We Can Only Go Beyond Communism by Coming to Terms With Its History

Thirty years ago today, the Soviet Union collapsed. Twentieth-century communism should be understood in all its complexity, as revolution and regime, a spur to anti-colonialism and an alternative form of social democracy.

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) Soviet leader, addressing the Sixteenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, 1930. (Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

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BYENZO TRAVERSO
12.26.2021

JACOBIN

This is an extract from Enzo Traverso’s new book Revolution: An Intellectual History, available from Verso Books.

The legacy of the October Revolution is torn between two antipodal interpretations. The rise to power of the Bolsheviks appeared, on the one hand, as the announcement of a global socialist transformation; on the other hand, as the event that set the stage for an epoch of totalitarianism. The most radical versions of these opposed interpretations — official communism and Cold War anti-communism — also converge insofar as, for both of them, the Communist Party was a kind of demiurgic historical force.

Several decades after its exhaustion, the communist experience does not need to be defended, idealized, or demonized. It deserves to be critically understood as a whole, as a dialectical totality shaped by internal tensions and contradictions, presenting multiple dimensions in a vast spectrum of shades, from redemptive élans to totalitarian violence, from participatory democracy and collective deliberation to blind oppression and mass extermination, from the most utopian imagination to the most bureaucratic domination — sometimes shifting from one to the other in a short span of time.

Like many other “isms” of our political and philosophical lexicon, communism is a polysemic and ultimately “ambiguous” word. Its ambiguity does not lie exclusively in the discrepancy that separates the communist idea from its historical embodiments. It lies in the extreme diversity of its expressions. Not only because Russian, Chinese, and Italian communism were different, but also because in the long run many communist movements underwent deep changes, despite keeping their leaders and their ideological references.

Considering its historical trajectory as a world phenomenon, communism appears as a mosaic of communisms. Sketching its “anatomy,” one can distinguish at least four broad forms, interrelated and not necessarily opposed to each other, but different enough to be recognized on their own: communism as revolution; communism as regime; communism as anti-colonialism; and finally, communism as a variant of social democracy.

Revolutionary Template

It is important to remember the mood of the Russian Revolution, because it powerfully contributed to creating an iconic image that survived the misfortunes of the USSR and cast its shadow over the entire twentieth century. Its aura attracted millions of human beings across the world, and remained relatively well-preserved even when the aura of the communist regimes completely fell apart. In the 1960s and 1970s, it fuelled a new wave of political radicalization that not only claimed autonomy from the USSR and its allies, but also perceived them as enemies.

The Russian Revolution came out of the Great War. It was a product of the collapse of the ‘long nineteenth century.’

The Russian Revolution came out of the Great War. It was a product of the collapse of the “long nineteenth century,” and the symbiotic link between war and revolution shaped the entire trajectory of twentieth-century communism. Emerging from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Paris Commune had been a forerunner of militarized politics, as many Bolshevik thinkers emphasized, but the October Revolution amplified it to an incomparably larger scale.

World War I transformed Bolshevism itself, altering many of its features: several canonical works of the communist tradition, like Lenin’s The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) or Leon Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (1920), simply could not be imagined before 1914. Just as 1789 introduced a new concept of revolution — no longer defined as an astronomical rotation but rather as a social and political break — October 1917 reframed it in military terms: a crisis of the old order, mass mobilization, dualism of power, armed insurrection, proletarian dictatorship, civil war, and a violent clash with counterrevolution.

Lenin’s State and Revolution formalized Bolshevism as both an ideology (an interpretation of Karl Marx’s ideas) and a unity of strategic precepts distinguishing it from social democratic reformism, a politics belonging to the exhausted age of nineteenth-century liberalism. Bolshevism came out of a time of increasing brutalization, when war erupted into politics, changing its language and its practices. It was a product of the anthropological transformation that shaped the old continent at the end of the Great War.

This genetic code of Bolshevism was visible everywhere, from texts to languages, from iconography to songs, from symbols to rituals. It outlasted World War II and continued to fuel the rebellious movements of the 1970s, whose slogans and liturgies obsessively emphasized the idea of a violent clash with the state. Bolshevism created a military paradigm of revolution that deeply shaped communist experiences throughout the planet.

The European Resistance, as well as the socialist transformations in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba reproduced a similar symbiotic link between war and revolution. The international communist movement was therefore envisioned as a revolutionary army formed by millions of combatants, and this had inevitable consequences in terms of organization, authoritarianism, discipline, division of labor, and, last but not least, gender hierarchies. In a movement of warriors, female leaders could only be exceptions.

Earthquake

The Bolsheviks were deeply convinced that they were acting in accordance with the “laws of history.” The earthquake of 1917 was born from the entanglement of many factors, some set in the longue durée of Russian history and others more temporary, abruptly synchronized by the war: an extremely violent peasant uprising against the landed aristocracy, a revolt of the urban proletariat affected by the economic crisis, and finally the dislocation of the army, formed of peasant-soldiers who were exhausted after three years of a terrible conflict, which they neither understood nor perceived as nearing an end.

If these were the premises of the Russian Revolution, it is difficult to grasp in it any supposed historical necessity. The Soviet experiment was fragile, precarious, and unstable during its first years of existence. It was constantly threatened, and its survival required both inexhaustible energies and enormous sacrifices. A witness to those years, Victor Serge, wrote that in 1919 the Bolsheviks considered the collapse of the Soviet regime likely, but instead of discouraging them, this awareness multiplied their tenacity. The victory of the counterrevolution would have been an immense bloodbath. The Soviet experiment was fragile, precarious, and unstable during its first years of existence.

Maybe their resistance was possible because they were animated by the profound conviction of acting in accordance with the “laws of history.” But, in reality, they did not follow any natural tendency; they were inventing a new world, unable to know what would come out of their endeavor, inspired by an astonishingly powerful utopian imagination, and certainly incapable of imagining its totalitarian outcome.

Despite their usual appeal to the positivistic lexicon of “historical laws,” the Bolsheviks had inherited their military conception of revolution from the Great War. The Russian revolutionaries read Clausewitz and dealt with the interminable controversies about the legacy of Blanquism and the art of insurrection, but the violence of the Russian Revolution did not arise from an ideological impulse; it stemmed from a society brutalized by war.

This genetic trauma had profound consequences. The war had reshaped politics by changing its codes, introducing previously unknown forms of authoritarianism. In 1917, chaos and spontaneity still prevailed in a mass party composed mostly of new members and directed by a group of exiles, but authoritarianism quickly consolidated during the civil war. Lenin and Trotsky claimed the legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871, but Julius Martov was right when he pointed out that their true ancestor was the Jacobin Terror of 1793–94.

The military paradigm of the revolution should not be mistaken, however, for a cult of violence. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky put forward solid arguments against the thesis widely spread from the 1920s onward of a Bolshevik “coup.” Rejecting the ingenuity of the idyllic vision of the taking of the Winter Palace as a spontaneous popular uprising, he dedicated many pages to the methodical preparation of an insurrection that required, well beyond a rigorous and efficient military organization, an in-depth evaluation of its political conditions and a careful choice of its execution times.

The result was the dismissal of the interim government and the arrest of its members practically without bloodshed. The disintegration of the old state apparatus and the construction of a new one was a painful process that lasted for more than three years of civil war. Of course, the insurrection required a technical preparation and was implemented by a minority, but this did not equate to a “conspiracy.” In opposition to the pervasive view spread by Curzio Malaparte, a victorious insurrection, Trotsky wrote, “is widely separated both in method and historical significance from a governmental overturn accomplished by conspirators acting in concealment from the masses.”

