INTERNASYONALISMO

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Workers have no country. Their class interest have no boundaries.

May 9, 2008

Revolution Betrayed: How the Trotskyists Betrayed the Proletarian Revolution

Filed under: Theories and Concepts

Some sincere Filipino revolutionaries but imprisoned in their dogmatism and uncritical study of the history of the international workers’ movement and the actual experience of state capitalism as the general tendency of decadent capitalism continue to believe that there are still “socialist characteristics” of the Stalinist-Maoist regimes that “must be defended” against their enemies. Many of these elements belong to many Trotskyist factions, claiming that their Trotskyist faction is the “true heir” of Lenin and Trotsky. The truth is, Trotskyism betrayed the proletariat revolution since WW 2 using the mistakes and opportunism of Leon Trotsky as their “theoretical guide”.

We are re-publishing below the contribution text of a Russian comrade in the 1997 Moscow Conference of Leon Trotsky and the Russian Revolution. In this text, the comrade scrutinized the “bible” of the Trotskyists – The Revolution Betrayed of Leon Trotsky — where they based their “theory” in defending the “deformed workers’ states” of the so-called “socialist countries.”

In the Revolution Betrayed we can see how the Trotskyists – from Left to Right – betrayed the international proletarian revolution by raising the mistakes of Trotsky into a dogma and as a consequence, defending the state capitalist and imperialist USSR in WW 2.

The Trotskyists today do not differ fundamentally with other Filipino Leftist organizations like the CPP, PMP, MLPP, or even BISIG with the latter’s call of Gloria Resign, Oust Gloria, Transitional Government, etc. The former even in more radical slogans is like latter: reform the capitalist system not destroy it:

"What matters is not Stalin as an individual, but his fraction… The slogan "Down with Stalin!" could be (and inevitably would be) understood as a call for the overthrow of the fraction which is today in power, and more widely of the regime. We do not want to overthrow the system, but to reform it" (Trotsky, Bulletin of the Opposition, 1933, no.33, p9-10.)

In order to advance the international proletarian revolution every Communists must completely reject the leftist bourgeois ideologies of Stalinism, Maoism, Trotskyism and Anarchism.

INTERNASYONALISMO, May 8, 2008 

 

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International Review no.92
A Contribution from Russia

The Unidentified Class: Soviet Bureaucracy as seen by Leon Trotsky

What was the nature of the system that existed in our country during the "soviet" period?

This is certainly one of the most impor­tant questions for history, and to an extent for the other social sciences. And it is not at all an academic question - it is very closely tied to the present epoch, for it is impossible to understand the reality of today without understanding that of yes­terday.

And yet this question can be summed up as follows: what was the nature of the central actor of the "soviet" system, which determined the country’s development, ie the ruling bureaucracy? What were its relations with other social groups? What motives and needs determined its activ­ity?

It is impossible to study these problems seriously without knowing the works of Leon Trotsky, one of the first writers to try to understand and analyse the nature of the "soviet" system and its ruling strata. Trotsky devoted several works to this problem, but his most general and concentrated view of the bureaucracy is set out in his book The Revolution Be­trayed, published 60 years ago (1) .

Principal characteristics of the bureaucracy

Let us recall the main characteristics of the bureaucracy that Trotsky gives in his book:

1) The upper levels of the social pyra­mid of the USSR are occupied by "a ruling caste in the proper sense of the word" (p117), and this caste "does not do any directly productive work, but directs, orders, commands, par­dons and punishes" . According to Trotsky, this stratum comprises be­tween 5 and 6 million people.

2) This stratum which rules everything is removed from any control by the masses who produce social commodi­ties. The bureaucracy reigns, the toiling masses "obey and are silent.”

3) This stratum maintains relations of material inequality in society: "Lim­ousines for the "activists", fine per­fumes for "our women", margarine for the workers, stores "de luxe" for the gentry, a look at delicacies through the store windows for the plebs" (p120). In general, the living condi­tions of the ruling class are analo­gous to those of the bourgeoisie: "the ruling stratum comprises all gradations, from the petty bourgeoisie of the backwoods to the big bourgeoisie of the capitals" (p140).

4) This stratum rules not only objec­tively, but subjectively, for it consid­ers itself sole master of society: ac­cording to Trotsky it "possesses the specific consciousness of a ruling class" (p135).

5) The domination of this stratum is based on repression, and its prosper­ity on "the masked appropriation of the fruits of other’s labour". "The privileged minority", notes Trotsky, "lives at the expense of the non-privileged majority".

6) There is a latent social struggle between this ruling caste and the oppressed majority of workers. Trotsky in fact is describing the following picture: there exists a fairly numerous social stratum which controls production, and therefore its produce, in a monopolistic manner, and which appropriates a large part of production (in other words, exercises a function of exploitation, which is united around an understanding of its common material interests, and is opposed to the producing class.

What do marxists call a social stratum that displays all these characteristics? There is only one answer: this is the ruling social class in every sense of the term.

Trotsky leads his reader to the same conclusion. But he does not come to it himself, even though he notes that in the USSR the bureaucracy "is something more than a bureaucracy" (p249). Something more, but what? Trotsky does not say. Moreover, he devotes a whole chapter to refuting the notion of the bureaucracy’s bourgeois class nature. Trotsky starts with "a", but after describing the exploit­ing ruling class, Trotsky hesitates at the last moment, and refuses to go on to "b".

Stalinism and capitalism

Trotsky demonstrates the same reticence when he compares the Stalinist bureaucratic system with the capitalist system.

"Mutatitis mutandis, the Soviet government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the same position as the capitalist does in relation with the single enterprise" (p43), says Trotsky in Chapter 2 of Revolution Betrayed. In Chapter 9, he says: "The transfer of the factories to the state changed the situation of the worker only juridically [my emphasis - AG]. In reality he is compelled to live in want and work a definite number of hours for a definite wage (…) The workers lost all influence whatever in the management of the factory. With piecework payment, hard conditions of material existence, lack of free movement, with terrible po­lice repression penetrating the life of every factory, it is hard indeed for the worker to feel himself a `free workman". In the bureaucracy he sees the manager, in the state the employer" (p24112).

In the same chapter, Trotsky notes that the nationalisation of property does not liquidate the social difference between the ruling and subject strata: the former enjoy every possible luxury, while the latter live in poverty as before and sell their labour power. He says the same thing in Chapter 4: "state ownership of the means of production does not turn manure into gold, and does not surround with a halo of sanctity the sweat-shop system" (p82).

These theses seem to observe very clearly phenomena that are elementary from a marxist viewpoint. For Marx always emphasised that the principal char­acteristic of a social system was not its laws and "forms of property", whose analysis as things in themselves leads to a useless metaphysics (2). The decisive factor is the real social relations, and principally the position of social groups in relation to society’s social product.

A mode of production can be based on different forms of property. The example of feudalism shows this well. During the Middle Ages, it was based on private feudal ownership of the land in the west, and on state feudal ownership in the east. Nonetheless, social relations were feudal in both cases, since they relied on the feudal exploitation of the class of peasant producers.

In Volume III of Capital, Marx defines the principal characteristic of any society as "the specific economic form in which free labour is directly extracted from the producers themselves.” Consequently, what is decisive is the relationship be­tween those who control the process and the fruits of production, and those who carry it out. The attitude of the owners of the means of production towards the producers themselves: "This is where we discover the most profound mystery, the hidden foundation, of every society" (3).

