We need to learn from past and present socialist experiments
The decision of Left Unity’s National Coordinating Group to allow political platforms to submit resolutions to the its policy commissions and national conference could prove to be one to regret if these platforms are allowed to exist on a permanent basis, argues Phil Waincliffe from Leeds Left Unity. Phil is also a supporter of the Economic and Philosophical Science Review.
Setting party decision-making procedures around “one member one vote” whilst allowing individual members to maintain their affiliations to other organisations or publications, and refusing all requests from other “left” groups to formally affiliate to the emergent party, is a positive move because it 1), helps to maintain party discipline around agreed decisions; 2), allows individual members to continue their intellectual development outside the party, which they can bring into the party to support and develop its collective understanding of what needs to be done to end capitalism; and 3), protects the party from academic individualists who, under the pretence of wanting to see “unity”, ultimately reject all party discipline and leadership (unless they are in charge), and want the freedom to be able to endlessly “factionalise” and “manoeuvre” around abstractions and prevent positive party development based on a correct understanding of the real world needs of the working class.
Ken Loach’s appeal is a call for a discussion “around the formation of a new political party of the Left”. A healthy debate is required but rather than creating open forums for individual members to argue their positions as individuals, discussions are now deferred to the competing platforms; and the formulation of platform statements and supporting documents are debated internally, away from ordinary members (unless they are platform supporters) and the working class who must be drawn into the debates if they are to develop their understanding of the historical revolutionary role they need to play to bring capitalist exploitation and misery to an end.
All three of the competing platforms consciously avoid discussion around the Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding (proven in practice) that the only way to avoid the devastating consequences of capitalism’s plunge into Slump and world war destruction is to build a revolutionary movement for a planned socialist society; and defended from non-stop subversion and sabotage by firm proletarian dictatorship discipline until capitalism has been overthrown and defeated everywhere.
Instead, all that is on offer from the carefully worded Left Party Platform, Workers Power’s wannabe “practical-activist” Class Struggle Platform and the biliously anti-Soviet “Socialist” Platform is wishful thinking and false promises of a glorious new socialist dawn achievable “if only we get together and do something in a unified, democratic and comradely way”.
Yes, “unity” is essential, and discussions should be held in as “comradely” a way as possible, but the vital ingredient necessary for building genuine unity is the broadest debate possible on the nature of capitalism’s crisis and how to overcome it; as well as the historical legacy of the Soviet Union and the existing workers’ states so that lessons can be learned from their successes and mistakes. Only through the achievement of an agreed perspective that approximates past and current concrete realities as closely as possible, given the limited resources available, can real unity be achieved.
Far from embracing debate, cynical and scoffing responses of the “We have a government engaging in class war and you want to talk about the Soviet Union!” kind are made. Well, yes!! These discussions are crucial. If they have no relevance, why would the Socialist Platform frame its ‘Statement of Aims and Principles’ around this poisonous assertion tagged on at the end of Point 3: “We reject the idea that the undemocratic regimes that existed in the former Soviet Union and other countries were socialist”, and then refuse to explain it?
If “everyone knows” the Soviet Union had never been socialist, and if it is dead and buried, never to return again, then why even bother to say anything about it?
But there was a purpose to making this statement. “Everyone knows” capitalism has no future to offer the working class, or anyone else for that matter, and very soon “everyone” will want to know what to do about it.
“Everyone” will want to know why the only event proven to have ended capitalist Slump and war, made huge strides in human development without capitalist bosses, and inspired millions across the globe to do the same, the 1917 Russian Revolution, fell apart so disastrously in 1989.
“Everyone” will also want to learn from the only proven theory available for correctly analysing the historical situation and balance of class forces, and correctly building the only sort of democratic-centralist movement that is capable of leading the working class towards revolution, and then defending their revolution from counter-revolutionary intrigue: Leninism, the science of Marxism put into practice.
The purpose of the SP statement is to say that such a movement of revolutionary theory is unnecessary because it has never worked, and only ever leads to “totalitarianism” and “economic disaster” (not true).
The only way to obtain the scientific understanding necessary to achieve socialism is by means of a constant interchange between theory and practice; learning how right or wrong a party’s perspectives, programmes, strategies and tactics have been by analysing their successes and mistakes. This struggle has to be made in front of the working class, drawing in as many layers as possible into the debates, and it has to begin with a struggle to learn from the historical reality of the Soviet Union.
Building a workers’ state out of whatever remains of the old order after the destructive consequences of capitalism’s collapse will always be messy because it has to be based on raw human material, damaged by lifetimes of capitalist dog-eat-dog consumer culture and exploitation.
It is not possible for the vast majority to live a life in capitalist society “as you would want to see the future society to be”. One of the key triggers for revolution is that capitalist exploitation and cultural practices do not allow people to be the sort of decent well-balanced people they would like to be. All sorts of crude and backward notions and practices will be present at the start. Capitalism will need to be overthrown before “all oppression and discrimination” (SP Point 4) can eventually end, and even then only after a lengthy period of socialist education and international co-operative development and growth.
The Russian proletariat were building their newly won socialist state from scratch, with no past histories of socialist construction to learn from, and out of the ruins of extremely backward Tsarist degeneracy. Much of its development had to be done through trial and error. Mistakes were inevitable. Non-stop threats of war, and actual civil war and imperialist invasion combined to create the harshest conditions imaginable for the building of a completely new co-operative society.
Proletarian dictatorship was necessary to defend the new state and steer its development and growth. It was successful in defending the state from total destruction, including NAZI invasion and non-stop threats of nuclear annihilation, throughout the entire existence of the USSR.
It is a myth that the USSR “failed” because its leadership behaved dictatorially or bureaucratically, and that a speedy transition to “complete political, social and economic democracy” (whatever that means) would have somehow have “put it on the right path to socialism”, as the SP statement implies (Point 3).
The USSR did not “fail”. Its growth may have been painful and uneven, but it was growing in general strength, in line with its development since 1917, until Gorbachev’s brain-dead break up of its tried and tested planned economic system and the dismantlement of its proletarian dictatorship, after which the economy tanked.