There is no doubt that the taking of the Winter Palace and the dismissal of the provisional government was a major turn within the revolutionary process: Lenin called it an “overthrowing” or an “uprising” (perevorot). Nevertheless, most historians recognize that this twist took place in a period of extraordinary effervescence, characterized by a permanent mobilization of society and constant recourse to the use of force; in a paradoxical context in which Russia, while remaining involved in a world war, was a state that no longer possessed the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Disillusionment

Paradoxically, the thesis of the Bolshevik “coup” is the crossing point between conservative and anarchist criticisms of the October Revolution. Their reasons were certainly different — not to say antipodal — but their conclusions converged: Lenin and Trotsky had established a dictatorship.

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, expelled from the United States in 1919 because of their enthusiastic support of the Russian Revolution, could not accept Bolshevik rule and, after the repression of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921, decided to leave the USSR. Goldman published My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and Berkman The Bolshevik Myth (1925), whose conclusion expressed a bitter and severe assessment:

Gray are the passing days. One by one the embers of hope have died out. Terror and despotism have crushed the life born in October. The slogans of the Revolution are foresworn, its ideals stifled in the blood of the people. The breath of yesterday is dooming millions to death; the shadow of today hangs like a black pall over the country. Dictatorship is trampling the masses underfoot. The Revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness.

Their criticism certainly deserves attention, since it came from inside the revolution itself. Their diagnostic was pitiless: the Bolsheviks had established a party dictatorship that ruled not only in name of the soviets but sometimes — as in Kronstadt — against them, and whose authoritarian features had becoming more and more suffocating.

In fact, the Bolsheviks themselves did not contest this trenchant appraisal. In Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930), Victor Serge described the USSR during the Civil War in this way:

At this moment, the party fulfilled within the working class the functions of a brain and of a nervous system. It saw, it felt, it knew, it thought, it willed for and through the masses; its consciousness, its organization were a makeweight for the weakness of the individual members of the mass. Without it, the mass would have been no more than a heap of human dust, experiencing confused aspirations shot through by flashes of intelligence — these, in the absence of a mechanism capable of leading to large-scale action, doomed to waste themselves — and experiencing more insistently the pangs of suffering. Through its incessant agitation and propaganda, always telling the unvarnished truth, the party raised the workers above their own narrow, individual horizon, and revealed to them the vast perspectives of history. After the winter of 1918–19, the revolution becomes the work of the Communist party.

The Bolsheviks’ eulogy of party dictatorship, their defense of the militarization of work and their violent language against any left-wing criticism — either social democratic or anarchist — of their power, was certainly abhorrent and dangerous. It was during the Civil War that Stalinism found its premises. The fact remains that a left-wing alternative was not an easy option. As Serge himself lucidly recognized, the most probable alternative to Bolshevism was simply counterrevolutionary terror.

Without being a coup, the October Revolution meant the seizure of power by a party that represented a minority, and which remained even more isolated after its decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. At the end of the Russian Civil War, however, the Bolsheviks had conquered the majority, thus becoming the hegemonic force in a devastated country.

This dramatic change did not happen because of the Cheka and state terror, as pitiless as it was, but because of the division of their enemies, the support of the working class and the passing over to their side of both the peasantry and the non-Russian nationalities. If the final outcome was the dictatorship of a revolutionary party, the alternative was not a democratic regime; the only alternative was a military dictatorship of Russian nationalists, aristocratic landowners. and pogromists.'

Revolution From Above

The communist regime institutionalized the military dimension of revolution. It destroyed the creative, anarchistic, and self-emancipatory spirit of 1917, but at the same time inscribed itself into the revolutionary process. The shift of the revolution toward the Soviet regime passed through different steps: the Civil War (1918–21), the collectivization of agriculture (1930–33), and the political purges of the Moscow Trials (1936–38).

Dissolving the Constituent Assembly, in December 1917, the Bolsheviks affirmed the superiority of Soviet democracy, but by the end of the Civil War the latter was dying. During this atrocious and bloody conflict, the USSR introduced censorship, suppressed political pluralism to the point of finally abolishing any fraction within the Communist Party itself, militarized labor and created the first forced labor camps, and instituted a new political secret police (Cheka). In March 1921, the violent repression of Kronstadt symbolized the end of Soviet democracy and the USSR emerged from the Civil War as a single-party dictatorship.In the second half of the 1930s, the political purges physically eliminated the vestiges of revolutionary Bolshevism and disciplined the entire society by establishing the rule of terror.

Ten years later, the collectivization of agriculture brutally ended the peasant revolution and invented new forms of totalitarian violence and bureaucratically centralized modernization of the country. In the second half of the 1930s, the political purges physically eliminated the vestiges of revolutionary Bolshevism and disciplined the entire society by establishing the rule of terror. For two decades, the USSR created a gigantic system of concentration camps.

From the mid-1930s, the USSR roughly corresponded with the classical definition of totalitarianism elaborated a few years later by many conservative political thinkers: a correlation of official ideology, charismatic leadership, single-party dictatorship, suppression of rule of law and political pluralism, monopoly of all means of communication through state propaganda, social and political terror backed by a system of concentration camps, and the suppression of free-market capitalism by a centralized economy.

This description, currently used to point out the similarities between communism and fascism, is not wrong but extremely superficial. Even if one overlooks the enormous differences that separated the communist and fascist ideologies, as well as the social and economic content of their political systems, the fact remains that such a canonical definition of totalitarianism does not grasp the internal dynamic of the Soviet regime. It is simply unable to inscribe it into the historical process of the Russian Revolution. It depicts the USSR as a static, monolithic system, whereas the advent of Stalinism meant a deep and protracted transformation of society and culture.

Equally unsatisfactory is the definition of Stalinism as a bureaucratic counterrevolution or a “betrayed” revolution. Stalinism certainly signified a radical departure from any idea of democracy and self-emancipation, but it was not, properly speaking, a counterrevolution. A comparison with the Napoleonic Empire is pertinent insofar as Stalinism consciously linked the transformations engendered by the Russian Revolution to both the Enlightenment and the tradition of Russian Empire, but Stalinism was not the restoration of the Old Regime, neither politically or economically, nor even culturally. 

Far from restoring the power of the old aristocracy, Stalinism created a completely new economic, managerial, scientific, and intellectual elite.

Far from restoring the power of the old aristocracy, Stalinism created a completely new economic, managerial, scientific, and intellectual elite, recruited from the lower classes of Soviet societies — notably the peasantry — and educated by new communist institutions. This is the key to explaining why Stalinism benefited from a social consensus, notwithstanding the Terror and mass deportations.

Monumental and Monstrous

Interpreting Stalinism as a step in the process of the Russian Revolution does not mean sketching a linear track. The first wave of terror took place during a civil war, when the existence of the USSR itself was threatened by an international coalition. The brutality of the White counterrevolution, the extreme violence of its propaganda and of its practices — pogroms and massacres — pushed the Bolsheviks to establish a pitiless dictatorship.

Stalin initiated the second and third waves of terror during the 1930s — collectivization and the purges — in a pacified country whose borders had been internationally recognized and whose political power had been menaced neither by external nor by internal forces. Of course, the rise to power of Hitler in Germany clearly signaled the possibility of a new war in the medium term, but the massive, blind, and irrational character of Stalin’s violence significantly weakened the USSR instead of reinforcing and equipping it to face such dangers.

