John Molyneux
This first appeared in Irish Marxist Review 24.
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts
and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as
tragedy, the second time as farce...
The
tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the
living.
Karl
Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte.
When the Berlin Wall
came down in 1989 with the fall of the ‘Communist’ regimes in Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union collapsed soon after in 1991,Stalinism, together with
socialism in general, was widely pronounced dead. The death of Stalinism was
proclaimed not only by the right but by many on the left who hoped that its
demise would clear the way for a genuine socialism from below. And, in fact,
much of this was true. In particular, the once mighty international communist
movement, which brought us truly mass communist parties in places such as Italy,
France, Greece and South Africa and was globally hegemonic on the left, has
shrivelled to a fraction of its former glory. Nevertheless, it is now clear
that Stalinism, however diminished, survived this catastrophe both at the level
of state power in certain places (e.g. China, partly, North Korea, Vietnam and
Cuba) and in the consciousness and organisations of sections of the
international left (the KKE in Greece, the French CP, the South African CP, the
Morning Star in Britain and so on).
Moreover – and this is
the occasion of this article – there are signs of a certain revival of various
forms of Stalinism among a layer of young people on the left, including in
Ireland. In light of this, it seems worthwhile to revisit the question of
Stalinism: to examine the nature of the beast and assess the role it has played
internationally and in Ireland.
To assess Stalinism as
a historical phenomenon, we first need to recognise that it has various
manifestations and that, while these are all related to one another, they are
by no means all ‘the same’. I would distinguish the following main categories:
1) Stalinism in Russia under Stalin, known as ‘high Stalinism’;2) Comintern Stalinism;
3)Stalinism after Stalin in Russia and Eastern Europe; 4) Stalinism in the Third
World (China, Cuba etc.). I will look at them in turn and then say something
about the specific role of Stalinism in Ireland. Because this necessitates
covering a vast amount of history on an international scale, it will not be
possible in one article to offer detailed substantiation for all the points
made, but I will endeavour to supply references to such substantiation in the
notes.
High Stalinism
Joseph Stalin was
appointed General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party on 3 April 1922. At
this stage, this was an administrative position and not at all equivalent to
party leader, as it later became. Lenin was already seriously ill at this time,
and in May1922, he suffered
his first stroke, temporarily losing his ability to speak and being paralysed
on his right side. With Lenin politically offside, leadership within the
Communist Party, and therefore the state, passed to the ‘triumvirate’ of
Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin. This alliance was formed, explicitly, to
marginalise and combat Trotsky.Within it, Zinoviev and Kamenev (both long-standing
associates of Lenin) were generally seen as the senior partners.
During
this period, Lenin, as he started to recover, became increasingly concerned
about and hostileto Stalin. He worried about Stalin’s bureaucratic methods, his
increasing power and his Great Russian bullying tendencies in his handling of
the national question in Georgia. In January 1923, the ill Lenin dictated a
note urging comrades to seek the removal of Stalin from his post as General
Secretary, but a further stroke rendered him unable to pursue this and, after a
long illness, he died in January 1924.[i]
In
the period 1923–24, Stalin operated in coalition with Zinoviev and Kamenev
while steadily building up his control over the rising bureaucracy. In late
1924, he moved against Zinoviev and Kamenev while also promulgating his key
doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’.[ii]
(Prior to this, Bolshevik doctrine had been that, ultimately, the Russian
Revolution could not survive and socialism could not be built without spreading
the revolution internationally.) Zinoviev and Kamenev joined forces with
Trotsky to oppose Stalin, but in 1927, Stalin, backed by Bukharin, was
completely victorious, getting his opponents removed from the Central Committee
and deporting Trotsky to the remote Alma Ata on the Chinese border.
In
1928–29, Stalin launched policies of forced industrialisation (the Five Year
Plan), and forced collectivisation of agriculture. At the same time, he turned
against and removed his ally, Bukharin, who favoured slower, more
peasant-friendly economic growth. From this point on, Stalin was the effective
personal dictator in Russia. He continued to rule, without serious internal
challenge, until his death in 1953. This period included the transformation of
Russia into a major industrial nation (the second largest economy in the world),
the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War (at the cost of 20–25
million Russian lives) and Russia’s emergence as a world superpower with
nuclear weapons and the onset of the Cold War. It also included the
establishment by the early 1930sof a totalitarian police state in which no
opposition of any kind was tolerated, not even the most limited literary,
poetic or philosophical criticism. It was possible to be persecuted for having
the ‘wrong’, i.e. disapproved of, theory of genetics or writing the wrong kind
of symphony or to end up in a camp in Siberia for lateness to work.
This
regime lasted until Stalin’s death and beyond, but within this, there was a
period of intense, almost manic repression between 1934 and 1938. It began with
the assignation of the prominent Stalin supporter Sergei Kirov in December
1934, which served as the excuse for a huge crackdown. In the Great Purges that
followed, millions of workers and peasants were sent to the Gulag (network of
prison camps) in Siberia and hundreds of thousands were shot – many of them
Communist Party members and officials. The terror culminated in the Moscow
Trials of 1936–38, massive show trials in which many leading Old Bolsheviks
(veterans of the Revolution) were put on trial for treason. These included
Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, Pyatakov and Radek, most of whomwere
summarily executed. Three features of this period were particularly
nightmarish: a) You didn’t have to be an actual opponent of the regime to be
persecuted – it was enough to fall foul of your boss or a minor local official
to find yourself accused, and accusation was tantamount to conviction; b)
people were regularly accused not only of crimes they did not commit but of
crimes they couldn’t have committed (thus, leading communists who had played
major roles in the Russian Revolution were accused of having been fascist
agents all along and having plotted to murder Lenin, all at the behest of Leon
Trotsky; c) many of the leading old revolutionaries, such as Zinoviev and
Kamenev, were induced by threats, torture or other pressures to confess to
these outlandish crimes.[iii]Another
feature of the period was the development of an extreme cult of personality
around Stalin (a feature subsequently replicated by other Stalinist leaders
such as Mao, Kim Il Sung, Nicolae Ceausescu and Enver Hoxha) in which not only
was the length and breadth of Russia covered in his portraits and statues, but
he was regularly hailed in the press in the most obsequious terms as the ‘all
knowing’ father of his people, the sun around which the stars revolve and such
like.
