Trotskyists are constantly going on about how every revolution in history has been a ‘revolution betrayed’, and how every Marxist regime has ‘degenerated’. Since every single Marxist regime or organisation has degenerated in his way, and as this is a phenomenon which seems to uniquely afflict Marxism, we might venture to ask some tough questions about why this is. We may end up drawing some unpalatable conclusions, such as the fact that Marxist ideology is in fact responsible for this endless degeneration. But this would severely damage the faith of our Marxist friends, who cannot bring themselves to accept such a monstrous proposition. They would prefer to advance all sorts of rationalisations for why Marxism continues to fail. Let us look at some of the excuses advanced for why Marxism has consistently failed everywhere it has been tried.
Socio-Economic Conditions
Trotskyists are fond of saying that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution was largely due to the socio-economic backwardness of Russia and the rotten legacy left over by Tsarism. Reducing the failure of the Russian Revolution to backward socio-economic conditions inherited from the reactionary past is a wonderful way of absolving Marxist ideology of any role in the horrors of Stalinism. Granted, economic backwardness undoubtedly played a role in thwarting the Communist experiment. The Mensheviks did after all warn against the Bolshevik seizure of power for this very reason. Lenin and Trotsky did not listen. The result was as predicted by Mensheviks, Anarchists, SRs, liberal-conservatives and many other people. It is not as if the Stalinist outcome of the Bolshevik coup could not have been foreseen. Too bad Lenin and Trotsky did not have the dialectical foresight to appreciate this simple fact.
No serious person would pretend that the conditions in Russia were ideal for building socialism, or even liberal-democratic capitalism, for that matter. Russia was the most backward country in Europe, with a whole weight of medieval rubbish hanging around its neck. But one could equally make the argument that there were ways in which this economic backwardness actually helped the Bolsheviks to seize power in the first place. The failure of Tsarism to modernise meant that it failed the big test of WWI, crumbling into dust halfway through the conflict. The army, composed of peasant masses drawn from the vast lands of the empire, mutinied, and this mutiny was accompanied by a peasant uprising in the countryside and strike action by workers in the cities. However, it was not a proletarian revolution as envisaged by Marx. The decisive role was played by the army mutiny, and after that, the peasant uprising. The workers by themselves had relatively little power in a backward, barely industrial country. Once in power, the Bolsheviks had to govern a country in the grip of a worsening economic crisis, a crisis made worse by Bolshevik policies. For all that, economic backwardness arguably helped them stay in power. The continuing failure of industry due to war-related pressures and the loss of economically important territory due to Brest-Litovsk and foreign independence movements, made worse by the disastrous policy of War Communism, actually saw many workers return to the villages in the countryside from which they originally hailed, desperate for food with which to feed themselves and their families. They were able to do this because agriculture had remained relatively resilient during the war. The peasantry were able to run a self-sufficient economy that helped to keep themselves and their families alive, despite the economic collapse in the cities. The war and revolution led to the de-industrialisation of Russia, as all the economic progress made under Nicholas II’s regime was undone. Starving workers had no choice but to rely upon the black market (as the Bolsheviks had suppressed legal market activity) in order to keep from starving to death. Bagmen went into the villages, bought up surplus food, and brought it back to the towns and cities to sell to hungry workers. This kept the cities afloat. The smash-and-grab policies of War Communism, which involved grabbing grain from peasants without payment, played next to no role in feeding the cities. It secured relatively little grain and encouraged the peasantry to revolt and refuse production. It is just as well that agriculture retained its self-sufficient nature, for had Russia been more economically developed, agriculture would have been more dependent on the cities and thus the breakdown in industry would have caused a simultaneous collapse in agriculture, thereby giving the workers no option but to starve. Russian backwardness saved the Russian masses from a worse fate, and the Bolshevik regime from total collapse.
We therefore see that the role of economic backwardness in thwarting the success of Communism was mixed. In some respects, it made Marxist socialism harder to implement. In other respects, this backwardness was a blessing. It is unclear whether a more developed country could have withstood the damage done by Bolshevik policy.
