File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-09-05.145, message 1


Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 00:40:55 +0100
From: m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Hugh Rodwell)
Subject: Re: Stalin explained


Chris opens up his defence of Stalinism with an interesting pirouette.

>I was interested in Hugh's commentary on this thread, which I felt
>was not purely polemical. It is possible that things could be
>achieved in discussion here, different from what might be
>achieved by discussion in "another place".
>
>I welcomed Hugh's early remark :
>
>>>>>>
>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.
><<<<<

Then, step by step, he proceeds to absolve those responsible -- Stalin and
the bureaucracy he led -- from their crimes, and to carp at those who both
made valid proposals for solving the problems facing the Soviet Union and
also fell victim to Stalin's reign of terror.

He starts off:

>Strong as the  criticisms are that have been levelled
>at Stalin as an individual

but doesn't bother to repeat or refute the criticisms or tell us where
their strength might lie. Neither does he appear to realize that the most
damning criticisms are those levelled at Stalin in his capacity as a leader
of the proletariat, not as an individual, since he goes on to say:

>I find it more convincing to read
>analysis of the inter-war Soviet Union in terms of a dynamic to
>which many people and circumstances contributed.

as if this somehow lessened the responsibility for counter-revolutionary
policies.

I love the following example:

>On more than
>one occasion it has emerged that in polemic untoward developments
>have been attributed to Stalin or Stalinism, where there is no evidence
>that he was involved, personally, eg the treatment of the KPD opposition
>in 1923-4.

Now, of the dozen or more historically crucial charges against Stalin and
the Stalinist bureaucracy that I've seen raised here and elsewhere recently
(such as the beheading of the Chinese revolution in 1927 and the handing
over of power in Germany to the Nazis in 1933), not one has involved the
incident Chris mentions. And note the language: 'untoward developments' --
the Shanghai massacre 'an untoward development'! The victory of Nazism and
the crushing of the strongest labour movement in Europe 'an untoward
development'!

And once again, the issue is not Stalin's personality, but the policies he
put forward and *executed*, to coin a phrase.


>Stalin was powerful partly because he rode as well as consolidated
>a current of thinking and an approach that many shared.

So was Hitler. So was Lenin. So is the Pope. So were Thatcher and Reagan.


Then we get to Chris's real errand:

>The weakness of Trotskyist critiques of the interwar Soviet Union
>seems to me that they are caught in an inescapable trap of always
>being oppositional. Hugh tries to address this in part by the
>statement I have quoted approvingly, but later I feel he slips into
>this again. Even when it looks strong it is weak.
>
>Trotskyists can always point out to something that Stalin or the
>Stalinist did that was wrong. Any oppositional group can do that
>about people who have some power. The critique goes so far but
>fails to convince.

The depth, Chris, the depth...

I think I'll put 'an inescapable trap of always being oppositional' into my
golden book of deathless phrases.

Just look at it. The 'failure to convince' boils down to one thing. Lack of
state power. You're wrong (or unconvincing) because you're in opposition.
-- Might is right. -- Whatever is, is right. -- I'm the king of the castle,
and you're a dirty rascal!

Lenin fails to convince against the Tsar, because he is 'caught in an
inescapable trap of always being oppositional'! But from 1917 on he is very
convincing indeed...

Mao fails to convince against the Japanese and the Nationalists, because he
is 'caught in an inescapable trap of always being oppositional'! But from
1949 on he is very convincing indeed, except of course in Taiwan and Hong
Kong...

Uncle Ho fails to convince in South Vietnam, because he is 'caught in an
inescapable trap of always being oppositional'! Except that he is very
convincing indeed in North Vietnam...

The Sandinistas are very convincing indeed in Nicaragua between 1979 and
1990. But then all of a sudden they become 'caught in an inescapable trap
of always being oppositional' -- second time round!

Mandela fails to convince in South Africa, because he is 'caught in an
inescapable trap of always being oppositional'! Then all is forgiven as the
man becomes president and starts convincing us all...

Abimael Guzman most definitely fails to convince in Peru. Not because of
any mistaken policies (pozhalsta!) but because he is 'caught in an
inescapable trap of always being oppositional'!

And the whole lot of us here -- Trots, Maoists, Gramsci-ites, anarchists,
Stalinists (hi Richard!), ex-SWPers, Broad Lefters, CPers, Laborites,
Mormons, Blake-ites, Laestedians, you name it -- fail to convince for the
simple, reductionist reason that we're 'caught in an inescapable trap of
always being oppositional'!


So...

>Trotskyists can always point out to something that Stalin or the
>Stalinist did that was wrong.

Only *one* Stalinist? ;-)

You bet they can, and do, and will. 'Always' is right on target. Anyone who
is led blindfold to a list of Stalinism's policies and actions from 1924 on
and sticks a pin into it will pinpoint something that's wrong. Criminally
wrong. Counterrevolutionary.

>Any oppositional group can do that
>about people who have some power.

Shame on them -- see my list of culprits above.

>That is why IMHO contributors in another place
>have some force when they call for a sympathetic analysis of the
>historical experience of the efforts to build socialism.

Which being interpreted means: 'Lay off Stalin and the bureaucracy, they
were only doing what they had to, you'd do the same in their place, so shut
it -- and I wish we were in power again so we could make you!'


>This can be called the experience of the dictatorship of the
>proletariat. Put in more neutral terms it is about the challenge
>of actually using power.