The greatest figure of our time.
Thanks
to Stalin and to the Communist Party which he heads, as its outstanding guide,
the world of socialism is invincible.
Thanks
to Stalin, and to the genius which he inherited and developed further from
Marx, Engels and Lenin, the working class and oppressed peoples of all lands
have a mighty example and ally in their struggle against capitalist
exploitation, oppression and war.[iv]
The genius and will of Stalin, the architect of the rising
world of free humanity, lives on for ever.
The great theoretician
of communism ...an unsurpassed master of Marxiandialectics.[v]
But
although these are all facts about Stalin and his rule, a Marxist analysis must
go beyond this narrative to examine the deeper social and class forces
involved. Stalinism represented not a continuation of the Russian Revolution of
1917 but its counter-revolutionary negation, and it was part of the counter-revolutionary
wave that swept Europe after the initial post World War 1 international
revolutionary upsurge. This wave brought Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany,
O’Higgins in Ireland, Pilsudki in Poland, Horthy in Hungary, Chiang Kai-Shek in
Chinaand Stalin in Russia. However, Stalin did not create the counter-revolution
in Russia, any more than Lenin created the revolution; rather, he was its
expression, the political leader of the rising bureaucratic class that
displaced and replaced the working class at the helm of the Russian state. The
combination of two major developments produced this process: the social
disintegration of the Russian working class and pressure from international
capitalism.[vi]
The Russian
working class, which had reached the highest level of consciousness and
revolutionary struggle yet seen anywhere in the world in 1917, had virtually
ceased to exist by 1921. In the course of the Civil War, the vast majority of
the most militant and politically conscious workers had either been killed in
battle or raised to the position of state officials. Under the combined impact
of the Civil War, the Revolution itself and the World War that preceded it, the
Russian economy had collapsed utterly. Gross industrial production fell to 31%
of its 1913 level, large-scale industrial production to 21% andsteel production
to 4.7%.The transport system was in ruins.Epidemics
and famine raged. The total of industrial workers fell from about three million
in 1917 to one and a quarter million in 1921, and those that remained were
politically exhausted. As Lenin put it in 1921:
[The] industrial proletariat ... in our country, owing to
the war and to the desperate poverty and ruin has become declassed, i.e.
dislodged from its class groove and has ceased to exist as a proletariat.[vii]
The
Bolshevik party found itself suspended in a vacuum. To administer the country,
it had to take over and use a vast army of Tsarist officials, and, against all
its intentions, it itself became bureaucratised. Bureaucracy is essentially a
hierarchy of officials not subject to popular control from below. In Russia,
the social force that Marxists (above all, Lenin) counted on to prevent the
development of bureaucracy, an active revolutionary working class, had been cut
from under the feet of the party. In this situation, it was impossible to
implement the Marxist programme in pure form. For a period, it was possible to
mount a holding operation, relying on the hardened socialist commitment of the
Bolshevik old guard, to cling to the basic revolutionary aspirations while
making the necessary practical compromises (for example, the New Economic
Policy or NEP) and waiting for help from the international revolution. This, in
essence, was the course taken by Lenin. But failing the international
revolution (and it did fail), a stark choice had eventually to be made:either
remain loyal to the theory and goal of international proletarian revolution,
with the possibility of losing state power in Russia, or cling to power and
abandon the theory and goal. The situation was extremely complex – and the
participants did not see it in these clear terms – but, essentially, Trotskyism
was the product of the first choice and Stalinism of the second.
The
second main objective factor in the rise of Stalinism was the isolation of the
Russian Revolution and the consequent immense pressure of international
capitalism on the Soviet regime. The imperialists obviously wanted to see the
restoration of capitalism in Russia and were prepared to exert political,
economic and, ultimately, military leverage to bring that about. Given that the
capitalist world was enormously stronger than the Soviet Union in all these
respects, how could this pressure be resisted? The Bolshevik answer to his
question – and it remained Trotsky’s answer – was by spreading the revolution.
But Stalin’s adoption of ‘socialism in one country’, which was not just his own
innovation but expressed the mood and interests of the bureaucracy he
represented, turned its back on that solution. The only alternative was to
compete economically and militarily with the West. In a country as poor and
underdeveloped as Russia in the 1920s, that meant industrialisation and the
accumulation of capital as rapidly as possiblebased on the exploitation of the
labour of the working class and the peasantry, i.e. competition with the West
on capitalist terms. Stalin’s ‘strength’, if that is what you can call it, was
that he understood this and pursued it ruthlessly:
No comrades ... the pace must not be slackened! On the
contrary, we must quicken it as much as is within our powers and possibilities.
To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind; and those who
lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten. No, we don’t want to. The
history of old ... Russia ... she was ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness
... For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for political
backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness ...
We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced
countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they
crush us.[viii]
This
was the meaning of the intense industrialisation of the Five Year Plan and the
forced collectivisation of agriculture. The process transformed the bureaucracy
into a ruling capitalist class and Russia into a bureaucratic state capitalist
society.[ix] Its immediate
consequences were a huge increase in industrial production, a dramatic fall in
the living standards of the working class and extreme famine in the
countryside. It was this extreme contradiction between the crushing of the
working class and peasantry and the ‘Marxist/Communist’ rhetoric of the regime that
generated the extreme repression against anyone who just might object or point
to the realities, especially if, like the Old Bolsheviks, they had a living
connection to 1917.
