Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 07:54:56 +0100
From: Chris Burford <cburford-AT-gn.apc.org>
Subject: M-I: The Bolshevik trajectory


Barkley to Louis P>>>

            As far as I am
concerned your material on Zinoviev goes at least part of
the way in punching a hole in the "Leninism leads to
Stalinism" argument.  Yes, I have made such arguments in
the past, but I am not set in concrete on this.  <<


Yes Barkley's position has been a particularly interesting one
over the last year, for testing out the degree of continuity and 
the degree of difference between "Leninism" and "Stalinism".

Louis P's contribution (as well as some others over the months)
have demonstrated that not all the evils that developed can 
coherently be explained by laying them at Stalin's door personally.
Indeed the more sophisticated Trotskyist critiques of "Stalinism"
really treat it as a phenomenon and argue that it arises out of 
a certain material base.  Unfortunately though, the process of 
calling the phenomenon by this name muddles the wider question up
with the balance sheet about Stalin as an individual, and 
whether he alone was responsible for a nightmare of deaths and 
repression in the CPSU(B). 

I have also been testing out in Spoons 
marxism space the question of continuity and discontinuity between
Lenin and Stalin. These workshops seem to me to work a bit like 
the Windows game Minefield. You can gradually stake out ground
inch by inch, by seeing whether you detonate a mine. I did not know
whether there was any serious literature refuting the summary of 
Leninism in "Foundations of Leninism" by Stalin, (quite possibly aided
in subsequent editions, by the resources of the CPSU(B)). 

But I am reasonably confident that such a robust participant as 
Hugh Rodwell would be able to lay his hands on such a refutation out
of all the Trotskyist criticisms of Stalinism over the decades,
if one existed. But even if Hugh thinks he defeated me and other 
"Stalinists" pseudo or otherwise, I saw no such convincing 
demonstration. Even over a passage from the book about the 
progressive nature of the Emir of Afghanistan.

So how do we have a more sophisticated explanatory model of 
the process of development and change within the Bolshevik 
tradition? My view increasingly, is that in an ultimate sense
it was nobody's fault. What happened was ultimately 
independent of the will of any one individual. 


As far as I am concerned Louis P's
more recent contributions about Zinoviev demonstrate most convincingly
it was *not* all Stalin's fault, rather than it was all Zinoviev's
fault. So serious discussion has to move onto a more sophisticated model
of history.

My hunch is that there was something in the Leninist model of the 
Party and its method of handling conflict of ideas, that for a time
seems very "democratic" (there is in all parties a contradiction
between democracy and centralism - which is a different question from
whether the democracy of bourgeois states is as classless as it
claims to be), but which was unstable, and in certain historical
situations, including of course the death of Lenin, was likely to 
gravitate towards a more stable, consolidated, rigid form.

But then I am a devotee of chaos theory, which IMO in its discussion
of phase changes is not so far away from the dialectical materialist
concept of quantitative changes leading to qualitative ones.

I suspect that only some sort of historiographical and epistemological
overview like this, can avoid being caught in endless skirmishing
about good Bolshevik x versus bad Bolshevik y, serious though the
lessons are about particular policies and actions.

Regards,

Chris Burford,

London.




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