Anti-communism is endlessly pumping out luridly exaggerated or made up stories about food shortages, labour camps, the KGB, and all sorts of “mistakes”, all of which are eagerly swallowed by the anti-Soviet fake-‘left’ sects and circulated amongst the working class. The same fake-‘lefts’ will promptly put their fingers in their ears and shout “la-la-la-la – I can’t hear you…” when historical comparisons are made between the generous USSR aid and support for Third World national-liberation struggles (technical support, arms, trade and aid) and Western imperialism which, at the same time, was busy sucking all life and resources out of their colonies and butchering any movement that stood in their way (Malaya, Kenya, Algeria, etc).
The real problem was one of philosophy. The Stalin era USSR made all manner of bad decisions and mistakes because it had retreated from Leninism’s struggle to understand and explain what was happening in the world and the insoluble revolutionary crisis that is at the heart of imperialism and into anti-theory philosophical bankruptcy; moving away from the real world and placing all hope for change on “peaceful roads to socialism” and “permanent peaceful co-existence” with “good” imperialists. From this bad theoretical perspective came bad practice.
This wrong-headed perspective developed to the point that the emerging revolutionary movements were not warned of the need to build proletarian dictatorship defences; leading to Chile in 1973 and Allende’s appalling theoretical error of believing that socialism could be brought about peacefully by “democratic” means (and still not corrected by Cuban revisionism today – fascist coups in Honduras, Thailand and now Egypt, and non-stop imperialist disruption in Venezuela and Bolivia show the urgent need to dispel the illusion that bourgeois “democracy” is the way forward).
Gorbachevism’s capitulation to Western glitz and glamour, leading to break up of the proletarian dictatorship, and finally the USSR, was the logical end point of Stalinist revisionism.
The SP declaration that “the socialist transformation of society can only be accomplished by the working class acting democratically” (Point 6) stands in direct opposition to Lenin’s proletarian dictatorship science, as does the statement that “Socialism has to be international... It rejects the idea that there is a national solution to the problems of capitalism” (Point 5). Whilst true in the long term because capitalism will have to be overthrown everywhere before the workers’ states could begin to “wither away”, this abstract statement as it stands is tantamount to telling the Cuban working class today that they have to give up on their socialist construction because they stand alone in the Americas!
Their statement only deals in abstractions, which is where these “Bolshevik” poseurs and academic dilettantes feel most comfortable. How will capitalism’s “state and institutions be replaced by ones that act in the interests of the majority” (Point 2)? What does “a fundamental breach with capitalism” (Point 3) mean in reality? They don’t say, preferring to leave such questions hanging in the air to allow for endless circular debates around further abstract idealising that never come to a conclusion. All this to cause maximum confusion and prevent the working class from understanding that only revolution for the building of socialist proletarian dictatorships will emancipate them from endless capitalist oppression and war.
Once, Trotskyist hostility “conceded” that the USSR was socialist “for a short period of time”, but they could never agree on when the alleged “counter-revolution” took place (because there never was one), or explain why world imperialism was wetting itself in jubilation and triumphalism when it all fell apart in 1989 (the real counter-revolution). The SP doesn’t even bother with that. It simply asserts that it was never socialist and ridicules anyone who suggests otherwise or simply asks for an explanation (which they never give). There statement amounts to a denial that there has ever been a socialist revolution anywhere (tell that to the Cuban working class!). Can anti-theory philistinism become more degenerate???
The fake-‘left’ sects circulating around the platforms want to hijack Left Unity in order to prevent healthy discussion and debate around these issues and more from emerging. Their subjective individualism wants to see a party riddled with oppositional factions, each subjectively maintaining that they know the “truth” and thinking that they should be the leaders, but ensuring that no-one should ever become “the Leader” or have “a monopoly on the truth” (i.e. be able to give leadership through correctly analysing concrete world developments). Some have recently produced reams of academic papers supposedly “proving” that Lenin was for permanent platforms and factions. Not true. Lenin was against factions and numerous lengthy quotes can be produced to demonstrate this. All this work is aimed at justifying factionalising interventions into workers’ parties, and not simply an obscure historical debate.
Whilst there will be a huge range of motivations for supporting these platforms, and recognising that individuals need to form their own experiences and come to their own conclusions, allowing such platforms to persist indefinitely will, objectively, form a block on discussion.
An understanding of the objective reality of the world can only come by arguing every individual subjective perspective through to a conclusion that can be agreed collectively by the entire party body. Leadership will emerge from this struggle for understanding. Leninist science understands from experience that permanent platforms mean permanent potentials for disruption to such positive developments. More recent experiences in Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party further demonstrate the potentially destructive nature of political platforms.
Abolish the platforms. Build a unified party willing to learn from past and present experiments in socialist construction through genuinely open discussion and debate.
35 comments
35 responses to “We need to learn from past and present socialist experiments”
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“Far from embracing debate, cynical and scoffing responses of the “We have a government engaging in class war and you want to talk about the Soviet Union!” kind are made. Well, yes!! These discussions are crucial. If they have no relevance, why would the Socialist Platform frame its ‘Statement of Aims and Principles’ around this poisonous assertion tagged on at the end of Point 3: “We reject the idea that the undemocratic regimes that existed in the former Soviet Union and other countries were socialist”, and then refuse to explain it?
If “everyone knows” the Soviet Union had never been socialist, and if it is dead and buried, never to return again, then why even bother to say anything about it? ”
Phil, if you want to address something I’ve said, you can just quote me directly. I won’t be offended.
The reason that there seems to be some contradiction between what I’m saying and what the Socialist Platform are saying is simply explained. I’m not a member or supporter of the Socialist Platform.
So I stand by what I’ve said. The fact that this is a really important debate to the last century left does not mean it’s in any way relevant to the working class in the 21st century. It’s historical reenactment. I would be prepared to put money on the following. When out campaigning, not a single person will ask you what you think of the ex Soviet Union.
On the contrary , Hoom, I can absolutely guarantee that as soon as Left Unity got any electoral “traction”, the capitalist press wold immediately dredge up all the old “Gulags, Purges, famines, totalitarianism” stuff to tar the party with the crimes of Stalinism. And of course given that its all quite TRUE , they have a real ideological weapon to beat us with if we don’t distance ourselves from the crimes of Stalinism. So we WOULD meet that slur “on the doorstep” . I’ll take your bet – A fiver ?