Trotsky, analysing Stalinism, argued that Stalin and the bureaucracy had risen to power on the back of the ‘backwardness’ of the peasantry. Stalin represented the Russian peasant par excellence, being narrow-minded, ignorant and utterly lacking in cultural refinement, unlike the cosmopolitan polyglot Trotsky. He shared the prejudices of the peasant masses towards the foreign world, hence his doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’, which for Trotsky was a revival of Russian nationalism. Stalin also started out as a supporter of the NEP and Bukharin’s Right Opposition, which he used as a tool against Trotsky and the left. This ‘Bonapartist’ position enabled him to crush the Left Opposition and secure his personal dictatorship, which he then secured further by smashing Bukharin and the right, then doing a 180 degree shift and adopting the program of the Left Opposition in an extreme fashion. This was implemented by the brutal means of forcibly collectivising the peasantry. Trotsky attributed this sudden shift not to a principled Marxist policy, but to the mounting economic crisis caused by the increasing strength of the kulak farmers, who represented a threat to the power of Stalin and the bureaucracy which could only be quelled by brute force. Trotsky blamed the failure of the revolution to spread to the advanced countries of Europe – specifically Germany – for the degeneration, as their superior economies and technical development could have helped Russia industrialise without the need for forced collectivisation. Instead, the peasantry could have been ‘voluntarily’ brought into the farms. The problem with Trotsky’s position is he assumes that a revolution in Germany would not simply have extended the destruction and chaos caused by the Russian Revolution to Germany, damaging its economy so severely that it would have been little or no help to Russia. He also discounts the potential for foreign intervention by Allied forces that would have smashed any such revolution. Moreover, Trotsky incorrectly depicts Stalin as simply a cynical bureaucrat, without a strong theoretical grounding in Marxism, who simply used Marxist theory to rationalise his lust for power. Yet Stalin was a genuine Marxist, who implemented forced collectivisation and his brutal policy of rapid industrialisation on the basis of his Marxist convictions that state control over the economy was necessary for Russia to build socialism, and that this could only be achieved by smashing the peasantry and regimenting the worker and peasant masses – something Trotsky himself championed in Terrorism and Communism. Stalin implemented Trotsky’s policy in the only way that was practically possible, and Trotsky could never bring himself to admit this simple fact.
The degeneration of the revolution in Russia, then, is clearly due to a mixture of Marxist ideology and the inheritance of socio-economic backwardness inherited from Tsarism. The conditions were far from perfect for genuine democracy, and even without a Bolshevik takeover, Russia would likely have endured a period of dictatorship under an authoritarian nationalist leader like Kolchak or Denikin. However, it would have been nowhere near as brutal a regime as the Soviet one. For a start, such a regime would not have implemented forced collectivisation. The idea that such a policy was ‘objectively necessary’ for Russia’s modernisation is frankly risible. A country that was anywhere from an eighth to a sixth of the Earth’s surface (depending on whether we are counting just Russia or all the countries that went on to make up the USSR) would almost certainly have become an economic powerhouse at some point, based on the sheer amount of resources it enjoyed. Before WWI, Tsarist Russia was rapidly growing its economy. It is an insult to the intelligence to say that the brutal and wasteful measures of forced collectivisation and the virtual enslavement of Soviet citizens were necessary to bring this about. Stalinism can only be seen as ‘objectively necessary’ from the point of view of Communism, which believes that the only valid form of economic development is that which occurs on a non-capitalist basis and involves suppressing the market, profit, voluntary labour and private property. History has shown that this is just not possible without totalitarianism. Marxist ideology then, not economic backwardness, explains the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.
The process of ‘degeneration’ in Russia is also held by Trotskyists to have extended to the Comintern, which led to all the Communist Parties outside Russia becoming obedient clones of the Kremlin, used in the service of Stalin’s foreign policy, their leaders and members deprived of all critical thought. Yet a cursory examination of the evidence shows that the degeneration of the Comintern began under Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin founded the Comintern on the basis that it would be a more ‘disciplined’ organisation than the Second International had been, and impose strict ideological homogeneity. This necessarily led to the subordination of all Communist Parties to the leadership of the mothership in Russia. As time went on, the individual parties in the Comintern had independent-minded leaders like Paul Levi forced out and replaced with epigones. Trotsky approved all of this, even telling French Communist Party leaders what should be in their papers and who should sit on their editorial boards. When he founded the Fourth International in 1938, he borrowed the exact same internal regime from the Comintern, hence why all Trotskyist sects are as repressive and totalitarian in their internal regimes as the Communist Parties of old. Again, ideology, not ‘objective conditions’, explains this fetishism of organisational forms, the obsession with ‘revolutionary discipline’, the demand for groupthink and blind obedience in today’s sects. Marx first put forward the idea of the vanguard party, Kautsky developed it and Lenin borrowed this and made it his hallmark.