We have already shown how Trotsky described the relationship between the ruling stratum and the producers. On the one hand, the real "owners of the means of production" embodied in the state (ie the organised bureaucracy), on the other the de jure owners, in fact the workers deprived of any rights, the wage workers, from whom "free labour is extracted.” We can only draw one logical conclusion: there is no fwidamental difference in nature between the Stalinist bureaucratic system and "classical" capitalism.

Here again, Trotsky starts with "a" by demonstrating the essential identity be­tween the two systems, but does not go on to "b". On the contrary, he sets himself firmly against any identification o f Stalinist society with state capitalism, and puts forward the notion of the existence in the USSR of a specific form of "workers’ state", where the proletariat remains the ruling class from the economic view­point, and is not subjected to exploitation despite being "politically expropriated" .

Trotsky supports this thesis by refer­ring to the nationalisation of the land, the means of production and exchange, and transport, and the monopoly of foreign trade. In other words, he uses the same "juridical" argumentation which he has already convincingly refuted (see the quotations above). On page 82 of Revolu­tion Betrayed, he denies that state prop­erty can "turn manure into gold", while on page 248 on the contrary, he declares that the sole fact of nationalisation is enough to make the oppressed workers into the ruling class.

The schema that replaces reality

How is this to be explained? Why does Trotsky the publicist, the merciless critic of Stalinism who cites the facts proving that the bureaucracy is a ruling class and a collective exploiter, contradict Trotsky the theoretician when he tries to analyse these facts?

Obviously, we can name two major factors which prevented Trotsky from overcoming this contradiction, one theo­retical and one political.

In Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky tries to refute theoretically the thesis of the bureaucracy’s bourgeois class nature with arguments as weak as the fact that it "has neither stocks nor bonds" (p249). But why should the ruling class necessarily possess them? For it is obvious that the possession of stocks and bonds is of no importance in itself: the important thing is whether this or that appropriates to itself a surplus product of the direct pro­ducers. If yes, then the function of exploi­tation exists whether the distribution of the appropriated product is done via divi­dends on shares, or through a salary and privileges attached to a job. The author of Revolution Betrayed is just unconvinc­ing when he says that the representatives of the leading stratum cannot bequeath their privileged status (p249). It is highly unlikely that Trotsky thought that chil­dren of the elite could become workers or peasants.

In our opinion, it is not worth consid­ering superficial explanations like this to determine a serious reason for Trotsky’s refusal to consider the bureaucracy as a social ruling class. Instead, it is to be found in his firm conviction that the bureaucracy could not become the cen­tral element of a stable system, that it was only capable of "expressing" the inter­ests of other classes, but by distorting them.

During the 1920s, this conviction had already become the basis for Trotsky’s schema of the social antagonisms of "so­viet" society. For him, the framework for all these antagonisms was reduced to the strict dichotomy between the prole­tariat and private capital. There was no place in this schema for a "third force". The rise of the bureaucracy was seen as the result of the pressure of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie on the Party and the state. The bureaucracy was seen as balancing between the interests of the workers and those of the "new owners", unable to serve one or the other. Such a regime, dominated by an unstable group "between the classes" could only fall, and the group itself split, at the first serious threat to its stability. This is what Trotsky predicted at the end of the 1920s (4).

And yet in reality, events developed quite differently. After the most violent conflict with the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy had neither fallen nor split. After easily obtaining the capitulation of an insignificant internal "right", it set about liquidating the NEP and "the kulaks as a class", and establish­ing a regime of forced collectivisation and industrialisation. All this came as a complete surprise to Trotsky and his supporters, convinced as they were that the "centrist" apparachiks would by na­ture be incapable of it! It is not surprising that the bankruptcy of the Trotskyist op­position’s political calculations should be followed by its catastrophic capitulation in Russia, and its political bankruptcy at the international level (5).

Trying in vain to find a way out, Trotsky sent letters and articles from exile where he proved that the bureauc­racy lead only one option, and that it would "inevitably collapse long before achieving any serious results" (6). Even when the leader of the opposition saw the practical incoherence of leis idea of a role dependent on the "centrist" bureaucracy, he obstinately stuck to his bankrupt schema. At the time of the "great turn", his theoretical reflection is striking for its remoteness from reality. For example, at the end of 1928, he writes: "Centrism is an official line of the apparatus. The bearer of this centrism is the party func­tionary. The functionaries do not form a class. So what class line is represented by centrism?.” Since Trotsky denied the possibility of the bureaucracy having its own line, he arrived at the following conclusion: "The rising owners of prop­erty find their expression, though a cow­ardly one, in the right fraction. The pro­letarian line is represented by the Oppo­sition. What is left for centrism? When we remove the above social strata, all that is left is… the middle peasant" (7). And he writes all this at the same time as the Stalinist apparatus is conducting a violent campaign against the middle peasantry, and preparing its liquidation as an eco­nomic formation!

As time went on, Trotsky continued to expect an imminent split in the bureauc­racy between the proletarian and bour­geois elements, and those "who would be left to one side.” He predicted the "cen­trists’" fall from power, first after the failure of a "complete collectivisation", then as the result of an economic crisis at the end of the first Five Year Plan. In his Draft Platform for the International Left Opposition on the Russian Question writ­ten in 1931, he even envisaged the possi­bility of a civil war when the elements of the state and party apparatus would be divided "on the two sides of the barri­cades" (8).

Despite all these predictions, the Stalinist regime survived, the bureauc­racy not only remained united but even strengthened its totalitarian power. Trotsky nonetheless continued to con­sider the bureaucratic system in the USSR as extremely precarious. And during the 1930s, he thought that the bureaucracy’s power could collapse at any moment. In other words, it should not be considered as a class. Trotsky expressed this idea most clearly in his article The USSR at war (September 1939): "Would we not be mistaken to describe the Bonapartist oli­garchy as a new ruling class a few years or even months before its shameful fall?"(9).

All Trotsky’s predictions of the "So­viet" bureaucracy’s imminent fall have been refuted, one after the other, by events themselves. Despite everything, he did not want to change his ideas. For hint the attachment to a theoretical schema was worth more than anything else. But this is not the only reason, since Trotsky was more a politician than a theoretician, and generally preferred the "concrete political" approach to a problem than that of "abstract sociology". We will look here at another important reason for his obstinate refusal to call things by their real names.

Terminology and Politics

If we examine the history of the Trotskyist Opposition during the 1920s and at the beginning of the 1930s, we can see that his entire political strategy was based on the imminent disintegration of the USSR’s governing apparatus. Trotsky thought that an alliance between a hypothetical "left tendency" and the Opposition would be necessary for the reform of the party and the state. At the end of 1928, he wrote: "A bloc with the centrists [ie the Stalinist apparatus] is admissible and possible in principle. Moreover, only such a regroupment in the party can save the revolution" (10). Because they counted on such a bloc, the leaders of the Opposition tried not to put off the "progressive" bureaucrats. This tactic explains the highly equivocal attitude of the Opposition leaders towards workers’ class struggle against the state, their refusal to create their own party, etc.

Even after his exile from the USSR, Trotsky continued to place his hopes in a rapprochement with the "centrists". His hope to gain the support of a part of the ruling bureaucracy was so great that he was prepared to compromise (under cer­tain conditions) with the Secretary Gen­eral of the CP’s Central Committee. The story of the slogan "Stalin resign!" is a striking example. In March 1932, Trotsky published an open letter to the Central Executive Committee of the USSR where he launched an appeal: "It is necessary at last to carry out Lenin’s final, insistent advice: snake Stalin resign" (11). How­ever, a few months later he had already gone back on this, explaining: "What matters is not Stalin as an individual, but his fraction… The slogan "Down with Stalin!" could be (and inevitably would be) understood as a call for the overthrow of the fraction which is today in power, and more widely of the regime. We do not want to overthrow the system, but to reform it" (12). Trotsky made the ques­tion of his attitude towards the Stalinists completely explicit in an unpublished article-interview written in December 1932: "Today, as before, we are ready for co-operation in many forms with the present ruling fraction. Question: Are you as a result ready to co-operate with Stalin? Answer.- Without any doubt" (13).

