TROTSKY'S MARXISM: AN ANTI-~CRITIQUE
By Ernest Mandel
(The New Left Review, in its July- August, 1967, issue (No. 44), published an extensive article by one of the members of its editorial committee, Nicolas Krassé, that sought to draw a balance sheet on Leon Trotsky as a Marxist. In Krass6's opinion, Trotsky failed to measure up. [In the current January-February issue (No. 47), the editors have provided equal space for a reply by Ernest Mandel, the editor of the Belgian weekly La Gauche and author of Traité d'Economie Marxiste, a study that has won the author a considerable reputation in the European left as a Marxist economist. (An English translation is now on the press.)
Nicolas Krassd’s critique of Trotsky’s political thought and activities, which appeared in issue No. 44 of the New Left Review, provides a welcome occasion to unravel some of the misconceptions and prejudices about the historical role of the founder of the Red Army, which still haunt a large part of the ‘non-engaged left intelligentsia. The roots of these misconceptions are easily discovered. The public admission and denunciation of some of Stalin’s worst crimes by the present Soviet leaders is by no means accompanied by an adoption of the policies for which Trotsky fought during the last 15 years of his life. Neither in the internal organization of the ‘socialist’ countries, nor in their international policy (with the single exception of Cuba), have their leaders gone back to the principles of Soviet democracy and revolutionary internationalism which Trotsky defended.
But historically, the very fact that Stalin has been thrown down from his pedestal, and that many accusations launched against him by Trotsky are now accepted as correct, represents a tremendous historical vindication of the man whom Stalin’s agent murdered on August 2oth, 1940 in Coyoacan.
Anyone who remains unengaged in the struggle to bring about the final triumph of Trotsky’s programme—his complete political vindication—will therefore tend to rationalize his abstention by looking for faults, mistakes and weaknesses in that programme. By doing so, he cannot repeat the gross distortions and falsifications of Stalinist henchmen of the ’thirties, the forties and the early "fifties: that Trotsky was a ‘counter-revolutionary’ and an ‘agent of imperialism’; that he wanted to, or objectively tended to, restore capitalism in the ussr. He has thus to fall back on the arguments which the more sophisticated and cleverer opponents of Trotsky advanced against him during the *twenties: that he was essentially a ‘non-Bolshevik’, a ‘left socialdemocrat’, who had not understood the pecularities of Russia, the finesse of Lenin’s theory of organization, or the complex dialectics of successful proletarian class struggle, in the West and the East. This is exactly what Krass6 is doing today.
x. Classes, Parties and the Autonomy of Political Institutions
Krassé’s central thesis is quite simple: Trotsky’s original sin is lack of understanding of the rdle of the revolutionary party, his belief that social forces can directly and immediately mould history, that they are, as it were, ‘transportable’ into political organizations. This prevented him from ever understanding Lenin’s theory of organization, and led to crass ‘sociologism’ and voluntarism. From his rejection of Bolshevism in 1904, to his rdle in the October revolution and in building up the Red Army, his defeat in the inner-party struggle of 1923-27, his style as a historian and his ‘futile attempt’ to build a Fourth International,
[Mandel's reply is of unusual interest, in our opinion, in view of the level on which he approaches the issues raised by Krass6. We are therefore making it available by reprinting it from the New Left Review.
[For those not familiar with the New Left Review, it is a lively socialist bimonthly devoted to theoretical questions. It has shown special interest in problems of the Latin-American revolution and is decidedly "pro-Cuban." A subscription is 49 shillings, or US#5.50, for one year and the address is 7 Carlisle St., London, W.1, England. ]
*
sociologism and voluntarism constitute a single nexus. Trotsky’s Marxism thus ‘forms a consistent and characteristic unity, from his early youth to his old age’, Krassé claims.
Nobody will dispute that Trotsky rejected the essence of Lenin’s theory of organization before 1917.! We shall not dispute either that the party, the ideology and the psvchology of social classes can gain a certain degree of autonomy in the historical process, or, to quote Krassdé, that Marxism (not only Lenin’s Marxism but any adequate interpretation of Marx’s doctrine) ‘is defined by the notion of a complex totality, in which all the levels—economic, social, political and ideological—are always operational, and there is 2 permutation of the main locus of contradictions between them’. But this is a very meagre basis to substantiate Krass6’s thesis. When we try to analyse Trotsky’s real thinking and its development through nearly 40 years, we eacounter at every step evidence of the incomplcteness and the inadequacy of Krass0’s picture.
In the first place it is incorrect to say that, when rejecting Lenin’s theory of organization, Trotsky borrowed his own modcl of a socialdemocratic party from the German spp, as a ‘party cocxistensive with the working class’ (p. 66). Historically, it would be much more correct to argue along opposite lines, i.e. to show that Lenin’s theory of organization was to a large extent borrowed from the theoreticians of German and Austrian Social-Democracy, Kautsky and Adler.? Trotsky’s mistaken opposition to Lenin’s theory, at least in its rational kernel, was based upon his distrust of the Western social-democratic apparatus as an essentially conservative one. Krassé himself admits a few pages later that Trotsky already in 1905 was more critical of Western social-democracy than Lenin (p. 68). How could he then mould his party model on that social-democracy ?3
1In justice to Trotsky it must be added, however, that before 1917 Lenin likewise rejected the necessity of adopting as the strategic goal for the coming Russian revolution the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The victory of the October Revolution resulted from a historical combination of Lenin’s theory and practice of the revolutionary vanguard party, and Trotsky’s theory and practice 0° the permanent revolution. 2 The Hainfelder Programm of Austrian Social-Democracy states unambiguously in 1889: ‘Socialist consciousness is therefore something which has to be introduced from outside into the proletarian class struggle.” Kautsky devoted an article in the April 17th, 1901 issue of Die Neue Zeit (Akademiker und Proletarier’) to the problem of the relationship between revolutionary intellectuals and workers, in which he formulated most of Lenin’s organizational concepts. There is no doubt, given the date of publication, that this article (one of a series of two) directly inspired Lenin’s What is to be done?. 3 One should add that Trotsky’s instinctive distrust of dilettante intellectuals penetrating a workers’ party stemmed from Marx and was entirely shared by Lenin, a
In the second place, it is completely untrue to insinuate that Trotsky continued to misunderstand or to reject Lenin’s theory of organization after he had recognized that Lenin had been right on that issue, in 1917. There is no proof for this assumption. Lenin himself declared emphatically that, after Trotsky had understood that unity with the Mensheviks was impossible,‘ ‘there was no better Bolshevik than Trotsky’. All Trotsky’s writings after 1917 insist on the kev rdle of the revolutionary party in our age. At each turning point of his career, in 1923 with Lessons of October and The New Course, in 1926 with the Platform of the Left Opposition, in his critique of the Comintern’s disastrous policies in China, Germany, Spain and France, 1 the ’thirties in his History of the Russian Revolution and in his political testaments, the Transitional Programme of the 4th International and the so-called Emergency Conference Manifesto, he tirelessly stressed that the problem of building revolutionary parties is the key problem of this epoch: “The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.’ A queer way, indeed, to ‘forget’ the réle of the vanguard and to believe that social forces can directly and immediately mould history. ...