The Russian Revolution is not the only instance where Trotskyists cite the role of socio-economic conditions as causing degeneration. Not only is this held to be the case for all ‘backward’ nations where Marxists have seized power, but even in ‘advanced’ countries, where Marxist organisations have been active for decades, the ‘objective conditions’ are regularly blamed by Trotskyists for the ongoing failure of their ideology. They will simultaneously insist that the ‘objective conditions’ are getting more and more favourable and that capitalism is nearing its end, a catastrophist perspective that Trotsky imparted to his movement in the 1930s. Yet in eighty years of the movement’s existence, there have been all sorts of ‘objective conditions’ that have come to pass – revolutions, counter-revolutions, booms, slumps, wars, terrorist attacks – and yet none of these have shaken the working-class out of its stupor. How long are we meant to keep on waiting? Robert Service, in his book Comrades, discusses how communist regimes have maintained essential features regardless of the socio-economic context (‘objective conditions’):
If only one communist state had experienced the basic difficulties of Soviet society, it might be thought as a freak coincidence. In fact all those new states were troubled by problems which had afflicted the USSR from its inception. The structures, practices and ideas of communist rule were remarkably alike. The reaction to them by people, including even party officials themselves, was likewise similar. Czechoslovakia was an industrial, urbanised society integrated into the European economy before the Second World War, whereas Albania was over overwhelmingly agrarian. Yet the pattern of responses to communism was a common one; national circumstances were important but only at a secondary level. There really was such a thing as communism. Until the creation of new communist states after the Second World War this was not easy to predict – and the fact that everyone at the time concentrated attention on the power of the state deflected attention from the ineffectual sides of communist authority. The consequences were going to take years to be fully appreciated. Lenin in 1917 had announced: “There is such a party!” His supporters outside the Soviet Union could now: “There is such a system!”‘-Robert Service, Comrades: A History of World Communism (London, 2007), p.303
One perspective argues that whilst ‘backwardness’ explains the degeneration of Bolshevism, excessive prosperity in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries explains the failure of Marxist ideas to take hold. The workers are too prosperous, Marxists argue, and so are effectively bribed by the capitalists out of wanting to engage in revolution. This was the argument of Trotsky and others in the case of Germany, where the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the leading party in the Second International, the largest Marxist party in the entire world, with the allegiance of the largest and most powerful working-class in the world, capitulated to reformism and ‘betrayed’ the German Revolution. The same fate befell all the Social Democratic parties of Europe, which ditched Marxism entirely for reformism. In the case of the Labour Party in Britain, Marxism never had a significant influence on the labour movement in the first place. Trotskyists hold that the corrupt leaders of the labour movement were able to bribe the working-class with the profits of empire, thereby dampening their militancy. However, they also believed that this was a short-lived phenomenon, and that sooner or later, the masses would rise up against their reformist leaders, provided that there is a ‘revolutionary’ leadership waiting in the wings. Indeed, Trotsky went so far as to argue that the the failures of all revolutions can be reduced to the failures of the leadership. (He did not extend this observation to the Russian Revolution, which he led – an interesting omission.)
Certainly Trotskyists have a point when they suggest that prosperity in the advanced capitalist countries has dampened the enthusiasm for revolution. But this contradicts the other Marxist idea that the more ‘proletarian’ and advanced countries, where capitalism is more developed, have better ‘objective conditions’ for socialism. This disproves a central plank of Marxist theory, and suggests that the whole ideology is fatally flawed.
We are therefore faced with the wholesale degeneration of Marxism everywhere. In the USSR, Eastern Europe and the Marxist regimes of Africa and Asia, Marxism took the form of Leninist-Stalinism and variations of this, like Maoism and Castroism. In the advanced countries, Marxism became reformist social democracy. Communist Parties in the West degenerated just as the Communist Party in the USSR did. Trotskyist sects, borrowing their internal regime from the Comintern, have also degenerated. Every Marxist International, from the First International under Marx to the Fourth International under Trotsky, has degenerated, regardless of whether the objective conditions were good, bad or indifferent. We are therefore forced to conclude that regardless of the socio-economic context, and regardless of whether they take power or not, all Marxist organisations are doomed to degenerate. This can only be explained by Marxist ideology’s deficiencies.
