the Workers’ Opposition and then the Left Opposition – e.g., Rakovsky) long before Stalinism was securely established. The Mensheviks saw all their predictions borne out in the 1930s, and Trotsky’s belated rejoinder to their ‘we told you so’ is pathetically unconvincing. They may have predicted what would happen, he argued, but still they were quite wrong, for they believed that despotism would come as result of Bolshevik rule’ it has indeed come, he said, but as a result of a bureaucratic coup. Qui vult decipi, decipiatur.
Kolakowski conclusively demonstrates that Stalinism was, in a limited sense, the logical conclusion of Marxist ideology, or a legitimate interpretation of it. The real question is why on earth Trotsky believed that a working-class which he had helped to oppress, exploit and enslave, would rise up and restore what he described as true socialism. As it happens, Marxism could only ever be the source of these people’s misery, not their liberation.