Bolshevism and Stalinism
--------------------------------------------------------------------

People :
----------------------------------

Author : Paul Mattick

Text :
----------------------------------



Source: Kurasje Archive;Transcribed: by Andy Blunden, for marxists.org 2003; Proofed: and corrected by Geoff Traugh, August 2005.
Further corrected by Jonas Holmgren, July 2009.

The following is an abridged edition of Mattick's review, originally published in Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2, Mar/Apr 1947. The full version is available in PDF format.

The alleged purpose of Trotsky’s biography of Stalin[1] is to show “how a personality
of this sort was formed, and how it came to power by usurpation of the right to
such an exceptional role.” The real purpose of the book, however, is to
show why Trotsky lost the power position he temporarily occupied and why his
rather than Stalin’s name should follow Lenin’s. Prior to
Lenin’s death it had always been ‘Lenin and
Trotsky’; Stalin’s name had invariably been near or at the end of
any list of prominent Bolsheviks. On one occasion Lenin even suggested that he
put his own signature second to Trotsky’s. In brief, the book helps to
explain why Trotsky was of the opinion “that he was the natural successor
to Lenin” and in effect is a biography of both Stalin and Trotsky.

All beginnings are small, of course, and the Bolshevism of Lenin and Trotsky
differs from present-day Stalinism just as Hitler’s brown terror of 1933
differed from the Nazism of World War II. That there is nothing in the arsenal
of Stalinism that cannot also be found in that of Lenin and Trotsky is attested
to by the earlier writings of Trotsky himself.[2] For example Trotsky, like Stalin, introduced
compulsory labor service as a ‘socialist principle’. He,
too, was convinced “that not one serious socialist will begin to deny to
the Labor State the right to lay its hands upon the worker who refuses to
execute his labor power.” It was Trotsky who hurried to stress the
‘socialistic character’ of inequality, for, as he said,
“those workers who do more for the general interest than others receive
the right to a greater quantity of the social product than the lazy, the
careless, and the disorganizers.” It was his opinion that everything must
be done to “assist the development of rivalry in the sphere of
production.”

Of course, all this was conceived as the ‘socialist principle’
of the ‘transformation period’. It was dictated by objective
difficulties in the way of full socialization. There was not the desire but the
need to strengthen party dictatorship until it led to the abolishment of even
those freedoms of activity which, in one fashion or another, had been granted
by the bourgeois state. However, Stalin, too, can offer the excuse of
necessity.

In order to find other arguments against Stalinism than his personal dislike
for a competitor in intra-party struggles, Trotsky must discover and construct
political differences between himself and Stalin, and between Stalin and Lenin
in order to support his assertion that without Stalin things would have been
different in Russia and elsewhere.

There could not have been any ‘theoretic’ differences between
Lenin and Stalin, as the only theoretical work bearing the name of the latter
had been inspired and supervised by Lenin. And if Stalin’s ‘nature
craved’ the centralized party machine, it was Lenin who constructed the
perfect machine for him, so that on that score, too, no differences could
arise. In fact, as long as Lenin was active, Stalin was no trouble to him,
however troublesome he may have been to ‘The Number Two
Bolshevik’.

Still, in order for Trotsky to explain the ‘Soviet Thermidor’,
there must be a difference between Leninism and Stalinism, provided, of course,
there was such a Thermidor. On this point, Trotsky has brought forth various
ideas as to when it took place, but in his Stalin biography he ignores the
question of time in favor of the simple statement that it had something to do
with the “increasing privileges for the bureaucracy”. However, this
only brings us back to the early period of the Bolshevik dictatorship which
found Lenin and Trotsky engaged in creating the state bureaucracy and
increasing its efficiency by increasing its privileges.

Competitors for Power

The fact that the relentless struggle for position came into the open only
after Lenin’s death suggests something other than the Soviet Thermidor.
It simply indicates that by that time the Bolshevik state was of sufficient
strength, or was in a position, to disregard to a certain degree both the
Russian masses and the international bourgeoisie. The developing bureaucracy
began to feel sure that Russia was theirs for keeps; the fight for the plums of
the Revolution entered its more general and more serious stage.