War and Imperialism
The fact that revolutionary regimes have faced civil war and ‘imperialist’ encirclement after coming to power is also cited as a reason why these regimes have degenerated. If there had been no civil war and imperialist invasion of Russia after 1917, Trotskyists argue, the revolution would not have degenerated as it did. The brutal war and imperialist sabotage forced the Bolsheviks to use authoritarian measures due to the ‘difficult objective conditions’ with which they were faced. This led to the rise of a bureaucracy that substituted itself for the working-class.
A problem with this argument is that, however true, the fact is that any socialist revolution is likely to face this. If this is enough to make the revolution degenerate, then revolution is a far too risky prospect to embark on. Despite all our talk in the IMT of how War Communism was an ‘objectively necessary’ response to the difficult challenges posed by war, it is clear from the writings and public utterances of leading Bolsheviks at the time that it was justified in ideological terms as a means of eliminating the market and collectivising agriculture. This was in line with the Marxist program of eliminating capitalism. Nothing was forcing the Bolsheviks to steal grain and collectivise agriculture, except their own ideology. They could have allowed a free market in grain that would have brought prices down as a result of market competition, and secured them a steadier supply of grain. The fact that the Bolsheviks continued with plundering the peasantry even after the Whites had been defeated, only abandoning it after serious peasant revolts, shows how ideological this decision was. Victor Serge, in his pro-Bolshevik account of the revolution, confirms that ideology, not war, was the prime motive behind War Communism.
War is inherent to Marxist ideology. Class war is a central feature of Marxism, and Marx and Engels both spoke of the need for violent measures against counter-revolutionaries, whether foreign or domestic. Moreover, Marxism is an internationalist, universalist ideology which demands that every Marxist regime seek to spread Marxism worldwide. Inevitably, this will bring Marxist regimes into conflict with the rest of the world, and lead to imperialist intervention by reactionary powers. War is seen as essential for bringing about revolutionary change. Indeed, the Russian Revolution of 1917 could not have happened without the breakdown of the Tsarist regime caused by WWI, and without the destruction of WWII, Communism could not have been spread to Eastern Europe, and thereafter to the Third World.
Of course, war by its very nature militates against a free society, for it demands militarisation and regimentation of the population and the suppression of individual freedom. Even the liberal democracies had to suspend certain democratic freedoms during both world wars, how much more a country that had never even experienced democracy and was run by a regime which looked upon ‘bourgeois’ freedoms with contempt and had long sought to regiment and militarise the population for ideological goals even before war broke out? In that sense, the war simply accentuated what was already latent in Bolshevik ideology. The Communist regime became more oppressive after the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922, not less – a direct consequence of Bolshevik ideology.
Leadership
Trotsky once said that the failures of revolutionary socialism could be reduced to the failings of the revolutionary leadership. The Social Democrats and Communists had both betrayed the working-class and failed to bring about the world socialist revolution, even though the masses were more than capable. One might question the ability of a class that manages to be ‘betrayed’ over and over again by various corrupt leaderships to govern and build a new society. After all, these leaderships usually have the support of the workers at least some of the time, even if one were to argue that these workers are simply duped. Trotsky sought to resolve this crisis of leadership by putting his Fourth International – always a tiny organisation with no organic support among the working-class – forward as an alternative leadership, which, with the ‘correct ideas’, would bring about the final victory of socialism. Needless to say, the Fourth International degenerated just like the previous three Internationals did. In fact, it was degenerate from the moment of its birth. Trotsky borrowed the internal regime of the new organisation from Stalin’s Comintern, but assumed that because his organisation had the ‘correct ideas’, it would not degenerate. There is good reason to believe that the founding congress of the organisation was rigged by Trotsky’s lieutenant, Cannon, to prevent more sceptical Trotskyists who were opposed to the premature founding of an organisation, from turning up. Already, we see bureaucratic manipulation at work.