It is true that for Trotsky, a revolutionary vanguard was not just a cleverly built and well-oiled political machine. Such an idea, born from American bourgeois politics which, as is well known, are often undistinguishable from gangsterism, was completely alien to Lenin, Bolshevism or, for that matter, the entire international labour movement, until Stalin introduced it into the practice of the Comintern. For Trotsky, as for Lenin and any Marxist tendency, a revolutionary vanguard party should be judged objectively, in the first place in the light of its avowed programme and its actual policy. If and when the bestfunctioning and strongest party starts to act against the interests of the revolution and the working class, a struggle has to be led to put it right. If and when its actions become consistently and for an entire epoch contrary to the interests of the proletariat, it cannot be considered a revolutionary vanguard party any more—and then the task of building a new one immediately arises.”
Of course ncither Lenin nor Trotsky ever identified a revolutionary party only with a correct programme. Lenin explicitly stated that the correctness of a policy could prove itself in the long run only by its ability to win over a significant part of the working class—in fact, the majority.8 But both elements are the indispensable complements out of which a revolutionary vanguard party is built. Without a correct programme and policy, a party can become objectively counter-revolution-
point which Krassé adroitly forgets. Cf. Marx-Engels: Circular letter to ‘Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke and others of September 17th-18th, 1897 (pp. 455-6, in Marx- Engels: Ausgewablte Schriften, Band IT, Verlag fiir fremdsprachige Literatur, Moscow, 1950 and V. I. Lenin: ‘One step forward, two steps back,’ p. 27°, in Selected Works Vol. I, 1947, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, where Lenin heaps scorn upon the ‘bourgeois intellectuals who fear the discipline and the organization of the proletariat’. As for the ‘supreme irony’ which Krassé discovers in the fact that Trotsky, at the end of his life, had to discuss with ‘salon intellectuals’, which he had always detested and despised, of the Burnham-Schachtman type (p. 84), Krassé forgets that Engels had to discuss with Dithring and Lenin with Bulgakov, who were certainly not superior to Burnham or Schachtman. It is Krass6 who does not understand here the party-building function of such educational polemics—well understood by all the masters of Marxism. * As the text of Trotsky quoted by Krassé clearly indicates, Trotsky understood that ‘unity with the Mensheviks was impossible’ from the moment that the Menshevik conciliationary policy in the 1917 revolution became clear to him. 3 Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed, p. 259, Oxford University Press, 1954. 6 The Founding Conference of the Fourth International, published by the Socialist Workers Party, New York, 1939, p. 16. 7 Already in November 1st, 1914, Lenin wrote: “The 2nd International is dead, overcome by opportunism . .. The 3rd International has the task of organizing the forces of the proletariat for the revolutionary onslaught upon the capitalist governments.’ (Lenin-Zinoviev: Gegen den Strom, p. 6, Verlag der Kommunistischen Internationale, 1921). O already in 1908, Lenin writes: ‘The fundamental precondition for this success was naturally the fact that the working class, whose élite had created social-democracy, is distinct from all other classes of capitalist society, for objective economic reasons, by its organizational capacity. Without this precondition, the organization of professional revolutionaries would be only a game, an adventure. .. The pamphlet What is to be done>, underlines again and again that the organization of professional revolutionists which it proposes has a meaning only in relation with ‘the really revolutionary class which arises elementarily for struggle’ (V. I. Lenin: ‘Zwolf Jahre’, ia Sdmtliche Werke, Vol. XII, p. 74).
ary, whatever its mass influence in the working class may be. Without in
the long run winning mass influence in the working class, revolutionists
armed with the best programme will degenerate into a sterile sect.
So we sce, in the third place, that far from solving the problem by
stating the ‘autonomy of political institutions’ which Trotsky is said
to have misunderstood, Krassé has only posed a question without
furnishing an answer. For the problem is precisely that of understand-
ing at one and the same time the autonomy of political institutions, and
the relative character of that autonomy. After all, it was not Trotsky but
Marx and Engels, who said that all history is in the last analysis the
history of class struggles !° Political institutions are functional bodies.
When they become divorced from the social forces which they are sup-
posed to serve, they very rapidly lose all efficacy and power—except
when they are used by other social forces. This is precisely what hap-
pened to Stalin and his faction inside the Bolshevik party.
Krasso says that Trotsky’s ‘constant underestimation of the autono-
mous power of political institutions became his nemesis’ (p. 76). In
reality, Stalin’s belief in the autonomous possibilities of ‘power
politics’ became his ‘nemesis’, because it transformed him into an un-
conscious tool of social forces whose very existence he did not seem to
notice till the end of his life. Had Stalin been convinced, in the early
*twenties, that by following the course he had entered upon he would
have to kill three-quarters of the Old Bolshevik upper and middle
cadres, to liquidate the Comintern,'” to introduce forced labour into
the factories and to establish one of the harshest labour codes in
modern times, he would probably have recoiled in horror: after all, he
was at that time a Bolshevik of some sort.
‘Pure’ power politics, which Krasso scems to admire so much, degrade
thcir actors precisely to the point where they lose all control over their
own actions. The links between conscious purpose and objective con-
sequences of these actions fade away. In opposition to this, Marxists
give a premium to conscious action; and consciousness implies conscious-
ness of the decisive role of social forces, and the limitations which this
role inevitably imposes upon any individual’s action. Krasso’s lack of
understanding of this dialectical intet-relationship between party and
class, his unawareness of the problem, is the basic weakness of his
essay.
The class cannot triumph without a vanguard party. But the vanguard
party is in turn a product of the class, although not only of the class. It
can only play its role if it has the support of the most active part of that
class.!! In turn, without favourable objective conditions, the class can
neither produce such a vanguard party, nor can the vanguard party
lead the class to victory. Finally, without conscious understanding of
these problems, no vanguard party will arise, even under tavourable
conditions, and opportunities for victory of the revolution will be
irretrievably lost for a long time.
Trotsky understood this dialectical inter-rclationship perfectly after
1916, and applied it to a variety of concrete conditions in such a master-
9 ‘It was precisely Marx who first discovered the law according to which all historical
strugyles, whether they were conducted on the political, the religious, the philo-
sophical or any other ideological plane, are, in fact, only more or less clear expres-
sions of the struggle between social classes, a law in virtue of which the existence of
these classes, and consequently also their collisions, are in turn conditioned by the
level of development of their economic situation, by their mode of production and
mode of exchange . . .” (Engels, Preface to the third German edition of “The 18th
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, p. 245, in Marx-Engels: Selected Works, Volume I,
Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958.)