All adversaries in this struggle stressed the need of dictatorship in view
of the unsolved internal frictions between ‘workers’ and
‘peasants’, the economic and technological backwardness of the
country as a whole, and the constant danger of attack from the outside. But
within this setting of dictatorship, all sorts of arguments could be
raised. The power-struggle within the developing ruling class expressed itself
in policy-proposals either for or against the interests of the peasants, either
for or against the limitation of factory councils, either for or against an
offensive policy on the international front. High-sounding theories were
expounded with regard to the estimation of the peasantry, the relationship
between bureaucracy and revolution, the question of party generations, etc. and
reached their climax in the Trotsky-Stalin controversy on the ‘Permanent
Revolution’ and the theory of ‘Socialism in one Country’.

It is quite possible that the debaters believed their own phrases; yet,
despite their theoretical differentiations, whenever they acted upon a real
situation they all acted alike: In order to suit their own needs, they
naturally expressed identical things in different terms. If Trotsky rushes to
the front - to all fronts in fact - he merely defends the fatherland. But
Stalin “is attracted by the front, because here for the first time he
could work with the most finished of all the administrative machines, the
military machine” for which, by the way, Trotsky claims all credit. If
Trotsky pleads for discipline, he shows his ‘iron hand’; if Stalin
does the same, he deals with a ‘heavy hand’.

If Trotsky’s bloody suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion was a
‘tragic necessity’ Stalin’s suppression of the Georgian
independence movement is in the manner of a “great-Russian Russifier,
riding roughshod over the rights of his own people as a nation”. And
vice versa: suggestions made by Trotsky are called false and
counter-revolutionary by Stalin’s henchmen; when carried out under
Stalin’s auspices, they become additional proof of the great
leader’s wisdom.

To understand Bolshevism, and in a narrower sense Stalinism, it is not
enough to follow the superficial and often silly controversies between
Stalinists and Trotskyites. After all, the Russian Revolution embraces more
than just the Bolshevik Party. It was not even initiated by organized political
groups but by spontaneous reactions of the masses to the breakdown of an
already precarious economic system in the wake of military defeat. The February
upheavals ‘started’ with hunger riots in market places, protest
strikes in factories, and the spontaneous declaration of solidarity with the
rioters on the part of the soldiers. But all spontaneous movements in modern
history have been accompanied by organized forces. As soon as the collapse of
Czarism was imminent, organizations came to the fore with directives and
definite political goals.

If prior to the Revolution Lenin had stressed organization rather than
spontaneity, it was because of the retarded Russian conditions, which gave the
spontaneous movements a backward character. Even the politically advanced
groups offered only limited programs. The industrial workers desired
capitalistic reforms similar to those enjoyed by the workers in more
capitalistically advanced countries. The petty-bourgeoisie and important layers
of the capitalist class wanted a Western bourgeois democracy. The peasants
desired land in a capitalist agriculture. Though progressive for Czarist
Russia, these demands were of the essence of bourgeois revolution.

The new liberalistic February government attempted to continue the war. But
it was the conditions of war against which the masses were rebelling. All
promised reforms within the Russian setting of that time and within the
existing imperialistic power relationships were doomed to remain empty phrases;
there was no way of directing the spontaneous movements into those channels
desired by the government. In new upsurges the Bolsheviks came into power not
by way of a second revolution but by a forced change of government.
This seizure of power was made easy by the lack of interest that the restless
masses were showing in the existing government. The October coup, as
Lenin said, “was easier than lifting a feather.” The final victory
was “practically achieved by default ... Not a single regiment rose to
defend Russian democracy ... The struggle for supreme power over an empire
that comprised one-sixth of the terrestrial globe was decided between amazingly
small forces on both sides in the provinces as well as in the two capital
cities.”

The Bolsheviks did not try to restore the old conditions in order to reform
them, but declared themselves in favor of the concrete results of the
conceptually backward spontaneous movements: the ending of the war, the
workers’ control of industry, the expropriation of the ruling classes and
the division of land. And so they stayed in power.