The problem with Trotsky’s voluntarist reduction of everything to the role of the leadership is that it ignores all the other factors that might cause a revolution to fail. In one of his final essays, ‘The Class, the Party and the Leadership’, Trotsky reacts indignantly to the suggestion that the Spanish Revolution failed because the working-class were not strong enough. He equates this to reducing the failure of the revolution to the insufficient development of its means of production, and denounces this as crude, undialectical determinism. Of course the leadership can make a difference! We saw this in Russia in October 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power and build the world’s first socialist state in a backward country. Notice the contradiction at the heart of Trotsky’s thought, in that he would attribute the failure of the Russian Revolution entirely to Russian backwardness and deny that any individual, least of all himself, could have done anything to avert it, but then simultaneously insist that the failure of all revolutions outside Russia was down to the leadership not following Bolshevik precepts, precepts which could not prevent the Russian Revolution degenerating! Trotskyists would have us believe that if only there had been a ‘Bolshevik’-style organisation in every country, that country would have had a successful revolution. This elevates the fluke event of October 1917 to the defining paradigm through which all other revolutions should be seen, an achievement which can be replicated in all times and in all places. Even Lenin did not go that far, advising foreign Communists not to turn the experience of the Bolsheviks in Russia into an idol to be bowed to. In his last public appearance at an early congress of the Comintern, he criticised a proposed motion for being ‘too Russian’ and based too much on the experience of the Communist seizure of power in Russia. Clearly, Lenin had become concerned that he may have erred by insisting upon the primacy of the Russian Communist Party within the Comintern, something that was distorting the perspective of the other Communist Party leaders. Trotsky appears not to have heeded this advice.
When we look at the 1917 revolution, we note that it would not have happened without Lenin and Trotsky. Leaders as talented as a Lenin or a Trotsky are rare, and none of the failed revolutions of the 20th century had anyone like a Lenin or a Trotsky at the helm. Certainly this played a role in their defeat. But if the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful revolution is the need for an individual as skilled as Lenin or Trotsky, then we are unlikely to have a successful socialist revolution for quite some time, if ever. This contradicts the traditional Marxist understanding that it is ‘laws of history’ and not individuals which are decisive.
There were in fact many reasons for the failure of the socialist revolutions of the interwar period (the Hungarian Revolution, the Spanish Revolution, the German Revolution etc) that cannot be reduced to the role of the revolutionary leadership, whether we are talking about an individual or a party. There is no way that even a German equivalent of Lenin could have seized power in Germany without bringing about a civil war and a massive Allied invasion of Germany. Lenin and the Bolsheviks barely held on to power in Russia, and they benefited from Russia’s giant landmass, incompetent White armies, the unwillingness of the Allies to intervene against the Bolsheviks in sufficient numbers or with money, the defeat of the Germans (who almost certainly would have allied with the Whites had they won the war and destroyed the nascent Bolshevik government) and the willingness of most of the population to back the Reds over the Whites, who were seen as agents of foreign imperialism and in alliance with the oppressive landlords that the peasantry had just managed to rid themselves of. The Bolshevik seizure of power took place in the context of a power vacuum that resulted when the Tsarist regime crumbled midway through WWI. This did not happen in Germany, where there was a relatively orderly transition from the Kaiser’s regime to the new Weimar Republic, and where the peasantry were both smaller than in Russia and less revolutionary. In Spain, the forces of reaction in the form of Franco’s Nationalists received far more foreign support than the Whites had received in the Russian Civil War, and Stalin’s aid to the Republicans was not only insufficient but aimed less at defeating Franco than at turning the republic into a Soviet client state and massacring Stalin’s rivals on the left, in other words, sabotaging the revolution. The USSR did not have the resources to go any further than they did, and had they done so, and tried to turn Spain into a fully-fledged Communist republic, they may well have provoked intervention from the Western democracies on the side of the Nationalists. There is nothing that could have been done by even the most capable revolutionary leader to overcome the geopolitical and domestic obstacles to the triumph of a socialist revolution.