Although I’m not a supporter of the rather inappropriately “ultra Left” Socialist Platform Statement – they are absolutely correct to distance our aims from those of the “State Capitalist” stalinist dictatorships of the so-called “Communist” states. Left Unity must also do so as a party when we are up and running.
Those Mao/Stalin enthusiasts like Phil Waincliffe who think the monstrous dictatorships of the USSR, China, North Korea, etc, have anything to do with our radical democratic socialist objectives are quite simply in the wrong party . There are still a few Maoist sects about to cater to this extraordinary historical perspective.
Hoom,
I simply paraphrased you because it was a good example of the sort of responses these questions can get when they are raised around Left Unity, although not when I talk to ordinary people, and it was mocking. I wasn’t assuming you were in the Socialist Platform or any other platform.
The rest of the piece you quote is merely to point out that the Socialist Platform has put this sentence in their statement and yet won’t explain it, which is odd, especially as they claim to want debate.
We’ll see what happens, but I will continue to maintain that capitalism cannot be reformed because the crisis is insoluble because no other theory makes sense. If that proves to be true, then the Soviet Union will be highly relevant, because nothing else has brought capitalist crisis to an end.
If the Socialist Platform is passed the sectarians will have won. If the Left Party statement is passed then the opportunists will have won. Either is death for LU and oddly the same people supporting Left Party in different circumstances could be supporting Socialist Platform and vice versa as there is nothing in either statement of any real import and it is the want of centrists to zig zag backward and forward between the two approaches.
As for the Soviet Union the Socialist Platform people seem to be trying to smuggle in SWP state cap theory in the most sectarian manner. The Soviet Union which collapsed in 1991 was a degenrated workers state deformed by Stalinism. Russia is now an imperialist state with a rabid kleptocracy in charge. China remains a deformed workers’ state run by the Stalinist/Maoists in the interests it seems of Western corporations.
I would like a non-platform platform.
There are good reasons why all these sects are small and irrelevant. They deserve to be.
Left Unity simply cannot succeed if we are going to have to take side between platforms representing sects, who will argue for ever regardless of the material circs.
In the end, allowing sects to dominate the agenda for debate means we will end up ignoring material reality and the working class.
Mike,
A non platform platform is an excellent idea! Why don’t you set one up? I’ll definitely support it. All we’ll need is another signatures.
If you aren’t able to set up a platform, I’ll be happy to do so.
I mostly agree with your arguments about the soviet union and the trotskyists nonsense about it all.
I just think : ‘what would they have done if they had had power?’
And that’s a tough one to answer, because Trotsky was just as vacillating as Stalin appeared to be, moving from one extreme economic position to the other over the period 1922 until his exile.
But also, that’s really just a matter of personal interest as a piece of history and has little relevance to LU.
But even if I disagreed with you about that period of mixed advance, progress, terror and inhumanity, we should be able to be part of the same platform, relevant to modern UK not 1930s SU.
Simply by not joining or forming a platform we could have a de facto non-platform platform.
I’m really not sure the best way forward for the left is picking over the bones of the Soviet Union. I’d much rather be defending the NHS and the welfare state before future generations are left picking over the bones of these vital institutions, thinking how ever did we allow something so precious to be taken from us?
Salman,
Defend the NHS and welfare state by all means, but there is no turning the clock back to 1945 after the crash of 2008. Capitalism’s crisis cannot be solved, which is why we need to learn lessons from the Soviet Union. This is the perspective we need to give in all our campaigning work.
Sorry. “All we’ll need is another 8 signatures”
I am a socialist who supports the Socialist Platform but does not believe in “firm proletarian dictatorship discipline”, as advocated by Phil Waincliffe and other Leninists on this website. I explicitly reject the notion that Leninism is a science and await any kind of proof that it is; where are its analytical achievements?.
Leninism was a tactical approach to politics based on expediency – hence the U-turns in economic policy while Lenin was in power. As for being against factions, this is a euphemism for Lenin’s – and Trotsky’s – elimination of all opposition on the left. Kronstadt paved the way for the later purges of old Bolsheviks; there was a fundamental continuity between Lenin and Stalin on dealing with other left-wingers assumed not to be loyal to the leadership.
This kind of self-appointed right to lead has to kept out of Left Unity.
Leninism and its development into Stalinism served for a time in the early Cold War as a model for some newly-independent states in Africa, Asia and Latin America to industrialise and develop their economies – as a quick developmental fix for an essentially nationalist project. In this it created mostly repressive regimes and went on to crush workers’ movements in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s, which is when western communist parties started to haemorrhage members.
As for the supposed achievements of central planning, as Krushchev said, it consisted mostly of setting unrealistic targets in ignorance of capacity and actual conditions of production and shouting endlessly at real productive facilities to achieve or surpass them – a bit like Blair’s target culture but even less sophisticated. This kind of authoritarian planning lays the Left open to the critique of those right wing economists who argue that without a price mechanism regulated by supply and demand, it is extremely difficult for a producer or planner to know what, how much and what variety of goods to produce. The answer to this problem lies not in Leninism, but in the Internet and the computer software enabling 21st century supermarkets to track individual consumption profiles, which means that sensitive and accurate ways of non authoritarian overall planning of production and distribution can be found and the market eliminated altogether.
It is ironic that you talk about learning from the past and then present us with an unrehabilitated version of Leninism which eliminates the experience of workers and socialists in the past and fails to acknowledge the reasons it alienated so many of them.
Well said -exactly!
“Leninism and its development into Stalinism served for a time….”
“As for the supposed achievements of central planning, as Krushchev said, it consisted mostly of setting unrealistic targets in ignorance of capacity and actual conditions of production and shouting endlessly at real productive facilities to achieve or surpass them – a bit like Blair’s target culture but even less sophisticated. This kind of authoritarian planning lays the Left open to the critique of those right wing economists who argue that without a price mechanism regulated by supply and demand, it is extremely difficult for a producer or planner to know what, how much and what variety of goods to produce.”
Some questions for John Tummon. He writes that Lenin ‘developed’ into Stalinism, and even associates Krushchev with Lenin and the ‘planning’ of the USSR.
But if Leninism ‘developed’ into ‘Stalinism’, it must have been the one of the most violent forms of ‘development’ in history, ‘development’ through extermination. In order to ‘develop’ his regime out of ‘Leninism’, Stalin had to exterminate virtually all of the original Leninists. How can that seriously be called ‘development’, as opposed to usurpation and extermination?