The massive, blind, and irrational character of Stalin’s violence significantly weakened the USSR instead of reinforcing and equipping it to face the dangers of Nazism.

Stalinism was a “revolution from above,” a paradoxical mixture of modernization and social regression, whose final result was mass deportation, a system of concentration camps, an ensemble of trials exhuming the fantasies of the Inquisition, and a wave of mass executions that decapitated the state, the party, and the army. 

In rural areas, Stalinism meant, according to Nikolai Bukharin, the return to a “feudal exploitation” of the peasantry with catastrophic economic effects. At the same time as the kulaks were starving in Ukraine, the Soviet regime was transforming tens of thousands of peasants into technicians and engineers.

In short, Soviet totalitarianism merged modernism and barbarism; it was a peculiar, frightening, Promethean trend. Arno Mayer defines it as “an uneven and unstable amalgam of monumental achievements and monstrous crimes.” Of course, any left scholar or activist could easily share Victor Serge’s assessment on the moral, philosophical, and political line that radically separated Stalinism from authentic socialism, insofar as Stalin’s USSR had become in his words “an absolute, castocratic totalitarian state, drunk with its own power, for which man does not count.” But this does not change the fact, recognized by Serge himself, that this red totalitarianism unfolded in and prolonged a historical process started by the October Revolution.

Avoiding any teleological approach, one could observe that this result was neither historically ineluctable nor coherently inscribed into a Marxist ideological pattern. The origins of Stalinism, nevertheless, cannot simply be imputed, as radical functionalism suggests, to the historical circumstances of war and the social backwardness of a gigantic country with an absolutist past, a country in which building socialism inevitably required reproducing the gruesomeness of “primitive capital accumulation.”

Bolshevik ideology played a role during the Russian Civil War in this metamorphosis from democratic upsurge to ruthless, totalitarian dictatorship. Its normative vision of violence as the “midwife of history” and its culpable indifference to the juridical framework of a revolutionary state, historically transitional and doomed to extinction, certainly favored the emergence of an authoritarian, single-party regime.

Multiple threads run from revolution to Stalinism, as well as from the USSR to the communist movements acting across the world. Stalinism was both a totalitarian regime and, for several decades, the hegemonic current of the Left on an international scale.

From Moscow to Hunan

The Bolsheviks were radical Westernizers. Bolshevik literature was full of references to the French Revolution, 1848 and the Paris Commune, but it never mentioned the Haitian Revolution or the Mexican Revolution. For Trotsky and Lenin, who loved this metaphor, the “wheel of history” rolled from Petrograd to Berlin, not from the boundless Russian countryside to the fields of Morelos or the Antillean plantations.

In a chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky deplored the fact that peasants were usually ignored by the history books, just as theater critics pay no attention to the workers who, behind the scenes, operate the curtains and change the scenery. In his own book, however, the peasants appear mostly as an anonymous mass. They are not neglected but are observed from afar, with analytical detachment rather than empathy.

The Bolsheviks had started to question their vision of the peasantry — inherited from Marx’s writings on French Bonapartism — as a culturally backward and politically conservative class, but their proletarian tropism was too strong to complete this revision. This was done, not without theoretical and strategic confrontations, by anti-colonial communism in the years between the two world wars.

In China, the communist turn toward the peasantry resulted from both the devastating defeat of the urban revolutions of the mid-1920s and the effort to inscribe Marxism into a national history and culture. After the bloody repression inflicted by the Kuomintang (GMD), the Communist Party cells had been almost completely dismantled in the cities, and its members imprisoned and persecuted. Retreating into the country, where they found protection and could reorganize their movement, many communist leaders started looking at the peasantry with different eyes, abandoning their former Westernized gaze on Asian “backwardness.”

This strategic turn, the object of sharp controversies between the Communist International and its Chinese section during the 1930s, was claimed by Mao Zedong at the beginning of 1927, even before the massacres perpetrated by the GMD in Shanghai and Canton that year. Coming back to his native Hunan, Mao wrote a famous report in which he designated the peasantry — instead of the urban proletariat — as the driving force of the Chinese Revolution.

Against the Moscow agents who conceived of peasant militias exclusively as triggers of urban uprisings, in 1931, Mao persisted in building a Soviet republic in Jiangxi. Without believing in the rural character of the Chinese Revolution, he could not have organized the Long March in order to resist the annihilation campaign launched by the GMD. Initially considered as a tragic defeat, this epic undertaking paved the way for a successful struggle in the following decade, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD itself. 

The three major dimensions of communism — revolution, regime, and anti-colonialism — emblematically merged in the Chinese Revolution.

The proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing in 1949 was the result of a process that, from the uprisings of 1925 to the Long March and the anti-Japanese struggle, found one of its necessary premises in October 1917; but it was also the product of a strategic revision. There was a complex genetic link between the Chinese and the Russian Revolutions. The three major dimensions of communism — revolution, regime, and anti-colonialism — emblematically merged in the Chinese Revolution.

As a radical break with the traditional order, it was incontestably a revolution that heralded the end of centuries of oppression; as the conclusion of a civil war, it resulted in the conquest of power by a militarized party which, since the beginning, established its dictatorship in the most authoritarian forms. And as the conclusion of fifteen years of struggle, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD — a nationalist force that had become the agent of Western great powers — the communist victory of 1949 marked not only the end of colonialism in China but also, on a broader scale, a significant moment in the global process of decolonization.

The Wind From Baku

After the Russian Revolution, socialism crossed the boundaries of Europe and became an agenda item in the South and the colonial world. Because of its intermediary position between Europe and Asia, with a gigantic territory extending across both continents, inhabited by a variety of national, religious, and ethnic communities, the USSR became the locus of a new crossroads between the West and the colonial world. Bolshevism was able to speak equally to the proletarian classes of the industrialized countries and to the colonized peoples of the South. Bolshevism was able to speak equally to the proletarian classes of the industrialized countries and to the colonized peoples of the South.

During the nineteenth century, anti-colonialism was almost nonexistent in the West, with the notable exception of the anarchist movement, whose activists and ideas widely circulated between Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and different Asian countries. After Marx’s death, socialism based its hopes and expectations on the growing strength of the industrial working class, mostly white and male, and was concentrated in the developed (mostly Protestant) capitalist countries of the West.

Every mass socialist party included powerful currents defending the “civilizing mission” of Europe throughout the world. Social democratic parties — particularly those located in the biggest empires — postponed colonial liberation until after the socialist transformation of Europe and the United States. The Bolsheviks radically broke with such a tradition.

The second congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in July 1920, approved a programmatic document calling for colonial revolutions against imperialism: its goal was the creation of communist parties in the colonial world and the support of national liberation movements. The congress clearly affirmed a radical turn away from the old social democratic views on colonialism.

A couple of months later, the Bolsheviks organized a Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, which convened almost two thousand delegates from twenty-nine Asian nationalities. Grigory Zinoviev explicitly affirmed that the Communist International had broken with older social democratic attitudes, according to which “civilized Europe” could and must “act as tutor to ‘barbarous’ Asia.” Revolution was no longer considered as the exclusive realm of “white” European and American workers, and socialism could not be imagined without the liberation of colonized peoples.

The conflicting relationships between communism and nationalism would be clarified in the following decades, but the October Revolution was the inaugural moment of global anti-colonialism. In the 1920s, anti-colonialism suddenly shifted from the realm of historical possibility to the field of political strategy and military organization. The Baku conference announced this historic change.