10 One of the most pathetic documents of the twenties is precisely Stalin’s pamphlet
Questions and Answers, written in 1925, in which he states that a degeneration of the
Party and the State are possible, ‘provided’ that the Soviet government’s foreign
policy abandons proletarian internationalism, divides regions of the world into
spheres of influence with imperialism, or dissolves the Comintern—eventualities
which he, of course, completely rules out, but which he was to realize himself 18
years later.
In Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, Lenin stresses the necessity for the
Communist vanguard to win the support of ‘the whole working class’, of ‘the
broadest masses’, before it can victoriously conquer power (Selected Works, Vol. II,
P- $73, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947).
ly fashion, that it is really prepostcrous to state, as Krasso does, that he ‘failed to see the autonomous power of political institutions’ (p .66). Krasso himself detines Trotsky’s essays on German fascism as ‘the only Marxist writings of these years to predict the catastrophic consequcnces of Nazism and the folly of the political policics of the Third Period of the Comintern towards it’ (p. 85). But how could Trotsky succeed in achieving such a correct analysis of the evolution of German society between 1929 and 1933 without a minute examination and understanding not only of social classes and groupings, but also of their parties ? Are not these brilliant writings documentary proof of his capacity to provide a correct assessment of the importance of parties, above all the parties influential in the working class? Was not his whole warning summarized in the Cassandra call: ‘Either the communist and socialdemocratic parties will fight together against Hitler, or Hitler will crush the German working class for a long period’ ? Was not this call precisely based upon Trotsky’s understanding of the inability of the working class to tackle the threat of fascism without a coming together of these parties? Was not this whole analysis titted together with an equally minute study of the evolution of bourgeois political institutions, which allowed him to discover the universal value, in our epoch, of Marx’s category of Bonapattism ? In the light of all these facts, what remains of Krasso’s contention that Trotsky ‘underestimated the autonomous power of political institutions’ till the end of his life ?
2. ‘Struggle “or Power and Social Conflicts in the Soviet Union 1923-27"
When studying the ‘struggle for power’ inside the Soviet Communist Party between 1923 and 1927, Krasso is torn between two conflicting lines of thinking. On the one hand he argues that Trotsky committed mistake after mistake, because of his underestimation of the autonomy of political institutions. He refused to make a bloc with the Right against Stalin and thereby made Stalin’s victory certain; for the only way to prevent that victory was to ally all the Old Bolsheviks against Stalin. On the other hand he argues that Trotsky had no chance of winning anyway, because ‘virtually the whole Old Guard of the Bolsheviks’ united against Trotsky in 1923 (p. 75); ‘in effect, Stalin was already organizational master of the party by 1923’ (p. 76). Surely these two lines of thinking are self-excluding. In the first case, Stalin’s victory was the result of the mistakes of his opponent. In the second case, it was inevitable.
The weakness of Krassd’s analysis appears clearly from the fact that both versions do not offer any explanation; the facts—or rather Krass6’s partial misreading of them—are just taken for granted. We are not told why, according to the first version, not only Trotsky. but all the Old Bolsheviks misread Lenin’s warnings about the importance of Stalin and ganged up with him against Trotsky, instead of joining Trotsky in his fight against Stalin. We are not told wy, according to the second version, Stalin had suddenly become master of the party as early as 1923, while Lenin was still alive. Was all this just due to his clever inner-party manoeuvring, to his ‘capacity of persuading individuals or groups to accept the policies he advocates’ or even to his ‘great patience’ (p- 73)? But if this is so, then Stalin arises as a real giant among dwarfs, and even Lenin is hopelessly outmanoeuvred by the crafty General Secretary. ...
History then becomes completely incomprehensible for social science, just an arena for ‘power politics’ in a social vacuum. The millions of victims of forced collectivization and of the Yesbovschina; the conquest of power by Hitler; the defeat in the Spanish civil war and 50 million victims of the Second World War are due essentially to some genetic accident when Joseph Djugashvili was conccived. Here we have the ultimate result of the insistence upon an absolute autonomy of political institutions, divorced from social forces, and of the refusal to view political struggles as reflecting in the last analysis the conflicting interests of social forces. Marx, in the Preface he wrote to the second edition of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, noted that Victor Hugo, by considering Louis Bonaparte’s seizure of power as an act of force by a single individual, ‘aggrandizes him instead of diminishing him, by attributing to him a personal strength of initiative without precedence
in history’.!2 How small appear the consequences of Louis Bonaparte’s
seizure of power, compared to those of Joseph Stalin’s!
The correct method of understanding and explaining what happened in
Russia between 1923 and 1927, ot more correctly between 1920 and
1936, is that which Marx suggests in the above-mentioned Preface:
to show, ‘how the class struggle created the circumstances and a situ-
ation in which a mediocre person’ could appear as a hero and a dictator.
In that context, what is significant about Krassé’s non-Marxian method
is not merely the fact that he sees the inner-party struggle as ‘focused
on the exercise of power as such’ (p. 75), i.e. in a certain separation even
from the political issues involved. It is above all that he completely
refuses to connect the political struggle, and its expression in a struggle
over certain divergent ideas and platforms, directly or indirectly with
social conflicts. Here the idea of autonomy of political institutions is
pushed to the point where it becomes incompatible with historical
materialism as such. In fact, when Krassé reproaches Trotsky with
having written that ‘even episodic differences in views and nuances of
opinion may express the remote pressure of distinct social interests’
(p. 77, we underline), he reproaches him for being Marxist! For what
this sentence states is not, as Krassé seems to assume, a possible ‘iden-
tity’ between parties and classes, but simply the fact that parties in the
last analysis represent social interests, and cannot be understood other-
wise historically than as spokesmen for different social interests. This is,
after all, what Marx showed in great detail in Class Struggles in France
1848-18s0, and in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, not to speak of
his lesser works.
Small wonder that, under these conditions, Krassé does not mention
even once the social grouping which makes the whole Russian history
of the ’twenties understandable in socio-historical terms: the bureau-
cracy. One should not consider it Trotsky’s personal idiosyncrasy to
stress and overstress the role of the bureaucracy as a social force with
separate interests from those of the proletariat.'3 Marx and Engels first
drew attention to the danger that a bureaucracy could dominate a
proletarian state as early as 1871, in their writings on the Paris Com-
mune, and they enumerated a series of simple rules in order to prevent
this danger.'* The mature Kautsky, in his best period, when Lenin
considered himself to be his pupil, formulated this danger in an un-
cannily prophetic way, in 1898.15 Lenin, in State and Revolution, and in the
first Bolshevik programme after the October Revolution, underlines
the seriousness of the problem.'®
One might have expected that an author like Krasso, who considers
himself a great admirer of Lenin, would have at least paid a little
attention to what became Lenin’s main final battle, a preoccupation
which in fact grew into an obsession during the last part of his life: the
struggle against bureaucracy. Already in 1921 he rejected a definition of
the Soviet Union as a workers’ state, and stated instead that Russia was
‘a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations’. His apprehension
and worry grew from month to month, and we can follow it graphically
12 Marx-Engels: Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 244, Foreign Languages Publishing
House, Moscow 1958.
