Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 22:09:50 +0100
Subject: Re: Stalin explained


I appreciate the comments of Jorn, John, Barkley and Justin,
particularly since I am making some leaps here.

One theme I am drawing on is the split between Trotsky and 
Stalin. Stalin took as his casus belli this statement of 
Trotsky in December 1923

'The degeneration of the "old guard" has been observed in history more
than once. Let us take the latest and most glaring historical example:
the leaders and parties of the Second International. We know that
Wilhelm Liebknecht, Bebel, Singer, Victor Adler, Kautsky, Bernstein,
Lafargue, Guesde, and others, were the immediate and direct pupils of
Marx and Engels. We know however, that all those leaders - some partly,
and others wholly - degenerated into opportunism.' ....

'We, that is we 'old ones', must say that our generation, which naturally
plays a leading role in the Party, has no self-sufficient guarantee
against the gradual and imperceptible weakening of the proletarian and
revolutionary spirit, assuming that the Party tolerates a further
growth and consolidation of the bureaucratic-apparatus method of policy
which are transforming the younger generation into passive educational
material and are inevitably creating estrangement between the apparatus
and the membership, between the old and the young.'

'The youth - the Party's truest barometer - react most sharply of all
against Party bureaucracy.' ... 'The youth must capture the revolutionary
formulas by storm...'



Now this is remarkably consistent with later Trotskyist 
criticisms of the social base of "Stalinism" with the old 
Bolsheviks turned into the nomenclatura, who would like to 
have been old Bolsheviks. At the same time, as Barkley points
out the country has got to be run. 

One of the problems is if you have too simple a model of 
how socialist democracy can perform. No doubt there were
some people who were sufficiently disaffected to engage in 
sabotage in the 30's but I assume that the prevalence of 
accusations of sabotage is a reflection of the frustration of 
officials who have no knowledge of management. 

It was an early stage of the socialist state and there was 
a tendency to rely on mass political exhortation and emulation
- Stakhanovites in the Soviet Union, Great Leap forward in 
China. And then the attacks on those who must be dragging 
their feet or impeding the building of socialism. 

I agree with Jorn that much of the functions of a modern state
are about handling conflict for the ruling class, but I agree 
even more with Justin that under socialism contradictions and 
conflict are universal. Equilibrating and channeling those 
conflicts takes much detailed work. 

Really I assume the Trotskyist tradition does not have an 
answer for this. The Maoist tradition ran into serious problems
in the cultural revolution that Mao could not resolve in a 
stable way before his death. What is called the Stalinist 
tradition, and which evolved into say the Eastern European 
states, accepted to a degree the nomenclatura  but did not 
give them as much in the way of privileges as western capitalist 
countries do, but they called it building socialism.

My fear is that there are no simplistic solutions to this, and
at the very moment in the belly of the beast, arguments about 
the organisation of schooling, rural conservation, health 
delivery, and urban planning, all have both a democratic 
aspect to them and a capitalist aspect. The two aspects may
be intertwined in a complex way and their interrelationship
may be veiled. 

Could people coming from Trotskyist tradition consider the 
hypothesis that if the bureaucracy was the social basis 
for "Stalinism", the solution has turned out to be 
more bureaucracy and more sophisticated bureacracy, ie 
a developed intelligentsia. 

Chris Burford
London.



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