The graphic on this 1941 front page of the American Trotskyist newspaper Socialist Appeal shows what happened to the leaders of Lenin’s central committee of 1917.
http://www.billhunterweb.org.uk/articles/socialist%20appeal%20reduced/sa_oct_1941.pdf
Barring a few who died in the meantime for unrelated reasons, most of them were “Shot”, “Executed”, “Disappeared” (the latter a GPU speciality). Stalin alone remained. How can this be called ‘development’ of Stalinism out of Leninism?
It is perfectly reasonable to say that Krushchevism and Brehnevism ‘developed’ out of Stalinism, since there was obvious continuity between most of the personnel involved. But to say that Stalinism ‘developed’ out of Leninism is simply bizarre, as the continuity was minimal, and most of the original ‘Leninists’ were physically wiped out by Stalin.
Is this not a slander that you are repeating against people who were victims of Stalin, in saying that in some way they were responsible for the politics of the people who murdered them systematically? And conversely, if Stalin’s politics were so similar to those of ‘Leninism’, why did he have to murder the overwhelming majority of the surviving ‘Leninists’ in order to consolidate himself in power? If they had been so politically similar as you say, why would that be remotely necessary?
John,
The Russian revolution is the greatest analytical achievement of Leninism. As I said, all successful revolutions have been a result of a theoretical struggle to correctly analyse the historical circumstances and balance of class forces at the time. So certain was Lenin of the correctness of his theoretical analysis that, in 1917, he threatened to break away from the Bolshevik party when its leadership was delaying a decision over whether or not the time was ripe to seize power. The rest is history.
He also correctly warned the international working class that imperialism was heading for a second world war, not long after the “war to end all wars” had ended. Following the defeats of the European revolutionary movement (Germany especially), he argued that the USSR will be isolated until revolutions emerged in the East, which the world witnessed after WW2. As well as this, he updated Marx’s theoretical prediction that capitalism was heading for catastrophic crisis, which was witnessed in the 1930s and 40s, and which we are experiencing now.
Dialectical materialism is a theoretical tool for understanding the world, not a blueprint for action. Its findings constantly needed reassessing and updating to help understand new developments as they emerge. Leninism was correctly able to build the sort of party able to do this and emancipate the working class from capitalist slump and war.
Stalinism retreated from this struggle for understanding, hence the sort of difficulties you quoted from Khrushchev, also the problems ordinary workers and socialists within the USSR and beyond had in fully understanding the difficulties they faced and what was needed to be done to overcome them.
There is no reason why new technological developments would not be used in they way you suggest, if they are deemed the most effective at the time, but it would require central planning to carry it out. There would be anarchy if workers in one factory decide they want to produce butter when there is a national shortage for bread, for example, and so some centralised means of organising this, using the best technology available, would be necessary.
Yes, firm discipline would be necessary. Capitalist culture and society is extremely individualistic. A new co-operative collectivist culture would have to be created from scratch. That won’t happen overnight, but the need to meet the overall needs of the majority after the devastation caused by capitalism’s collapse, and to defend socialism, would be immediate.
Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s were not workers movements. They were remnants of the old fascist order that always hated communism. Communists were lynched in Hungary. This was evident in Solidarnosc too, when Pilsudski-era symbolism was resurrected, continuing today. The Waffen SS are now able to march freely in the Baltic states. These movements needed to be suppressed to protect the gains of the majority.
Great to see some proper Stalinists emerge to defend the ‘existing workers’ states.’
Oh wait, it’s not great at all. It’s horrible.
Whichever direction LU goes in I hope it can at least reject Stalinism. I mean, come on, if we can’t do that…
Edd,
I don’t see where you get the “proper Stalinists” from. Haven’t you read what I wrote about Stalinism in this and my previous piece?! I said the fall of the Soviet Union can be traced back to Stalinism’s retreat from revolutionary perspectives – that’s not very Stalinist! They blame Khrushchev.
It was Marx who saw the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat after the 1848 revolutions, and especially after the Paris Commune was drowned in blood in 1871. Lenin argued that the recognition of the proletarian dictatorship was “the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested”, not Stalin (or Mao for that matter).
I’m just battling to make the case for Leninist-Marxism because it is the only philosophy that is able to stop capitalist slump and war. I’m not saying I’m doing it in the best way, but it is an argument that needs to be made.
That’s a pretty sectarian response, though.
There are far fewer real Stalinists than there are people accused of being Stalinists.
We’ll get nowhere if people sling ‘ultra-leftist’ and ‘Stalinist’ around whenever the SU is discussed.
Mike,
Agreed. We need a party in which all perspectives are taken seriously and opened up for discussion. That includes giving freedom to Stalinists to argue for their positions based on what is true about the world (present and past).
There is a Stalinist position on the SU which blames Khrushchev for the the ultimate demise of the SU, I don’t agree, but such positions need to be argued out to a conclusion.
Phil
1 Revolutions are not analytical but practical achievements. Analysing the historical circumstances not fully but only insofar as is necessary to make practical decisions about a seizure of power in one country does not qualify as analytical achievement. Or was Thatcher’s outmanoevering of the trade unions and old Labour an analytical achievement, too?
2 Many people foresaw another major war, because of the idiocy of the Peace Treaty and the continued attempt to keep Germany out of the imperialist game.
3 Marx’s theory of crisis did not need updating. Exactly what did Lenin add that wasn’t there before? Lenin distorted Marx’s schematic theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat by ignoring the need to give it social content and instead using it to create a coercive apparatus – how long exactly did he wait before creating a secret police on the Tsarist model? This was virtually immediate and before any significant opposition had emerged, so it was an ideological not a pragmatic act.
4 He did not go beyond recognising the USSR’s coming isolation to providing an alternative to the theory of socialism in one country, so his contribution on this was far from distinctive and certainly not decisive.
5 In what sense did the Bolshevik party “emancipate the working class from capitalist slump and war”? The USSR and the Eastern Block was even more affected by the ’70s oil crises than the west, mostly because its economies were tied to the west through massive western investment, which was made conditional on anti-working class measures being implemented.