The pre-revolutionary demands of the Russian masses had been backward for
two reasons: they had long been realized in the main capitalist nations, and
they could no longer be realized in view of existing world conditions. At a
time when the concentration and centralization process of world capitalism had
brought about the decline of bourgeois democracy almost everywhere, it was no
longer possible to initiate it afresh in Russia. If laissez faire
democracy was out of the question, so were all those reforms in capital-labor
relations usually related to social legislation and trade-unionism. Capitalist
agriculture, too, had passed beyond the breaking up of feudal estates and
production for a capitalist market to the industrialization of agriculture and
its consequent incorporation into the concentration process of capital.

The Bolsheviks and Mass Spontaneity

The Bolsheviks did not claim responsibility for the Revolution. They gave
full credit to the spontaneous movements. Of course, they underlined the
obvious fact that Russia’s previous history, which included the Bolshevik
Party, had lent some kind of vague revolutionary consciousness to the
unorganized masses and they were not backward about asserting that without
their leadership the course of the Revolution would have been different and
most probably would have led to a counter-revolution. “Had the
Bolsheviks not seized power,” writes Trotsky, “the world would have
had a Russian name for Fascism five years before the March of Rome.”

But counter-revolution attempts on the part of the traditional powers failed
not because of any conscious direction of the spontaneous movements, not
because of Lenin’s “sharp eyes, which surveyed the situation
correctly,” but because of the fact that these movements could not be
diverted from their own course. If one wants to use the term at all,
the ‘counter-revolution’ possible in the Russia of 1917 was that
inherent in the Revolution itself, that is, in the opportunity it offered the
Bolsheviks to restore a centrally-directed social order for the perpetuation of
the capitalistic divorce of the workers from the means of production and the
consequent restoration of Russia as a competing imperialist power.

During the revolution, the interests of the rebelling masses and of the
Bolsheviks merged to a remarkable degree. Beyond the temporary merger, there
also existed a deep unity between the socializing concepts of the Bolsheviks
and the consequences of the spontaneous movements. Too
‘backward’ for socialism but also too ‘advanced’ for
liberal capitalism, the Revolution could end only in that consistent form of
capitalism which the Bolsheviks considered a pre-condition of socialism,
namely, State-capitalism.

By identifying themselves with the spontaneous movement they could not
control, the Bolsheviks gained control over this movement as soon as it had
spent itself in the realization of its immediate goals. There were many such
goals differently reached in different territories. Various layers of the
peasantry satisfied, or failed to satisfy, divergent needs and desires. Their
interests, however, had no real connection with those of the proletariat. The
working class itself was split into various groups with a variety of specific
needs and general plans. The petty-bourgeoisie had still other problems to
solve. In brief, there was a spontaneous unity against the conditions of
Czarism and war, but there was no unity in regard to immediate goals and future
policy. It was not too difficult for the Bolsheviks to utilize this social
division for building up their own power, which finally became stronger than
the whole of society because it never faced society as a whole.

Like the other groups which asserted themselves within the revolution, the
Bolsheviks, too, pressed to gain their particular end: the control of
government. This goal reached farther than those aspired to by the others. It
involved a never-ending struggle, a continuous winning and re-winning of power
positions. Peasant groups settled down after dividing the land, workers
returned to the factories as wage laborers, soldiers, unable to roam the
countrysides forever, returned to the life of peasant and worker, but for the
Bolsheviks the struggle only really began with the success of the Revolution.
Like all governments, the Bolshevik regime involves submission of all existing
social layers to its authority. Slowly centralizing all power and control into
their hands, the Bolsheviks were soon able to dictate policy. Once more Russia
became thoroughly organized in the interests of a special class - the class of
privilege in the emerging system of State-capitalism.

The Party ‘Machine’

All this has nothing to do with Stalinism and ‘Thermidor’ but
represents Lenin’s and Trotsky’s policy from the very day they came
to power. Reporting to the Sixth Congress of Soviets in 1918, Trotsky
complained that “Not all Soviet workers have understood that our
administration has been centralized and that all orders issued from above must
be final. ... We shall be pitiless with those Soviet workers who have not yet
understood; we will remove them, cast them out of our ranks, pull them up with
repressions.” Trotsky now claims that these words were aimed at Stalin
who did not co-ordinate his war-activity properly and we are willing to believe
him. But how much more directly must they have been aimed at all those who were
not even ‘second-rate’ but had no rating at all in the Soviet
hierarchy. There already existed, as Trotsky relates, “a sharp cleavage
between the classes in motion and the interests of the party machines. Even
the Bolshevik Party cadres, who enjoyed the benefit of exceptional
revolutionary training were definitely inclined to disregard the masses and to
identify their own special interests with the interests of the machine on the
very day after the monarchy was overthrown.”