During this period, Trotsky linked a possible turn of a part of the Stalinist bureaucracy towards a "multi form co­operation" with the opposition, to an imminent "catastrophe" for the regime, which as we have said above, he consid­ered inevitable because of the "precari­ousness" of the bureaucracy’s social po­sition (14). As a result of this catastrophe, the leaders of the Opposition were ready to consider an alliance with Stalin in order to save the party, nationalisation, and the "planned economy", from the bourgeois counter-revolution.

And yet, the catastrophe did not hap­pen. The bureaucracy was much stronger and more firmly consolidated than Trotsky thought. The Politburo did not respond to his appeals to ensure "an honest co­operation between the historic fractions" in the CP (15). Finally, in the autumn of 1933 and after many hesitations, Trotsky abandoned any hope - which was utopian anyway - in a reform of the bureaucratic system with the participation of the Stalinists, and called for a "political revo­lution" in the USSR.

However, this change to the Trotskyists’ principal slogan did not mean any radical revision of their view of the nature of the bureaucracy, the Party, and state, any more than it meant a definitive rejection of their hoped-for alliance with its "pro­gressive" wing. When Trotsky wrote Revolution Betrayed, and afterwards, he still considered the bureaucracy theoreti­cally as a precarious formation devoured by growing antagonisms. In the IVth International’s Transitional Programme (1938), he declared that the state appara­tus in the USSR comprised all political tendencies, including a "truly Bolshe­vik" one. Trotsky thought of the latter as a minority within the bureaucracy, but nonetheless a significant one: he was not talking of a few apparachiks, but of a fraction within a social stratum of 5-6 million people. According to Trotsky, this "truly Bolshevik" fraction was a potential reserve for the left opposition. Moreover, the leader of the IVth Interna­tional still thought it admissible to form a "united front" with the Stalinist part of the apparatus, in the case of a capitalist counter-revolution, which he considered "imminent" in 1938 (16).

It is this political orientation, first towards co-operation and the bloc with the "centrists" - ie the majority of the ruling "Soviet" bureaucracy - (in the late 20s and early 30s), then towards an alli­ance with the "truly Bolshevik" fraction and a "united front" with the ruling Stalinist fraction (after 1933),, that we must bear in mind when we examine Trotsky’s ideas on the nature of the bu­reaucratic oligarchy and social relations in the USSR, expressed ill their most complete than ill Revolution Betrayed.

Let us suppose that Trotsky had recog­nised in the totalitarian "Soviet" bureauc­racy the exploiting ruling class and bitter enemy of the proletariat. What would have been the political consequences? In the first place, he would have had to reject the idea of uniting with a part of this class - the very idea of the existence of a "truly Bolshevik fraction" within the exploiting bureaucratic class would have been as absurd as its existence within the bour­geoisie, for example. Secondly, a sup­posed alliance with the Stalinists to fight the "capitalist counter-revolution" would have become a "popular front", a policy categorically rejected by the Trotskyists because it would have amounted to a bloc of enemy classes instead of a "united front" within the same class, an idea well within the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition. In short, understanding the class essence of the bureaucracy would have dealt a heavy blow to the foundations of Trotsky’s political strategy. Naturally, he did not want to accept this.

Thus the problem of determining the nature of the bureaucracy was much more important than a mere matter of theory or terminology.

The destiny of the bureaucracy

To do Trotsky justice, towards the end of his life he began to revise his vision of the Stalinist bureaucracy. We can see this in his book on Stalin, the most mature of his works, although incomplete. Examining the decisive events at the turn of the 20s and 30s, when the bureaucracy completely monopolised power and property, Trotsky already considered the state and Party apparatus as one of the main social forces in struggle to "control the nation’s surplus product" . In declaring all-out war on the "petty bourgeois elements" they were not driven by the "pressure" of the proletariat, nor were they "pushed by the opposition" (as Trotsky had once claimed) (17). Consequently, the bureaucracy did not "express" anyone else’s interests, and was not "balancing" between two poles, but appeared as a social group conscious of its own interests. After beating all its competitors, it had won in the battle for power and profits. It alone disposed of surplus product (ie, the function of a real owner of the means of production). Admitting this, Trotsky could no longer neglect the question of the bureaucracy’s class nature. Indeed, speaking of the 1920s, he writes: "The essence of the [Soviet] Thermidor… has crystallized new privileged strata, and has led to the birth of a new substratum of the ruling class in the economic sense [my emphasis]. There were two pretenders to this role: the petty-bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy itself (18). Thus this substratum nourished two pretenders to the role of ruling class. It only remained to see who would win - and the winner was the bureaucracy. The conclusion is very clear: it is the bureaucracy that has become the new ruling social class. In reality, although he prepared for this conclusion, Trotsky did not in fact reach it, preferring not to complete his reflections politically. But he had taken a great step forward.

In his article The USSR at war, pub­lished in 1939, Trotsky took one more step in this direction: he thought it possi­ble in theory that "the Stalinist regime may be the first stage of a new society of exploitation" . Certainly, as always he emphasised that there was another view­point: the "Soviet" system, and its ruling bureaucracy, were only an "episode" in the process of transformation of bour­geois into a socialist society. Nonethe­less, he declared his willingness to revise his opinions in certain circumstances, notably should the bureaucratic govern­ment in the USSR enter the world war which had already begun, and should this spread to other countries (19).

We know what happened thereafter. According to Trotsky, the bureaucracy had no historic mission, was situated "between the classes", had no autonomy, was precarious, and so constituted an "episodic event". In reality, the bureauc­racy did nothing less than radically alter the social structure of the USSR by proletarianising millions of peasants and petty-bourgeois, carry out an industriali­sation based on the super-exploitation of the workers, transform the country into a great military power then subject it to a terrible war, and export its form of domi­nation to Central and Eastern Europe and South-East Asia. After all that, would Trotsky have changed his view of the bureaucracy? It is hard to say: he did not survive World War II, and never saw the formation of a "socialist camp". But for decades after the war, his political adepts continued to repeat word for word the theoretical dogmas contained in Revolu­tion Betrayed.

The march of history has obviously refuted all the main points of the Trotskyist analysis of the social system in the USSR. To understand this, only one fact is nec­essary: none of the "successes" of the bureaucracy fall within Trotsky’s theo­retical schema. And yet even today, some savants (not to mention the representa­tives of the Trotskyist movement) con­tinue to claim that his conception of the ruling "caste", and forecasts as to its destiny, have been confirmed by the col­lapse of the CPSU regime and the events which followed in the USSR and the "Soviet bloc". Here they are talking about Trotsky’s prediction that the power of the bureaucracy would inevitably fall, either as a result of a "political revolu­tion" by the working masses, or after a social coup d’Etat by the counter-revolu­tionary bourgeoisie (20). For example, V.Z. Rogovin (21), writes that the "coun­ter-revolutionary variant" of Trotsky’s predictions "has been carried out 50 years late, but with extreme precision" (22).

Where are we to find this precision, especially "extreme precision"?

The essence of the "counter-revolu­tionary variant" of Trotsky’s forecasts lies above all in his predictions as to the bureaucracy’s fall as a ruling stratum. "The bureaucracy is inseparably linked to the ruling class in the economic sense [he means the proletariat], is nourished by the same social roots, stands and falls alls with it [my emphasis]" (23). Supposing that a social counter-revolution did take place in the countries of the ex-Soviet Union, and that the working class did lose its economic and social power, then ac­cording to Trotsky the ruling bureauc­racy should have fallen with it.