The alliance between communism and anti-colonialism experienced several moments of crisis and tension, related to both ideological conflicts and the imperatives of the USSR’s foreign policies. At the end of World War II, the French Communist Party participated in a coalition government that violently repressed anti-colonial revolts in Algeria and Madagascar, and in the following decade it supported Prime Minister Guy Mollet at the beginning of the Algerian War. In India, the communist movement was marginalized during World War II because of its decision to suspend its anti-colonial struggle and to support the British Empire’s involvement in a military alliance with the USSR against the Axis powers.

If these examples clearly show the contradictions of communist anti-colonialism, they do not change the historical role played by the USSR as a rear base for many anti-colonial revolutions. The entire process of decolonization took place in the context of the Cold War, within the relations of force established by the existence of the USSR.

Retrospectively, decolonization appears as a historical experience in which the contradictory dimensions of communism previously mentioned — emancipation and authoritarianism, revolution and dictatorial power — permanently merged. In most cases, anti-colonial struggles were conceived and organized like military campaigns carried out by liberation armies, and the political regimes they established were, from the beginning, one-party dictatorships.

In Cambodia, at the end of a ferocious war, the military dimension of the anti-colonial struggle completely suffocated any emancipatory impulse, and the conquest of power by the Khmer Rouge immediately resulted in the establishment of a genocidal power. The happiness of insurgent Havana on the first of January 1959 and the terror of the Cambodian killing fields are the dialectical poles of communism as anti-colonialism.

Revolutionary Reformists

The fourth dimension of twentieth-century communism is social democratic: in certain countries and periods, communism played the role traditionally fulfilled by social democracy. This happened in some Western countries, mostly in the postwar decades, thanks to a set of circumstances related to international context, the foreign policy of the USSR, and the absence or weakness of classic social democratic parties; and it also occurred in some countries born from decolonization.

In certain countries and periods, communism played the role traditionally fulfilled by social democracy.

The most significant examples of this peculiar phenomenon are found in the United States, at the time of the New Deal, in postwar France and Italy, as well as in India (Kerala and West Bengal). Of course, social democratic communism was geographically and chronologically more circumscribed than its other forms, but it existed nonetheless. To a certain extent, the rebirth of social democracy itself after 1945 was a by-product of the October Revolution, which had changed the balance of power on a global scale and compelled capitalism to transform significantly, adopting a “human face.”

Social democratic communism is an oxymoronic definition that does not ignore the links of French, Italian, or Indian communism with revolutions, Stalinism, and decolonization. It does not neglect the capacity of these movements to lead insurgencies — notably during the Resistance against the Nazi occupation — nor their organic connections with Moscow for several decades. Their first open criticism of the USSR’s foreign policy took place only in the 1960s, first with the Sino-Soviet split, then with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks.

Even their internal structure and organization was, at least until the end of the 1970s, much more Stalinist than social democratic, as well as their culture, theoretical sources, and political imagination. In spite of these clearly recognizable features, such parties played a typical social democratic role: reforming capitalism, containing social inequalities, getting accessible health care, education, and leisure to the largest number of people; in short, improving the living conditions of the laboring classes and giving them political representation.

Of course, one of the peculiar features of social democratic communism was its exclusion from political power, except for a couple of years between the end of Word War II and the breakout of the Cold War (the swan song of social democratic communism took place in France at the beginning of the 1980s, when the (French Communist Party (PCF) participated in a left coalition government under François Mitterrand). Unlike the British Labour Party, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), or Scandinavia’s social democracies, it could not claim paternity of the welfare state.

In the United States, the Communist Party was one of the left pillars of the New Deal, along with the trade unions, but it never entered the Roosevelt administration. It did not experience power, only the purges of McCarthyism. In France and Italy, the communist parties were strongly influential in the birth of postwar social policies simply because of their strength and their capacity to put pressure on governments.

The arena of their social reformism was “municipal socialism” in the cities they led as hegemonic strongholds, like Bologna, or the Parisian “red belt.” In a much bigger country like India, the communist governments of Kerala and West Bengal could be considered equivalent forms of “local,” postcolonial welfare states.

In Europe, social democratic communism had two necessary premises: on the one hand, the Resistance that legitimized communist parties as democratic forces; on the other, the economic growth that followed the postwar reconstruction. By the 1980s, the time of social democratic communism was over. Therefore, the end of communism in 1989 throws a new light on the historical trajectory of social democracy itself.

An accomplished form of the social democratic welfare state only existed in Scandinavia. Elsewhere, the welfare state was much more the result of a capitalist self-reformation than a social democratic conquest. At the end of World War II, in the midst of a continent in ruins, capitalism was unable to restart without powerful state intervention. Despite its obvious — and largely achieved — goal of defending the principle of the “free market” against the Soviet economy, the Marshall Plan was, as its name indicated, a “plan” that assured the transition from total war to peaceful reconstruction. 

The postwar welfare state was an unexpected outcome of the complex and contradictory confrontation between communism and capitalism that had begun in 1917.

Without such massive American help, many materially destroyed European countries would have been unable to recover quickly, and the United States worried that a new economic collapse might push entire countries toward communism. From this point of view, the postwar welfare state was an unexpected outcome of the complex and contradictory confrontation between communism and capitalism that had begun in 1917.

Whatever the values, convictions, and commitments of its members and even its leaders, social democracy played a rentier’s role: it could defend freedom, democracy, and the welfare state in the capitalist countries simply because the USSR existed, and capitalism had been compelled to transform itself in the context of the Cold War. After 1989, capitalism recovered its “savage” face, rediscovered the élan of its heroic times, and dismantled the welfare state almost everywhere.

In most Western countries, social democracy turned to neoliberalism and became an essential tool of this transition. And alongside old-style social democracy, even social democratic communism disappeared. The self-dissolution of the Italian Communist Party, in 1991, was the emblematic epilogue of this process: it did not turn into a classic social democratic party but rather an advocate of center-left liberalism, with the explicitly claimed model of the American Democratic Party.

After the Fall

In 1989, the fall of communism closed the curtain on a play as epic as it was tragic, as exciting as it was terrifying. The time of decolonization and the welfare state was over, but the collapse of communism-as-regime also took with it communism-as-revolution. Instead of liberating new forces, the end of the USSR engendered a widespread awareness of the historical defeat of twentieth-century revolutions: paradoxically, the shipwreck of real socialism engulfed the communist utopia.

The twenty-first-century left is compelled to reinvent itself, to distance itself from previous patterns. It is creating new models, new ideas, and a new utopian imagination. This reconstruction is not an easy task, insofar as the fall of communism left the world without alternatives to capitalism and created a different mental landscape. A new generation has grown up in a neoliberal world in which capitalism has become a “natural” form of life.

The Left rediscovered an ensemble of revolutionary traditions that had been suppressed or marginalized over the course of a century, anarchism foremost among them, and recognized a plurality of political subjects previously ignored or relegated to a secondary position. The experiences of the “alter-globalization” movements, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, Syriza, the French Nuit debout and gilets jaunes, feminist and LGBT movements, and Black Lives Matter are steps in the process of building a new revolutionary imagination, discontinuous, nourished by memory but at the same time severed from twentieth-century history and deprived of a usable legacy.

