File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1997/marxism-general.9711, message 330


Date: Sun, 30 Nov 1997 03:57:13 -0500
From: malecki-AT-algonet.se (Robert Malecki)


COCKROACH! #98 (Soviet fascism & capm 
"abolishing" itself..)

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1. Soviet fascism & capm "abolishing" itself..

--------------------------------------------------
Soviet fascism & capm "abolishing" itself...

Andrew does exactly what might be expected from someone who shrinks back
from acknowledging the fascist aspects of the Stalinist regime in the
Soviet Union -- he provides an apology for this regime by claiming partly
that it was responsible for the  conquests of October and partly that it's
crimes weren't as bad as they have been painted ("Trotsky exaggerates") nor
as bad as those of the Nazis. Dave should perhaps make *his* position
clearer in relation to this apology.

Let's start with "1000 times worse than the Nazis".  I wrote:

>> Andrew's got this all arsy-versy. Trotsky's point is the fact that the
>> petty bourgeois and lumpen Nazis represent the "possessing and educated"
>> big bourgeoisie, whereas the Soviet bureaucracy "takes on bourgeois
>> customs" without having direct roots in  or bonds with "a national
>> bourgeoisie". The alienation of the Soviet bureaucracy from the people, its
>> perversion of the real class needs and aspirations of Soviet society, of
>> the workers' state, is in fact a thousand times more revolting than the
>> relationship of Nazism to the German bourgeois state. "This isn't like
>> fascism at all" -- it's *worse*.

Andrew reacts as follows:

>Yes, Hugh, there are those who argue that the Soviet bureaucracy was worse
>that the fascist state. But this is complete bullshit. A thousand times
>more revolting?!

Again this confusion between regime and state! I refuse to compare the
Soviet bureaucracy, as a regime, a superstructure, with the fascist state
as a totality of regime and socio-economic foundations, superstructure and
base. Comparing like with like, however, regime with regime, superstructure
with superstructure, the Stalinist regime was worse than the fascist regime
because of its class *betrayal*. As petty bourgeois agents of alien
imperialist interests, the bureaucracy was no natural outgrowth of an
imperialist country in crisis. The Nazis were rabid petty-bourgeois thugs
running a bourgeois state, they were no class traitors, merely executors of
short-term crisis interests of the bourgeoisie. Their violence,
irrationality and viciousness were consonant with the class basis of the
society they sprang from.  This was not the case with the Stalinist
bureaucracy, except in so far as the world as a whole was dominated by
imperialism. It is the treacherous perversity of Stalinist violence,
irrationality and viciousness in relation to the workers' state and the
interests of the proletariat that makes it worse than the fascists. The
fascists never subverted the world labour movement or socialism. Stalinism
did. The fascists held power in a few countries for a little over a decade
(a few decades in the case of Spain and Portugal). Stalinism held power in
many countries for many decades. The fascists may have acted as the
executioners of the German labour movement when Hitler came to power, but
Stalinist policies brought the fascists to power and placed the axe in
their hands. Stalinist policies, not fascist ones, led to the Second World
War. The Stalinists are responsible for more murders and deportations than
the fascists were. Worst of all, the Stalinists have strangled more
revolutions and revolutionary movements than the fascists ever did or could
have done.

You see, it's not just what they did, but what they prevented from
happening. The fascists prevented the normal exploitation of bourgeois
democracy running smoothly. The Stalinist bureaucracy prevented the
development of workers' democracy in the Soviet Union, they prevented the
development of a revolutionary workers' movement internationally, they held
up the construction of socialism for almost a century and brought the world
much closer to barbarism rather than socialism as the solution of the
terminal crisis of imperialism. These are crimes of an enormity that almost
beggars description.


In a later reply, with all flags flying, Andrew gives us a lecture on
fascism. I wrote:

> Let's recall that fascism is the counter-revolutionary destruction of the
> independent organizations of the working class run by petty-bourgeois,
> lumpen Bonapartist bureaucrats

and Andrew, with amazing light-mindedness, replied:

>Is this all fascism is? No. This is a caricature of fascism.

Is this *all*??? A *caricature*???

* counter-revolutionary

* destruction of independent organizations of the working class

* carried out by petty-bourgeois, lumpen, Bonapartist bureaucrats

what more does he want?

I'd already made it clear that the Stalinist bureaucracy was acting, if
indirectly, in the interests of imperialism. The difference (an important
one, of course) between the Stalinists and the Nazis (say) is that the
Nazis were a petty-bourgeois political stratum (no class!) running a
bourgeois state apparatus, while the Stalinists were a petty-bourgeois
political stratum (no class!) running a workers' state apparatus. Otherwise
they're as alike as peas in a pod.

Andrew's lecture runs:

>Fascism is a
>reactionary destruction of liberal polyarchy, and the placing in its stead
>a authoritarian state run by big industrial and finance capital.