In reality, did it fall, to give way to a bourgeoisie come from somewhere else? According to the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, more than 75% of the Russian "political elite" and more than 61 % of the "business elite" have their origins in the Nomenklatura of the "Soviet" period (24). Consequently, the same people are in the same ruling economic, social, and political positions in society. The origins of the other part of the elite can easily be explained. O. Krychtanovskaya writes: "Apart from direct privatisation… whose principal beneficiaries were the techno­cratic part of the Nomenklatura (econo­mists’, professionalbankers, etc.), we saw the quasi-spontaneous creation of com­mercial structures which appear to have no ties to the Nomenklatura. At the head of such structures are to be found young people, whose biographies reveal no links with the Nomenklatura. Their great fi­nancial success can only be explained in one way: although not part of the Nomenklatura, they were in its confi­dence, its "trusted agents ", in other words its plenipotentiaries [emphasis in the origi­nal]" (25). All this shows very clearly that it was not some "bourgeois party" (where could this have come from in the absence of a bourgeoisie under the totali­tarian regime?) which took power and succeeded in using a few individuals from the previous ruling "caste" as its serv­ants. It was the bureaucracy itself which organised the transformation of the eco­nomic and political forms of its rule, while remaining master of the system.

Thus, contrary to Trotsky’s forecast, the bureaucracy did not fall. What about the other side of his predictions: the imminent split of the ruling social "stra­tum" between proletarian and bourgeois elements, and the formation within it of a "truly Bolshevik" fraction. Indeed, to­day the leaders of the "communist" par­ties formed from the debris of the CPSU claim to play the part of "true" Bolshe­viks and to defend the interests of the working class. But it is unlikely that Trotsky would have recognised in a Zhuganov or an Ampilov (26) his "prole­tarian elements", since the aim of their "anti-capitalist" struggle is nothing other than the restoration of the old bureau­cratic regime in its classic Stalinist, or "patriotic statist" form.

Finally, Trotsky saw the "counter­revolutionary" version of the bureaucra­cy’s fall from power in almost apocalyp­tic terms: "In the unlikely event of capi­talism being restored in Russia, this could only be done through a cruel counter­revolutionary coup d’Etat, which would claim ten times more victims than the October revolution and the civil war. Should the soviet regime fall, its place could only be taken by Russian fascism, compared to whose cruelty the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler would look like phil­anthropic institutions" (27). This predic­tion should not be seen as a fortuitous exaggeration, for it springs inevitably from Trotsky’s whole theoretical vision of the nature of the USSR, and above all from his firm conviction that the "soviet" bureaucratic system served the mass of the workers, in its own way, by guaran­teeing their "social conquests". Such a vision naturally considered that a coun­ter-revolutionary transition from Stalin­ism to capitalism would be accompanied by a rising of the proletarian masses to defend the "workers’" state and their "own" nationalised property. And surely only a ferocious fascist regime could defeat and crush the workers’ powerful resistance <.p>Obviously, Trotsky could not have known that in 1989-90 the working class would not only fail to defend nationalised property and the "communist" state ap­paratus, but would actively contribute to their abolition. Since the workers saw nothing in the old system to justify its defence, the transition to the market economy and the denationalisation of state property led to no bloody class struggle, and no fascist or semi-fascist regime proved necessary. Trotsky’s pre­dictions cannot be said to have been confirmed in this domain either.

If the "soviet" bureaucracy were not a ruling class, but as Trotsky put it only a "policeman" of the distribution process, the restoration of capitalism in the USSR would have required a primitive accumu­lation of capital. And indeed, contempo­rary Russian commentators often use the expression "initial capital accumulation.” In doing so, they generally mean the enrichment of this or that person, the accumulation of money, the means of production, or other goods, in the hands of the "new Russians" . However, this has nothing to do with scientific understand­ing of primitive capital accumulation uncovered by Marx in Capital. In analys­ing the genesis of capital, Marx empha­sised that "so-called primitive accumula­tion is nothing but the historic process of separating the producer from the means of production" (28). The formation of an army of wage workers by the confiscation of the producers’ property is one of the main conditions for the formation of a ruling class. In the countries of the ex-USSR during the 1990s, did the "restor­ers of capitalism" need to form a class of wage workers by expropriating the pro­ducers? Obviously not: this class existed already, the producers had no control whatever over the means of production -there was nobody to expropriate. Conse­quently, the time for capital’s initial ac­cumulation had already passed.

Trotsky was doubtless right to link primitive accumulation with a cruel and bloody dictatorship. Marx also writes that "new-born capital sweats blood from every pore", and that in its first stages needs a "regime of blood" (29). Trotsky’s mistake was not in linking primitive accu­mulation to the counter-revolution, but in failing to see how that counter-revolution was taking place under his very eyes, with all its characteristics of massacres and monstrous political tyranny. The millions of despoiled peasants dying of poverty and hunger, the workers de­prived of every right and forced to work beyond endurance, whose tombs were the foundations of the buildings con­structed according to the Stalinist 5-Year Plans, the innumerable prisoners of the gulag: these are the real victims of primi­tive accumulation in the USSR. Today’s property owners do not heed to accumu­late capital, they need only redistribute it amongst themselves by transforming state capital into private corporate capital (30). But this operation did not mean a change in society, nor in the ruling classes, nor did it demand any great social cataclysm. If we do not understand this, then we will understand neither "soviet" history, nor Russia today.

To conclude. The conception of the bureaucracy contained in Trotsky’s fun­damental theoretical views and political perspectives is incapable of explaining the realities of Stalinism or its evolution. We can say the same of the other elements of the Trotskyist analysis of the social system in the USSR (the "workers’" state, the "post-capitalist" nature of so­cial relations, the "dual role" of Stalin­ism, etc.). Nonetheless, Trotsky did suc­ceed in resolving one problem: this re­markable commentator directed a crush­ing critique against the claims of "social­ist" construction in the USSR. And that was not too bad for his day.

——– 

1) All quotations from Revolution Betrayed are taken from the New Park edition of 1973.

2) See Marx, 771e Poverty of Philosophy, Chap 2.

3) Marx, Capital, Book III.

4) See the article Towards the New Stage in the Russian Centre of Collections of Documents for New History (RCCDNH), drawer 325, list 1, folder 369, p1-11.

5) By about 1930, the Opposition had lost two thirds of its members, including almost all its "historical leadership" (ten out of the thirteen who had signed the Platform (Pile Bolshevik-Leninists).

6) RCCDNH, drawer 325,1.1., folder 175, p4,32- 34.

7) Bioulleten oppositsii (Bulletin of the Opposition), 1931, no.20, p.10.

8) Bioulleten oppositsii (BO), 1931, no.20, p.10.

9) Ibid., 1939, no.79-80, p.6

10) RCCDNH, drawer 325,1.1., folder 499, p2.

11) B0, 1932, no.27, p.6.

12) Ibid., 1933, no.33, p9-10.

13) See Broue, "Trotsky et le bloc des oppositions de 1932", Caltiers Leon Trotsky, 1980, no.5, p22.

14) See Trotsky, Dnevniki i pisma, (Letters and Correspondance), Moscow, 1994, p54-55. 15) ibid.

16) B0, 1938, no.66-67, p.15

17) Trotsky, Stalin, Vol. 2

18) Ibid.

19) The USSR in the war, Trotsky, 1939.

20) Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, p290.