6 You can’t try to distance Leninism from the Stalinism that followed whilst defending the role of central planning, which spanned them both.
7 Your attempt to tar the post-war opposition movements in Eastern Europe as in some way Fascist is disgraceful and a testament to ignorance and dogma.
Brilliant again!
I know we are a broad church but surely we can’t accept holding the Soviet union (under Stalin, Krushchov, Brezhnev etc)as a model for our future society.
It goes without saying ……..doesn’t it?????
“He did not go beyond recognising the USSR’s coming isolation to providing an alternative to the theory of socialism in one country, so his contribution on this was far from distinctive and certainly not decisive.”
How could he provide an alternative to the theory of “Socialism in one country”, since it was only put forward openly as a programmatic idea after his death?
New introduction to Stalin’s “problems of Leninism”, published in late 1924, contained the first advocacy of ‘Socialist in One Country’. Lenin died in Jan 1924.
1. It was a titanic analytical achievement – the result of a lifetime of analysis, at the highest level, of the revolutionary nature inherent in all phenomena, and proven in practice by the 1917 revolution. And yes, Thatcher’s outmaneuvering of the TU and Labour was also analytical (though she was only the figurehead, the ruling class plot, scheme and analyse situations all the time in order to maintain their class rule). The difference is, she failed. It ended in a slump crisis and was brought down by the semi-revolutionary poll tax movement. I don’t know what you mean by it just being about “a seizure of power in one country”. Its just not true.
2. Many may have predicted war, but they did not see that capitalist boom was always going to end up in world war because it is inherent in imperialism. Lenin did.
3. Of course Marxist theory constantly needs updating. Nothing is static, everything is in motion – that’s the very essence of Marxism. New developments emerge all the time. Marx couldn’t foresee the merger of industrial capitalism with finance capitalism and its transformation into finance-dominated imperialism because the conditions weren’t there. Engels lived long enough to point to it. Lenin was able to describe this process in great detail. It needs a whole new reassessment today, with imperialism’s complete dependence on credit to survive.
I don’t know what you mean by Marx’s “schematic theory” of proletarian dictatorship and the need to “give it social content”. This is meaningless academicism. You’d need to explain this and say how you think he distorted it. The secret police were based on a new Bolshevik model, not a Tsarist model.
4. I don’t understand your point. Lenin was for world revolution, but recognised that this was not going to happen immediately. What do you say about his predictions of revolutions happening in the East?
5. Erm, the Russian revolution ended WW1, the economy was making enormous strides throughout the 1930s, when the rest of the planet was in a slump, and the Red Army crushed the Nazi invasion and ended WW2. What else needs saying?
6. I’m not trying to distance Lenin from Stalin, I’m just trying to explain the difficulties in analysis Stalin had which Lenin didn’t. You are just trying to say that Lenin and Stalin are one and the same thing.
7. Why would the whole of world imperialism cheer them and on and finance them if they were a “workers movement” to create a purer communism? Surely they’d want to destroy this movement, if that was the case. The idea that fascist backwardness would disappear overnight is idealistic nonsense. The Hungary movement was saturated with Horthyists and Solidarnosc proved to be out-and-out Pilsudski-admiring clerical fascists.
Phil
1 There is a crucial difference between revolution – the wholesale transformation of society over a period of time – and a seizure of power, which the Leninist tradition conflates, and there was no revolution in Russia after 1917 – hierarchical society continued, political culture became nepotistic and change was forced through by a powerful state that assumed vast coercive powers and grew and grew in expanse. No civil society emerged, there were no independent workers’ organisations, the housing crisis was never solved and there was no public debate. The opportunity to seize power was presented by the collapse of the Romanov order, not gained by the persistent application of theory.
2 World War is not inherent in imperialism, which is still going strong 68 years after the last world war. Leninist theory – that imperialism is just a stage in capitalism – lost credibility on the international Left decades ago because it was one-dimensional economism.
3 It is Marx’s theory of recurring capitalist crisis due to the over-accumulation of capital and the tendency of the rate of profit to decline that was proven correct in 1929 and in 2007. The Wall Street crash did not happen because of anything Marx did not set out in his writing.
‘Schematic’ just means ‘in outline’, as opposed to fully developing an idea. ‘Social content’ means developing this theory to show how the working class itself would manage and organise production, what structures this would involve, what the relationship of this to political democracy would be, its implications for surplus value, for the wage nexus and such like. Lenin chose to use the phrase and hang something quite different on it – party rule.
4 My point is that Lenin’s resignation to the failure of the international revolution after the German KDP and Comintern screwed up big style in 1923 should have pointed him to a theoretical re-assessment of what to do, but in not doing so he allowed socialism in one country to triumph. WIshing it were otherwise does not amount to clear blue water between him and Stalin on this.
5 The Russian revolution did not end World War One; after Brest Litovsk the war lost its eastern front, that’s all. The ‘enormous strides’ of the Soviet economy in the 1930s depended on forced labour whipped into shape by the NKVD and that economy did not set out to produce much for civilian use – its overriding focus on heavy industry was for the purpose of preparing industrial capacity for the expected war against Germany; in short it was nationalist, not socialist in inspiration.
6 In terms of the trajectory they set Russia on, Lenin and Stalin were very close on all fundamental questions, either explicitly or implicitly. Central planning and all it meant for the nature of Soviet society and its class relations ws their most important point of agreement.
7 Imre Nagy’s ‘new course’ from 1953 on was designed to ease the load on the workers and peasants, produce higher living standards, end the internment camps and turn the economy away from heavy industry. Many political prisoners were released. When the Stalinists ousted Nagy in 1955, the Hungarian workers began their fightback. In Poland the workers’ demands were pay increases, lower prices and lower piecework norms but in Hungary they were demanding genuine workers’ self-government in the factories. The demands were revolutionary in the circumstances: broadening of trade union democracy; establishment of workers’ control; a prominent role for the unions in solving problems of production and management; the manager to keep his “full right” to make decisions, but to consult the union committee on questions of wages and welfare. Only someone who sees central planning rather than workers’ self-management as the core of socialism could bring themselves to describe these developments as ‘Fascist’.