If
Stalinist Russia was this monstrous, how is it possible for some ‘socialists’
and ‘communists’ today to defend it? I will deal here with four main arguments
put forward by apologists for Stalinism.
First,
that the case against Stalinist Russia put here is just a recycling of Western
capitalist propaganda. It is commonly assumed and claimed that socialist
critics of Russia get their information from the capitalist media and from
right-wing pro-capitalist academics. This is quite false. For a start, there
are a number of eye-witness accounts of repression in Russia by long-standing
revolutionaries, such as Victor Serge and Ante Ciliga. Then there is the fact that
the key critiques of Stalinist Russia such as Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge and Tony Cliff’s State Capitalism in Russiaare based on extensive use of Russian
sources. Besides this, many of the most damning facts, such as the appalling
Moscow Trials, were not secret but were trumpeted around the world. If
‘Marxists’ are prepared to believe that the majority of the Bolshevik Central
Committee who led the October Revolution were really fascist agents, as was
claimed in the show trials, then there is little hope for them. In any case,
the Soviet state later conceded that these were frame-ups and rehabilitated
many of the victims.[x]
A
second line of defence concedes that there were ‘problems’ in the Stalin era
(and after)– ‘mistakes’ were made, even ‘crimes’ were committed – but maintains
that the basic social structure, especially the economy, remained basically
sound and socialist. This argument is more complex because it comes in many
forms, ranging from the official Soviet explanation after 1956 that ‘the
problem’ was that Stalin allowed or encouraged a ‘cult of personality’ to
develop around him as an individual, all the way through escalating degrees of
criticism to the so-called ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist view that the Stalinist
bureaucracy was out and out counter-revolutionary and that the Russian
Revolution had seriously degenerated but that it remained a workers’ state
because of the state ownership of all the major means of production.[xi] At the most apologetic,
pro-Soviet end of this spectrum, this view is simply incompatible with the now
well known facts: with the total absence of any real democracy in the one-party
police state and with the vast scale and long duration of the repression, which
cannot be attributed to one or a few individuals but required a huge layer to
administer it and which, in its essentials, endured after Stalin’s death until
the time of Gorbachev; and with the large-scale and extravagant privileges of
the ruling bureaucracy.[xii] Even its most radical
anti-Stalinist form, that espoused by Trotsky himself,[xiii] this attempt to
separate the realm of politics and the state from the realm of the economy and
treat them as opposed to one another, runs into deep contradictions. In a
society where the state owns the bulk of the means of production and plans the
economy, the class that controls the state and the planning clearly controls
the economy. And it was a matter of demonstrable fact that the working class
controlled neither the state, nor the planning process, nor the workplaces. Far
from there being workers’ control, workers did not even have the limited
protection of independent trade unions.
In
the end, the argument that Stalinist Russia was either socialist or a workers’
state, even a flawed or degenerated one, boiled down to the negative claim that
it could not be capitalist because it was dominated by state ownership. But
history provides a multitude of examples of state capitalism, i.e. of state-owned
enterprises and industries being clearly capitalist, ranging from the tobacco
industry under Napoleon[xiv] to the Pentagon and the
US military and much of the Chinese economy today. Even when the state ownership
of industry is close to total, this doesn’t stop that industry being run on a
capitalist basis, for the accumulation of capital at the expense of the working
class, in competition with the forces of world capitalism, as happened in the
USSR.
The
third main argument in favour of supporting Stalinist Russia is that it
defeated Hitler and the Nazis. Clearly, this has a certain emotive appeal, but
we should note that a) the same argument can be, and is, used to justify
Churchill and the British Tory Party, and b) from the Roman army’s defeat of
Spartakus to the Battle of Waterloo or the killing fields of the Somme or the
US at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is no basis for the idea that victory in
war makes a regime or state in any way progressive. Moreover, there is the
inconvenient fact that, but for the disastrous role of Stalinism in Germany in
the early 1930s, it is likely that Hitler would have been stopped from coming
to power at all. (I will amplify this point in the next section.)
Stalinism and the Communist International
The
Communist International or Comintern was founded in March 1919. By the time of
its Second Congress, it had the support of mass working class parties in a
number of countries and 67 affiliates globally. The Comintern was conceived of,
by its founders, as a single world party of socialist revolution. Its task was
to coordinate and carry through in each individual country the proletarian
revolution begun in Russia in October 1917. The Comintern in its early years
constituted the highest point ever achieved, before or since, by working class
socialist organisation.[xv]
But
in winning the struggle for power inside the Russian Communist Party in the
1920s, the Stalinist bureaucracy also took control of the Comintern. They were
able to do this by exploiting the prestige of the Russian Revolution and
because the national leaderships of the other parties lacked confidence in
themselves as a result of their almost universal experience of defeat. This
rapidly had a devastating impact on the practice of the Communist parties
globally. In line with Stalin’s new doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, the
CPs came to be treated by the Comintern leadership not as agents of
workingclass revolution but as instruments of Soviet foreign policy. In particular,
they were steered towards cultivating various reformist and bourgeois forces
who, it was hoped, could be relied upon to hinder and oppose Western
intervention in Russia.
This
resulted in two major defeats for the international working class in Britain
and China, respectively. In Britain, the Soviet trade unions (on orders from
the Party, of course) formed an alliance with the leaders of the British TUC.