21) During the "soviet" epoch, Vadim Rogovin, professor at the Russian Institute of Sociology, was one of the main official propagandists and commentators on the social policy of the CPSU. During Perestroika, he converted himself into an "anti-Stalinist" and an unconditional admirer of Trotsky. He is the author of several apologetics for Trotsky and his ideas.

22) Rogovin, Stalinski neonep, (The Stalinist NeoNEP), Moscow, 1994, p.344.

23) B0, 1933, no.36-37, p.7

24) O. Krychtanovskaya, "Finansovaya oligarkhiav Rossii", (The Financial Oligarchy in Russia), Izvestia, 10/01/96.

25) Ibid.

26) Zhuganov is the leader of the "renovated" Communist Party and Yeltsin’s main rival in the last presidential elections. Victor Ampilov is the main leader of the hard-line Stalinist movement in Russia, and the founder of the "Russian Communist Workers’ Party". He calls for the restoration of the "classical" totalitarian regime of the 1930s.

27) B0, 1935, no.41, p3.

28) Marx, Capital, Book I, p663.

29) Ibid.

30) Arriving at a similar conclusion after concrete sociological studies, O. Krychtanovskaya writes: "If we analyse carefully the situation in Russia in the 1990s, we see that the only "primitive accumulation" was the work of unlucky doctors turned stock-broker, or engineers buying a kiosk. This stage of accumulation almost always ended in the purchase of shares in MMM [a failed financial "pyramid"] (the result is well-known), and was rarely transformed into "secondary accumulation"" (Izvestia, 10/0111996).

May 7, 2008

Food Crisis: The Price of Capitalist Greed that Kills

Filed under: International Issues

Food Crisis: The Price of Capitalist Greed that Kills

The world food crisis hit the center stage of media attention only very recently, but it is a phenomenon that has been building steadily for decades. The food riots from Haiti to Bangladesh, from Pakistan to Egypt may have brought forth the issue of the soaring costs of basic commodities to the forefront of the world’s attention, but the fact remains that they were all direct result of years of accumulated ravages of capitalism. For a time, national governments like the Arroyo regime tried to ignore the signs of the looming crisis, even when the prices of rice in public markets have soared to a 34-year high in the Philippines. The Philippine president even quipped that there is no such thing as rice shortage because it is “a physical phenomenon where people line up on the streets to buy rice. Do you see lines today?”1

The world is in the midst of an unprecedented worldwide food price inflation that has driven prices to their highest levels in decades. The increases affect most kinds of food, particularly the most important staples like corn, rich and wheat. According to UN Food and Agriculture Organization, between March 2007 and March 2008 alone prices of grains increased 88%, oils and fats 106%, and dairy 48%. A World Bank report on the other hand pointed out that in the 36 months ending last February 2008, overall global food prices increased by 83% and it expects most food prices to remain well above 2004 levels until at least 2015.2

In Thailand, the most popular grade of rice that sold for $198 a ton five years ago was quoted at a record high of more than $1,000 per ton on April 24, 2008 and it is expected to continue to rise according to traders and exporters due to tight supply.3 The same phenomenon is repeated all over the world. In the Philippines alone, from the retail price of 60 US cents a kilo a year ago, the price of rice rose up to 72 US cents a kilo today. And in a country where 68 million of its 90 million inhabitants live on or under US$2 a day4, this has become a nightmare of horrific proportions.

The world food crisis is the inevitable result of the permanent crisis of capitalism since the late 1960s. Various national economies battled to stay a float in a world of intense competition and capitalist profiteering in an already saturated world market. As a result, governments adopted economic policies that are geared towards encouraging the growth of industries that will inject more dollars into their respective economy rather than meeting the needs of their people. Combine that with unsustainable use of natural resources and the onslaught of industrial production for profit that is aggravating pollution levels and the emission of green house gases worldwide, humanity is now faced with the accumulated concoction of capitalist recipe for its own destruction.

In the field of agricultural production, the use of nitrogen and the over-aeration of soils to boost capitalist agricultural productions have destroyed the total productivity of the once fertile centers of agricultural production. And while it is true that the application of advance farming methods at the onset of green revolutions worldwide brought about initial increases in productivity, we have also seen the gradual drops of agricultural production in many parts of the world. According to a report by the London-based Institute of Science in Society:

“In India, grain yield per unit of fertilizer applied decreased by two-thirds during the Green Revolution years. And the same has happened elsewhere.

Between 1970 and 2000, the annual growth of fertilizer use on Asian rice has been 3 to 40 times the growth of rice yields [8]. In Central Luzon, Philippines, rice yield increased 13 percent during the 1980s, but came at the price of a 21 percent increase in fertilizer use. In the Central Plains, yield went up only 6.5 percent, while fertilizer use rose 24 percent and pesticides jumped by 53 percent. In West Java, a 23 percent yield increase was accomplished by 65 and 69 percent increases in fertilizers and pesticides respectively.

However, it is the absolute drop in yields despite high inputs of fertilizer that finally punctured the Green Revolution bubble. By the 1990s, after dramatic increases in the early stages of the Green Revolution, yields began falling. In Central Luzon, Philippines, rice yields rose steadily during the 1970s, peaked in the early 1980s, and have been dropping gradually since. Similar patterns emerged for rice-wheat systems in India and Nepal.

Where yields were not actually declining, the rate of growth has been slowing rapidly or leveling off, as documented in China, North Korea, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

Since 2000, yields have fallen further, to the extent that in six out of the past seven years, world grain production has fallen below consumption.”5

The penchant for profit of a decadent system that is caught up with its own web of contradictions has resulted in the destruction of natural soil fertility to the point of exhaustion. While it is true that the world economy still produce more food than the world needs, a lot of what is produce and distribute through global capitalist trade perishes before it reaches the market and when it does arrive, millions of people just cannot afford to buy it anymore. In the final analysis, the endpoint of this crisis is the pauperization of the working class and the subjugation of the greater portion of humanity into abject poverty and destitution. Capitalism after all is primarily concern about accumulation of surplus value and never the satisfaction of the needs of society.

The “Rice” Crisis in the Philippines

According to Arturo Yap, the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture of the Philippines, "We don’t have a food crisis but, rather, a rice price crisis. All of us are looking for innovative solutions in our countries–how to address not only the issue of supply but also the issue of prices, how to [ensure] that poor families can eat.” He said there are 5 five critical reasons behind the current “rice” situation in the Philippines that the government needs to address: First, there is a supply largely affected by an increased demand resulting from rising population; Second, the effects of climate change; Third, the booming demand for bio-fuels; Fourth, continuous conversion of agricultural lands to non-agriculture use; And finally, there is a neglect of irrigation facilities.