I have just read the letter in the Guardian about Left Unity and decided to check out the website. Back in the 70’s and 80’s I was politically active in the SWP, particularly aound the Right To Work Campaign. I gradually drifted away becaue of what I perceived as the inherent contradictions in the revolutionary perspective. Marxism is supposed be ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’, yet we were in the position of saying that the state would be abolished under future revolutionary conditions, while at the same time were were campaigning for the complete protection and future existence of the NHS. How you run an NHS without a state is beyond me.
When the Central committee decided they wanted to close the Woman’s magazine (after all this time I can’t recall the title) a huge row broke out and all these ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ Marxist’s couldn’t even agrre on what the circulationwas, how many were being sold or even how many were being printed.
I have just read the above discussion and it is making my brains and balls ache and feel as though I have been thrown back into some late 70’s time warp. Can we be clear please that Stalin’s crimes and the gulags were not some fascist or capitalist fiction; they existed and I, and everyone in this discussion, would have been either shot or locked away for decades.
The above discussion is just the type of arcane, quasi religious, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, only we have the correct answer bollocks
that voters are not interested in. Unless you can discern the signs of revolutionary insurrection brewing that nobody else can then it might come as a surprise to you that people with votes are the people you have to persuade that you have something to offer.
To get any chance of any impact then Left Unity has to start with the acknowledgement that it will take a minimum 20 years of campaigning before they might get say two or three MP’s elected, if that. If you think this is wrong look at the Green Party who have managed one after 35 years. You also need to build a national network of groups, with a view to getting local council representation, how do you propose to do that? Where is funding going to come from?
I suspect that all of the above contributors will be far too busy urgently making sure that LU has the ‘correct’ line than actually doing anything practical. Like the Pope’s ‘infallibility’ the ‘correct line’ is subject to change according to how events change. Witness the ideological zig zags communists had to undertake before and during the second world war. The Soviet Union was not a shining example on how to achieve socialism/communism. I am old enough to recall people waving Mao’s little red book and even Ghadafi’s green tome, and even hear praise for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. To my chagrin and shame I remember toasting Mugabe’s victory. The left over the last 70 years have not got much right.Do you think we could stop arguing the toss over Lenin, Trotsky, Mao and all the others and try and find our own path suitable to our own historical circumstances?
The problem, Philip,is that not everyone who has been through the Left is as rehabilitated as thou! There is quite a big debate going on in the Left, of which this is only a small part, about whether Leninism should be dead and buried. It is important if we want to move on to a higher gear, because Leninism has been at the core of most of the biggest organisations on the British Left since the 1960s, including – no, especially – the SWP. You can advocate pragmatic, rudderless zig-zagging as much as you want, but we need to have some fundamental issues out in the open, not hidden for the sake of a fake unity. We can’t paint a picture of what socialism will be like unless we resolve this – see my thread “What is Socialism, why do we want it and how do we argue for it?”
Thanks for that, other Philip. I was active in the SWP from the late 70s to the 90’s also(and around the RTWC) I left when I realised the leadership of the SWP was taking it back to being a sect. They could never give up control, trust the membership or participate honestly in a United Front. I too want to reach for a blunt instrument when I read a bunch of farts wasting their lives thinking that if only we had the right analysis the workers would join en masse and all would be well. I am really interested in building something that can give people courage and optimism for the future. I don’t want a liberal ‘everyone do their own thing’ party, but I do think we have to take chances and trust people-I will not be subjected to ‘the line’ although I do not have a problem, say with mandated reps.The last thing we need is a bunch of mechanical trots sucking the life out of it.
Dear Mr Tummon, I am not in the least advocating rudderless zig-zagging. One of my points about my experience of the SWP is that Leninism cannot even do what it claims, i.e. be ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’. I think you will find that Lenin zig zagged quite a bit during his lifetime.
After Lenin’s death Stalin certainly zig zagged. One of the most ridiculous defences of Stalin is that he signed the pact with Hitler because he needed time to build up the Soviet Union’s defences and he always knew that Germany would attack. Yet when he was repeatedly warned by Britain and the USA that Hitler was gathering all his forces on the border of the Soviet Union he absolutely refused to believe it. So much for Stalin’s far sightedness. I am certainly not convinced that a Leninist party is needed and even to be arguing about his ‘legacy’is pointless in the current circumstances prevailing in the U.K.
Unlike a great many people on this site I have runs some small enterprises and am currently self-employed. My self-employment currently brings in very small sums and I would not recommend the insecurity. However, I do know the freedom to make my own decisions and there is no question that the one thing most people in this country do not have is the freedom to make any decision about their work, how it is run, who benefits from the labout etc.
If control over the means of production means anything it should mean the freedom of the workers running the organisation to take their own decisions. That certainly was not the case under the Soviet Union.The right is not entirely wrong about everything and competition is not always unhelpful.(Yes I do know what competition leads to in the long run.)
Take a simple thing like shoes. Within living memory people had only one pair or often none. Now, at least in the West, most people except the extremely poor will have at least three pairs, and sports shoes and slippers and sandals and perhaps wellingtons.
Now, just sit and think for an hour or so of just how many different activities have to be undertaken to produce that footwear. In other words think of the logistics. Then try and imagine that carried out at the behest of a soviet. There was in the Russian Revolution a ‘golden moment’ when it appeared that soviets ‘worked’, and they probably did on an extremely small scale.
But there is no possibility of providing everyone with shoes on that model. If you tried how would you solve questions such as how many shoes should people have? What designs should they be allowed to choose? What materials should they be made from? Where should they be sourced from? How should all these materials be transported? When the shoes have been made where should they be stored? How many shoe shops should there be? Where should they be? How do you price the shoes? How much should be people paid for making them and selling them? Should there be differential rates of pay? On and on and on and on. That is just shoes. The only solution would be to allow workers to run their own shoe production in competition with other workers. Obviously those that failed would not be left to starve or become homeless. But it is only by letting some fail and some succeed that all goods will be produced in sufficient quantities.
I note you have not answered my point about the state and the NHS as an example of how it is impossible on practical and logistical grounds to argue that a stateless society could be produced. I have not, as you put it, been ‘rehabilitated’, far from it. I found the Labour Party to be useless, but I find the revolutionary left unable to come up with workable alternatives. In effect I am confronted, logically and intellectually, with twin cul de sacs.
