‘The Collapse of Stalinism – its Causes and Consequences’ is the latest book to be published by Mentmore Press. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the dictatorial, bureaucratic Stalinist regimes of Russia, Central and Eastern Europe foundered, allowing capitalism to be restored. It also explains how that collapse fuelled a global ideological offensive against the ideas of socialism, one that still weighs heavily on working class consciousness and organisation today.
However, in today’s
unstable world, that capitalist triumphalism has been replaced by pessimism for
the future of their system. The task for the world’s working-class is to rebuild the mass parties
needed to organise a united struggle for a socialist world. It also requires learning
from the horrors of Stalinism, to ensure that capitalism is replaced by
genuinely democratic planned economies, this time freed from top-down
bureaucratic control.
Stalinism,
the negation of Bolshevism
This book is
written to help workers learn those lessons. Like last year’s well-received publication
‘Great Revolutionaries’, it brings together a collection of articles by Peter
Taaffe, the former general secretary of the Socialist Party. They are presented
in three sections, tracing the rise and fall of the Stalinist regimes, before analysing
the ‘post-Stalinist’ world of today.
The book’s first
section, ‘Stalinism, the negation of Bolshevism’, exposes the brutal character
of these dictatorial, bureaucratic regimes. They had nothing in common with the
workers’ democracy being built after the victory of the 1917 Russian
Revolution.
Sadly, in
the absence of successful socialist revolutions taking place in more
economically developed countries, the Russian workers’ state was left isolated.
It was left to try and develop a socialist plan with an already weak economy,
one then further weakened by civil war, as imperialism sought to strangle the
revolution at birth.
The book
outlines how civil war stretched the economy and the Red Army to its limits. It
also severely undermined the fledgling Soviet democracy too. With many of its
worker delegates killed on the front lines, the soviets – or workers’ councils
- were no longer able to keep the officials and bureaucrats in charge of state
administration sufficiently in check.
Growing in
confidence, the bureaucracy then manoeuvred to ensure the Communist Party met
their needs, not those of the workers and poor peasants. In Stalin, they found a
leader that would deliver for them.
The book includes
reviews of the memoirs of Leopold Trepper and Petro Grigorenko, who both became
opponents of the regime. They chillingly spell out how the bureaucracy were so
fearful of the working class moving to overthrow them, that anyone suspected of
providing even the mildest opposition was brutally suppressed.
Trepper’s
memoirs confirm that the remaining genuine revolutionaries, the supporters of
Leon Trotsky in the ‘Left Opposition’, “fought Stalinism to the death, and
they were the only ones who did”. But, Trepper adds, “they had the
enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of
replacing Stalinism.”
The
Revolution Betrayed
The book
summarises Trotsky’s analysis of the rise of the bureaucracy, stressing that Stalinism
was only able to consolidate its power by purging all traces of genuine
Bolshevism.
In 1936, in ‘Revolution
Betrayed’, Trotsky described how “two opposite tendencies are growing up out
of the depth of the Soviet regime. To the extent that, in contrast to a
decaying capitalism, it develops the productive forces, it is preparing the
economic basis of socialism. To the extent that, for the benefit of an upper
stratum, it carries to more and more extreme expression bourgeois norms of
distribution, it is preparing a capitalist restoration”.
The hopes of
socialists basing themselves on Trotsky’s analysis was always that it would be
the progressive tendency, towards socialism, that would prove dominant. Indeed,
while the productive forces within the Stalinist states still appeared to be
growing, it was not just with hope, but with a degree of expectation, that
Marxists predicted that the working-class would push aside the parasitic
bureaucrats and carry out a political revolution.
Indeed, as
the book describes, the workers’ revolt that shook the foundations of the
Stalinist regimes in 1989 started by raising demands for democratic reform, not
capitalist restoration. That had also been the case in earlier struggles, such
as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and those raised at the height of the
‘Solidarity’ movement in Poland in 1980.
However, not
least because of Stalin’s mass purges, the forces that could have
provided these movements with the necessary revolutionary leadership had been
wiped out. As Peter puts it, “the collective memory of the masses and their
ability to gather themselves together to challenge the Stalinist regime in a
conscious way was eliminated”.
By the
1980s, bureaucratic misrule had brought economic growth in the Stalinist states
to a complete standstill. In comparison, the capitalist economies ‘over the
wall’, then going through a temporary economic upswing, appeared to a growing
layer of workers to offer a better chance of prosperity and freedom of
expression. In these circumstances, the opposite tendency identified by
Trotsky, towards capitalist restoration, grew ever stronger.
Why did
Stalinism collapse?
The articles
in the second section, ‘Why did Stalinism collapse?’, describe the growing
crisis within the Stalinist regimes and how Mikhail Gorbachev stumbled around to
try and find a way of preventing an uprising from below.
Right up
until the 1960s, despite the overheads of bureaucratic mismanagement, the
advantages of a planned economy meant that the Soviet Union experienced
economic growth that easily outstripped world capitalism.
The main
‘Achilles heel’ of the Stalinist economies was quality. Without workers and
consumers being able to influence production through workers’ democracy,
substandard goods were churned out. Thanks to the bungling, corruption and bad
planning inherent in the undemocratic top-down system of economic management, there
was also huge wastage and
massive uncontrolled environmental degradation.