Trotsky holds, of course, that the dangers implied in this situation were
averted by Lenin’s vigilance and by objective conditions which made the
“masses more revolutionary than the Party, and the Party more
revolutionary than its machine.” But the machine was headed by
Lenin. Even before the Revolution, Trotsky points out, the Central Committee of
the Party “functioned almost regularly and was entirely in the hands of
Lenin.” And even more so after the Revolution. In the spring of 1918 the
“ideal of ‘democratic centralism’ suffered further reverses,
for in effect the power within both the government and the Party became
concentrated in the hands of Lenin and the immediate retinue of Bolshevik
leaders who did not openly disagree with him and carried out his wishes.”
As the bureaucracy made headway nevertheless, the emerging Stalinist machine
must have been the result of an oversight on the part of Lenin.

To distinguish between the ruler of the machine and the machine on the one
hand, and between the machine and the masses on the other implies that only the
masses and its top-leader were truly revolutionary, and that both Lenin and the
revolutionary masses were later betrayed by Stalin’s machine which, so to
speak, made itself independent. Although Trotsky needs such distinctions to
satisfy his own political interests, they have no basis in fact. Until his
death - disregarding occasional remarks against the dangers of
bureaucratization, which for the Bolsheviks are the equivalent of the bourgeois
politicians’ occasional crusades for a balanced budget - Lenin never once
came out against the Bolshevik Party machine and its leadership, that is,
against himself. Whatever policy was decided upon received Lenin’s
blessing as long as he was at the helm of the machine; and he died holding that
position.

Lenin’s ‘democratic’ notions are legendary. Of course
state-capitalism under Lenin was different from state-capitalism under Stalin
because the dictatorial powers of the latter were greater - thanks to
Lenin’s attempt to build up his own. That Lenin’s rule was less
terroristic than Stalin’s is debatable. Like Stalin, Lenin cataloged
all his victims under the heading ‘counter-revolutionary’.
Without comparing the statistics of those tortured and killed under both
regimes, we will admit that the Bolshevik regime under Lenin and Trotsky was
not strong enough to carry through such Stalinist measures as enforced
collectivization and slave-labor camps as a main economic and political
policy.  It was not design but weakness which forced Lenin and Trotsky to the
so called New Economic Policy, that is, to concessions to private
property interests and to a greater lip-service to ‘democracy’.

Bolshevik ‘toleration’ of such non-Bolshevik organizations as
the Social Revolutionists in the early phase of Lenin’s rule did not
spring, as Trotsky asserts, from Lenin’s ‘democratic’
inclinations but from inability to destroy all non-Bolshevik organizations at
once. The totalitarian features of Lenin’s Bolshevism were accumulating
at the same rate at which its control and police power grew. That they were
forced upon the Bolsheviks by the ‘counter-revolutionary’ activity
of all non-Bolshevik labor organizations, as Trotsky maintains, can not of
course explain their further increase after the crushing of the various
nonconformist organizations. Neither could it explain Lenin’s insistence
upon the enforcement of totalitarian principle in the extra-Russian
organizations of the Communist International.

Trotsky, Apologist for Stalinism

Unable to blame non-Bolshevik organizations entirely for Lenin’s
dictatorship, Trotsky tells “those theoreticians who attempt to prove
that the present totalitarian regime of the U.S.S.R. is due ... to the ugly
nature of Bolshevism itself,” that they forget the years of Civil War,
“which laid an indelible impress on the Soviet Government by virtue of
the fact that very many of the administrators, a considerable layer of them,
had become accustomed to command and demanded unconditional submission to their
orders.” Stalin, too, he continues, “was molded by the environment
and circumstances of the Civil War, along with the entire group that later
helped him to establish his personal dictatorship”. The Civil War,
however, was initiated by the international bourgeoisie. And thus the ugly
sides of Bolshevism under Lenin, as well as under Stalin, find their chief and
final cause in capitalism’s enmity to Bolshevism which, if it is a
monster, is only a reluctant monster, killing and torturing in mere
self-defense.