3) Not completely separate however—in the same way as the fascist bureaucracy can
never completely separate itself from monopoly capital. But in both cases the
defence of common historical interests of the class (collective property in the first
case, private property in the other), are combined with a thorough political expro-
priation of that same class, and even with great individual hardships for many of its
members.
* K. Marx: The Civil War in France—Fr. Engels: ‘Preface to The Civil War in France’,
Pp. 516-9, p. 483, in: Marx-Engels: Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, Foreign
Languages Publishing House, 1958.
'S Kautsky: Der Ursprung des Christentums, 13th edition, Dietz, Stuttgart, 1923, p. 499.
'€In Lenin’s speech on the Party Programme, before the VIIIth Congress of the
cpsu (March rgth, 1919), he returns again and again to the subject of bureaucracy:
*The lack of culture of Russia... debases Soviet Power and recreates bureaucracy...”
“The bureaucracy camouflage themselves into communists . . .” ‘To fight bureau-
cratism till the end, till complete victory, is only possible if the whole population
participates in the administration of the country . . .’ (Lenin: Selected Works, Vol. I,
PP. 447, 450, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947).
from article to article, in all his last writings, till they reach the sombre premonitions of his last essay and of his Testament.}7
Surely Lenin saw the concrete interplay between the social process— growing political passivity of the working class and growing strength of the bureaucracy in the state apparatus and socicty, accompanied by a growing bureaucratization of the party apparatus itself—and the inrerparty struggle. Surely Trotsky, following the same method,understood —after a certain delay—the same interplay and acted upon that basis.'8 The tragedy was that the other leaders of the Bolshevik Party failed to see in time the danger of bureaucracy, and of Stalin mounting to absolute power as representative of the Soviet bureaucracy. All of them ended by seeing the danger at some time or other, but not at the same time, and not early enough. This is the basic explanation for the apparent ease with which Stalin conquered power.
There is no doubt that Trotsky committed tactical mistakes in the struggle—which are especially apparent today to authors such as Krassd, endowed with that unique source of political intelligence which is called hindsight.!9 But so did Lenin too. After all it was Lenin who had built the party apparatus which now suddenly started to degenerate. It was I.enin who had failed to oppose Stalin’s election as general secretary. It was Lenin who had put his personal authority behind a scrics of institutional and organizational measures which greatly helped the victory of the bureaucracy, and which as we know today—again with hindsight!—could have been avoided without destroying the Revolution: the rule of personal authority of the factory manager; over-reliance upon material incentives; the exaggerated identification of party and state; the abolition of the remnants of Soviet parties or groupings other than the Bolshevik party, at a moment when the CivilWar was over (and while these same groupings had been tolerated during the Civil War, provided they did not collude with counter-revolution); the suppression of the traditional right of the Bolshevik party members to form factions.?°
17 Examples: ‘We see this evil (bureaucratism) rise before us in a clearer, more precise and more threatening way’ (April 21st, 1921); ‘the recourse to strike struggles, in a state in which political power belongs to the proletariat, can be explained and justified only by the bureaucratic deformations of the proletarian state . . .” (January 17th, 1922); ‘But if we consider Moscow-—4,700 responsible communists—and if we consider this bureaucratic machine, this mountain, who is leading and who is being led? I doubt very much that one could say that the communists are leading that mountain. Truly, they are not leading; they are being led.’ (March 27th, 1922); ‘Bureaucracy exists in our country not only in the Soviet institutions but also in those of the Party.’ (March 2nd, 1923) In the third codicil to his Testament, drafted on December 26th, 1922, Lenin proposes that several tens of workers should enter the Central Committee, but not chosen among those who have worked in the Soviet apparatus, because they are already infected with the bureaucratic virus. 18]t is untrue to say. as does Krasss, that Lenin, in his Tcstament, ‘evinced no special confidence in him (Trotsky)’ (p. 75). The Testament presents Trotsky as the most capable member of the Central Committee. It underlines, to be sure, what Lenin considers to be his weakness, but predicts also that a sharp conflict will break out between Trotsky and Stalin, and proposes to eliminate Stalin from his central organizational position. The implication is obvious. 19 Krassa’s record of these errors is inaccurate on numerous issues. He wrongly attributes the idea of ‘militarization of labour’ to Trotsky, whereas in reality it was a collective party decision adopted at the [Xth congress of the cpsu. He alleges that Trotsky did not fight for the publication of Lenin’s will; in reality, Trotsky on this point was defeated in the party leadership and did not want to break discipline, for reasons which we shall go into further on. Trotsky ‘utterly failed to see that Stalin was determined to evict him from the party’, states Krass6. This may have been true of 1923—but at that time nobody saw this, and Stalin himself had probably no intention of going to that extreme. But Trotsky recognized earlier than any other Bolshevik leader the gravity of the situation in the party and the state, which, combined with Stalin’s specific character, would Icad not only to expulsions but even to bloody fepressions. Krass6 writes that Trotsky did not pay any attention when the troika Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev broke up. He forgets to add that out of that break-up the United Left Opposition between Trotsky and Zinoviev-Kamenev was eventually formed, and that this united front was broken in 1927-28 not by Trotsky and his friends, but by the Zinovievists. 20 In fairness to Lenin one must add that, while making these mistakes, he also tried to introduce a series of safeguards which were intended to put a brake upon the process of bureaucratization of state and party. The “troika’ system in the factories effectively limited the authority of the managers. The rights of the trade-unions were extended (on that point, Lenin was correct in his criticism of Trotsky’s trade union proposals). The principle of ‘maximum income’ for party cadres was upheld. While factions were abolished, the right to form tendencies was consolidated and Shlyapnikov received the promise that his oppositional views would be printed on hun-
One can say in a more general way that after the end of the Civil War
and the beginning of Nep, Lenin exaggerated the immediate danger
which would arise out of loosening of discipline in the Party, and un-
derestimated the danger that suppression of civil liberties for non-
Bolshevik Soviet tendencies, and reduction of internal democracy in
the Bolshevik party, might hasten the process of bureaucratization
which he rightly feared. The root of this mistake lay precisely in a
certain exaggerated identification between Party and Proletariat, a
belief that the party autonomously defended the conquests of the pro-
letariat. A few years later Lenin understood how mistaken this belief
had been—but it was already too late to nip the danger of bureaucratiza-
tion of the party apparatus in the bud.
Krass6 is completely mistaken when he thinks that Trotsky under-
estimated the autonomous power of political institutions during his
critical struggle inside the party, between 1923 and 1927. The very
opposite is true. His whole political strategy of that period can be under-
stood only in the light of his understanding of the peculiar dialectical
inter-relationship between the objective conditions of Soviet society in
a hostile capitalist environment, the relationship of forces between
social groupings in that society, and the autonomous role of the Bol-
shevik party in that particular period and under these concrete conditions.