Born as an attempt at taking heaven by storm, twentieth-century communism became, with and against fascism, an expression of the dialectic of the Enlightenment. Ultimately, the Soviet-style industrial cities, five-year plans, agricultural collectivization, spacecraft, gulags converted into factories, nuclear weapons, and ecological catastrophes, were different forms of the triumph of instrumental reason.

Was not communism the frightening face of a Promethean dream, of an idea of Progress that erased and destroyed any experience of self-emancipation? Was not Stalinism a storm “piling wreckage upon wreckage,” in Walter Benjamin’s image, and which millions of people mistakenly called “Progress”? Fascism merged a set of conservative values inherited from the counter-Enlightenment with a modern cult of science, technology, and mechanical strength. Stalinism combined a similar cult of technical modernity with a radical and authoritarian form of Enlightenment: socialism transformed into a “cold utopia.”

A new, global left will not succeed without working through this historical experience. Extracting the emancipatory core of communism from this field of ruins is not an abstract, merely intellectual operation; it will require new battles, new constellations, in which all of a sudden the past will reemerge and “memory flash up.” Revolutions cannot be scheduled, they always come unexpectedly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Enzo Traverso teaches at Cornell University. His most recent book is Revolution: An Intellectual History.

What is Stalinism?US SECTION OF THE IMTJUNE 10, 2015

The legacy of the collapse of Stalinism

December 2021 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the official dissolution of the USSR. 

After the fall of the wall, Berlin 1989   (Click to enlarge)

 From The Socialist newspaper, 15 December 2021

December 2021 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the official dissolution of the USSR. This year's Socialism event in November included a session on the legacy of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe, introduced by Clive Heemskerk, editor of Socialism Today, the Socialist Party's monthly magazine. Below is an edited transcript of his introduction.

This year's Socialism is taking place one month short of the day 30 years ago, on Christmas Day in 1991, that Mikhail Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the USSR - the 'Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' - which had been founded five years after the October revolution of 1917, in 1922.

The end of the USSR did not have the same iconic imagery as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the execution of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. But Gorbachev's announcement was the culmination of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR, events which opened up a new era and gave a renewed impetus to capitalism for a whole historical period.

Firstly, it led to an ideological disarming of the workers' organisations - both the trade unions and their traditional political parties - consolidating the idea that there was no alternative possible to capitalism.

And secondly, it created a new world order - globalisation under rules set by the USA including the opening up of China - in which the countries of the ex-colonial world, both the masses and the elites within those countries, also no longer saw an alternative model of economic development.

But that 'post-Stalinist' era is ending, with the factors that gave capitalism a new lease of life turning into their opposite, opening up another new period - of the system showing once again its inability to solve the problems of society (economically, socially, and environmentally too); generating a new mass awareness of the need for a different way of organising human relations; and therefore creating the conditions for a mass revival of socialist ideas.

Those themes show that understanding the legacy of the collapse of Stalinism in Russia and Eastern Europe is not just an historical discussion, but sets the parameters for the events that will unfold in the years ahead.

Ideological defeat

There is an irony in discussing the legacy of the collapse of Stalinism at the Socialism weekend, because for us the totalitarian Stalinist regimes were not models of socialism but a grotesque caricature.

Leon Trotsky, whose ideas we base ourselves on, was actually the first Russian 'dissident' against Stalinism, defending the ideals of the 1917 October revolution which he led alongside Vladimir Lenin, against a regime headed by Joseph Stalin which emerged and then consolidated itself in power in the 1920s, before Trotsky was assassinated by an agent of Stalin in 1940.

Trotsky defended, as we do, the 1917 revolution as the greatest democratic movement in history, transferring power from the landlords, the factory owners, the judges, the elite civil servants, the police chiefs, the army tops, the owners and editors of the means of communication, the university directors, and so on, to committees of the people, of workers and peasants - the soviets - democratising every aspect of economic and social life.

But the revolution took place in a relatively underdeveloped country, mainly a peasant economy, with mass illiteracy, facing armed intervention from 21 different countries, including Britain, which sent troops to Archangel, Vladivostok, and the oilfields of Azerbaijan.

And because the revolution did not spread to the West - above all to the more economically advanced Germany where a series of revolutionary opportunities were lost from 1918 to 1923 - mass participation in the running of society was under constant pressure and increasingly replaced by the rule of the officialdom, the administrators, the bureaucracy as Trotsky termed it, which consolidated itself as a system of rule in the 1920s.

Initially, with the removal of the old owners, state direction of the economy still saw enormous economic progress made, even under the rule of the bureaucracy. There are many different figures but even the ideologically pro-capitalist Economist magazine, on the hundredth anniversary of the 1917 Russian revolution, pointed out that manufacturing output in the USSR grew by over 170% from 1928 to 1940 while "the rest of the world wallowed in the Depression". (11 November 2017)

But without the check of either workers' democracy or the price signals of the capitalist market, this came with enormous overheads. So, after a new spurt in the period following the end of world war two, the economy began to stagnate, unable to incorporate new technology, for example, or be flexible enough to meet new consumer needs, with the bureaucracy moving from being a relative fetter to an absolute fetter.

So what failed in the late 1980s and early 1990s was not democratic planning of the economy by the mass of the population - but the unchecked, top-down, bureaucratic planning of an unaccountable elite. Yet still the collapse of that system - not socialism but Stalinism - was used to 'prove' that socialism was unworkable and that the capitalist market was the only viable way of organising society.

It was an objective defeat, ideologically, for the international working class that led to a period of capitalist triumphalism - a torrent of propaganda about the 'end of history' - summed up in a headline in the Wall Street Journal, 'We Won'.

Impact on working-class organisation

The first consequence was the impact for a whole historical period on the confidence of even the most active, politically conscious workers in the possibility of socialism. This had its effect on working-class organisation in the 1990s - on the combativity of the trade unions and workers' parties - exemplified in Britain as the leader of an international trend with the transformation of Labour into Tony Blair's capitalist New Labour.

The Labour Party had been formed in 1900 as the result of the working class and its organisations coming into conflict with the capitalists and their political representatives in both the Conservative and Liberal parties, and drawing the conclusion of the need for their own independent party - which in turn developed their class consciousness by bringing workers together to discuss collectively their different sectional interests and their common struggle.

The party was a 'capitalist workers party', with a leadership which still reflected the outlook of the capitalist class but with a working-class base, and a structure through which the unions could move to challenge the leadership and threaten the capitalists' interests. This meant that, until Blair, Labour governments, while reluctantly tolerated as a means of holding the working class in check, were simultaneously undermined and eventually brought down by the capitalists when they could no longer accomplish that task.

That dual character of the party meant that when - in 1960 - the right-wing Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell tried to abolish the socialist Clause Four of Labour's constitution adopted in 1918 for "the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange", he was met with a storm of protest in the workers' organisations.

Even Harold Wilson, who went on to become prime minister in 1964, opposed the move, saying at the time that "nationalisation is to socialism what Genesis is to the Bible - it is the fundamental opener". While Michael Foot, who also later became Labour leader in 1980, said: "Like it or not, one of the most spectacular events of our age is the comparative success of the communist economic system".

Contrast that with 35 years later, in 1995 - just five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall - when Tony Blair was able to replace Clause Four with a new clause supporting the dynamic "enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition" with barely a whimper of opposition. And then back that up with organisational changes massively reducing the role of the unions within the Labour Party, to change its character into the completely capitalist dominated New Labour.

That process - of changing workers' parties into capitalist formations, which was an international trend - would not have been possible without the new conditions created by the collapse of Stalinism.