This is liberal textbook stuff. It's a caricature and a half. And it's
wrong. The state is not run *by* big industrial and finance capital but
*for its benefit* by its lackeys in the state apparatus, in the same way as
in a bourgeois democracy or any other kind of regime in a bourgeois state.
What characterizes fascism isn't the "destruction of liberal polyarchy" but
the historical emergence of fascism as a Bonapartist petty-bourgeois
solution to insoluble crises of bourgeois democracy in the epoch of
imperialism. It is also characterized by the objective weakness of
proletarian leadership and the consequent weakness of the proletariat,
opening up the way for the petty-bourgeoisie to tail the big bourgeoisie as
the stronger class in the class struggle.


>Fascism
>means the destruction of any pretense to democratic government where the
>capitalist class rules directly through the bludgeon of a reactionary
>state.

*All* bourgeois states in the imperialist epoch are reactionary, they are
based on exploitation and the maintenance for ever of exploitation and the
oppression of the working class and have no progressive historical tasks
such as the overthrow of feudalism. What characterizes a fascist regime are
the features I've listed above and previously, most particularly the
destruction of all independent organizations of the working class.

The statement that what is overthrown by fascism is a "pretence to
democratic government" I can accept.

The capitalist class rules *indirectly* through lackeys, whether the regime
is fascist or some other variety. The indirectness is revealed by the
chunks of meat the lackeys carve out of national surplus for themselves.
Mind you, contradictions between the lackeys and the real rulers are seldom
allowed to develop very far, as the tight rein kept on the
Social-Democratic regime in Sweden for 50 odd years testifies.


>The bourgeoisie pulls about the state reactionary ideologies,
>national chauvinism, atavism, regeneration, even racism--ideologies whose
>idioms lay dormant already in the culture, cultivated by the fascist and
>other social conservative movements, activated by crisis.

Andrew seems to be claiming that the Stalinist bureaucracy was *not*

national chauvinist (even Lenin was fighting Stalinist Great Russian
chauvinism over the Georgian question in alliance with Trotsky before his
death)

atavistic (I wonder if he's seen Eisenstein's historical epics?)

racist (maybe Andrew doesn't count anti-Semitism as racist?)

regenerative (how about motherhood medals and the bulging muscles of
Socialist Realist works of "art", if this is what Andrew's on about? As
recently as the late 80s some bloody-minded Young Communists in Slovenia
pulled a fast one on the party by exhibiting a Nazi statue as a fine
example of "Socialist" aesthetics. Guess how popular they were with the
mandarins when the scandal became public knowledge.)

Andrew conveniently fails to mention the judiciary or censorship where the
parallels are just too blatant to deny.

>The fascist
>movement, having secured the middle strata of society, opportunistically
>enters into an alliance with its masters, the capitalist class. To think
>that fascism retains its petty bourgeois traits is to buy into a cartoon
>image of fascism.

They were a cartoon caricature of themselves. It took a Georg Grosz to do
them justice. How about the concentration camp commandants and doctors in
their carpet slippers and pretty lace curtains? What about the anal
retentive petty-bourgeois bookkeeping that went on just the other side of
the gas chamber walls -- so many sets of dentures, so many gold teeth, so
many pairs of glasses. The uniforms and rituals...


>And to suppose the Soviet Union was ever fascist, in any
>of its structures, is ridiculous. The socioeconomic foundation of fascism
>is capitalism.

This is a complete non-sequitur, totally ignoring the whole argument so
far. Pure assertion.  For reasons he gives, and that I have repeated,
Trotsky states that (as Dave quoted):

	Meanwhile some ultralefts
	have already reached the ultimate absurdity by affirming that it is
	necessary to sacrifice the social structure of the USSR in order to
	overthrow the Bonapartist oligarchy! THEY HAVE NO SUSPICION THAT THE
	USSR MINUS THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE FOUNDED BY THE OCTOBER
	REVOLUTION WOULD BE A FASCIST REGIME.
	[In defence of Marxism, p.69 in New Park Edition]

For anyone capable of distinguishing between base and superstructure, this
is the equivalent of saying that if you take away the October base you are
left with a fascist superstructure. In other words that the USSR was an
extremely contradictory formation -- a workers' state and a fascist regime.
Now Trotsky is typically cautious in phrasing his conclusion negatively. He
doesn't say straight out that the regime in the Soviet Union is fascist in
so many words as an affirmative statement. However, to argue as Andrew does
that such an affirmative statement is ridiculous or stretching Trotsky's
argument to breaking point is nonsense. Each time I characterize the regime
(in the sense I have indicated a thousand times by now), Andrew comes back
as if I was describing the socio-economic foundations of the state. This is
persistent and wilful distortion of what I am saying.

I wrote:

>> The Stalinist bureaucracy was serving two masters, in class terms. One
>> was the dictatorship of the proletariat, and one was world imperialism.
>> History has shown us which master was served most faithfully.

And Andrew reacted:

>Huh? What in the hell does this mean?