Because Krass6 docs not understand this strategy, and perforce wants
to explain Trotsky’s attitudes in the light of his alleged original sin, he
has to throw up his hands in despair and claim complete incoherence on
behalf of the founder of the Left Opposition: ‘Trotsky had never con-
cretely envisaged the problem of the political implementation of his
economic policies’ in the ’twentics (p. 83). These economic policies,
according to Krassd, were only the results of his ‘gifts as an administra-
tor of the state’, and not elaborated and correct political policies towards
the different social forces in the ussr. Furthermore they were divorced
from his theory of the permanent revolution which implied that
‘socialism in one country was not practicable’, because it would
succumb to ‘subversion’ through the world market and military col-
lapse before a foreign imperialist aggression (pp. 79-80) . .. Confronted
with so many historical distortions, one wonders whether the inco-
herence which Krass6 imputes to Trotsky does not exist in his own
mind.
It is, in fact, incoherent to oppose Trotsky’s immediate economic pro-
gramme for the Soviet Union to his concept of ‘permanent revolution’.##
How is it possible that a Marxist, who gave such preponderance to
ideas, and related them—according to Krassé—in such an ‘immediate’
way to social groupings, could at one and the same time struggle for
the accelerated economic growth of the Sovict Union, and say that
everything depended on immediate international revolution, without
which the Soviet Union would collapse ? Does not the second assump-
tion make the first struggle meaningless ? This is a contradiction impli-
cit in the falsified version of the theory of permanent revolution, which
both his Stalinist critics of past and present, and some of his foolish
ultra-Ieft pseudo-followers, never could explain away. The mystery is
easily solved when the problem is posed in correct terms: all Trotsky
stated in the third ‘law of the permanent revolution’ was the fact that a
fully fledged socialist society, ic. a society without classes, commodi-
ties, money and state, could never be accomplished within the bound-
aries of a single state (which was more backward than the most ad-
vanced capitalist countries, at that).2# He never for a single moment
disputed the need to start the job of building socialism, and to achieve
an increased tempo of economic growth for this purpose, precisely as
long as the Revolution remained isolated within a single country. It was
he, after all, who had first concretely proposed a policy for increasing
the tempo of industrialization.
dreds of thousands of copies. But history has shown that the more the proletariat
became politically passive and the more the power of the burcaucracy became all-
pervasive, the greater became its possibilities to swecp away these safeguards by a
few swift strokes, as it did in the late twenties and the early thirties.
24 Krass6 characterizes the formula ‘permanent revolution’ as ‘an inept designation
which indicated the lack of scientific (!) precision even in his profoundest insights’
(p. 68). He seems to ignore that the formula was coined by Marx himself.
22 In a chapter of his critique of the Draft Program of the Comintern, Trotsky shows in
great detail that Stalin and his allies deliberately confused the question of the pos-
But if the whole argument only concerned the abstract theoretical problem of achieving a final stage of socialism (as distinct from Communism, characterized by the withering away of the social division of labour), why then all the heat of the discussion, one might ask ? Did not Trotsky make a grave tactical mistake by involving himself in such a battle which could not be understood by the overwhelming majority of the party membership ?
The truth of the matter is that it was not at all Trotsky who raised the question, but Stalin and his faction. Undoubtedly, this was a ‘clever’ tactical move, tending to isolate Trotsky and his followers from the more pragmatically minded Bolshevik cadres. But it so happens that on precisely this issue, most of the Bolshevik Old Guard, including Lenin’s widow, sided with the United Left Opposition, and that Zinoviev and Kamenev in particular threw themselves into a full-fledged battle. Trotsky’s opposition to the theory of achieving ‘socialism in one country’ thus became the basis for his closest collaboration with the Old Guard since the Civil War.
Both Stalin’s reckless game with ideas and the Old Guard’s resistance to it were not accidental. In the theory of achieving ‘socialism in one country’, the bureaucracy expressed its incipient consciousness of its own power, and arrogantly turned its back upon elementary Marxist- Leninist theory. It was ‘emancipating’ itself not only from world revolution, but also from the whole theoretical heritage of Lenin, and, incidentally, from any reliance upon an active and conscious working class, both inside the Soviet Union and on the world arena. By opposing this jettisoning of elementary Marxist theory, the Old Guard expressed its basic qualities. It was willing to go along with Stalin in order to ‘safeguard the unity of the Party’ and ‘not to upset the safety of the dictatorship of the proletariat’. It was reluctant to go beyond a point where open antagonism with basic tenets of Lenin’s theory became apparent. As said above, the tragedy of the twenties is in fact the tragedy of that Old Guard—that is, of Lenin’s Party without Lenin. But Stalin paid it the supreme homage of wholesale physical extermination, thereby clearly indicating his conviction that it was by its very nature ‘irrecuperable’ for the sombre bureaucratic dictatorship of the ’thirties and "forties.
Where Krass6é divides Trotsky’s thinking in the ’twenties into unrelated and incoherent bits and pieces, there is in reality dialectical unity and coherence. Trotsky was convinced that Soviet society, in transition from capitalism to socialism, could not solve its problems gradually in the framework of the NEP. What he opposed was the idea of peaceful coexistence between petty commodity production and socialist industry inside the ussr, which was just the other side of that well-known coin, ‘peaceful coexistence’ between capitalism and the workers’ state on the world arena. He was convinced that sooner or later the conflicting social forces would arrive at a point of conflagration, nationally and internationally. His policy could be summarized in the formula: favour all those tendencies which, nationally and internationally, strengthen
sibility of a victory of the socialist revo/ution in one country, which implied the necessity of a beginning of socialist organization and construction of the economy, with the question of the final victory of socialism, i.e. the establishment of a fully develuped socialist society (The Third International after Lenin, pp. 24~40, Pioneer Publishers, New York, 1936). It is interesting to note that as late as 1924, in the first Russian edition of his Lenin and Leninism, Stalin himself wrote: ‘For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of such a peasant country as Russia are insufficient.’ Interpreted confusedly by Krassé (pp. 79-80), the economic reasons given by Trotsky for the impossibility of ‘socialism in one country’ become perfectly reasonable when one looks at them from the point of view of ‘final victory’ and not of ‘beginning to build’. Obviously, a fullyfledged socialist economy must have a higher productivity-of labour than the most developed capitalist economy; on this, even Stalin and Bukharin agreed. Trotsky simply argued that in an essentially autarchic economy, it would be impossible to reach a higher productivity of labour than that which the imperialist countries achieve thanks to their international division of labour. He nowhere alleged that this would lead to an inevitable ‘subversion’ of the planned econumy inside the ussr. He only stated that it would be a source of violent conflicts and contradictions, which would not enable the Soviet Union to achieve a classless society. Historical experience has completely confirmed this prognosis. the proletariat, its numerical and qualitative strength, its self-confidence and revolutionary leadership; weaken all those tendencies which, nationally and internationally, tend to divide the working class or its capacity and will to defend itself.?5 Looked at from that point of view, everything falls into place and there is no longer any puzzle. Trotsky favours industrialization, because this is indispensable if the proletariat is to be strengthened inside Soviet society. He favours gradual collectivization of the countryside, because this is indispensable for weakening the rich peasants’ pressure against proletarian state power and their threat of blackmailing the city by sudden withdrawal of grain deliveries, He favours a combination of accelerated industrialization and gradual collectivization, because it is necessary to create a material-technical infrastructure for collective farms in the form of tractors and agricultural machinery**—without which collectivization becomes an adventure which could lead to famine in the cities. He favours a course towards increasing Soviet democracy, in order to stimulate the political activity and consciousness of the working class. He is in favour of abolishing unemployment and increasing real wages—for industrialization accompanied by a lowering of the standard of living of the workers would lessen and not heighten the political self-activity of the proletariat. He favours a course of the Comintern which would profit from all favourable conditions to achieve proletarian victory in other countries, in order to ameliorate the international balance of forces in favour of the proletariat. A combination of all these policies would not have avoided a first trial of strength with the enemy; but it would have allowed it to take place in much more favourable conditions than it in fact did, in 1928-32 inside Russia, and in 1941-45 internationally. Was this programme ‘unrealistic’? No, in the sense that the objective conditions for its realization did exist. No unprejudiced student of history can doubt today that, had this alternative course been followed, the Soviet proletariat and people would have been spared innumerable avoidable sacrifices and hardships, and mankind would have avoided, if not a World War, at least the scourge of victorious fascism spread all over Europe and dozens of millions of dead. Yes, in the sense that the subjective conditions for its implementation did not exist. The Soviet proletariat was passive and atomized. It viewed the programme of the Left Opposition with sympathy but, at a time of exhaustion, without the necessary militancy to fight for it. Contrary to what Krassé seems to think, Trotsky at no time had the slightest illusion about this.