New world order

The collapse of Stalinism in Russia and Eastern Europe was an ideological defeat but it had material consequences in creating a new world balance of forces, no longer shaped by the 'clash of systems' that had defined the post-war period after 1945.

US imperialism had emerged from the rubble of world war two as the overwhelmingly dominant power among the capitalist nations. But the other victor was Russian Stalinism, with the war against Nazi Germany being effectively won on the Eastern front - there were 454,000 deaths suffered by Britain in World War Two, military and civilian, but at least 20 million by the USSR. The strengthened prestige of Russian Stalinism was especially dangerous for capitalism as a model in the former colonial countries, exploited and underdeveloped by the imperialist powers. But generally it presented a systemic challenge as a non-capitalist society.

The fear this generated was revealed in one incident, which only came to light after the release of government papers under the 30-years rule in 1991. In 1960, the Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev had gone to the UN and boasted that the USSR would 'catch up and surpass' the West. The then British prime minister Harold Macmillian sent a memo to the Foreign Office asking, "do you suppose this is true?" - to which the reply was 'Yes', maybe by 1980! This actually shows that they didn't understand the inherent contradictions of a planned economy without the check of workers' democracy, how the grip of the bureaucracy meant that it was doomed to stagnation.

But that fear explains the US intervention in Korea, in Vietnam, the propping up of the military in Pakistan, the attempt to overturn the Cuban revolution, and so on.

And it also explains the common interest that was created between the different national capitalist powers, a 'glue' to patch over their conflicting interests. Tensions certainly persisted between them throughout the cold-war period - erupting openly on occasions - but a lid was kept on them by the check made on world capitalism by the very existence of the non-capitalist, Stalinist, states.

It was this international order that ended with the collapse of Stalinism in Russia and Eastern Europe, leaving the US as the world 'hyperpower'.

The post-1945 international institutions were remoulded in the 1990s under US direction - GATT, set up in 1947, was re-launched as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995, for example - and under presidents George HW Bush and then Bill Clinton a 'Washington Consensus' was inaugurated of unrestrained access for US capital to the world markets - 'globalisation' - so that 85% of the global capital stock (in real terms) of the world's multinational corporations has been generated after 1990.

This included the opening up of China, which was admitted to the WTO in 2010 - actually on stricter terms, on paper at least, than the ex-Stalinist states of Eastern Europe.

This was a period of 'capitalism unleashed' - of US capitalism in particular - backed up militarily: between 1989 and 2001 the US intervened abroad once every 16 months, more frequently than in any period in its history.

Things turn into their opposite

But things turn into their opposite. The era of 'unleashed capitalism' - with the ideological and organisational weakening of the check that workers' organisation imposes on the capitalists - saw an explosion of inequality.

The share of national income, including capital gains, going to the top 1% in the US has doubled since 1980 from 10% to 20% (while the share of the top 0.01%, 16,000 families, went from 1% to 5%), back to 19th century levels of inequality. But this was not just in the USA. In Britain wages' share of gross domestic product fell from a peak of 65% in 1976, to 53% in 2008.

However, the consequence of this shift in power to the capitalists over the working class was to weaken demand and deepen a fundamental contradiction of capitalism. As The Economist wrote in 2012, noting the irony, "a high share of GDP for profits results in a low share for wages and thus may eventually be self-limiting - a positively Marxist outcome".

And things turned into their opposite in world relations too. Without the 'glue' of the 'clash of systems' pushing the capitalist nation states together, inter-imperialist rivalries resurfaced and deepened.

There has been a 'block-isation' of the world economy, with no new global trade round completed for twenty years - there are now over 300 regional trade agreements compared to just 70 in 1990.

The US was, and still is, the greatest military power - accounting for 35% of global military spending. But there are new flashpoints, not least between the US and the rising world power of China - which has brought capitalist relations into its economy over the past 30 years but under the direction of the state, and which therefore continues to be officially classified by the WTO as a 'non-market economy', still not compliant with the 2010 entry terms.

And the Iraq war was a moment of 'imperial overreach' by the US, producing a global movement of opposition with possibly 30 million demonstrating in over 600 cities in February 2003 - which the New York Times said showed there "may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion".

That movement was largely an elemental tide of protest - the 'potential superpower of the street' lacked organised form and clear political aims. It showed both that the effects of the collapse of Stalinism had still not been fully overcome, but also how they will be.

The 2007-08 financial crash was a further turning point in shifting mass consciousness, in undermining both the ideas and the institutions supporting the capitalists' control of society, and responsible for the revival of basic socialist ideas - as shown in the Corbyn waves, the support for the Bernie Sanders' US presidential campaigns, particularly in 2016, the initial Syriza victory in Greece in 2015, the rise in just a matter of years of Podemos in Spain, and so on.

Even if those movements didn't realise their potential this time because of the weakness of their programmes, they show that 'capitalism unleashed' will generate mass opposition that looks to 'socialism' - because socialism is not just an idea but the reflection of the common, collective interests of the working class.

Thirty years is a long time in the life of an individual but a brief moment in history. We still need to answer the fear that socialism will inevitably lead to dictatorship - the lasting baleful legacy of Stalinism - but the main point is that events are showing that the idea of socialism can again become a mass force, a 'fresh idea' for millions.

And that the new era that is opening up will create the objective conditions once again for Marxists to boldly intervene - as we have done before in our history, as in Liverpool or the great anti-poll tax non-payment campaign - and begin a movement that could challenge the capitalist system itself and adopt a full programme for the socialist transformation of society.

What is Stalinism?

US SECTION OF THE IMT

JUNE 10, 2015

Why is socialism in one country impossible?

Why did Russia degenerate into a totalitarian, Stalinist dictatorship, and how does the planned economy work to develop the productive forces without the “check” of the market?

What about Mao and the Chinese Revolution?

Is China today communist or capitalist?

Q. Why is socialism in one country impossible?

A. First of all, socialism absolutely needs to be based on a high level of productivity. The lowest stage of socialism must be the highest stage of capitalism. If so many of the problems in the world today are due to the unequal distribution of resources, then the only solution is to produce more than enough and distribute it democratically to provide a high standard of living for all. Nowhere in any of the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky will you find them proposing the idea of socialism in one country. The Stalinist, nationalist idea of socialism in one country has nothing to do with Marxism which has always been internationalist in perspective.

The working class has had many opportunities to carry out a socialist transformation over the last century, and has tried in many different countries. However only once, and then only temporarily did they succeed, in the Russian Revolution of 1917. This revolution in a backward country succeeded in overthrowing 1000 years of Tsarist autocracy, and the working class began to grapple with running the whole of society. However it was never the intention of Lenin to build socialism in one country. That is impossible, as socialism requires a massive increase in production to produce the needs of society. That requires the pooling of resources internationally. Also of course, capitalism cannot simply be defeated in a single country. The revolution must spread to other countries, and eventually the whole world.

As a result of its isolation, and its backwardness, civil war, and the assault of 21 armies of foreign intervention, the revolution in Russia hung by a thread. Without the assistance of revolutions in more economically advanced countries in Europe, there could not be socialism in Russia. If the revolutions in the rest of Europe had been successful, they could have all pooled their technology, natural resources, and populations as one in order to begin producing enough for all and spreading the revolution to the rest of the world. Instead, the isolated revolution degenerated into a bureaucratic dictatorship. The struggle for socialism must be international!