This was known as the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, and it operated in
the run up to the British General Strike of 1926. As a result, the British
Communist Party and its trade union militants were instructed to moderate
(effectively cease) their criticism of the trade union leaders, and this had a
disastrous effect when the TUC General Council called off the General Strike
just as it was gaining strength. The Communist Party and the workers it
influenced were taken by surprise and totally disoriented.[xvi] In China, the disaster
was much worse. There, the young but large Communist Party was told to form an
alliance with the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), in which they
completely subordinated themselves to the KMT. This was because Stalin hoped
the KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek, would prove a useful international ally. But
when the workers of China rose up en masse in 1925–27, Chiang Kai-shek waited
for the opportunity to strike and then put the unprepared and unresisting
Chinese Communists to the sword (‘literally’ as they say) in the Shanghai
Massacre in April 1927.[xvii]
Even
more catastrophic were the consequences of Stalinist policies in Germany during
the rise of the Nazis. From 1924–28, the Comintern moved rightwards to
opportunist alliances, but in 1928/29 it lurched dramatically ‘leftwards’ to an
extreme and disastrous ultra-leftism. This turn, known as ‘the Third Period’ or
‘Third Period Stalinism’, was imposed by Moscow in tandem with Stalin’s
introduction of the Five Year Plan and forced collectivisation of agriculture.
Stalin needed exaggerated left-wing rhetoric to cover his establishment of
state capitalism and his personal dictatorship in Russia, and the German and
international working class were made to pay the price. After the Wall St Crash
of 1929 plunged the world and especially Germany into deep crisis, Hitler and
his Nazi Party started to grow massively. In 1928, the Nazis polled 800,000
votes. In 1930, it shot up to 6,400,000. The thoroughly Stalinist German
Communist Party (KPD) refused to recognise the danger. Instead, they claimed
this huge advance constituted the ‘beginning of the end’ for ‘Mr.Hitler’[xviii] and that they, the
KPD, were the real victors in the election, despite getting only 4,600,000
votes. They also comforted themselves with the disastrous illusion that, if the
fascists came to power, they would soon shoot their bolt and that ‘after
Hitler’ would come their turn.
Moreover,
the Stalinists accompanied this vain bragging with an ultra-sectarian refusal
to form a united front with the Social Democrats against the Nazis on the
grounds that the Social Democrats had become ‘social fascists’ and that
national fascism and social democracy were not opposites but ‘twins’. This
appalling ultra-leftism assisted the Nazis in two ways. On the one hand, it
lulled rank-and-file Communists into a false sense of security. If the social
democrats and the fascists were twins, then there was no need to be
particularly alarmed at the prospect of a Nazi government. On the other hand,
it rendered impossible any united resistance to the fascists on the ground. The
consequence was that, when the German bourgeoisie lifted Hitler into power in
January 1933, the German working class – on paper the strongest, best organised
working class in Europe –surrendered without a fight, and the first act of the
Nazi government was to smash to smithereens all the organisations of the German
working class, Communist and social democratic alike, before going on to plunge
the world into war and carry out the Holocaust.[xix]
Once
Hitler was in power, it seems gradually to have dawned on Stalin that the Nazi
regime, with its ambitions for lebensraum (living space) in the East,
constituted a serious military threat to the Soviet state. This realisation brought
about a 180 degree turn in Comintern policy from ultra-left opposition to any
united front to the indiscriminate unity of the Popular Front. The strategy of
the Popular Front, pioneered in France in 1934, was adopted at the 7th
Congress of the Comintern in 1935.It involved the attempt to construct grand
alliances in every country, not just between working class organisations and
the left but also with so-called ‘democratic’ bourgeois parties, such as the
Radical Party in France or progressive Tories in Britain, while behind the
scenes Stalin manoeuvred for an alliance at state level with Britain and
France.
As
a strategy, Popular Frontism faced its decisive tests in France and Spain and
was a miserable failure in both cases. In France, it met with the initial
success of electing a People’s Front government under Leon Blumin 1936, but
when this unleashed a massive general strike and wave of factory occupations
which threatened to challenge capitalism, the Blum government, crucially aided
by the French CP who had militants in the factories, sold out and settled the
strike. From that point on, the Blum government lost any radical impulse. It
broke up in 1938, and this prepared the way for the ignominious collapse in the
face of the Nazi armies in 1940.[xx]
In
Spain, a Popular Front government was elected in February 1936 but was met by an
armed fascist rebellion led by General Francisco Franco. This led to three
years of bitter Civil War in which the fascists, backed by Hitler and Mussolini
(while Britain and France stayed neutral), were eventually victorious and more
than 200,000 anti-fascists were slaughtered. Franco’s initial coup was met by a
mass revolutionary response from the working class, especially in Barcelona,
but this uprising was restrained and then repressed by the Popular Front,
including the Spanish CP, in the name of ‘unity’ against Franco. ‘First win the
war, then worry about the revolution’ was the line, but, without revolutionary
action from below, the working class was demobilised and demoralised, and thewar
could not be, and was not, won on a purely military basis.[xxi]
This
showed the fundamental flaw in the Popular Front strategy and how it differed
from the united front. The purpose of the united front was to maximise the
fighting strength of the working class, i.e. to increase the size and militancy
of demonstrations, mass strikes and workers’ occupations. The effect – and the
precondition – of the Popular Front with its ‘unity’ with the bourgeoisie and
its parties was to hold back and limit the workingclass struggle. Nor could it
be otherwise because the British and French capitalists would not dream of
entering an alliance on any other terms. Millions of rank-and-file Communist
workers were deluded on this score; Stalin was not. When he couldn’t get a
military alliance with British and French imperialism,Stalin opted for a
non-aggression deal with Hitler (the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1938–June 1941),
and when that broke down with Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941 and he got
his alliance with Britain (and the US), Stalin unceremoniously wound up the
Comintern in 1943 as a ‘gesture of good will’ to the allies.
Thus,
the balance sheet of the influence of Stalinism on the Communist International
and the international workingclass struggle from the British General Strike to
the Second World War was unrelentingly negative and greatly assisted the
advance of the fascism it later claimed credit for defeating.