To leave the Bolshevik party immediately, to proclaim a new (illegal) party, was to rely exclusively upon a working class which was becoming more and more passive. To rely upon the army, to stage a conp d@état, meant in fact to substitute one bureaucratic apparatus for another and to condemn oneself to become a prisoner of the bureaucracy. All those
23 We believe that history has born out the correctness of this basic conception. Even today, after a victorious war against Nazi imperialism, and after the complete liquidation of the kulaks as a class—two violent collisions which Trotsky considered inevitable from the early twenties on—the fate of the Soviet Union continues to depend upon the outcome of current and future social conflicts, nationally and internationally. In the final analysis, its fate—as well as the fate of all mankind— depends upon the capacity of the toiling masses of the United States to disarm the rulers of that country, before they reach the final stage of power-mad lunacy and, by unleashing a nuclear world war, demonstrate in practice that they accept the slogan ‘rather dead than red’, as Hitler did under similar circumstances, in 1944-45. * This is but one example of the fact that Stalin did mot take over Trotsky’s programme, but only parts of it, without their necessary inner logic. The Opposition had struggled from 1923 on for the building of a tractor plant in Tsaritsyne. The principle was accepted. It was not acted upon before 1928. If tractors had started to be produced from 1924-25 on, and ko/khozes had been built up gradually, with poor peasants voluntarily joining them on the basis of a higher productivity of labour and higher peasant income in the co-operative sector as compared with the private one, the combination of industrialization and collectivization of agriculture would have led to a situation completely different from the tragedy witnessed in 1928-32, from which the Soviet Union continued to suffer till the late "fifties. 23 The Opposition proposed as alternative sources of accumulation, compared to the ruthless lowering of the standard of living of the workers and peasants as prac tised by Stalin, a special tax levied upon the rich peasants only, and a radical reduction of administrative expenses, economizing one billion gold roubles annually. The goals of the first Five Year Plan, spread over eight or ten years instead of over five years, could have been reached with much lower sacrifices in consumption by the mass of the people.
critics of Trotsky who reproach him for having avoided either the first or the second of these avenues open to him do not understand the situation in terms of basic social and political forces. The task of a proletarian revolutionary is not to ‘take power’ by any means, under any conditions; it is to take power in order to implement a socialist programme. If ‘power’ can be won only under conditions which drive one away from the realization of that programme, instead of bringing one nearer to it, it is a thousand times preferable to stay in opposition. Non- Marxist admirers of abstract ‘power’, presumably floating in the air and detached from social reality, think this to be a ‘weakness’, Any convinced Marxist will understand this to have been Trotsky’s supreme strength and gift to history, instead of a ‘flaw’ in his armour.
Was Trotsky’s struggle in the ’twenties then only a ‘pose’ for history’s sake, in order to ‘save the procramme’? Let it be said in passing that even from that point of view it would have been completely justified. Todav it should have become obvious that the reappropriation of genuine Marxism by the new revolutionary vanguard in the world is greatly assisted by the fact that Trotsky, almost alone, saved the heritage and continuity of Marxism during the ‘black ’thirties’.
But, in reality, Trotsky’s struggle had a more immediate purpose. The Soviet working class was passive—but its passivity was not mechanically predetermined for a long period. Any upsurge of the international revolution, any shift in the inner-Soviet relationship of social forces, could have brought about an awakenina. The immediate instrument for these shifts could only be the Comintern and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Trotsky fought in order to have the party act as a brake upon the process of bureaucratic deeencration, as Lenin had called upon him to do. Flistory has shown a posteriori that the party apparatus had alreadv been bureaucratized to the point where it acted as a motor of, not a brake on the process of political expropriation of the proletariat. A priori, the outcome of this strugele depended upon the cons crete political options of the cpsu leadership—the Old Bolsheviks. A correct shift at the correct moment could have reversed the process— not to the point of eliminating the bureaucracy altogether (this was impossible under the conditions of a backward country and capitalist environment) but to reduce its malignancy and awaken the proletariat to renewed self-confidence. Trotsky’s ‘failure? was thus indeed the failure of the Old Guard—which understood too late the real nature of the monstrous parasite to which Revolution had given birth. But this very ‘failure’ underlines Trotsky’s understanding of the intricate and complex relationship between social forces, political institutions and ideas in the ’twenties.