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Q. Why did Russia degenerate into a totalitarian, Stalinist dictatorship, and how does the planned economy work to develop the productive forces without the “check” of the market?

A. In order to be able to understand the process of the socialist transformation of society, and why it has not yet succeeded, we must be able to give a scientific answer to the question what happened to the USSR?  There is an entire book online about this question, called Russia: from Revolution to Counter-Revolution. But a brief generalization of the events is as follows.

First of all, the general historic appraisal that we make of the Russian Revolution is extremely positive. For the first time, the mass of workers and peasants proved in practice that it was possible to run society without landlords, capitalists, and bankers. The superiority of a planned economy over the anarchy of capitalist production was proved, not in the field of ideas but on the concrete arena of industrial development, raising living standards, education, and health. Russia, in a short period of time, went from being a backward, mainly agricultural, and imperialist dominated country into being one of the first industrial and economic powers on earth. And this was achieved only because of the planned economy. If you take any other backward capitalist country of that time and you see its evolution over the last 80 years, with very few exceptions, you will see that it remains backward and dominated by imperialism. You can use as examples India, Pakistan, the Philippines, most of Latin America, etc.

But at the same time we must be able to explain why the Stalinist states with their potentially very productive planned economies then entered into crisis at the end of the 1980s and eventually collapsed in the early 1990s. We think that the explanation lies in the lack of democratic control over the planning of the economy. Under capitalism, the market represents, to a certain extent, a check on the economy. If you own a shoe making factory, and the shoes you produce are of very poor quality and more expensive than others in the market, you will probably go bankrupt. If you invest in a sector of the economy where there is already overproduction you will probably go bankrupt.

So the market, although in an anarchic way and through devastating cyclical crises, represents a certain check on the productive forces (although this has been diminished by the concentration of the economy in the hands of a few multinational corporations). That does not exist under a planned economy. The only possible control is that of the democratic participation of working people (consumers and producers themselves) in the planning of the economy. Who knows better than the workers themselves the needs that there are in their neighborhoods? Who better than them knows how the factories should be organized? The problem in the Soviet Union was that these democratic controls did not exist at all. A handful of bureaucrats at the top of the “Communist Party” and the state apparatus dictated everything. .

It is clear that an economy which produced one million different commodities every year could not be controlled without real genuine workers’ democracy. So, why was there no workers’ democracy in the USSR? The bourgeois critics will tell us that this was the inevitable consequence of the struggle for socialism. “Communism is anti-democratic and means dictatorship.” We reply: these are all lies and slanders.

If you read Lenin’s State and Revolution, you can see how Lenin establishes a series of conditions for the functioning of workers’ democracy, which he draws mainly from the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune, the first workers’ government in history. There are four main conditions:

1) All public officials to be elected and with the right to recall (that is that they can be changed immediately when they longer represent the interests of those who elected them).

2) No public official to receive a wage higher than that of a skilled worker. Marx said that “social being determines consciousness,” in other words the way you live determine the way you think. One of the main causes for reformism amongst labor movement leaders is precisely the inflated salaries they receive as members of the government, or even trade union top officials.  They therefore think that capitalism is “not so bad” after all.

3) No standing army, but general arming of the people.

4) Over a period of time everyone would participate in the tasks of running the economy and the state. In the words of Lenin “if everyone is a bureaucrat, no one is a bureaucrat.”

Even a superficial analysis of these conditions will immediately lead us to the conclusion that none of them applied in the old Soviet Union. But why? In the first years of the revolution, Lenin and the other leaders of the revolution struggled to establish what was probably the most democratic regime which has ever existed. The soviets (workers’ and peasants’ councils) were running the state and the economy and everyone was allowed to participate in them. All political parties were allowed to participate in soviet elections and debates and put forward their ideas. It is a little known fact that the first Soviet government was in fact a coalition between the Bolshevik Party and the left wing Social Revolutionaries. The only parties not allowed were those which had taken up arms against Soviet power.

Within the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks were later called) there was the widest of democracies. During the discussion of the Brest-Litovsk peace agreement with Germany there were at least three different fractions within the CP with different opinions. One of them, the Left Communists, headed by Bukharin, even published for a while a daily paper, The Communist, opposing Lenin’s position on the issue! So, how could such a democratic regime become a dictatorship?

Lenin, in State and Revolution also deals with the questions of the economic preconditions for the establishment of socialism. The democratic planning of the economy can only be established if you have the economic and material basis to produce plenty for all. As soon as there is scarcity of the basic goods, inevitably, there must be someone to control in an authoritarian way, the distribution of these scarce goods. In short, in Russia in 1917 the material conditions for socialism did not exist.

So why did the Bolsheviks organize the revolution in Russia? Their perspective was never building socialism in Russia in isolation. They saw the Russian Revolution as the beginning of the European revolution. They thought that the taking of power by the workers in Russia would lead to a wave of revolutionary struggle all over Europe. Workers’ power in Europe would provide the material means for a fast development of backward Russia. And in fact, the Russian Revolution opened the way for a massive revolutionary wave in Europe. There was the 1918–19 German revolution, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the Spanish revolutionary general strike, factory occupations in Italy, and in general mass movements of the working class all over the continent. But unfortunately, all these revolutions were defeated.

The were various reasons for these defeats, but to summarize it, the labor movement was still very much under the influence of the social democratic reformist leaders, and the Communists had not had time to organize properly and made a number of fatal mistakes in this period. So, in this way, the Russian Revolution became isolated in a backward, mainly peasant country, ruined by the First World War. If that was not enough, immediately they were sucked into a vicious civil war, in which the counterrevolution with the support of 21 foreign armies of intervention tried to overthrow the young soviet republic (and they nearly succeeded).

Finally, the Red Army won the civil war but at a very high cost. Not only the economy was completely destroyed and the masses were starving, but also the cream of the cream of revolutionary communist cadres had been killed over these difficult years. One of the preconditions for workers’ democracy is precisely a general shortening of the working week, in order to allow all working people time enough to raise their level of education and to participate in politics and the running of society. In Russia we actually had a longer working week and very bad conditions in general. Participation in the soviets slowly dropped and a layer of officials started to emerge which slowly started to push the normal workers out of politics and discourage participation.

One of the first to warn against the danger of bureaucratization was actually Lenin in his last writings, which were suppressed by Stalin for many years. But even under these extremely difficult conditions it was not easy for the Stalinist bureaucracy to firmly establish a grip on power. There was a very big opposition in the ranks and the leadership of the Communist Party. In fact, the bureaucracy had to physically eliminate most of the party in order to succeed. If you take the Central Committee of the party in 1917, the revolutionary leaders who carried out the October Revolution, by 1940 there was only one survivor apart from Stalin. Most of the others had been shot dead by Stalin, died in prisons and labor camps, some were missing and a few had died of old age. Thousands of honest and loyal Communists were killed or died in the concentration camps. The person who waged the most comprehensive opposition against the rise of bureaucracy was Trotsky, who with Lenin had led the October Revolution and later organized the Red army.

The figure of Trotsky has been obscured for many years in the Communist movement, precisely by those who defended unconditionally the Stalinist bureaucracy. That is why it is to be welcomed for example that the documents of the last Congress of the South African Communist Party (ex-Stalinists) recommend the reading of his writings. Communists can only learn from an open and frank debate about the reasons for the rise of Stalinism.  See also Lenin and Trotsky: What They Really Stood For.

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Q. What about Mao and the Chinese Revolution?