I’ll tell you what Socialism is. It is Freedom. What socialists need to do is come up with some definitions of freedom and stop being obsessed with what Lenin said to Trotsky and what Stalin said to Lenin and the Russian Revolution and where it went right/wrong etc.
Philip, I think we got off on the wrong foot and that’s probably my fault. Like you, I am very interested in these questions of freedom, central planning v self-organisation and making the absence of a market work, which is why I have put up a thread entitled “What is Socialism, Why do we want it and how do we argue for it?” Part One of that is already up on this website and Part Two will follow. Please read through it (I know its long) and come back to me about these issues. We need to find a way through them if we are to have a vision of socialism robust enough to take to people as an alternative.
“Take a simple thing like shoes. Within living memory people had only one pair or often none. Now, at least in the West, most people except the extremely poor will have at least three pairs, and sports shoes and slippers and sandals and perhaps wellingtons.
Now, just sit and think for an hour or so of just how many different activities have to be undertaken to produce that footwear. In other words think of the logistics. Then try and imagine that carried out at the behest of a soviet. There was in the Russian Revolution a ‘golden moment’ when it appeared that soviets ‘worked’, and they probably did on an extremely small scale.”
But of course, the detailed design of shoe patterns would not be carried out at the behest of a soviet. Why should it be? Any more than the design of computer software would be carried out by the soviet. It would be carried out by those workers who choose to specialise in that particular field of shoe design, or software design, or whatever. In conditions of workers democracy, they would have more chance to express their creativity than under capital.
Through the soviets the workers in all their varieties could get together and collectively plan the broad parameters of what things need to be produced, as well as working conditions, resources etc.
Detailed implementation would still be carried out by interaction between the people doing the work: shoe designers working with shoe producers to investigate the practicality of designs, etc, produce prototypes, etc. Since under capitalism such products are produced for a blind market that furthermore depends as much on ability to pay as on aesthetics, why should the working class with its many intricate connections between producers and consumers, from below, and without the restriction than anything produced must be immediately profitable, fail to produce a large variety of products? Maybe a different variety, produced in different conditions, but still a variety.
It is absolutely pointless to talk about the shortcomings of the soviets ‘explaining’ anything about the irrationalities of the Stalinist economies. By the end of the Civil War at the latest, there were no soviets. They never worked economically in peacetime, because they never held real power in peacetime.
Stalinism had nothing in common with soviets, and if a workers soviet ever arose in conditions of Stalinist rule, the rule was simple: it should be (and was) crushed with the utmost brutality, just as much as everywhere else (from the Paris Commune onwards).
I don’t think those that conflate workers soviets with Stalinism understand the sheer murderous hated that the Stalinist regimes had for anything that even looked like a genuine soviet. It was a class hatred; it was that at bottom that led to monstrous purges throughout the Stalinist states. Not ‘totalitarian ideology’ but class hatred was the motive for these crimes.
If it is deemed ‘sectarian’ to draw a hard line against Stalinism in order to make clear what genuine revolutionary socialism stands for, then so be it. Many more people, and of a qualitatively better type, are repelled by any conciliation to Stalinism than will be attracted to it. And those who claim to ‘support’ a socialist project who advocate Stalinist politics will likely prove treacherous to it.
This is not an esoteric subject that is only of interest to ‘sectarians’ but a vital matter for every left-wing or socialist movement in the future, which will inevitably be thrown at us w’hether we like it or not by our adversaries of all types. So I would pray peoples indulgence and ask them to consider what I say, or even ask questions if they do not understand it.
I’m not aware that the Socialist Platform had even adopted SWP ‘state cap theory’ on the USSR, let alone have they “smuggled it in in the most sectarian manner”. The Platform itself does not proclaim state capitalism, and even if it did, who is to say it would be the SWP’s theory it advocated anyway? It would be rather difficult for it to do so, since this question has not been discussed collectively and no detailed position has been adopted. Why should it be ? The Socialist Platform mainly consists of non-aligned individuals with varying views on this, along with some supporters of the CPGB (a small minority of the Platform’s supporters) who are not in any case bound to defend any ‘party line’ on the USSR as far as I know.
There have been other attempts to analyse the degeneration of the the USSR and the nature of Stalinism, not all of them can be simply fit into a box according to whether or not the author follows either the SWP’s analysis (authored by their late leader Tony Cliff) or the various left currents that claim to agree with Trotsky’s view of Stalinism.
I would argue that that these currents in fact post-WWII have made a major political leap that Trotsky never made – giving the terribly undeserved credit of ‘workers states’ to cloned Stalinist regimes like those in Eastern Europe, China, North Korea etc., where unlike in early Bolshevik Russia, the working class never held one iota of state power for even a single day, or even a single hour for that matter.
Cliff’s theory of the USSR did not manage to predict its demise. Indeed he postulated the view that “state capitalism” was a higher form of capitalist concentration and development than ordinary monopoly capitalism, and because of that there could not be ‘restoration’ of more traditional capitalist norms in the so-called ‘socialist bloc’. That was proven completely wrong by what happened in the last 20 years or so.
He also claimed that the main economic law that regulates, in an anarchic but real way, the capitalist economy as a whole, the exchange of commodities on average according to the proportions of labour embodied in them (the law of value for short) did not apply or exist in the economy of the USSR, again implying that it was a higher form of economy than Western capitalism.
This was again proven wrong, as it was precisely the law of value, given the conditions where in Russia capital accumulation co-existed as a socio-economic goal of the bureaucracy with economic forms inherited from the revolution, that led to the economy stagnating and grinding to a halt, and ultimately to the collapse of Stalinism, precisely devolving towards more traditional capitalism.
There are other analyses of Stalinism that are more objective, in tune with reality, but unfortunately do not have the organisational muscle of some relatively large sect behind them, in attempting to deal politically with the destruction of the Russian revolution. There are better analyses to be found authored by much less well known people – other views of the USSR, which use the term ‘state capitalism’ or ‘statified capitalism’ in a very different manner to the SWP.
Elements of such an analysis were contributed by such theorists as CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the post-WWII years. Natalia Trotsky herself broke with the Trotskyist movement in the early 1950s in disgust over its softness on Stalinism, and appears to have evolved similar views. But the most coherent rendering of this into a unified theory of Stalinism, that generalises from the economic and political forces that led to the bloody counterrevolution of the late 1930s Great Purges, is contained in a remarkable book, the Life and Death of Stalinism, by Walter Daum, of the fairly little known and minor (in terms of size anyway) US Marxist group, the League for a Revolutionary Party.