Trotsky is therefore guilty of utter naivety when he reduces the failures of all revolutions outside Russia to the inability of the leadership. Even the greatest political genius could not have salvaged the situation in republican Spain, or the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, or the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Trotsky took Lenin’s voluntaristic emphasis on revolutionary leadership and the role of the party to an extreme, creating an in-built tendency to catastrophism and the unique role of the ‘Lenin of today’, something which can only give today’s sect leaders a swollen head. As it happens, when Trotsky was deprived of his role as a leading figure in the Soviet regime, even a man of his brilliance could not have any impact on world events. After his assassination in 1940, his organisation splintered and scattered to the four winds. There are now thousands of organisations competing to be the ‘Fourth International’. Almost all of them are hysterical, sectarian cults led by a deluded guru who believes himself to be the reincarnation of Lenin and Trotsky. None of them are of any political relevance. Yet they all claim to be Trotskyist, and Trotsky insisted that as long as there was the ‘correct leadership’, with the ‘correct ideas’, the masses would come rallying when the ‘objective conditions’ heated up. So why is it that despite all the revolutions, counter-revolutions, wars, recessions, crises and other explosive events that have occurred over the past eighty years, Trotskyist leaderships have remained utterly irrelevant?
Human Nature
I posit that that reactionary concept, human nature, is a key reason why Marxism has always degenerated.
Firstly, it must be acknowledged that human beings are naturally corrupted by power. The structures of ‘revolutionary organisations’ tend to ensure that power is preserved at the very top. When the Communists seized power in Russia, they created a bureaucratic party-state which ensured that all power was in the hands of the revolutionary cadres. This involved undermining all other forms of social organisation, such as the soviets, and smashing the nascent democracy that had emerged since the February Revolution. This was justified in ideological terms. Lenin argued from a Marxist point of view that the revolution required strong leadership, centralisation and coordination, and that leaving the soviets to their own devices would allow bourgeois influences to creep back in. Moreover, being a good Marxist, Lenin had nothing but contempt for ‘bourgeois’, ‘formal’ democracy, represented by mechanisms such as regular elections to renew one’s mandate from the people, checks and balances, separation of powers etc. The party had to have total power, undivided and undiluted by any separation of institutional functions like you would have in a liberal democracy, or by anything as preposterous as bourgeois elections. Only the party knew the ‘real’ interests of the working-class, and the risk of them voting the wrong way was far too high to go allow a free and fair vote of any kind. Indeed, within months of the October coup, the Bolsheviks were rigging elections in the soviets to ensure their victory, and annulling the results of elections in which the Mensheviks and SRs were able to make a comeback, using the Cheka to terrorise all opposition. Strikes were banned and trade unions subordinated to the party. As Zinoviev put it, why would the workers need to organise strike action against their ‘own’ state? Within the party, factions were banned, and by 1922, the Mensheviks and SRs had been made illegal and the USSR was officially a one-party state. Once the ‘socialist choice’ of 1917 had been made, the Bolsheviks would provide no opportunity for the peoples of the Soviet Union to change their mind.
Corrupted by power, and convinced that they were holding onto this power for the masses’ own good, the Communist Party would not permit any challenges to its rule. Inevitably, this went to the heads of the people in charge, who were convinced that they were the ciphers through which history would bring the entire world to socialism. Anyone who challenged in any way the monopoly of the party on power, or the policies of leading members of the party, could be accused of being an agent of reaction and purged. Anyone within the party who didn’t toe the line would be purged, promoting a toxic idea of ‘party patriotism’ that paralysed meaningful opposition and imposed blind loyalty to the organisation as an ideal. A similar attitude is at work in today’s Trotskyist sects, which, unlike the Russian Communists, do not enjoy state power. It was certainly my experience in the International Marxist Tendency (IMT). It seems that your organisation does not have to suffer the same ‘objective conditions’ as the Bolsheviks did in order to become a repressive, authoritarian cult. Human nature being what it is, people conformed in order to avoid being cast out and disgraced. Even Trotsky, in his struggle against Stalin, never considered appealing to people outside the party for help – to the workers, for example – or of creating his own party to challenge the now degenerated Communist Party. He remained a supporter of the one-party state, psychologically paralysed by his ‘party patriotism’.
Within the one-party state, the General Secretary of the party, Stalin, was able to manipulate the bureaucratic structures of the organisation to ascend to absolute power. The system created by Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Communists provided Stalin the machinery for his rise to the top. If it hadn’t been Stalin, some other individual would have done something very similar. All of Lenin’s fulminations against bureaucracy do not change the fact that he was responsible for this, and could not see that his ideology, which was hostile to any notion of ‘bourgeois’ checks on the power of the Party, made this inevitable. Unless he was willing to abandon Marxism entirely, there is nothing he could have done to stop this had he lived. Stalin, like a great many people, was ambitious and power-hungry, and was able to play the political game in such a way that he could fulfill these ambitions more successfully than his opponents. Of course, he was not simply a Machiavellian guided by nothing but the desire for power. He was a true-believing Marxist, who saw himself as indispensable to the revolution’s success, and sought to build on what Lenin had started. Whether Lenin would have approved of every dot and comma of what Stalin said or did is irrelevant, for Lenin himself was not infallible, and was subject to the same human frailties as everyone else. Moreover, he was not willing to abandon his blinkered worldview, which refused to allow ‘bourgeois’ institutions to form as a check to individual power.