Stalinism after Stalin
At
the end of the Second World War, Stalinism extended its grip across Eastern
Europe. Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Roumania, Bulgaria,
Yugoslavia and Albania all ‘went Communist’, i.e. established regimes that
economically and politically were modelled on the Soviet Union with state
ownership of the major means of production, a ruling bureaucratic class and a
single-party dictatorship. In every case except Yugoslavia and Albania, where
Communist-led partisans took power, these regimes were the result of the
westward sweep of the Red Army on its way to Berlin and not of independent
people’s movements from below.[xxii] And this division of
Europe was broadly agreed between the Great Powers (US, Britain and Russia) at
the Yalta Conference in 1945,[xxiii] though that did not
prevent the Cold War breaking out within a few years.
The
death of Stalin in 1953 was followed by a power struggle within the leadership
of the Soviet Communist Party, which was eventually won by Nikita Khrushchev, a
long-standing Stalinist apparatchik. Khrushchev promptly shocked the world and
the international Communist movement by embarking on a limited process of
liberalisation and convening the 20th Congress of the CPSU at which,
in a Secret Speech, he acknowledged and denounced some of the crimes of Stalin.[xxiv] However, this
liberalisation was only a power move by Khrushchev to win support against his
opponents, and its very narrow limits were rapidly made clear. The moment
dissidents began to question the ongoing party dictatorship and police state,
they were faced with severe repression.
This
took its most extreme form in Hungary. In October 1956, a mass student protest
in Budapest against Stalinist control turned rapidly into a nationwide workers’
revolution which threw up numerous workers’ councils and brought the collapse
of the Stalinist Government. But on 4 November, the Russian army mounted a full-scale
invasion of Hungary with 30,000 troops and over 1,000 tanks. The Hungarian
revolutionaries resisted, but after six days of street fighting,they were crushed, suffering more than 7,500 casualties.
Unsurprisingly, the Stalinists in Russia, Hungary and internationally denounced
the Hungarian workers as fascist counter-revolutionaries.[xxv]Apart from being
factually false, this accusation plunged Stalinist apologists into serious
contradictions. How was it to be explained that after 10years of ‘glorious’
socialism, fascism suddenly gained mass support in Hungary? Nor was this
contradiction restricted to Hungary –the entire period of Stalinist rule and
Russian domination in Eastern Europe was punctuated by popular revolts: Berlin
workers in 1953, Polish intellectuals and workers in 1956 and then again on a
mass scale with Solidarnosc in 1980, Czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring in
1968, Yugoslavia in 1987 and so on untilthe fall of the Berlin Wall, the Rumanian
Revolution and the collapse of the whole system in 1989–91.[xxvi]Either Eastern European
workers had an in-built aversion to socialism and a congenital affection for
fascism (in which case, how did Eastern Europe go ‘socialist’ in the first
place?) or the ‘socialism’ that was imposed on them must have left a great deal
to be desired.
From
1956 onwards, these contradictions began to affect the consciousness of
European Communists. At the time of Hungary, the Western party leaderships,
though shaken by Khrushchev’s revelations, remained loyal to Moscow, but there
were considerable rank-and-file splits, especially in Britain, which saw over a
quarter of the members leave and the emergence of the anti-Stalinist New Left around
E.P.Thompson.[xxvii]
By the time it came to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, many Western
CPs, including the British, actually opposed the invasion and, for the first
time, defied the Moscow line.
This
led to the gradual development of what became known as Eurocommunism.Eurocommunism
was spearheaded by the Italian Communist Party, then the largest CP in Europe,
in the 1970s. It involved a combination of increasing distance from Moscow,
including critiques of high Stalinism that could sound superficially
Trotskyist, with an evolution rightwards in domestic policies towards social
democratic centrism.[xxviii] This culminated in
Italy in the mid-1970sin the ‘historic compromise’, whereby the CP made an
alliance with the Christian Democrats. It also brought with it a shift away
from grassroots industrial organisation in the direction of ‘cultural politics’
allegedly inspired by Gramsci.[xxix]
However,
social democratic reformism with a
‘communist’ tinge proved no more successful than social democratic reformism without a ‘communist’ tinge. In Italy,
the once mighty CP went into gradual but chronic decline, and Eurocommunism
proved a failure everywhere it was put to the test, culminating in the utter
debacle and surrender by Eurocommunism’s descendants in Syriza. Moreover, the
ongoing underlying dependence of the Eurocommunist CPs on Russia (both ideologically
and, in many cases, materially) was demonstrated by the fact that, when the
Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989–91, so did the Western CPs
in many cases.[xxx]
Stalinism in the Global South
If
Stalinism in Europe has been a story of disaster and failure, in the Global
South – what used to be called the Third World or ‘the developing countries’–
it can at least lay claim to a number of historic victories. There has also
been no shortage of catastrophes where Stalinist policy has contributed
directly to terrible defeat (for example, Indonesia in 1965, where half a
million people were massacred, the Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973 and numerous
calamities in the Middle East). But against this can be set such major
successes as the Chinese Revolution in 1949, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the
Vietnamese Revolution and the defeat of the US in 1976 and the overthrow of
Apartheid in South Africa in the early 1990s, and the reflected prestige
accruing from these victories has played a role in both the survival of
Stalinism after 1991 and in its recent limited revival in the West.
What
accounts for this relative difference is that the Western CPs, for all their
allegiance to the bureaucracy in Moscow, retained a social base in their
respective working class movements and were, therefore, a) blocked from taking
power by the bourgeoisie and b) unable to make a breakthrough while the working
class remained subordinate. In the South, however, Stalinism was able to attach
itself to anti-imperialist bourgeois nationalism and, in some cases, become a
social force that was able to come to
power.