3. Was International Extension of the Revolution Impossible between 1919 and 1949 ? We now reach the third tier of Krass6’s critique of Trotsky’s Marxism, in a certain sense the decisive one, and obviously the weakest link in his chain of reasoning: his critique of Trotsky’s ‘expectations’ of international victories of the revolution after 1923. This whole part of Krassé’s essay is dominated by a strange paradox. Krass6 started out by accusing Trotsky of underestimating the role of the party. But Trotsky’s hope of succe’sful revolutions in the West, Krass6 now states, was based upon his failure ‘to understand the fundamental differences between Russian and Western European social structures’ (p. 81). In other words, objectire conditions made world tevotion impossible, at least between the two world wars. In opposition to Trotsky’s alleged ‘voluntarism’, Krassé here defends a position of crude socio-economic determinism: as revolutions have not won (vet) in the West, this proves that they could not have been victorious, and if they could not have been victorious it was because of the ‘specific social structure’ of the West. The role of the party, of the vanguard, of the leadership, the ‘autonomy of political institutions’, is now completely eliminated from the picture—by Krass6 himself, and in polemics against Trotsky. A strange somersault indeed. . . But what about Lenin? How docs Krass6é account for the fact that Lenin, who, to quote Krassd, ‘theorized the necessary relationship between party and society’ (p. 84), was as fervently convinced as Trotsky of the necessity of building Communist parties and a Communist International ? Does Krass6 consider this ‘futile voluntarism’ on Lenin’s behalf? How does he explain the fact that, vcars after Brest-Litovsk (Krass6 here commits a historical distortion by insinuating the contrary on p. 78), Lenin continued to think that an international extension of the revolution to the West and the East was unavoidable ?2¢ Krass6 can only try and construct a difference between Lenin’s and Trotsky’s position on the dialectical inter-relationship between the October Revolution and the international revolution, by attributing to Trotsky three mechanistic and childish ideas: the idea that revolutions were ‘imminent’ in Europe (p. 81); that capitalist conditions were everywhere, at least in Europe, equally ripe for revolution without any difference between specific nations (p. 81); and that the victory of these revolutions was ‘certain’ (pp. 79, 81). Needless to say, Krasso will find it impossible to substantiate any of these allegations. It is easy to find overwhelming documentary proof of the contrary.
As early as the Third Congress of the Comintern (1921), Trotsky, together with Lenin (both were ‘at the right wing’ of that Congress), stated unmistakably that, after the first wave of pust-war revolutionary struggles, capitalism had now gained a brcathing-spell in Europe. What was on the agenda was not ‘immediate revolution’, but the preparation of the Communist partics for future revolution, i.e. a correct policy to win the majority of the working class and create a cadre and leadership capable of Icading these parties to victory when new revolutionary situations occurred.”? Criticizing Bukharin and Stalin’s ‘Draft Programe me of the Communist International’, Trotsky stated explicitly in 1928: ‘The revolutionary character of the cpoch is not that it permits the accomplishment of the revolution, that is, the scizure of power, at every given moment. Its revolutionary character consists in profound and sharp fluctuations and abrupt and frequent transitions from an immediately revolutionary situation, that is, such as enables the Communist party to strive for powcr, to a victory of the Fascist or semi- Fascist counter-revolution, and from the lattcr to a provisional régime of the golden mean (the ‘“‘Left bloc”, the inclusion of social democracy into the coalition, the passage of power to the party of Mac- Donald, and so forth), immediately thereafter forcing the antagonism to a crisis again and acutely raising the question of power’.?8 In his final writings, he again and again characterizes our epoch as a swift succession of revolutions, counter-revolutions and ‘temporary stabilizations’, a succession which prcciscly creates the objective conditions for building a revolutionary vanguard party of the Lenin type.
Here indeed is the nub of the question, which Krassé docs not even pose and obviously cannot answer for that reason. What is the basic assumption which is at the bottom of Lenin’s organizational concepts ? As Georg Lukacs so aptly characterized it, it is the assumption of the actuality of the revolution,?9 i.e. the conscious and dclibcrate preparation for conquest of power by the proletariat when revolutionary situations occur, and the profound conviction that given the objective laws of motion of Russian socicty, such revolutionary situations sad to occur sooner or later. When Lenin wrote his book on Imperialism, under the influence of Hilferding’s Fénanz-Kapital,3° and when he drew up a
% Just two quotations: ‘The first Bolshevik revolution has pulled the first hundred million human beings on earth out of the grip of imperialist war, the grip of the imperialist world. The coming revolutions will pull all mankind out of the grip of these wars and that world.’ (October 14th, 1921). ‘You have to learn in a special sense, in order to really understand the organization, the building, the method and the content of revolutionary work. If this happens, then I’m convinced that the perspectives of world revolution will not only be good but be excellent.” (November tsth, 1922.) (Lenin: Samtliche Werke, Band 33, pp. 37 and 418 of the 1966 edition, Dietz Verlag, Berlin). 27 A typical example of ‘underestimation of the autonomy of political institutions’, no doubt... 28. Trotsky: The Third International after Lenin, pp. 81-82, New York, Pioneer Publishers, 1936. 29 Georg Lukacs: Lénine, pp. 28-29, F..D.1. Paris, 1965. 3° Rudolf Hilferding: Das Vinanzkapital, Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, ends on p. 477 with a final paragraph characterizing finance capital as the accomplished dictatorship of Big Business, and predicts a ‘formidable collision of antagonistic (social) interests’ which will finally transform this dictatorship of Big Business into the dictatorship of the proletariat.
balance-sheet of the significance of the First'World War, he correctly extended that notion of actuality of the revolution to the entire imperialist world system: the weakest links would break first, but precisely because they were links of one chain, the entire chain would be broken up progressively.?! This was his justification tor calling tor the formation of a Third International. This was the programmatic foundation of the Comintern.
Now this is a central concept with which you cannot dally frivolously. Either it is theoretically correct and confirmed by history—and in that case not only is the ‘third law of permanent revolution’ adequate, but the main responsibility for the working class defeats of the "twenties, - the ’thirties and the early ’forties can then be put squarely at the door of inadequate leadership. Or Lenin’s central concept after August 4th, 1914 was incorrcct, and experience has shown that objective conditions were not ripe for the periodic arising of revolutionary situations in the rest of Europe—and in that case it is not only Trotsky’s ‘third law of permanent revolution’ which was a ‘theoretical error’ to quote Krass6, but all of Lenin’s endeavours to build Communist Parties, organized with the purpose of leading the proletariat to the conquest of power, then stand condemned as criminal splitting. Is not this, after all, what social-democrats have been claiming for more than 50 years, with the same basic argument about ‘socio-political conditions’ in the West being ‘unripe’ for revolution, and Lenin ‘failing to understand the fundamental differences between Russian and Western European social structures’?
The balance sheet can be drawn up very quickly, at least on the level of historical experiences. Leaving aside minor countries, there was a revolutionary situation in Germany in 1918-19, in 1920, in 1923, and a great possibility of turning a successful defence against the threat of nazism into a new revolutionary situation in the early ’thirties; there was a revolutionary situation in Spain in 1931, 1934 and 1936-37; there was a revolutionary situation in Italy in 1920, in 1945, in 1948 (at the moment of the attempted murder of Togliatti); there was a revolutionary situation in France in 1936 and in 1944-47. Even in Britain, there was something called a general strike in the mid-twenties . . . Ample literature, including writings of non-Communist and non-revolutionary sources, attests to the fact that in all these situations the unwillingness of the masses to tolerate the survival of the capitalist system, and their instinctive drive to take society’s fate in their own hands, coincided with wide confusion, division, if not ncar-paralysis among the ruling classes—Lenin’s definition of a classical revolutionary situation. If we extend the picture to the whole world, with the Chinese revolution of the ’twenties and the Vietnamese uprising of the early ’thirties blending at the end of the Second World War into two powerful revolutions which stimulated a worldwide revolutionary movement of the colonial and semi-colonial countries, then, surely, the definition of this half century as ‘the age of permanent revolution’, which Isaac Deutscher and George Novack chose as the title for a paperback selection of Trotsky’s writings*2, is an adequate summary of historical experience.