See! It's universal -- all cats are grey in the dark. Botha, de Klerk,
Mobutu, the Shah of Iran, the Viceroy of India, Suharto, Pinochet, Franco,
the list goes on for ever. Anyhow, they all had a rough time of it facing
that brutal 'challenge of actually using power'. And all us unsympathetic
brutes who failed to come up with a 'sympathetic analysis'! Time we
acknowledged the white man's burden, eh Chris?

>It is not enough to criticise mistakes in the
>use of power, if one does so in a tone that fails to accept the
>potential responsibility of the choices that power entails.

You mean, my responsibility as a potential fascist dictator? Or is this
just Menshevik whining like in 1917, when a leading Menshevik was going on
in the Soviet about 'there's nobody here willing to take the burden of
power on their own shoulders' and one voice declared loud and clear, and
rather sharply, 'oh yes there is. We are'. Lenin's voice. But of course, he
failed to convince, because he was 'caught in an inescapable trap of always
being oppositional'!


>I think this boils down to two areas. Criticisms of Soviet Foreign
>policy under Stalin, of course are sometimes correct in retrospect.

Names and pack drill, comrade Saboteur!

>However I think they underestimate the extent to which Lenin himself
>argued for an extremely pragmatic foreign policy.

Ah, that's better! Sew his head back on! It was all *pragmatic*, and the
Great Lenin himself set the seal of his approval on pragmatic, sorry
*extremely* pragmatic foreign policy. So everything's OK.

Would it be too much to ask for examples of Lenin justifying an 'extremely
pragmatic foreign policy' in a way that could be transferred as is to
justifying Stalinist foreign policy? Like Lenin's support and encouragement
of the revolutionary Comintern and Stalin's disembowelling of the same and
ultimate dismantling of it.


>On the question of the use of power within the Soviet Union,
>Trotskyist critiques IMO have plausibility when they point to
>the structure of the "bureaucracy". But they are under some obligation
>to say what should have been in its place.

Read Preobrazhensky's New Economics, Chris, for Christ's sake. Then the
Platform of the Left Opposition. Then everything Trotsky wrote from 1926 to
1940 when Stalin finally got the icepick into his brain. Nothing but
analysis of the situation as is, of the policies of the Stalinists in
power, and of the necessary counter-policies. Not forgetting the
Transitional Programme. Policy first last and all the time, and the
briefing materials and discussion that lay behind the policy proposals into
the bargain.

'They are under some obligation to say what should have been in its place'.
You sound like a braindead Tory MP talking to his loyal constituents about
Labour at election time! More sinister is the parallel with fascists like
Pinochet who would dearly love opponents to hand him their heads on a
platter: 'Any complaints?' The terrible irony highlighting the ignorance of
Chris's point here is that the Left Opposition and its successors *did* say
'what should have been in its place' as clearly as they could, and many
paid for this with their lives.


>The historical record is actually a little mixed even though I accept
>that Stalin and "Stalinism" can convincingly be linked to the
>interests and outlook of the official stratum in the Soviet Union.

Mirabile dictu!

>One of the features of the purges which hit the party officials hard,
>was a sort of pre-vision of the Cultural Revolution in China, albeit
>done by administrative means. Indeed at one point Stalin called for
>a cultural revolution.

Ah, so not to worry, Uncle Joe was unwittingly on the right track with his
purges.


>And one of the ironies that I think Trotskyist critics have to take on
>board, is that the people who started the purges were also the
>people who stopped them.

This is *irony*?! What's ironic about it?

The purges were instituted because the mass of the bureaucracy made a
virtue out of do-nothing rigidity, implementing a half-baked and
indigestible party line for all they were worth. The line was wrong to
start with and didn't take long to unravel completely, necessitating a
change. For every zig, a zag. Only bureaucrats running a zig routine, hate
zags. So they had to go. And the only body with sufficient clout to
initiate a new line was at the very top. Administer the enema, collect the
purgings, flush them away, let the gut refill, Bob's your uncle! *Of
course* the people who started the purges were the ones who stopped them.
Just as with the Great Cultural Revolution.

Interestingly enough, in the latest, greatest round of purges, it got out
of hand, and the Gorby gang got dumped itself. It remains to see how the
struggle of the bureaucracy to transform itself into a bourgeoisie will be
reflected in the power structures of the new state in the former Soviet
Union, when and if such a state is consolidated. In the current
transitional flux, there's no stable power base emerging as yet.

Chris concludes:

>At least Hugh concedes that in the
>early 20's all Bolsheviks including Trotsky were committed to
>trying to make a dictatorship of the proletariat work.

I concede nothing. Especially I have no reason to concede anything
regarding Trotsky. My point was that the Bolsheviks were committed to
*working for the survival* of the dictatorship of the proletariat, for
their various reasons. This isn't the same thing as trying to make it work.
As long as Lenin was alive and vigorous, Stalin was anxious to keep in his
good graces, even if it was a pain. This was a fairly effective constraint
on him, his ambitions and his supporters until around 1923. After that,
every increase in the power of the organism at his disposal was accompanied
by a decrease in understanding of what actually made it tick. He was in
charge of an organism about whose motive force he knew nothing. (Just to be
clear -- I'm talking about the workers' state and not the bureaucratic
regime -- Stalin knew well enough how the bureaucracy worked!) He treated a
self-expanding army of liberated workers as if it was a squad of armoured
cars or maybe a team of broken-down picador's nags. And every misplaced
wallop with the spanner or cut of the whip (anyone recall the
horse-whipping dream in The Brothers Karamazov?) slowed the growth of the
revolution and let its energy leak away. Since 1989, we have been
witnessing the ultimate effects of this on the ability of the dictatorship
of the proletariat to survive.



Cheers,

Hugh




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