This
assimilation of communism to bourgeois nationalism began as far back as the
Comintern’s policy of subordination to the Kuomintang in the Chinese Revolution
of 1925–27, referred to above. It was further accentuated by the Popular
Frontism of the mid-1930s and by the more or less formal adoption by Third-World
Stalinist parties everywhere of the originally Menshevik ‘stages theory’ of
revolution. In pre-revolutionary Russia, the Mensheviks argued that Russia was
heading for a bourgeois democratic revolution which would therefore have to be led
by the bourgeoisie. The struggle for socialism would only begin after the
bourgeois revolution had consolidated itself and capitalism had become more
fully developed. In the meantime, the working class and its party should accept
a subordinate role (so as not to frighten off the Bourgeois democrats).In
opposition to this, Lenin and the Bolsheviks argued that the bourgeois
democratic revolution would not be led by the bourgeoisie themselves, who were
terrified of revolution, but would have to be led by the working class.
Trotsky, in his theory of permanent revolution, agreed that the democratic
revolution would be led by the working class but also believed that, under
workingclass leadership, the revolution would grow over into a socialist
revolution.[xxxi]
Stalinism reverted to the Menshevik two-stage theory of revolution, which also
dove-tailed with the use of the Comintern parties as pressure groups in the
interests of Soviet foreign policy. In the absence of a ‘revolutionary’
bourgeoisie in Russia, the Mensheviks more and more tried to assume that role
themselves. The same thing tended to happen with the Stalinist Parties in the
so-called Third World.
The
classic cases were China and Cuba. After the terrible defeat of 1927 and
several subsequent crushed uprisings, Mao Zedong and the remnants of Chinese
Communism fled to the countryside, to Jiangxi and Hunan, where they commenced a
long guerrilla struggle, which included the epic Long March of the Red Army
through the immense Chinese interior. This culminated, after a period of
renewed limited alliance with the Kuomintang against Japanese invasion, in the
victory of Mao and the Red Army in the Chinese Revolution of 1949. In social
terms, the Red Army was based on the Chinese peasantry, but it was led and
controlled by the déclassé and displaced urban intellectuals of the [Stalinist]
Chinese Communist Party. The role of the Chinese working class in this struggle
was close to zero and certainly not in any way dominant. When the Red Army
marched in victory into Beijing in 1949, the working class remained passive,
and power was taken not by the Chinese peasantry (whose social position, as
Marx and Lenin had argued long previously, precluded them emancipating
themselves or running cities) but by the militarised CP intellectuals. What
they established was not workers’ power or socialism but a Chinese nationalist
state capitalism, disguised under extravagant ‘Marxist’ rhetoric.[xxxii]
The
Cuban Revolution of 1959 was also the result of a rural guerrilla war but, in
this case, led not by Communists or the Communist Party but by anti-imperialist
revolutionaries and intellectuals such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Camilo
Cienfuegos. As in China, such a revolution could not, by its nature, establish
either workers’ power or peasant power. However, Castro’s guerrilla army lacked
an administrative cadre with which to govern Havana and Cuba. For this, he
turned to the old Stalinist Cuban Communist Party and, in the process,
proclaimed his conversion from nationalist humanism to Marxist-Leninism and
declared (after the event) that Cuba had experienced a socialist revolution. At
the same time, Cuba joined the Soviet bloc and placed itself under Russian
protection. Again, the result was not socialism but state capitalism.[xxxiii]
A
third key example is South Africa. Here, as elsewhere, the Stalinist CP adopted
the stages theory of a struggle against apartheid first and a struggle for
socialism later.In accordance with this, the CP made an alliance with black
middle-class nationalist forces in the African National Congress. Within this alliance,
they accepted an influential but ultimately subordinate role (to Oliver Tambo,
Nelson Mandela and so on) and argued against excessive workingclass militancy
or socialist demands. The result was that, when the Apartheid regime finally
capitulated in the early 1990s, South African capitalism survived largely
unscathed. A black bourgeoisie, epitomised by current president Cyril
Ramaphosa, emerged, including many leading Communists;corporate white economic
power and white landownership continued, as did township poverty, and South
Africa remained one of the most unequal countries in the world.[xxxiv]
Thus,
in all these cases, as in others such as India, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Ghana,
Mozambique and Tanzania, a real victory was won – national independence – but
it was bourgeois national independence, not socialism. In fundamental class
terms, it was similar, for all the differences in scale, culture and rhetoric,
to what occurred in Ireland with the limited success of the War of Independence
and the defeat of the Irish Revolution.
Finally,
we should note that while Stalinism in the West has benefitted from its
association with the likes of Castro, Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, it has also
tended to extend its more or less uncritical support for the enemies of US
imperialism to figures such as Assad and Gadaffi, who are plainly oppressors of
their own people, even when the masses in these countries rise up against them.
Stalinist support for Assad, whose suppression of the Syrian Revolution has
involved the slaughter of close to half a million Syrians, is an extreme
example of this. It is worth saying that this approach has a certain ‘radical’
appeal in that it seems to defy American power and the bourgeois media, but in
global terms, it is profoundly counter-revolutionary and denies not only
revolutionary agency but even basic democratic rights to large swathes of the
world’s population.
Stalinism in Ireland
Because
of the post-Civil War counter-revolution – ‘the carnival of reaction’ following
partition – and the continuing influence of the republican tradition,[xxxv] the influence of
Stalinism in Ireland has been very weak. Consequently, Irish Stalinism cannot
be held responsible for catastrophes on the scale of the defeat of the British
General Strike and the failure to stop Hitler. Nevertheless, its role has been
damaging.