At first glance, one may find the so-called causes of the Philippine “rice” crisis as valid on its own. But the fact behind it all is the undeniable truth that the very framework from which those enumerated causes arose is the ultimate caused of them all – the capitalist framework of production worldwide. First, the supply that is supposed-to-be affected by the increased of demand from rising population is but an excused of the fact that what has been produced by the world capitalist economy is more geared towards the production of surplus value than satisfying the needs of humanity. Second, the effect of climate change to agricultural production is by itself also a direct result of the capitalist framework of production. For instance, it is not industrialization itself that is responsible for changes in climate patterns, but "capitalism’s overriding quest to maximize profits and its consequent disregard for human and ecological needs, except insofar as they coincide with the goal of wealth accumulation."6 There is no doubt that there has been an appalling degradation of the environment at the hands of a world capitalist system driven by the relentless quest for profits and economic expansion. But the fact is, all bourgeois states, including the Philippine state that is recognizing the heavy costs of environmental degradation, are the same states that are protecting the profit motives of their respective national capitals and their political puppets to sabotage research and development of more environmentally friendly alternative fuel sources to power industrial production. Third, the so-called adverse effect of the booming demand for bio-fuels to agricultural production is by itself an outcome of all the states’ policy, including Arroyo’s government,  to search for alternative fuels to ease the burden of the their industries’ dependence on foreign oil supply. In addition to this, lowering the cost of oil expenses for “social” purposes also increases the capacity of each state for military production and war. It is not as much as environmental concerns that drives the policy of bio-fuels development, but the need of each national capital to insulate itself against the rising prices of crude oil in the world market and even to the extent of “aiding” the war efforts of all bourgeois states. It is interesting to note that as early as the Second World War, bio-fuels have already been used in the war efforts of the both the Allied and Axis powers like the United States and the Nazi Germany. In the case of the Philippines, the logic of redirecting farm produce from the table to the needs of the bio-fuels industry is in consonance to the efforts of the Philippine government to produce more high value cash crops that can help sustain its own quest for additional sources of dollar revenues. Fourth, the continuous conversion of farmlands into subdivisions, golf courses, malls and industrial complex is also a direct result of government policies in agriculture, especially in the Philippines. The decades old Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) of the Philippine government was a both a failure and a disaster. It is not only that CARP is a mystifying and reactionary program of the Filipino bourgeoisie that is supported by some Leftist organizations, but also because it is not an economically viable program. In the age and time where intense capitalist competition in the world market destroys small agricultural producers due to high cost of farming and rising debt, farmers are either forced to abandon their lands or submit themselves into precarious arrangements as contract growers of big corporations, a practice that is prevalent in Mindanao region of the Philippines.7 As to the perennial problem of the utter neglect of irrigation systems in the Philippines, it is more a question of government mismanagement and corruption, an expression of the decomposition of ideological forms in capitalist decadence, where self-indulgence and the “every man for himself” mentality reigns supreme.

As what can be expected from a bourgeois state confronted with a crisis of great magnitude in stage of capitalist decadence, the Philippine state through the Arroyo regime responded to the crisis in the form of active state intervention - a move that is supported and fiercely advanced by all Leftist formations in the Philippines together with their effort to call for a legislated wage increase. As the pangs of the crisis intensifies, so as the mystifying efforts of the state to contain it. The Left and Right of the capital are one in raising the specter that “only the state” can save the workers and the poorest of the poor from the pangs of hunger and destitution. They completely ignore the fact that the state that they encourage to intervene more is the very organ that imposes the bourgeois dictatorship that is protecting the very source of enslavement and suffering - capitalism. In trying to be more “radical” in form and substance, various leftist currents pressed for the absolute and aggressive control of the state to society.

The Leftists “criticism” that what the state is doing is “not enough” – “raising” budget for agriculture, giving “rice subsidy” to the “poorest of the poor and the state competing with private traders in buying and selling rice – and it lacks “political will” clearly show that the former want absolute state control. They even go to up to the point of brandishing their age-old dogma of party dictatorship and totalitarianism - the complete and all encompassing control of the state like the so-called socialist countries that they defended as the “remnants” of the October Revolution.

There is no Solution to the Crisis within Capitalist System

The Right and Left of the capital are one in advancing programs of mystification that hides the fact that there is no solution to the crisis within the system. The contradiction between the forces and the relations of production is already at its peak. No reformist and temporary interventions by the state can alter the fact that whatever solution it can formulate within the bulwarks of capitalism will only lead to more intense crisis and destruction of the environment. Every effective solution that it can formulate will only mean a much heavier burden to the working class and the toiling masses. Even if the state will exercise absolute control of the economic life of society, the crisis will continue to intensify as a result of the saturation of the world market and inability of the population to absorb the excessive production of commodities within a system that owes its life to competition and profit. History has already proven that state capitalism and totalitarianism are futile reaction of capital faced with permanent and intensifying crisis. The fall of USSR and Eastern Europe in 1990s bears witness to this fact.

The solution of the crisis is not within the dying system but outside of it. It is in the hands of the only revolutionary class bearing the seed of future communist society – the working class. The solution is not within the bulwarks of capitalism, nor is it in the path of reforms and peaceful transformation of capitalism to socialism. The solution is not within absolute control of the state of the economic life of society, but in the destruction of capitalism itself along with the bourgeois state that serves as it machinery of domination.

In other words, the solution of the food crisis is the destruction of the system of production based on market and profit and establishing a system based on the absolute production of human needs. And the first step towards this direction and toward the revolutionary transformation of society is not in the legalistic and reformist approach of various leftist organizations, nor is it in the hands of an absolute state intervention. It is not through the peaceful and “legalistic” road of “lakbayan” (protest caravans and long marches) popularized by Leftist formations in the Philippines. It is not through the road of trade unionism either. It is in the hands of the working class itself9 that is confronting the attacks of the capital in its own terrain through its own unitary organs of struggle – the workers’ assemblies, the prefiguration of the workers’ councils.

Workers of the world, unite! It is only through this path of class unity that will usher in the inevitable culmination of the proletarian movement: the world proletarian revolution.

—–

1 Gil C. Cabacungan Jr., Arroyo warned on rice crisis, Philippine Daily Inquirer, March 24, 2008

2 “The rising trend in international food prices continued, and even accelerated, in 2008. U.S. wheat export prices rose from $375/ton in January to $440/ton in March, and Thai rice export prices increased from $365/ton to $562/ton. This came on top of a 181 percent increase in global wheat prices over the 36 months leading up to February 2008, and a 83 percent increase in overall global food prices over the same period.(…) The observed increase in food prices is not a temporary phenomenon, but likely to persist in the medium term. Food crop prices are expected to remain high in 2008 and 2009 and then begin to decline as supply and demand respond to high prices; however, they are likely to remain well above the 2004 levels through 2015 for most food crops” (Rising Food Prices: Policy Options and World Bank Response, p. 2, our emphasis)

3 “Bangkok, April 24 - Benchmark Thai rice prices leapt more than 5 percent to a record high above $1,000 a tonne on Thursday, and traders in the world’s top exporter warned of further gains if buyers Iran and Indonesia step into the market. (Reuters, Thai Rice Climbs to New Record Above $1,000 a Tonne, 24/04/2008 – posted on Flex News)

4 National Statistics Office, 2006 Family Income and Expenditure Survey, Released Date: January 11, 2008

5 Beware the New “Doubly Green Revolution”, ISIS Press Release 14/01/08

6 Como, Imperialist chaos, ecological disaster: Twin-track to capitalist oblivion, International Review no. 129 – 2nd Quarter 2007, p.2

7 “The Soyapa Farms Growers Association employs 360 contract workers, both adults and children. The association was formed at the initiative of Stanfilco six years ago, when it convinced members to grow bananas. It’s not a cooperative—each grower retains ownership of their individual plot, and each has an individual contract to sell their bananas to Dole.” (Banana War in the Philippines - Posted on July 8th, 1998 by Melissa Moore at www.foodfirst.org)

8 “That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule;” (The International Workingmen’s Association, General Rules, October 1864, our emphasis)

May 5, 2008

Oppression of Women

Filed under: Politics, Perspectives

Ang Pang-aapi sa Kababaihan

Ang paninidigan ng marxismo sa kababaihan ay nakabatay sa makauring tunggalian sa lipunan. Malinaw ito sa teksto ni Engels na sinulat noong 1887, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” at sa sinulat ni Bebel noong 1891, “Woman and Socialism”. Ang solusyon ng usapin ng kababaihan ay nasa solusyon paano wakasan ang makauring tunggalian, ibig sabihin paano at sa anong kondisyon mapawi ang mga uri sa lipunan – ang pagtatayo ng komunistang lipunan.