Such
‘commandism’ could achieve some success when the main task was to develop an
initial industrial infrastructure, but it was impossible to plan and set the
prices of thousands of commodities from on high in a more developed economy.
Genuine
socialist planning requires genuine workers’ democracy. As Peter explains, “That
would mean workers’ control in the factories and workers’ management at
national, regional and local levels. This would harness all the talents, ideas
and views for the future development of society by the producers, consumers,
and by society as a whole.” He adds a telling warning that a top-down approach,
borrowed from Stalinism, risked undermining workers’ support for the Chávez government in Venezuela.
The articles
also show how, as events developed, Peter, alongside the majority of the
Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), recognised that, rather than
events leading to a political revolution to restore a democratically planned
socialist economy, there was an increasing danger of capitalist restoration.
For many workers,
comparing their lives with what could be glimpsed through the shop windows of
the West after the fall of the ‘Berlin Wall’, the attractions of capitalism
appeared to be overwhelming. It led to a social counter-revolution with the
liquidation of what remained of the planned economies of Russia and Eastern
Europe.
The consequences of Stalinism’s
collapse
The third
section of the book, ‘The consequences of Stalinism’s collapse’, discusses the
consequences of this return to capitalism.
For the
working class of Russia, what followed was not the improvements that they had hoped
for, but an unprecedented economic collapse. Peter’s book explains the
‘gangster capitalism’ that emerged as Putin and other members of the former
regime fought with each other for control of the nation’s wealth and natural
resources.
The working
class internationally also paid a heavy price. The collapse of the planned
economies dealt a heavy blow to the idea that society could ever be organised
in a different way to capitalism.
Some former
‘lefts’, such as Paul Mason, concluded that Stalinism’s collapse meant the end
of any prospect of socialism. One of the articles in the book answers Mason, noting
that, yes, the immediate effect had been to strengthen world capitalism, providing
new markets and a source of cheap skilled labour. But, as Peter writes, “reality
always has two sides. The other side of this development was the enormously
increased potential power of the working class, which has already been glimpsed
but will be shown dramatically in the mass upheavals to come”.
As is
increasingly obvious today, the collapse of Stalinism in no way resolved the crisis
facing global capitalism. Nor did workers suffer the kind of crushing defeat inflicted
by fascism in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the ideological effects of the collapse
of Stalinism still need to be overcome.
The book
explains how it led to the wholesale political collapse of the leaders of the
workers’ organisations. They abandoned socialism - even as a historic aim - and
fully embraced capitalist ideas. Internationally, former workers’ parties
imploded into openly pro-capitalist formations. In Britain, that took the form
of Blair’s ‘New Labour’.
In the trade
unions too, most leaderships sought to accommodate themselves to the system,
adopting ‘social partnership’ with the employers, to the detriment of their
members. This timidity from the union leaders, together with the abandonment of
the historic aim of socialism by the leaders of the workers’ organisations,
enormously bolstered the confidence and the power of the capitalists. It allowed
them to restrict the share of the world’s wealth going to the working class back
to levels not seen since before the first world war.
Peter points
out that “It is true, as Lenin argued, that the Labour Party through its
pro-capitalist leadership has always been a ‘bourgeois’ party … However, Lenin
also emphasised that … through its trade union base in particular, it was also
a working-class party. … In office it was subject to the pressure of the unions
and therefore could potentially endanger the interests of capitalism”. He gives the examples of the unions refusing to
allow Ramsay MacDonald to impose ‘austerity’ under the 1931 Labour Government
and, similarly, preventing Harold Wilson’s 1969 government from introducing the
‘In Place of Strife’ anti-trade union legislation.
Mass
workers’ parties bring workers together to build struggles and reach
conclusions together. Their absence has made it harder for working-class consciousness
to catch up with the severity of today’s capitalist crisis, let alone to understand
the need to overthrow it. The kind of mass socialist and communist parties that
existed in the 1930s, at least formally standing in opposition to capitalism, do
not exist at the present time.
That’s why in
the articles in this book, and in the pages of ‘the Socialist’, we have
consistently stressed the importance of rebuilding mass workers’ parties, and
for them to include a firm Marxist current too. Such a core is vital to provide
the theoretical clarity needed to stand up to right-wing leaderships and to oppose
the damaging influence that supporters of capitalism will seek to introduce
into them.
Peter
concludes the introductory article to the book by saying: “As the most
optimistic but also the most realistic trend within the labour movement, we
recognised what had occurred was a significant setback for the workers’
movement. But we were not thrown off balance. The collapse of Stalinism did not
eliminate the inherent contradictions of capitalism … But the very weakness of
the labour movement encouraged the confidence, indeed the overweening arrogance
of the ruling class, which overreached itself in the bubble economies of the
last two decades. …
“1989 did
not bury socialism or Marxism. It temporarily blurred the vision of the working
class, which is now being cleared through the present crisis and the incapacity
of this system to solve even the basic requirements of the mass of the peoples
of the planet”.
This book can hopefully play a role in helping to clear that fog.
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