The
key to this has been Irish Stalinism’s acceptance and promulgation of the
stagestheory of revolution. As we have seen, this doctrine – Menshevik in
origin – was adopted by the Stalinised Comintern in relation to China in 1925–27
and then generalised to the rest of the developing world. In Ireland, it meant
arguing that Ireland had first to complete its struggle for national political
and economic independence, which would be waged in alliance with the
‘progressive national bourgeoisie’, before beginning the struggle for a
workers’ republic. This was counterposed to Connolly’s denunciation in Labour in Irish History of the repeated
treachery of the ‘national’ bourgeoisie and his advocacy of the working class
as the only ‘incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland’.[xxxvi]
One
important turning point where this had an effect was in the Republican Congress
in 1934. This very promising development emerged as a breakaway to the left of
the IRA as a result of the failure of the Army Council to permit agitation
against the Blueshirts and also conducted impressive work against sectarianism
in Belfast. In April 1934, they produced a manifesto which stated ‘We believe a
Republic of a united Ireland will never be achieved except through a struggle
which uproots capitalism on its way’.[xxxvii] But, in fact, many in
the Republican Congress leadership, including its main mover, PeadarO’Donnell, were
opposed to raising the demand for a Workers’ Republic, as proposed by Connolly’s
children, Roddy Connolly and Nora Connolly O’Brien. At a Congress in September
1934, the O’Donnell position, which advocated ‘the Republic’ but not ‘the
Workers’ Republic’, was narrowly passed by 99 votes to 84, crucially with the
support of the Irish Communist Party. [xxxviii] As a result, a
serious opportunity to found a revolutionary party with a base in the working
class was missed for a whole generation.
Its
adoption of the stages theory meant that the Irish Communist Party played a
conservative role on the Irish left for decades to come. Milotte comments that ‘The
assertion that national independence should be fought for prior to, and not in
unison with, the struggle for socialism ultimately led the Irish communist
movement back to supporting Fianna Fáil, and even to declaring that only Fianna
Fáil could unite Ireland and free it from Britain’s grasp’.[xxxix]
Another
channel by which the Stalinist stages theory permeated the Irish left was C.
Desmond Greaves’ influential biography of James Connolly. Greaves was a former
member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Connolly Association.In The Life and Times of James Connolly(1961),[xl]which was widely regarded
as authoritative, he maintained that the ‘mature’ Connolly had come round to
accepting a two-stages view of the Irish Revolution and that this was what led
him to join with Pearse and the nationalists in the 1916 Rising.[xli] Greaves, in turn, along
with Roy Johnston, was influential in winning the IRA/Sinn Féin over to a
Stalinist version of Marxism in the 1960s, and this in turn fed into the
disaster of the Workers’ Party.
After
the split between the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA in December 1969,
Official Sinn Féin evolved into Sinn Féin–the Workers’ Party in 1977 and then the
Workers’ Party in 1982. The Workers’ Party, which was thoroughly Stalinist in
its ideology, sought and received a certain amount of support from the Soviet
Union and, notoriously, North Korea. However, it also succeeded in building a
considerable base in the working class, and, in 1989, it won seven seats in Dáil
Eireann with 5% of the vote. However, this remarkable success (by the standard
of Irish history) was immediately undermined by the organisation’s Stalinism. Its
commitment to the stages theory led the Workers’ Party to the view that it
should advocate the industrialisation of Ireland to complete the first stage of
the Irish Revolution, i.e.it should support capitalist
industrialisation. Consequently, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989–91
and the majority of the Workers’ Party TDs became convinced the ‘Communist
project’ had failed, they moved to the right, not the left. In 1992, they split
to form Democratic Left and from there moved on to join the Labour Party.
Inside Labour, they used their considerable organisational skills to capture
the leadership of the party. The upshot was that when the Labour Party formed a
coalition government with Fine Gael in 2011 and proceeded to dramatically
betray its working class voters in a way that has still not been forgiven, it
did so largely under the leadership of former Stalinists in the shape of Eamon
Gilmore, Pat Rabbitte and Rory ‘Ho Chi’ Quinn.[xlii] One thing these Labour
traitors retained from their Stalinist past was their pathological hatred of
‘the Trots’.
Conclusion
Given
this sorry history, internationally and in Ireland, how is it possible that there
could be any sort of revival of Stalinism?
First,
there is the fact that most of this history is now quite old and either memory
of it has faded or it is simply not known, which of course is the reason for
this article. There is also the widespread notion that ‘my enemy’s enemy must
be my friend’,as in ‘our ruling class reactionaries denounce Colonel Gadaffi as
a dictator/murderer/mad dog or whatever and we know our rulers are liars so
maybe Gadaffi is not too bad or even a progressive friend of the Libyan people’.[xliii] The folly of this way
of thinking is most evident in the case of Hitler, but there are numerous other
examples: Pol Pot, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Norieda and so on. In the Falklands/Malvinas
War, Thatcher denounced the Argentinian junta – they deserved to be denounced.
What makes the Stalinist dictatorships and the various incarnations of
Stalinism internationally appear different is that, superficially, they employ
Marxist language. This makes it possible for them to sound very radical – for
example, ‘communist’ sounds more radical, more ‘in your face’ than socialist –
but the reality is that Stalinist and Stalinist-influenced parties have almost
always played a very conservative role in struggles everywhere.
It would, therefore, be a serious
mistake for a new generation radicalising in the face of the decay of
capitalism to turn in the direction of Stalinism in any of its forms.
[i] For a full account of this
episode, including Lenin’s last letters, see Moshe Levin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Ann Arbor, 2005.
[ii] For Trotsky’s critique of
‘socialism in one country’, see Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin, New York, 1970, especially
pp.3–76.
[iii] For a detailed historical
account of the Stalin era and the purges by a Russian socialist, see Roy
Medvedev, Let History Judge, New York,
1971. For an eye witness account by a Yugoslav communist, see Ante Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, London, 1979.
[iv]https://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/1939/12/stalin-bday.htm
[v]Dmitry Manuilsky, ‘The
Great Theoretician of Communism’, The Communist International, No 1, January
1940,https://www.marxists.org/archive/manuilsky/1940/01/x01.htm.