Para sa karagdagang pag-unawa, inanyayahan namin ang mga marxistang mambabasa na basahin ang mga links na ito:

Ang usapin ng kababaihan sa panahon ng dekadenteng kapitalismo

Sa panahon ng dekadenteng kapitalismo lalong lumala ang pang-aapi sa kababaihan. Subalit dapat bang “lumahok at pamunuan” ng rebolusyonaryong minorya ang naglitawang parang kabute na mga “kilusan para sa pagpapalaya sa kababaihan” na nagsimula noong 1960s?

Sa panahon ng dekadenteng kapitalismo, nasa agenda na ng kilusang manggagawa ang pagdurog sa estado at pagtatayo ng diktadura ng proletaryado sa pandaigdigang saklaw. Ito ang tanging programa na akma sa kasalukuyan. At dito dapat nakabatay ang usapin ng kababaihan at hindi sa kanilang “sektoral” at inter-classist na mga kahilingan sa loob ng kapitalistang sistema.

Ang iba’t-ibang organisasyon ng Kaliwa – maoista, stalinista, trotskyista at maging anarkista – ay nag-oorganisa at naglunsad ng mga kampanya para sa “sektoral” o isyung pangkababaihan lamang gaya ng isyu sa aborsyon, prostitusyon, battered women, kasal, at iba pa. Kabilang na dito ang “kilusan ng mga homosexual”. Humihiling sila sa kapitalistang estado na bigyang halaga ang mga problemang ito ng kababaihan at homesexual. Pinagbigyan naman sila ng burgesya. Subalit para sa Kaliwa, ang mga ito ay di-sapat at may “magagawa pa ang estado at sistema pero wala lang political will”.   

Ito ang pangkalahatang linya ng Kaliwa para “mapalahok” ang kababaihan sa rebolusyon. Ang linyang ito ay nakaangkla sa paniniwalang may kapasidad pa ang naaagnas na sistema na magbigay ng makabuluhang mga reporma gaya noong 19 siglo.

Subalit para sa Marxismo, sa panahon ng dekadenteng kapitalismo, walang maibigay ang sistema liban sa lalupang pagpapalala sa aping kalagayan ng kababaihan dahil kailangan ng naghihingalong sistema na patindihin ang pagsasamantala sa uring manggagawa para patuloy na makahinga.

Ganun pa man, tuwang-tuwang ang burgesya sa mga “kilusan ng pagpapalaya sa kababaihan” dahil ang mga kahilingan nila ay hindi para ibagsak ang kapitalismo kundi para repormahin ito, para pabanguhin sa mata ng malawak na masang proletaryo. Kaya naman, maraming mga debate at diskusyon at maging mga batas hinggil sa aborsyon, prostitusyon, gay marrtiage at iba pa na sinalihan mismo ng mga burges na “maka-kababaihan.”

Sa ganitong punto nanindigan kami na ang mga “kilusang” ito ay naglalayong ipako ang isyu sa pagitan ng kasarian, demokratikong karapatan, burges na pagkapantay-pantay at higit sa lahat, hatiin ang kilusang manggagawa. Para sa amin, ang tanging solusyon sa mga problema ng kababaihan ay ang paglakas ng kilusang manggagawa at komunistang rebolusyon.

Ang tungkulin ng mga rebolusyonaryong minorya ay mamulat at magkaisa ang malawak na masa – lalaki, babae, o homoseksuwal – bilang mga manggagawa, bilang isang uri laban sa kapitalismo. At ang mga isyu na maaring makapag-isa sa kanila ay ang mga isyu bilang inaapi at pinagsamantalahang manggagawa – sahod, trabaho, pension, at iba pa. Mga isyu na direktang umaatake sa burges na estado at kapitalistang mga relasyon. Ang dapat linangin ng mga komunista ay isang malakas na kilusang manggagawa anuman ang kanyang kasarian, kulay, nasyunalidad o relihiyon.

Sa madaling sabi, ang sentralidad ng kilusang manggagawa at hindi ang mga sektoral na kilusan na walang idudulot kundi hati-hatiin lamang ang uri. Wala itong kaibahan sa “kilusan ng mga kontraktwal”, “kilusan ng may-kapansanan”, “kilusan ng immigrants”, at iba pa at kaakibat na mga permanenteng organisasyon na walang ibinunga kundi pagkahati-hati at pagpapahina sa kilusang proletaryo.

Ang unitaryong organisasyon ng mga manggagawa – asembliya at konseho – ay umaangkop sa sentralidad ng pagpapalakas ng independyenteng kilusan ng manggagawa.

Hangga’t hindi naunawaan ang pundamental na pagbabago ng kapitalismo mula 19 siglo – mula pasulong tungo sa dekadenteng kapitalismo — at ang nasa agenda ng kilusang manggagawa – mula pakikibaka para sa reporma tungo sa pag-agaw ng kapangyarihang pampulitika, hindi maunawaan na wala ng silbi ang mga sektoral at parsyal na kahilingan sa loob ng kapitalismo.

Lalaya lamang ang kababaihan kung lalaya ang uring manggagawa mula sa kapital. Ibig sabihin, lalaya lamang ang kababaihan kung madurog ang kapitalismo at maitayo ang komunismo.

  

May 2, 2008

In Defence of Russian Revolution

Filed under: Theories and Concepts, Perspectives

In defence of the Russian Revolution, internationalism is not negotiable

Ninety years on from 1917 we are publishing an extract of correspondence on the degeneration of the Russian revolution. An essential part of our defence of the Russian revolution is to draw a clear class line between the revolution and the Stalinist counter-revolution which abandoned the internationalism that the Bolsheviks had based themselves on. This line has already been drawn in blood by the counter-revolution through the massacre of Bolsheviks in the Stalinist camps.

We are publishing here only an extract of the much longer correspondence from our reader, sent to us at the end of last year, which tries to take position on the ICC’s basic positions to provide a basis for discussion, taking up the issues that we felt were most important to reply to.


Dear Comrades

Please find below my comments and observations on the Basic Positions defended by the ICC:

The International Communist Current defends the following political positions:

* Since the First World War, capitalism has been a decadent social system. It has twice plunged humanity into a barbaric cycle of crisis, world war, reconstruction and new crisis. In the 1980s, it entered into the final phase of this decadence, the phase of decomposition. There is only one alternative offered by this irreversible historical decline: socialism or barbarism, world communist revolution or the destruction of humanity.

I agree that capitalism has been decadent since the turn of the 20th century and this placed the possibility and need for world socialist revolution on the agenda. I agree that capitalism cannot go on for ever and in the absence of revolution it has started to enter decomposition which starts to erode the materialist basis for proletarian revolution. I agree with the urgent need for world proletarian revolution.

I do not understand nor necessarily agree that decomposition is in some way linked with the collapse of the regimes in eastern Europe and Russia in 1989-91. How? Why? Also, you are opposed to ‘stalinism’, but at the same time you see the collapse of ‘stalinism’ as representing a major defeat for the working class, from which its combativity is only just re-emerging. How can the collapse of something you regard as anti working class represent a defeat for the working class?

* The Paris Commune of 1971 was the first attempt by the proletariat to carry out this revolution, in a period when the conditions for it were not yet ripe. Once these conditions had been provided by the onset of capitalist decadence, the October revolution in 1917 in Russia was the first step towards an authentic world communist revolution in an international revolutionary wave which put an end to the imperialist war and went on for several years after that. The failure of this revolutionary wave, particularly in Germany in 1919-23, condemned the revolution in Russia to isolation and to a rapid degeneration. Stalinism was not the product of the Russian revolution, but its gravedigger.