And so, if only in a roundabout way, Trotsky’s Bolshevism, despite its
saturation with hatred for Stalin, leads in the end merely to a defense of
Stalinism as the only possible self-defense for Trotsky. This explains the
superficiality of the ideological differences between Stalinism and Trotskyism.
The impossibility of attacking Stalin without attacking Lenin helps to explain,
furthermore, Trotsky’s great difficulties as an oppositionist.
Trotsky’s own past and theories preclude on his part the initiation of a
movement to the left of Stalinism and condemned
‘Trotskyism’ to remain a mere collecting agency for unsuccessful
Bolsheviks. As such it could maintain itself outside of Russia because of the
ceaseless competitive struggles for power and positions within the so-called
‘communist’ world-movement. But it could not achieve significance
for it had nothing to offer but the replacement of one set of politicians by
another. The Trotskyist defense of Russia in the Second World War was
consistent with all the previous policies of this, Stalin’s most bitter,
but also most loyal, opposition.

Trotsky’s defense of Stalinism does not exhaust itself with showing
how the Civil War transformed the Bolsheviks from servants into masters of the
working class. He points to the more important fact that it is the
“bureaucracy’s law of life and death to guard the nationalization
of the means of production and of the land.” This means that “in
spite of the most monstrous bureaucratic distortions, the class basis of the
U.S.S.R. remains proletarian.” For a while - we notice - Stalin had
Trotsky worried. In 1921, Lenin had been disturbed by the question as to
whether the New Economic Policy was merely a ‘tactic’ or
an ‘evolution’. Because the NEP released private-capitalistic
tendencies, Trotsky saw in the growing Stalinist bureaucracy “nothing
else than the first stage of bourgeois restoration.” But his worries were
unfounded; “the struggle against equality and the establishment of very
deep social differentiations has so far been unable to eliminate the socialist
consciousness of the masses or the nationalization of the means of production
and the land, which were the basic social conquests of the revolution.”
Stalin, of course, had nothing to do with this, for “the Russian
Thermidor would have undoubtedly opened a new era of bourgeois rule, if that
rule had not proved obsolete throughout the world.”

The Result: State Capitalism

With this last statement of Trotsky’s we approach the essence of the
matter under discussion. We have said before that the concrete results
of the revolution of 1917 were neither socialistic nor bourgeois but
state-capitalistic. It was Trotsky’s belief that Stalin would destroy the
state-capitalist nature of the economy in favor of a bourgeois economy. This
was to be the Thermidor. The decay of bourgeois economy all over the world
prevented Stalin from bringing this about. All he could do was to introduce the
ugly features of his personal dictatorship into that society which had been
brought into existence by Lenin and Trotsky. In this way, and despite the fact
that Stalin still occupies the Kremlin, Trotskyism has triumphed over
Stalinism.

It all depends on an equation of state-capitalism with socialism. And
although some of Trotsky’s disciples have recently found it impossible to
continue making the equation, Trotsky was bound to it, for it is the beginning
and the end of Leninism and, in a wider sense, of the whole of the
social-democratic world-movement of which Leninism was only the more realistic
part. Realistic, that is, with regard to Russia. What was, and still is,
understood by this movement under ‘workers’ state is governmental
rule by the party; what is meant by ‘socialism’ is the
nationalization of the means of production. By adding control over the economy
to the political control of the government the totalitarian rule over all of
society emerges in full. The government secures its totalitarian rule by way of
the party, which maintains the social hierarchy and is itself a hierarchical
institution.

This idea of ‘socialism’ is now in the process of becoming
discredited, but only because of the experience of Russia and similar if less
extensive experiences in other countries. Prior to 1914, what was meant by the
seizure of power, either peacefully or violently, was the seizure of the
government machinery, replacing a given set of administrators and law-makers
with another set. Economically, the ‘anarchy’ of the capitalistic
market was to be replaced by a planned production under the control of the
state. As the socialist state would by definition be a ‘just’
state, being itself controlled by the masses by way of the democratic
processes, there was no reason to expect that its decisions would run counter
to socialistic ideals. This theory was sufficient to organize parts of the
working class into more or less powerful parties.