Krassé now comes to the most extraordinary statement of his essay: the defeats of the European revolution in the ’twenties, the ’thirties and the early "forties prove that ‘the superiority of Stalin’s perspective over Trotsky’s is undeniable’ (p. 79). Because, you see, Trotsky foresaw victorious revolutions, while Stalin ‘discounted the possibility of successful European revolutions’. But wasn’t it precisely the opposite? Trotsky did not believe at all in automatically victorious revolutions, neither in Europe, nor anywhere else. He only tirelessly fought for a correct policy of the Communist Movement, which would enable it eventually—if not the first time, then the second or the third one—to
as The pamphlet ‘The Collapse of the IInd International’, written by Lenin in 1915 (Lenin-Zinoview: Gegen den Strom, pp. 129-70), is centered on the idea that a revoluonary situation is developing in Europe, and that revolutionary socialists have to act in order to stimulate the revolutionary sentiments and actions of the masses. His contributions to the two first Congresses of the Communist International extend this analysis to all colonial and semi-colonial countries. 52 Laurel Edition, Dell Publishing Company, 1964, New York. transform revolutionary situations into revolutionary victories. By advocating incorrect policies, Stalin contributed heavily to the defeats of these revolutions. He taught the Chinese communists to put their trust in Chiang Kai-Chek and, in a public speech held at the very eve of Chiang’s wholesale massacre of the Shanghai workers, expressed his firm belief in the executioner as a ‘faithful ally’.>3 He taught the German communists that social-democracy was their main enemy, and that Hitler would either be unable to conquer power or would be unable to stay in power more than a few months: they would be the real victors very soon. He taught the Spanish communists to stop their revolution and to ‘first win the war’, in alliance with the ‘liberal’ bourgeoisie. He taught the French and Italian communists to build a ‘new democracy’ which would not be any more ‘entirely’ bourgeois because of a few Communist cabinet ministers and a few nationalizations.
All these policies ended in disaster. Yet when Krassé draws up the balance sheet of the disasters, he concludes . . . that Stalin’s perspective was undeniably (1) superior to Trotsky’s, for, you see, he ‘discounted the possibilities’ of successful European revolutions’! Perhaps the Stalin course of the 3rd International, the transformation of the Comintern from a tool of world revolution into a simple aid to diplomatic manoeuvres of the Soviet government, and the theory of achieving the building of socialism in a single country, had something to do with the absence of successful European revolutions? Or would Krassé go so far as to impute to Stalin the intention of deliberately organizing these defeats . . . just to ‘prove’ the ‘superiority’ of his perspectives over those of Trotsky ?
As Marxists, we have to pose a final question. Stalin’s ‘mistakes’ in the realm of the Communist International cannot be explained away as accidental results of his ‘lack of understanding’ or ‘Russian provincialism’, any more than the disastrous results of his policies inside the Soviet Union can be explained by the thoroughly unMarxist formula of the ‘personality cult’.3* His ‘mistaken’ tactics in no way corresponded to the interests of the Soviet or of the international proletariat. They cost millions of deaths which could have been saved, decades of avoidable sacrifices and years of terrible sufferings under the iron rule of fascism. How then can one explain the fact that Stalin systematically opposed or sabotaged all attempts by Communist Parties to take power, outside of the realm of the Soviet army, anywhere in the world, for nearly 30 years.>5 Surely, a social explanation must be found for this astonishing fact. Such a systematic policy can only be explained as the expression of the particular interests of a special social grouping inside the Soviet society : the Soviet bureaucracy.
This grouping is not a new class. It does not play a particular and objectively necessary role in the process of production. It is a privileged outgrowth of the proletariat after its conquest of power under objective conditions unfavourable for the blossoming of socialist democracy. Like the proletariat, it is fundamentally attached to collective ownership of the means of production and opposed to capitalism:
33 It is in deliberate travesty of historical truth that the Maoist leadership of the ” Chinese Communist Party continues to make the leader of the ccp of the 1925~27 period, Chen Tu Hsui, mainly responsible for these mistakes, and hides the fact that be was only acting upon the direct and pressing instructions of the Communist Intemational, and in the first place of Stalin personally. 3% But wasn’t Stalin’s policy vindicated by the ussr’s victory in the Second World War, ask many people, and as Krassé also insinuates (p. 80)? To see things like this— completely passing over in silence the tremendous price paid for that victory, and the innumerable avoidable victims and defeats (including during the war: a whole literature has sprung up in the Soviet Union around this theme!)—is to present a distorted picture of reality. A man on the fifth floor refuses to take the elevator or even to switch on the light, but wants perforce to descend a narrow staircase in the dark. He slips, as could be expected, falls down the stairs, but thanks to his robust constitution does not break his neck but only both arms and legs, and is even able to walk on crutches again after four years. This is obviously proof of a strong constitution; but does it argue against taking the elevator? 35 As we know today, Stalin also tried to influence the Yugoslav and Chinese communists against conquering power. He instructed the Vietnamese CP to stay inside the French colonial empire, rechristened the ‘French Union’. The party he had educated obstinately refused to engage upon Fidel Castro’s road towards a victorious socialist revolution in Cuba for several years. Don’t these facts need a sociologseal and nota simply psychological explanation?
that is why Stalin finally crushed the &v/aks and stood up against the Nazi invasion. It has not destroyed the basic socio-economic conquests of the October revolution; on the contrary, it has conserved them, be it by means which enter more and more into conflict with the basic goals of socialism. The socialized mode of production born from the October revolution has withstood successfully all assaults from outside and all undermining from within. It has proved its superiority to hundreds of millions of human beings. This is the basic historical trend which, incidentally, also explains why world revolution, instead of being definitively thrown back for decades as pessimists assumed, could so easily rise again and conquer momentous victories after the Second World War. But unlike the proletariat, it is basically conservative in outlook, afraid of any new upsurge of world revolution, because it feels that this would trigger off a new stage of workers’ militancy inside its own country, which would threaten its own power and privileges. The theory and practice of ‘socialism in one country’ in the ’twenties and "thirties, like the theory and practice of ‘peaceful coexistence’ in the fifties and ’sixties, are a perfect expréssion of the socially contradictory nature of that bureaucracy. It will certainly defend itself when threatened with extinction by imperialism; it will even try to extend its ‘zone of influence’ when this can be done without upsetting the social equilibrium of forces on a world scale. But it is basically attached to the Status quo. American statesmen have found this out, in the long run. Krass6 should show at least their awareness of this rationale of Russian foreign policy since Lenin’s death, and he should try to find a social explanation for this consistent behaviour. He will find no other than the one which Trotsky elaborated. The bureaucracy and its apologists can, of course, try and rationalize