I agree the Paris Commune was the first proletarian revolution and that it established a workers’ state, the form and content of which was highly valuable and instructive. I agree the 1917 Revolution was the second major attempt at a proletarian revolution. I agree the failure of the revolutionary wave condemned the regime in Russia to isolation.

I disagree with the statement after ‘isolation’. The regime was the product of the 1917 proletarian revolution and the circumstances in which it found itself. There were three broad choices: the ultra left revolutionary catastrophist variant whereby an isolated proletarian bastion would be overwhelmed by internal and external factors; the rightist accommodation whereby capitalism would be encouraged rather than suppressed in Russia, given the conditions for socialism were ‘premature’; a ‘centrist’ policy whereby the proletarian party and leadership ‘did what it could’ to establish and defend a proletarian state and economy in almost impossible circumstances. What would you have done? What should the regime have done? Give up via choices one and two?

I agree the result was the creation of a ruling and privileged caste which became divorced from the masses and in effect became a ruling class. But I believe this was born from a proletarian core leadership which was determined to try and build what it could of a socialist state and economy in the absence of world revolution, or at least revolution in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries. Socialism in one country is of course not sustainable long term, hence the accommodation of successive leaderships to world capitalism through the adoption of capitalist economic policies and methods, which ultimately undermined whatever socialist bases had been created and ultimately led to their rapid collapse.

It seems to me that if you support the 1917 Revolution as proletarian, you have to have a view as to what the post 1917 regime should have done given the reality of the situation and the fact that it was born of the proletarian revolution. If, at a certain point, you would (with the benefit of hindsight) withdraw support for the regime (when?), you must be able to identify what alternatively the regime should have done to merit continued support.

* The statified regimes which arose in the USSR, eastern Europe, China, Cuba etc and were called ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ were just a particularly brutal form of the universal tendency towards state capitalism, itself a major characteristic of the period of decadence.

Not sure I can agree. My interpretation is that they were the product of the 1917 revolution and the attempt to build socialism in Russia in the 1930s via collectivisation and industrialisation. I am not sure I even hold they reverted to capitalism as such. From the mid 1950s, all the regimes increasingly adopted capitalist methods and economic policies which undermined the state ownership of productive resources and led ultimately to the collapse and sweeping away of those regimes 1989-91.

To equate them with the tendency towards state capitalism in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries seems to be comparing apples with pears. They would not have collapsed so easily and completely in 1989-91 if they were simply a different version of what prevails in the West.

* Since the beginning of the 20th century, all wars are imperialist wars… The working class can only respond to them through its international solidarity and by struggling against the bourgeoisie in all countries.

* All the nationalist ideologies - ‘national independence’, ‘the right of nations to self-determination’ etc - whatever their pretext, ethnic, historical or religious, are a real poison for the workers. By calling on them to take the side of one or another faction of the bourgeoisie, they divide workers and lead them to massacre each other in the interests and wars of their exploiters.

Totally agree with both. We are members of a world working class and have no interest whatsoever with the killing of fellow workers anywhere, let alone on behalf of our class enemies in the bourgeoisie….

I hope this letter is useful in setting out ‘where I am coming from’ and that it may provide a basis for further discussion and clarity.

All best wishes, A


Our reply

Dear Comrade A,

We were very glad to get the recent two letters you sent responding clearly and honestly to our basic positions in the attempt to develop a political discussion between us. We are very glad that you see the ICC and the tradition of the Communist Left as a reference point for revolutionary politics today. This reply is intended to continue this process even though we won’t be able to take up all the points you make. We were struck in both letters by your clear denunciation of nationalism in concert with our own intransigence on this question.  You agree for example in your November letter with our editorial in IR 127: ‘imperialism is the natural policy carried out by a national state or organisation that functions as a national state. …The more the workers are sucked into nationalism, the more they lose their ability to act as a class‘. And again in your commentary on our basic positions from December you totally agree with the following point: ‘All the nationalist ideologies - ‘national independence’, ‘ the right of nations to self determination’ etc - whatever their pretext, ethnic, historical or religious, are a real poison for the workers. By calling on them to take the side of one or another faction of the bourgeoisie, they divide workers and lead them to massacre each other in the interests and wars of their exploiters‘. As you say on this point: we are members of a world working class and have no interest whatsoever with the killing of fellow workers anywhere let alone on behalf of our class enemies in the bourgeoisie.

We were therefore surprised to see that you disagreed with the formulation in the section in the basic principles on the Russian Revolution to the effect that the isolation of the revolution led to its rapid degeneration and that Stalinism was not the product of the Russian Revolution but its grave digger. You believe instead that the Stalinist regime was in continuity with October, and despite all its weaknesses did what it could to preserve its gains in almost impossible circumstances; there was no other realistic alternative. But ’socialism in one country’, the banner of Stalinism, was only one more variety of ‘all the nationalist ideologies’ that you join us in denouncing in our basic positions. It buried the internationalist promise of the October Revolution and led the workers, on the basis of this variety of nationalism, into the fratricide of World War 2 - ‘the great patriotic war’ according to Stalin.

We think there is an important contradiction here that needs explanation.  There is surely a deep inconsistency between defending internationalism intransigently on the one hand and on the other hand taking the poison of nationalism when it is served up with a ’socialist’ sweetener. The October revolution was conceived by the Bolsheviks and the Marxist left as a product of an international ripeness of the conditions for a proletarian revolution. The Russian bastion of 1917 could only therefore be a stepping stone to the world revolution. This position was entirely consistent with the revolutionary marxist claim since 1847 (Engels: Principles of Communism) that socialism as a new mode of production and society was impossible in a single country and was only possible after the defeat of capitalism on a world scale. In contrast, the increasing sabotage of the world revolution by the Stalinist regime in the twenties (Germany 1923, Britain 1926, China 1928, etc) helped turn the Communist International into the spearhead of Russian national and imperialist interests. In the thirties this counter revolutionary process was completed when Russia joined the League of Nations and entered into the inter-imperialist manoeuvring that led to the massacres in Spain and those of 1939-45.What else could be done in this situation?

You say in your December letter that you very much welcome  the continuity between  the ICC and ‘left fractions which detached themselves from the degenerating Third International in the years 1920-30, in particular the German, Dutch and Italian Lefts‘ as it says in our basic positions. But these lefts were the most intransigents opponents of Stalinism. They were part of the internationalist oppositions to the counter-revolutionary nationalist orientation policy in the International and its constituent parties. These oppositions were eventually expelled and often physically liquidated by the Stalinist regime. Rather than preserving this real proletarian core of the revolution, patriotic Stalinism obliterated it, especially its most dedicated internationalist fighters - and had to - since all trace of internationalism had to be removed in the nationalist march to imperialist war. Certainly at a certain stage after the Russian revolution, the world revolutionary upsurge went into reverse and the internationalists became more and more isolated - an isolation that lasted for decades. But surely we can’t therefore identify with the counter-revolution because at the time it was more ‘realistic’ than revolution. Internationalism is not one of several options but the only one in all circumstances - favourable and unfavourable - for the working class because it alone defines its common interests as a class and its perspective of communism. In a historic sense, internationalism is the only realistic option. In pointing out what we see as the inconsistencies in your commentaries on the ICC basic principles we aren’t point-scoring but making the effort with you to arrive at a revolutionary, internationalist coherence. We hoping to continue the discussion at our forthcoming Public Forum… WR, 3/11/07.