[vi] See John Molyneux, ‘Does
Leninism lead to Stalinsm?’ Irish Marxist
Review 16, http://www.irishmarxistreview.net/index.php/imr/article/view/233/224.
[vii]Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow, 1962,
vol. 33, p.65.
[viii] Stalin, Speech to business
executives, 1931, cited in Mike Haynes, Russia:
Class and Power,1917-2000, London, p.81.
[ix] The fullest statement of the
state capitalist analysis of Stalinist Russia is Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, London,1974.
[x] Except Trotsky, of course.
[xi] This was summed up in the
formula that Russia was a ‘degenerated workers’ state’. This was the position
of Ernest Mandel and the Fourth International (USFI), of James P Cannon and the
US SWP, of Peter Taaffe and the Committee for a Workers International (parent
body of the SP in Ireland) and many other Trotskyist groups.
[xii] See the description of the
lifestyle of the Soviet Politburo in Mike Haynes op.cit, p.160.
[xiii] See Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, London.
[xiv]The example comes from Engels in Anti-Duhring. ‘Certainly if the taking
over of the tobacco industry is socialistic then Napoleon and Metternich must
be numbered among the founders of socialism’. Marx, Engels, Selected Works, Vol.2.,Moscow, 1962,
p.148.
[xv] For an overview of the history
of the Comintern as a whole, see Duncan Hallas, The Comintern, London, 1985and also Fernando Claudin, From Comintern to Cominform, London,
1975.
[xvi] See Tony Cliff and Donny
Gluckstein, Marxism and Trade Union
Struggle: The General Strike of 1926, London, 1986.
[xvii] See Harold R. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution,
Chicago, 2010 and Leon Trotsky on China,
New York, 1976.
[xviii] Die Rohte Fahne, September 1930,
cited in Tony Cliff, Trotsky, Vol. 4,
London, 1993, p.112.
[xix] See Leon Trotsky, Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front,
London, 1989 and Donny Gluckstein, The
Nazis, Capitalism and the German Working Class, London, 1999.
[xx] See Tony Cliff, Trotsky, Vol.4, London, 1993, Ch.9 and Leon Trotsky on France, New York, 1979.
[xxi]See Andy Durgan,The Spanish Civil War, Palgrave, 2007
and Felix Morrow, Revolution and
Counter-Revolution in Spain, New York, 1974.
[xxii] For an overall account of this
process, see Chris Harman, Class
Struggles in Eastern Europe:1945-83, London, 1988.
[xxiii] For Churchill’s account of his
deal with Stalin, see Winston Churchill, The
Second World War, Vol. VI, London, 1954, p.198. See also the discussion of
this in Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of
War, London, 1969.
[xxiv] For the text of Khrushchev’s,
speech see https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24.htm.
[xxv] See Peter Fryer
Hungarian Tragedy, London, 1956, https://www.marxists.org/archive/fryer/1956/dec/index.htm. Fryer was the Daily Worker (paper of the CPGB)
correspondent in Budapest in 1956. What he saw led him to break with Stalinism.
Chris Harman, as above pp.117–186, also provides an excellent account.
[xxvi] For an overall account of these
revolts, see Chris Harman, as above. For Poland, see Colin Barker, Festival of the Oppressed: Solidarity,
Reform and Revolution in Poland 1980-81, London, 1986.
[xxvii] See John
Saville, ‘Edward Thompson,the Communist Party and
1956’,The Socialist Register, 1994,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/saville/1994/xx/epthompson.htm.
[xxviii] See Ernest Mandel, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, London,
1978.
[xxix] For a critique of this misuse of
Gramsci, see Chris Harman, Gramsci versus Eurocommunism, parts 1&2,
International Socialism, old series 98 and 99,https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1977/05/gramsci1.html.
[xxx] See Alex Callinicos, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the
Eastern European Revolutions, Pennsylvania, 1991.
[xxxi] For the debate among Russian Marxists
and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution see John Molyneux, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution,
Brighton, 1981, Ch.1.
[xxxii] For Marxist analyses of the
Chinese Revolution of 1949 and the Maoist regime, see Tony Cliff, Deflected Permanent Revolution, London,
1986, https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1963/xx/permrev.htm and
Nigel Harris, The Mandate of Heaven: Marx
and Mao in Modern China, London, 1978.
[xxxiii] See Tony Cliff, Deflected Permanent Revolution, as
above, and Mike Gonzalez, Che Guevara and
the Cuban Revolution, London, 2004.
[xxxiv]See Mary Smith, ‘The Marikana
Massacre and Lessons for the Left’, Irish
Marxist Review 5, http://www.irishmarxistreview.net/index.php/imr/article/view/56/58.
[xxxv] For an analysis of the Irish
counter-revolution, see Kieran Allen, 1916:Ireland’s
Revolutionary Tradition, London, 2016, especially Ch.4.
[xxxvi] James Connolly, Labour in Irish History, London, 1987,
p.24.
[xxxvii] Cited in Mike Milotte, Communism in Modern Ireland, Dublin,
1985, p.150.
[xxxviii]For an account of this episode,
see Milotte, as above, pp.150–157.
[xxxix]Ibid. p.157.
[xl] C. Desmond Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly,
London, 1976.
[xli] See Kieran Allen’s critique of
Greaves in The Politics of James
Connolly, London, 1990, pp.xii–xvi.
[xlii] For a detailed history of the
Workers’ Party, see Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers
Party, Dublin, 2009.
[xliii] Unfortunately, Gadaffi was a dictator and a murderer. Just to
avoid any (wilful?) misunderstanding, this does not mean NATO or Western
intervention in Libya was in any way justified – merely that we should not sing
Gadaffi’s praises or defend him against his own people.
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