The theory of socialism boiled down to the demand for centralized economic
planning in the interest of all. The centralization process, inherent in
capital-accumulation itself, was regarded as a socialistic tendency.
The growing influence of ‘labor’ within the state-machinery was
hailed as a step in the direction of socialism. But actually the centralization
process of capital indicated something else than its self-transformation into
social property. It was identical with the destruction of laissez
faire economy and therewith with the end of the traditional business-cycle
as the regulator of the economy. With the beginning of the twentieth century
the character of capitalism changed. From that time on it found itself under
permanent crisis conditions which could not be resolved, by the
‘automatic’ workings of the market. Monopolistic regulations,
state-interferences, national policies shifted the burden of the crisis to the
capitalistically under-privileged in the world-economy. All
‘economic’ policy became imperialistic policy, culminating twice in
world-wide conflagrations.

In this situation, to reconstruct a broken-down political and economic
system meant to adapt it to these new conditions. The Bolshevik theory of
socialization fitted this need in an admirable way. In order to restore the
national power of Russia it was necessary to do in a radical fashion what in
the Western nations had been merely an evolutionary process. Even then it would
take time to close the gap between the Russian economy and that of the Western
powers. Meanwhile the ideology of the socialist movement served well as
protection. The socialist origin of Bolshevism made it particularly fitted for
the state-capitalist reconstruction of Russia. Its organizational principles,
which had turned the party into a well-functioning institution, would
reestablish order in the country as well.

The Bolsheviks of course were convinced that what they were building in
Russia was, if not socialism, at least the next best thing to socialism, for
they were completing the process which in the Western nations was still only
the main trend of development. They had abolished the market-economy
and had expropriated the bourgeoisie; they also had gained complete control
over the government. For the Russian workers, however, nothing had changed;
they were merely faced by another set of bosses, politicians and
indoctrinators. Their position equaled the workers’ position in all
capitalist countries during times of war. State-capitalism is a war-economy,
and all extra-Russian economic systems transformed themselves into
war-economies, into state-capitalistic systems fitted to the imperialistic
needs of modern capitalism. Other nations did not copy all the innovations of
Russian state-capitalism but only those best suited to their specific needs.
The Second World War led to the further unfolding of state-capitalism on a
world wide scale. The peculiarities of the various nations and their special
situations within the world-power frame provided a great variety of
developmental processes towards state-capitalism.

The fact that state-capitalism and fascism did not, and do not grow
everywhere in a uniform manner provided Trotsky with the argument of the basic
difference between Bolshevism, fascism and capitalism plain and simple. This
argument necessarily stresses superficialities of social development. In all
essential aspects all three of these systems are identical and represent only
various stages of the same development - a development which aims at
manipulating the mass of the population by dictatorial governments in a more or
less authoritarian fashion, in order to secure the government and the
privileged social layers which support it and to enable those governments to
participate in the international economy of today by preparing for war, waging
war, and profiting by war.

Trotsky could not permit himself to recognize in Bolshevism one aspect of
the world-wide trend towards a ‘fascist’ world economy. As late as
1940 he held the view that Bolshevism prevented the rise of Fascism in the
Russia of 1917. It should have long since been clear, however, that all that
Lenin and Trotsky prevented in Russia was the use of a non-Marxian ideology for
the ‘fascist’ reconstruction of Russia. Because the Marxian
ideology of Bolshevism merely served state-capitalistic ends, it, too, has been
discredited. From any view that goes beyond the capitalist system of
exploitation, Stalinism and Trotskyism are both relics of the past.

NOTES

1. Stalin. An appraisal of the
man and his influence. Edited and translated from the Russian by Charles
Malamuth. The first seven chapters and the appendix, that is, the bulk of the
book, Trotsky wrote and revised himself. The last four chapters, consisting of
notes, excerpts, documents and other raw materials, have been edited.

2. See for instance, L. Trotsky’s
“Dictatorship vs. Democracy”, New York, 1922; particularly from
page 135 to page 150.


     From : Marxists.org

Events :
----------------------------------

     Bolshevism and Stalinism -- Added : March 02, 2021

     Bolshevism and Stalinism -- Updated : January 08, 2022

About This Textfile :
----------------------------------

     Text file generated from : 
http://revoltlib.com/