It means just what it says. It preserved the working class foundations of
the dictatorship of the proletariat as long as it thought this was the best
way of preserving its privileges, and at the same time it served
imperialism by strangling revolutions and the international labour
movement. As its degeneration neared a condition of liquid rottenness it
contracted closer and closer ties of business and indebtedness. It would
rather die than renege on a debt to Western capitalists (Castro's refusal
to support a policy of No payment of the foreign debt, for instance),
whereas every minute of every day it reneged on its socialist duty and
constitutional pledges to the working people. When the Soviet bureaucracy
handed over the heart of the Soviet Union to imperialism and launched
restoration, this was historically conclusive proof of the Trotskyist
analysis of the contradictory character of the USSR and the role of the
bureaucracy in it as more faithful servants of the bourgeoisie than of the
working class.

>> Nazism (classical fascism)
>
>Hugh, Nazism is derivative fascism. Hitler used the Italian model, but
>built onto it. National socialism came much later in time than fascism in
>Italy. If any form of fascism is "classical," it is Italian fascism.

Big deal. People today thinking of fascism have the Nazi system in mind,
and it's the variety of classical fascism that developed furthest.

>> 	capitalist foundations -- needs social revolution to overturn
>> 	fascist regime -- is overthrown as part of social revolution -- OR
>> 			replaced by another bourgeois regime
>
>Fascism was also overthrown in World War II. It was replaced by
>parliamentary bourgeois regimes in West Germany, Italy, Japan, etc. It
>struggled on in Spain. It was replaced by state socialist regimes in East
>Germany, Croatia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, becoming integrated
>into a socialist world system.

For someone picking nits all the time this is very sloppily written. "It
[fascism] was replaced by state socialist regimes in East Germany, Croatia,
and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, becoming integrated into a socialist world
system." Fascism becoming integrated into a socialist world system!!! A
truly Freudian slip ...


>This is concrete historical reality--not
>silly speculative formulae involving mix-and-match political and economic
>forms.

Hm. Andrew is presenting pivotal historical changes as if they occurred
without conscious human intervention. "Replaced by" in the passive voice
without even a gesture towards indicating what forces made the replacement
possible or carried it through, or under what concrete historical
conditions or relationship of class forces. Objectivism. A cough and a spit
from Stalinist fatalism.


>> Stalinism (not classical fascism, but fascist regime running a workers'
>>state)
>
>Listen to this! "Stalinism [is a] fascist regime running a workers state."

Exactly what Trotsky said in the quote from In Defence of Marxism, only he
put it negatively.

>> I don't want to get hung up on words, however. I think it's useful to use
>> the label fascist to characterize the Stalinist regime and its
>> anti-working-class positions -- it brings out the complete unacceptability
>> of the setup.

>Ah, I get it now. It doesn't matter if calling the Soviet bureaucracy
>"fascist" is historically inaccurate or incorrect from a political
>economic framework. We call it "fascist" because it is "useful to use the
>label fascist to characterize the Stalinist regime and its anti-working
>class positions." And why is it "useful"? Because "it brings out the
>complete unacceptability of the setup." This, I suppose, is in keeping
>with the bourgeois practice of calling fascism a "socialist movement,"
>because it usefully distracts the public from the reality that fascism is
>authoritarian capitalism.

OK, so Andrew *does* want to get hung up on words. But behind the words it
is emerging more and more clearly that Andrew is on his way to becoming
another Stalinist apologist. Unable to distinguish between different
political currents, their active creation and organization etc, he flees to
some fatalist objectivism that worships the established fact. Whatever is,
is right. October defeated capitalism, but if fell from the sky. Socialism
is better than capitalism (that at least is an independent stand to take),
so anything at the head of it must be right. Divinely imposed, as the
actual mechanisms of parties and conflict of policy etc are "exaggerations"
or clashes of personality or whatever. The Moscow trials and the political
assassinations are discounted -- after all, nobody's perfect ....

To me this looks like the road Andrew is heading down. His final rhetorical
flourish just provides more confirmation:

>Somebody clue me is. First, are these guys Trotskyists? And, second, is
>this what Trotskyists believe?

What is so un-Trotskyist about what I wrote?

Why doesn't Andrew know for himself what he would consider Trotskyist? A
strange gap for a would-be Marxist polymath and speed-reader of Trotskyism
to boot ...

As for what Trotskyists believe, there's no problem at all with the
content. Some fuzziness at the edges exists with people and groups
incapable of handling the contradictions involved in the character of the
Soviet Union -- some veer off towards neo-Stalinism because they cling
one-sidedly to the conquests of October and refuse to acknowledge the
depths of counter-revolutionary degeneration to which the Stalinist
bureaucracy sank, while others just as one-sidedly grasp the horrors of the
Stalinist regime but refuse to acknowledge the conquests of October and
veer off towards state capitalism (or worse).

To me it looks as if Andrew is rapidly heading for the neo-Stalinist
corral, which would be a crying shame. We already have one Louis Proyect
and that's more than enough (he was once an active Trot). If Andrew doesn't
get active soon, or light off to Turkey (or Brazil, for instance) the way
Rahul did, my prognosis for his further political development is not
uplifting.

On the other hand, if he can wrap his mind round the dialectic, get
organized and start participating in the class struggle with the working
class, there's no telling how far he might go. I for one would be delighted
to have him by my side.

Cheers,

Hugh
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