Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 23:46:59 +0100
Subject: Re: Stalin explained


Wasting his breath replying to Mark A, Kevin C wrote:

>        What other option do you think Stalin had other than dictatorship
>and isolation at the time?

It wasn't a question of Stalin at the time. It was a question of the Soviet
leadership, including Trotsky and many an Old Bolshevik later to be
assassinated.

The Soviet option was to continue to enforce the dictatorship of the
proletariat or perish as a workers' state.

'Isolation' oversimplifies. 'Insulation' from the operations of the world
market, as far as this was possible, was necessary (and painful). The
greatest possible openness and linkage in relation to the world proletariat
was also the single biggest political necessity. Trotsky and others in the
Left Opposition realized this. Stalin and his various allies didn't.


>What type of a revolution could Stalin have
>made without protecting his economy from Western influence (as in cheap
>consumer goods)?

Stalin managed both to protect 'his' (ha!) economy from Western influence
to some extent and to make a counterrevolution. Stalin was not interested
in making a national or international revolution, merely in consolidating
the power setup in the hands of the bureaucracy and orchestrating a chorus
of assent to his own leadership of the bureaucracy.


>Should Stalin have continued on the guided capitalist road
>that Lenin took after the 1917 revolution?

In fact, he did. It was Trotsky and the Left Opposition who were quickest
to see the need for industrialization and in fact produced a programme and
policy for it. Eugene Preobrazhensky's book The New Economics (1926),
published in English by OUP provides an idea of the Marxist economic
reasoning behind this policy (primitive socialist accumulation). Stalin
supported the fattening of the Kulaks beyond any economic necessity, with
the support of a right-wing majority including Bukharin, merely to break
the Left Opposition and establish his own control in the Party and in
power. Once the Left Opposition was defeated, he was able to steal the
ideas of the industrializers, put them in jackboots (the ideas that is),
behead the kulaks, dump Bukharin and others who thought the issues were
about the economy and not about factional power struggle, and march on into
history as the greatest tyrant of the twentieth century.

>Or should he have just given up
>on the revolution when Europe turned away from Bolshevism and towards
>fascism?

He did. His policies on for instance the British General Strike of 1926 and
the Chinese revolution of 1927 were disastrous for the proletariat of these
countries and the world. Pure class collaborationism, turning the interests
and lives of the proletariat over into the hands of the class enemy.

The way you phrase this point is misleading. Europe, then as now, was a
stretch of territory with roads, railways and buildings. Then as now it
just sat there. Human beings, divided into the working class and the
bourgeoisie (and landowners) were engaged, as always, in class struggle,
and the results varied. Fascism gained a foothold early on in Italy, but
didn't win power in Germany until 1933, and then only with the destruction
of the working class as a result of the Stalinists falsely characterizing
the Social-Democrats as their main enemy and letting Hitler grow in
strength and seize power by default.

In fact, it was Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy giving up on the
revolution that prepared the way for the victories of fascism in Germany
and in Spain.


>What would have you done if you were in Stalin's position in
>1924?

This is a laugh. Mark would have turned the whole caboodle over to the
imperialists without batting an eyelid. He has no stake whatever in the
emancipation of the working class.


All in all, it's no defence of October to say that Stalin was just doing
what he had to do if the Soviet Union was to survive at all. On every
policy point there were explicit choices represented by various party
groupings, in the 1920s at least. Later there were choices to be made
regardless of the non-existence of any explicit opposition line. On every
issue Stalin and his supporters made policy decisions against the interests
of the Soviet and international working class.

Their only interest in maintaining the Soviet Union as a workers' state was
to provide a material base for themselves and their power. When the
contradictions finally became too hot to handle in the 1980s, they cut
loose from the workers' state and tried to sell out to imperialism, keeping
what they could of position and privilege. That's where we're at right now.



Cheers,

Hugh




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