Stalinism is not Bolshevism

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People behind the statistics: some of the 13 million Germans driven west Red Guards' flying column in January 1918 A SHORT article I wrote commemorating Lenin's death, (SO 165), has been attacked, first by lan McCalman (SO 167) as "typical of the hagiography [Bible-thumping] which performs a disservice to the socialist movement in that it obscures rather than clarifies the legacy of Leninism"; and second, by Paul Hubert (SO 168) as showing probable "conscious sleight of hand" in failing to refer to the fact that the USSR is a 'degenerated workers' state' So I am apparently, simultaneously, an unthinking, dogmatic orthodox Leninist, and à vile, underhand, conscious by the Russian army at the end of Wörld War 2 revisionist. Critics are hard to please.

Ian accuses me of 'betraying an unserious attitude towards the most contentious issue facing revolutionary socialists" which is this: "did Lenin lay the foundations for Stalinism, and, if so, in what ways was this relationship expressed?' And lan refers to one line of thinking by way of an answer: "the growing process of bureaucratisation was the inevitable and logical culmination of Lenin's concept of the party, the consequences of which he recognised too late." And Ian suggests, at least, that he agrees with this line of thinking.

The idea that Lenin's concept of the party, and the organisation of the Bolsheviks prior to 1917, in some way caused the Stalinist police state, is a widespread one. It is, however, not very convincing.

First of all, the Bolshevik party before the revolution was not the monolithic apparatus it was to have become by the end of the 1920s. Even in 1917, for example, Lenin had to wage a Sharp - and public - struggle to win the party to opposition to the Provisional Government and to a perspective of 'all power to the Soviets' • It had never been that bureaucratic, centralised machine that it would have needed to be to in any way 'cause' Stalinist degeneration.

Other factors account for Stalinism: the profound backwardness of capitalism Russia, which worked against the foundations of a socialist society being established unless the revolution was internationalised; the failure of revolutions elsewhere, which reinforced the isolationist tendencies in the new workers' state; the disruption. economically and politically. caused by civil war and imperialist blockade/intervention, strengthening the power of a bureaucratic elite that wanted, in this situation, to establish and maintain privileges amidst 'generalised want' Ian says that it is wrong to 'dismiss out of hand' more negative assessments of the influence of the Bolsheviks' methods of organisation. But it seems to me wrong to 'dismiss out of hand' Lenin's last struggle (Moshe Lewin's phrase - not mine - as lan notes) against bureaucratisation, as well as by implication to dismiss the subsequent struggle of the Left Opposition. These were not simply the result of and not necessarily doomed to failure.

The Left Opposition - 1 think rightly - saw a part of their struggle to be a return to Leninist principles of organisation, which the Stalin faction had broken with. To smugly believe that the Left Opposition shared the Stalin faction's basic ideas about the party is unhistorical and insulting.

This is not to say that Lenin and Trotsky did not make mistakes. Rosa Luxemburg, in a spirit of fundamental solidarity with the Bolshevik revolution, criticised them for making general theoretical justifications for actions they were forced to carry out by exceptional circumstances. I would tend to agree with her about this.

But I do think that the choices that faced the Bolsheviks immediately after 1917 were severely limited, as the new workers' state was fighting for its life. The mistakes that they made need to be assessed coldly in light of this historical situation.

Ian throws out two largely rhetorical questions. "Did Lenin ever conceive of ... submitting to the will of a democratically elected Constituent Assembly?" and "Did Lenin ever believe in a plurality of political parties?"

Lenin had consistently argued that the Soviets were a higher form of democracy than the Assembly: the decision to dismiss the latter was not made suddenly. But it would in any case seem to me pointless to maintain a bourgeois parliament (which is what the Assembly wasi with a majority elected some time earlier and opposed to the revolution in a situation in which power had already passed Stalin, Rykov, Kamener Zinoviev. Four he other three to becon • dictator to the Soviets as institutions the new working class state.

Rival parties were banned due to the exceptional circumstances referred to above. At the beginning of the October revolution, power was shared, with the Left Social Revolutionaries. Judgements about later actions should not be made with reference to abstract criteria about pluralism, but made historically.

But whatever judgement we make does not directly affont our view of the Leninist method of party organisation. Lenin's original work on the party was an attempt to apply then accepted forms of social democratic (in the pre-1914 sense) organisation to conditions of Isarist clandestinity. And its basic principles are, I think, sound ones. An organisation in which there is the greatest possible political discussion land what is possible is not always going to be what is desirable - for example if the organisation is permanently under threat of police infiltration); which has a democratically elected leadership with the authority to make interim decisions; and whose conference decisions or interim leadership decisions, are imple, mented by its membership, strikes me as extremely sensible, extremely democratic and extremely necessary. It does not rule out the possibility of bureaucratisation; but it also does not, and did not, cause bureaucratisation.

I concentrated in the article on the ideas in State and Revolution because they express the basic ideas of revolutionary socialism (lan seems to be dismissing them as anarchistic). And I think they should form a central corpus of our theoretical ideas today.

Paul Hubert's letter is ridiculous. Certainly, I do not use the expression 'degenerated workers' state' in my article, but I think I spell out the basic idea behind it. If we always have to use the right phrases not to be accused of revisionism, we are in a sorry state.

I also said nothing about Lenin's position on imperialism, the national question, the united front, etc., etc. No doubt that was " conscious sleight of hand" as well.

But Paul's letter is disturbing in other respects. He attacks me for juxtaposing the need to smash the state in capitalist societies and in the Stalinist countries. Of course the tasks facing the working class are not exactly the same in both cases: but does Paul mean that the Stalinist states do not need to be smashed? In the name of an irate orthodoxy, Paul seems to be chucking out the idea of political revolution. If I'm the revisionist, so be it.

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SER Organiser no.169 Page

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confusion and disillusionment, but necessary and important,