Stalin, once in power, manipulated the psychological frailties of his followers – the natural human tendency towards conformity and obedience – and suppressed any real opposition to his leadership. Prior to the purges, it was less physical retribution people feared, and more public humiliation and being cast out of the great fellowship of the ruling party. The Great Purge of 1936-1938 produced a still more homogeneous and conformist party. Now people had not just expulsion from the party, but death, for speaking out. Even once Stalin was gone from the scene, and mass terror was no longer utilised by the party leadership to keep people in line, there was a natural tendency to conformity and obedience from party members that kept the system in a state of inertia until its collapse in 1991. This also extends to the population, who were no longer the heroic workers of the 1920s, decimated by the war and suppressed by Communist dictatorship, but an artificially created entity descended from peasants who had been thrown into the heaving cauldron of factory life by Stalin’s rapid industrialization and forced collectivisation, and who had had any initiative or critical thinking squeezed out of them.
Trotskyists scratch their heads as to the failure of the working-class which Lenin and Trotsky suppressed in the first place to rise up and overthrow the bureaucracy. Yet an explanation far more plausible than the ‘backwardness’ of the population is the fact that, human nature being what it is, few people in their right mind will resist a state that is willing to use overwhelming force and terror against them for the crime of speaking out against the existing order. Much easier to simply obey. The Stanford prison and Milgram experiments conducted by American psychologists in the Cold War, provide us with evidence for the natural human tendency towards obedience towards those in authority, and the tendency towards those in positions of authority to abuse their power. Every totalitarian state reveals these aspects of human nature to the fullest degree.
The bureaucratic degeneration of Marxist organisations that have never even launched a Bolshevik-style revolution, or enjoyed state power, is also notable. The Social Democratic Party of Germany experienced such a degeneration many years before it took power in the German Revolution of 1918, seen by Marxists as a ‘revolution betrayed’ because the SPD did not break with capitalism, but made a compromise with the German ruling class and served as a break on the revolution’s radical trajectory. Trotskyists attribute this degeneration to years of economic prosperity allowing for the successful winning of concessions from the ruling class by the leaders of the German labour movement, which had made them soft on the whole idea of revolution. The party leadership had become dominated by centrists like Kautsky, who were more interested in maintaining their bureaucratic positions than in launching a revolution. There is certainly truth to this. But this socio-economic analysis ignores something more essential – human nature and the desire of human beings to hold onto their power and their privileges, something which holds true regardless of socio-economic conditions. The SPD, like the Bolsheviks, had gone through a long period of being an underground, illegal organisation, which necessitated a centralised bureaucracy, something it retained after becoming a legal party. Lenin had sought to model the Bolsheviks on the SPD (though in fact the Bolsheviks never developed the same degree of centralisation, up until the seizure of power in 1917). Lenin went out of his way in What is to be Done? to praise the SPD for its centralised nature – what he would criticise later on was its politics, not its organisational style. The development of a bureaucratic organisation necessarily disenfranchised ordinary members and increased the power of the leadership, which, with human nature being what it is, wanted to keep their positions and not endanger the power they enjoyed over the workers with something as chaotic as a revolution. It was not necessarily the material benefits of being in charge that they cared for, but the prestige and political power they had attained over large masses of people, something they nearly lost in 1918 as a result of the split caused by the anti-war Independent Socialists (USPD) and the growth of the Spartacists to its left. Robert Michels, the German sociologist, observed the SPD’s bureaucratic degeneration first-hand:
Michels impishly subjected the German Social-Democratic Party to scrutiny and found that its officials fell a long way short of eradicating authoritarian procedures. They cut themselves off from control by ordinary party members and decided policy outside a democratic framework. They paid themselves better than the average industrial worker. Furthermore, they quietly moved the party away from any activity that might invite trouble from the Imperial government; they talked revolution while in practice co-operating with the political status quo. Their Marxism was a mask for setting up a self-serving bureaucracy. Michels argued that, if they behaved like that before they came to power, there was little chance that they would ever establish an egalitarian social order. Marxism, far from being based on scientific observation, was just as utopian as the nineteenth-century rival variants of socialism which had drawn the ridicule of Marx and Engels.’-Robert Service, Comrades: A History of World Communism (London, 2007), p.39