This substantial work, for anyone really interested in this subject, can be downloaded in its entirety as a series of PDF files at the link below.
http://lrp-cofi.org/book/index.html
This book answers a lot of questions for me about Stalinism, and its real role as the gravedigger of the Russian revolution, and the fascist-like terror, paralleling that in Nazi Germany, that wiped out many thousands of communists in as bloody a counterrevolution as any in history in the years 1936-39.
Funnily enough it also contains some material on economics, on fictitious capital and the like, which is relevant to an understanding of capitalist crisis today, the economic forces behind the credit crunch and the threat of a new Great Depression – which is an indication of the universality of some aspects of the experience of Stalinism and its applicability to all forms of capitalism).
The final process of the overthrow of the workers state in 1936-39 was something that Leon Trotsky, who was involved in life and death battle with the counterrevolution without fully understanding its nature and full implications (quite a common experience in the face of complex and unprecedented events) failed to analyse correctly. It led to the restoration of a highly deformed variety of capitalism in Russia.
This was forced to co-exist with some economic forms that were in fact gains from the workers revolution – the guarantee of full employment, far reaching statification, and forms of social welfare that the new regime, for all of its terror, could not just abolish because of its origins as a usurper of the revolution and its need for an idelogical disguise to protect it from the working class. It was decades before economic problems, the decay of ‘socialism’ resulting from its own deceitful disguise, and the re-emergence of over popular illusions in ‘democratic’ capitalism allowed it to throw off the disguise in 1989-91. But basically, the ruling class of Russia today, the Putin and his conservative social base, is more or less the same as it was in Soviet times, albeit with greater marketisation of the economy, and some varying methods.
The Stalin-Hitler pact (and particularly its secret parts agreeing to Russian annexation of the Baltic States and what is now Moldova with Hitler’s agreement and blessing), represented the rebirth of Russia as a relatively backward and weaker imperialist power, part of the world imperialist system. This has its relevance for what happened after WWII, with the expansion of the Soviet bloc, and the capitulation of many Trotskyists to Stalinism. Even in cases like the SWP that did not directly adopt Stalinoid politics, we saw the perverse evolution of Stalinist-like bureaucratic methods of organisation.
The little fragment of ‘Trotskyism’ (Economic and Philisophic Science Review) that crossed over openly to pro-Stalinist apologetics, and penned the posting I am commenting on, will of course be outraged at the direct comparisons I made between Stalin’s regime and Hitler’s. That is to be expected, but their outrage may well stem from recognising their own hideous face in the mirror.
But this subject is not the business of ‘sects’ and ‘sectarians’. The Russian revolution, and the events that flowed from it, dwarf all of us. Stalinist China, appropriately dubbed ‘the sweatshop of the world’ by its own trade union activists, still dwarfs us today. As socialists we cannot duck the ‘Russian question’, it will always be used to attack us until we can overcome this means of attack in the popular mind, which means developing a convincing and coherent analysis that can gain an intellectual and political hegemony of its own. Seems like a tall order today? Perhaps. But it still is of vital necessity to our project.
This is very telling:
“As socialists we cannot duck the ‘Russian question’, it will always be used to attack us until we can overcome this means of attack in the popular mind, which means developing a convincing and coherent analysis that can gain an intellectual and political hegemony of its own. Seems like a tall order today? Perhaps. But it still is of vital necessity to our project.”
This is pure Orwellian 1984 double-speak. Not enough of the working class has bought your line that the Soviet Union wasn’t socialist so you want to instill anti-Soviet propaganda in the “popular mind”. Don’t worry about the truth, just make up a “convincing argument”.
It’s appalling. Why should anyone believe anything you’ve just written?
I think you speak a different language to myself, a language peculiar to the inhabitants of ultra-Stalinist micro-sects. If you cannot understand what I have written, I suggest you read it again until you do understand it. You can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink :)
“The Stalin-Hitler pact (and particularly its secret parts agreeing to Russian annexation of the Baltic States and what is now Moldova with Hitler’s agreement and blessing), represented the rebirth of Russia as a relatively backward and weaker imperialist power, part of the world imperialist system. This has its relevance for what happened after WWII, with the expansion of the Soviet bloc, and the capitulation of many Trotskyists to Stalinism. ”
So, for Donovan if not Trotsky, the class character of the former Soviet Union was determined (mostly in secret!) by the diplomacy of Joseph Stalin who brought the newly “imperialist” USSR into WWII when the Wiermacht poured over the Soviet boarder. But if he is correct about the restoration of capitalism by 1939, why does Donovan place the decisive Trotskyist “capitulation” to Stalinism in the post-War period? Why does he not pursue his own logic and declare that the Fourth International, following Trotsky until his murder by the bloody hand of Stalin, crossed the class line and scabbed on the international proletariat when it defended the long march of the Soviet Union till final victory over the Third Reich? The answer to that question is not difficult: most “new class” theorists found Soviet “imperialism” most reprehensible, not when the USSR was diplomatically allied with “their” bourgeoisie but when the “democratic” alliance broke down in the Cold War. For Donovan cannot attack Trotskyists in WWII for defending the USSR without renouncing defence of the imperialist Allies in the west supported by the scab “democratic socialists” soon to be rewarded by the Labour Government of 1945 (bow down and worship). The anti-communist “socialist” George Orwell was typical of his ilk, warning his readers that the Soviet war effort was a sham to fool the “democracies” and would shortly be replaced by a renewed pact with Hitler the moment a “second front” opened in France: when he finally realised that the Soviet determination to defeat Nazi Germany was all to real, he cynically changed tack and demanded a “second front” to “save” European “civilisation” against the horrors of Soviet “barbarism”. Donovan does not care to mention it, but the Fourth International was defencist in WWII ONLY on the side of the USSR and NOT on the side of USSR’s bourgeois allies in the west who were indeed fighting a predatory inter-imperialist war against their German and Japanese rivals.
‘Developing a convincing and coherent analysis that can gain a political and intellectual hegemony’ isn’t the same as arguing for an analysis based on the truth of the SU. What’s ‘ultra-Stalinist’ about that???