A. From time to time it is necessary to draw a balance sheet of our ideas and theoretical positions. How did they work out in practice over the past fifty years? If there is a major contribution of our tendency to Marxism, this is our analysis of the colonial revolution and the development of proletarian bonapartism, beginning with our analysis of the Chinese revolution after 1945. It was precisely the impasse of capitalism in these countries and the pressing need of the masses for a way forward which gave rise to the phenomena of proletarian bonapartism. This was due to a number of different factors. In the first place, the complete impasse of society in the backward countries and the inability of the colonial bourgeoisie to show a way forward. Secondly, the inability of imperialism to maintain its control by the old means of direct military-bureaucratic rule. Thirdly, the delay of the proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries and the weakness of the subjective factor. And lastly, the existence of a powerful regime of proletarian bonapartism in the Soviet Union.

The victory of the USSR in the Second World War, and the strengthening of Stalinism after the war with its extension to Eastern Europe and the victory of the Chinese Revolution were all factors that combined to condition the development of proletarian bonapartism as a peculiar variant of the permanent revolution which was only understood by our tendency. This was an entirely unprecedented and unexpected phenomenon. Nowhere in the classics of Marxism was it even considered as a theoretical possibility that a peasant war could lead to the establishment of even a deformed workers’ state. Yet this is precisely what occurred in China, and later in Cuba and Vietnam.

We characterized the Chinese revolution as the second greatest event in world history, after the Russian revolution of 1917. It had an enormous effect in the subsequent development of the colonial revolution. But this revolution did not take place on the classical lines of the Russian Revolution in 1917 or the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27. The working class played no important role. Mao came to power on the basis of a mighty peasant war, in the traditions of China. The only way Mao was able to win the civil war of 1944–49 was by offering a program of social liberation to the peasant armies of Chiang Kai-shek, who was armed and backed by American imperialism. But the Stalinist leaders of the peasant Red Army had no perspective of leading the workers to power as did Lenin and Trotsky in 1917. When Mao’s peasant armies arrived at the cities, and the workers spontaneously occupied the factories and greeted Mao’s armies with red flags, Mao gave the order that these demonstrations should be suppressed and the workers were shot.

Initially, Mao did not intend to expropriate the Chinese capitalists. His perspectives for the Chinese revolution were outlined in a pamphlet called New Democracy in which he wrote that the socialist revolution was not on the order of the day in China, and that the only development that could take place was a mixed economy, i.e., capitalism. This was the classical “two stage” Menshevik theory which had been adopted by the Stalinist bureaucracy and had led to the defeat of the Chinese revolution in 1925–27. But our tendency understood that under the concrete conditions that had developed that Mao would be forced to expropriate capitalism.

Not only that but we also predicted in advance the fact that Mao would be forced to break with Stalin. Already in early 1949 we wrote:

“The fact that Mao has a genuine mass base independent of the Russian Red Army, will in all likelihood provide for the first time an independent base for Chinese Stalinism which will no longer rest directly on Moscow. As with Tito, so with Mao, despite the role of the Red Army in Manchuria, Chinese Stalinism is developing an independent base. Because of the national aspirations of the Chinese masses, the traditional struggle against foreign domination, the economic needs of the country and above all, the powerful base in an independent state apparatus, the danger of a new and really formidable Tito in China is a factor which is causing anxiety in Moscow.”

However, the subordination of the Chinese economy to the benefit of the Russian bureaucracy, with the attempts to place puppets in control who will be completely subordinate to Moscow—in other words, the national oppression of the Chinese—will create the basis for a clash with the Kremlin of great magnitude and significance. Mao, with an independent and powerful state apparatus, with the possibility of maneuvering with the imperialists of the West (who will seek to negotiate with China for trade and try and drive a wedge between Peking and Moscow) and with the support of the Chinese masses as the victorious leader against the Kuomintang, will have powerful points of support against Moscow.

Stalin’s very efforts to try and forestall this development will tend to accelerate and intensify the resentment and the conflict. (“Reply to David James”, reprinted in, The Unbroken Thread, 304.)

These lines were written more than a decade before the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet conflict, when the Chinese and Russian bureaucracies seemed to be inseparable allies.

The victory of Mao’s peasant armies in China was due to a number of factors: the complete and utter impasse of Chinese capitalism and landlordism, the inability of imperialism to intervene because of the war-weariness of the imperialist troops after the Second World War, and also because of the colossal power of attraction of the nationalized planned economy in Stalinist Russia which demonstrated its superiority during the war with Hitler’s Germany.

The fact that the peasantry was used to carry through a social revolution was a completely new development in the history of China. China was the classical country of peasant wars, which took place at regular intervals. But even when these wars were victorious this merely resulted in the fusion of the leading elements of the peasant armies with the elite in the towns, resulting in the formation of a new dynasty. It was a vicious circle which characterized Chinese history for over 2,000 years. But here we had a fundamental departure. The peasant army under Mao was able to smash capitalism and create a society on the image of Stalin’s Moscow. Of course, there could be no question of a healthy workers’ state as in Russia in November 1917 being established by such means. For that, the active participation and leadership of the working class would be required. But a peasant army, without the leadership of the working class, is the classical instrument of Bonapartism, not workers’ power. The Chinese Revolution of 1949 began where the Russian Revolution had ended. There was no question of soviets or workers’ democracy. From the very beginning it was a monstrously deformed workers’ state. Our tendency underlined that on the world scale the only class which can bring about the triumph of socialism is the proletariat.

Once Mao had taken power and created a state apparatus on the basis of the hierarchy of the Red Army he did not have any need to ally himself with the bourgeoisie. In a typical bonapartist fashion, Mao balanced between the different classes. He leaned on the peasantry and to a certain extent on the working class to expropriate the capitalists, but once these had been defeated he then proceeded to eliminate any elements of workers democracy that might have existed. This phenomena was possible precisely because of the delay of the world revolution and the impasse of society. He had the powerful example of Stalinism in Russia, where a strong bureaucracy was parasitizing the planned economy and benefiting from it, so he decided to follow the same model. Despite its monstrously deformed character, the Chinese Revolution nevertheless represented a gigantic step forward for hundreds of millions of people who had been the beasts of burden of imperialism.

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Is China today communist or capitalist?

The Chinese bureaucracy, having seen the collapse of Stalinism in the USSR and Eastern Europe, sought a way to invigorate their economy and maintain their privileged positions. Beginning in 1978, Deng Xiao Ping introduced a series of measures to invigorate the economy to stimulate the economy. Since this time it has taken on a life of it’s own. Throughout the 1980s “free market zones” were established, allowing foreign-owned companies to operate with Chinese labor. Along with this process was a decline in the conditions of the Chinese working class. This is what lead to the massive Tianenmen Square movement which threatened to overthrow the bureaucracy. During the 1990s the bureaucracy accelerated the process, with more state enterprises being reorganized to be geared towards private sector, if not completely nationalized. In 2001 China joined the World Trade Organization.

While it is impossible to say where the nationalized, planned economy passed qualitatively into capitalism, it is undeniable that what exists in China today is the worst features of capitalist exploitation, along with a monstrous Bonapartist state that visciously represses the working class.

The task of the Chinese working class, is not merely a political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy—as was advocated by Marxists in regard to the Soviet Union—but a social revolution to overthrow the current regime and to take over the private industries, nationalize them, and put them under democratic, workers control.

For more on this process, please read our document China’s Long March to Capitalism

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