Similarly, the bureaucratic degeneration of the Communist Party in Russia after 1917 saw the development of a bureaucracy which, whilst maintaining its loyalty to Marxist ideology, also became more conservative as time went on, not because it no longer believed in the Marxist vision, but because they feared that a too radical approach would endanger its power. Hence, the upheaval of the Stalin and Khrushchev years culminated in the relatively unideological approach of Brezhnev. The Communist Party bureaucrats, shortly after taking power in 1917, gave themselves privileges over and above those enjoyed by the average worker. This is a phenomenon which affects not just Marxist organisations, but arguably affects all organisations of any kind, political or otherwise. There always develops a self-interested bureaucracy which wants to hold onto its power and privileges. A minority will always end up in positions of influence, whilst the majority are disenfranchised. At least in liberal democracies, there are checks and balances which prevent any one individual or party from having too much power over the state. There also exists a civil society which acts as a check to state power. The idea of a ‘party-state’ is unheard of – there are multiple parties which compete in free and fair elections, the state has a politically independent civil service not beholden to any party, and within these parties there is room for democratic debate and discussion far beyond anything we see in far-left sects. Soviet Russia had neither of these things, for separation of powers is ‘bourgeois’ and anathema to Marxists, and civil society is a product of capitalist alienation and must be suppressed in a socialist society, which acknowledges no distinction between private and public life. The ‘private’ interests of the individual become forcibly united with the interests of everyone. Force is the only way to do it, for people cling stubbornly to their individualism, and only massive outside pressure can force them into conformity. Within the party, there was no real debate or discussion, except within certain approved limits.
In today’s far-left sects, whether of the Trotskyist, Maoist or Stalinist kind, the same rotten internal regime that afflicted the Russian Communist Party and the German SPD is utilised. Of course, these are much worse than even the SPD or even the Russian Bolsheviks prior to the seizure of power in 1917 (for contrary to popular opinion, the Bolsheviks were a relatively democratic organisation before November 1917, after which they became increasingly bureaucratic). In these sects, a ‘guru’ figure is depicted as the present-day reincarnation of Lenin, and he (it is invariably a male) and his minions govern the sect with a rod of iron, ensuring conformity from the membership and perpetuating themselves in power decade after decade. Peter Taaffe, until his recent resignation, was at the helm of first Militant, then its successor the Socialist Party, from 1964 to 2020 – a fifty-six year tenure that rivals even Fidel Castro’s time in power. There is no real democracy or discussion. This reflects the tendency of all organisations towards bureaucracy, especially organisations with an ideology that demands military-like ‘discipline’ and blind obedience to the party leadership as a prerequisite for bringing about the revolution and overthrowing capitalism. It also reflects the all-too human desire to hold onto as much power as possible for as long as possible.
Beyond merely looking at the organisational aspects of Marxist degeneration, we must consider the fact that the Marxist program of anti-capitalism requires the suppression of all those things that derive from human nature – the market and its channelling of human greed and the desire for material gain, private property, nationhood, the family, religion etc. All were ‘bourgeois’ obstacles to the goal of society in which all essential conflicts of interest have been resolved, and a homogeneous brotherhood of man established. Such an anti-human society could never be established anywhere on earth. The USSR never achieved such a society, but merely approximated it, for they could suppress all the things mentioned, but never destroy them entirely. There was an illegal black market, nationalism remained (and in the end brought down the USSR), people continued to cling to religion, etc. Also, far from creating social solidarity, the fear that every other person might be an informant for the regime created distrust and ensured a merely superficial conformity combined with a secret resentment of the authorities. People were numbed to the Marxist propaganda with which they were bombarded on a daily basis, focusing their efforts on self-preservation within the limits of the system, without any real belief in it. Marxism is simply not compatible with human flourishing. When Marxists talk about how ‘objective conditions’ have prevented the creation of socialism, they should add essential human nature to the list of those ‘objective conditions’.